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Private School Students Score Above Average in WritingJuly 10, 2003 -- "The nation's children are writing better." That's how U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige characterized the release today of results from the 2002 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Writing. Scores for fourth-graders are up by four points since 1998, and scores for eighth-graders are up by three points. Students in private schools scored significantly above the national average in grades four, eight, and twelve. As the report put it, "Performance results in 2002 show that, at all three grades, students who attended nonpublic schools had higher average writing scores than students who attended public schools." The average writing score for fourth-grade students in public schools in 2002 was 153 on a scale that ranges from 0 to 300 for each grade tested. (In 1998, the base year, the average score for each grade was defined at 150.) For fourth-graders in private schools, the average score in 2002 was 166, an advantage of 13 points over public schools. The private school advantage in eighth grade was 18 points, and in twelfth grade, 22 points.
This year the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) also contrasted private school and public school scores for eighth- and twelfth-graders "while controlling for parental education." It found that with one exception (twelfth-graders whose parents did not finish high school), the "average writing scores were higher for nonpublic- than public-school students regardless of the reported level of parental education." According to the report, "the apparent difference in scale scores between public- and nonpublic-school twelfth-graders who reported that their parents did not finish high school was not found to be statistically significant."
CAPE used the NAEP Data Tool to pull out the scores for minority students in public schools and private schools. It turns out that black and Hispanic students in private schools scored significantly higher than their counterparts in public schools.
The NAEP report also provides the percentage of students performing at or above three achievement levels: basic, proficient, and advanced. As detailed in the following chart, there were significant across-the-board advantages for private schools in the share of students performing at or above all three levels.
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