Public schools,private schools,and the common school ideal

According to the ethos of the nineteenth century common school, all students are assigned the same tasks, and in all the same powers developed. Twentieth century innovations such as ability grouping are foreign to the common school's egalitarian ideal. Such innovations may reinforce connections between students' ascribed background characteristics and school achievement. Proponents of the common school sought to sever these connections. Coleman, Hoffer, and Kilgore, inHigh School Achievement (1982), argue that private schools are more in keeping with the common school tradition than public schools. In their view, private schools offer greater meritocratic justice than public schools; this is due to the fact that private schools minimize the impact of students' background characteristics, such as race and family income, on achievement. Our findings, however, are inconsistent with those of Coleman et al. We use a data set provided by the Educational Testing Service in which public and private subgroups are approximately equal with respect to measured background factors, and we employ a more adequate complement of independent variables, along with outcome measures which appear to be more curriculum sensitive than those employed by Coleman et al. Our regression results indicate that private secondary schools are no more effective than public schools at severing the connections between background characteristics and measured achievement in English, math, and American history.