Are Parochial Schools Really Better?

Sent this into the Inquirer last week but I don't think they ever published it:

Re: B.J. Kelly’s column, “Religious Schools’ Quiet Successes.”

Without taking anything away from the quality of education at Philadelphia's parochial schools, I would argue that the superior performance of students attending these schools has little, if anything, to do with the fact that they are faith based. Nor should such results be used as an argument for school vouchers.

Students in parochial schools do better because someone in their lives cared enough to find a way to put them there, scrimping and saving to pay tuition or advocating for a scholarship. These students are thus very likely to come from home environments where education is valued and prioritized—this, rather than religion, teacher quality or a "values based" curriculum, is the key differential when comparing these students to the general student population. It also can't hurt that parochial schools have the option of expelling their worst-behaving students, while public schools do not.

Taken as a whole, if the student population in Philadelphia's public schools enjoyed the same rate of caregiver involvement that parochial school student populations do, it’s very likely they would, as a group, perform just as well or better than their parochial school counterpart. Parochial and independent schools in Philadelphia draw off thousands of potentially best-performing students in a self-reinforcing dynamic where each new generation of city parents, seeing the poor quality of public education, will, if they have the means and motivation, put their sons and daughters in schools full of students who enjoy a similar degree of home support. While understandable, this pattern leaves the public schools in progressively worse shape.

School vouchers only add to this problem. Unless we want to see our public schools finally degrade to the point where they are mere sinks for the most disenfranchised, alienated and neglected among us (we might as well just merge the schools with the prisons at that point), we should put the spotlight on what can be done to bolster the social and family environments from which young students come. This would certainly provide a better return on investment than doling out vouchers.