December 2001
Private Schools
Outpace National Average on AP Exams
In an age bent on providing students with a more challenging curriculum,
Advanced Placement courses serve as a gold standard of rigorous coursework.
Exemplary secondary schools are often measured by how many AP courses
they offer, and exemplary students, by how many AP courses they take.
 Considered
college-level course-work, enough AP credits can propel a student well
along the way toward a degree. The trick, however, is not only taking
an AP course, but doing well on its difficult, standardized, high-stakes
final exam. (Colleges generally require a score of 3 or greater on a rating
scale of 1 to 5.)
But not every student has the same chance to take AP courses, and among
those who take them, the success rate varies dramatically. According to
data provided to CAPE by the College Board, which administers the AP program,
private school students seem to have an edge. They are not only more likely
than the general high school population to take AP courses, but also more
likely to attain a score of 3 or higher.
Ten percent of private secondary school students took AP exams in 2001,
double the 5 percent national rate. Although they only enrolled 8 percent
of all students in grades 9-12, private schools accounted for 16 percent
of all AP test takers.
The share of students who successfully completed AP courses in private
schools (i.e., scored 3 or greater) was also higher than the national
average. Students in public and private high schools took a total of 1,359,683
AP exams in 2001 and received a grade of 3 or greater on 834,076 exams.
That amounted to a national success rate of 61 percent. The breakout for
private schools shows that those students sat for 220,167 AP exams and
scored a 3 or greater on 154,620 of them, for a success rate of 70 percent.
Looked at from a different angle, private schools, which, it is worth
repeating, enrolled only 8 percent of high school students in 2000-01,
accounted for 19 percent of all AP exams on which students scored 3 or
above.
Because closing the achievement gap between minority and majority students
is a national priority, an examination of AP results by race is instructive.
Although private schools enrolled 6 percent of black high school students
last school year, they accounted for 10 percent of black AP test takers
and 18 percent of all AP exams on which black students scored a 3 or higher.
Although the percentage of black students who took AP exams in public
and private schools was lower than the average for all students, black
students in private schools were 1.78 times more likely to take an AP
exam than black students in general, and once they took the exam, their
success rate was 68 percent higher than the average success rate for blacks.
The difference in the black/white success rate (calculated by dividing
the number of exams receiving a score of three or greater by the number
of exams taken) was also narrower for private school students than for
the nation as a whole. As mentioned above, for all students in all schools
the AP success rate in 2001 was 61 percent. The rate varied by race.
For white students it was 64 percent; for black students, 31 percent
-- a difference of 33 points. But in private schools, the success rate
for white students was 71 percent, and for black students it was 52 percent
-- a difference of 19 points. In short, the private school success rate
was higher, and the black/white gap was smaller.
Note: High school enrollment data for October 2000 are from the U.S.
Census Bureau. Data on AP test takers and exams for 2001 are from the
College Board. All AP data are for students identified as attending a
public, private, or parochial school. For the purposes of this article,
the private and parochial data were combined and reported as "private."
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Private
School Students Above Average on Science Tests
 Perhaps
one reason the drop in twelfth-grade science scores announced last month
by the National Center for Education Statistics was so unsettling is that
the country knows, now more than ever, that survival depends on brainpower.
While the performance of fourth- and eighth-grade students on the National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2000 science test remained about
the same since the test was last administered in 1996, the scores for
twelfth-graders dropped three points. The disappointing results for seniors
prompted Education Secretary Rod Paige to call the decline "morally
significant." He noted that twelfth-grade scores are "the scores
that really matter," and warned, "If our graduates know less
about science than their predecessors four years ago, then our hopes for
a strong 21st century workforce are dimming just when we need them most."
There was, however, a glimmer of good news within the science report:
the scores of private school seniors shot up six points from four years
ago.
On average, twelfth-grade students in 2000 posted a score of 147 on a
300-point scale; private school students scored 161. The eighth-grade
national average was 151, and for private schools it was 166. At the fourth-grade
level, the figures were 150 and 163.
 What's
more, the performance gap between minority and majority students was substantially
narrower in private schools than in public schools, a significant result
given the national concern about the persistent disparity in minority/majority
achievement. For example, at the eighth-grade level, while the difference
between the performance of black students and white students nationally
was 40 points, it was 30 points in private schools. Similarly, the Hispanic/white
gap nationally was 34 points, but only 19 points in private schools.
Besides releasing scale scores, NCES reported the percent of students
performing at or above three achievement levels: basic (partial mastery
of  fundamental
skills and knowledge), proficient (solid academic performance), and advanced
(superior performance). At all three grade levels and all three achievement
levels, private school students scored significantly above the national
average.
To learn more about the NAEP 2000 science results, visit the NCES Web
site at http://nces.ed.gov.
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School Safety
Report Released
It would be comforting if schools were predictably places of peace where
students and teachers always felt safe and secure. But sadly, that is
not the picture presented in the latest government report on school crime
and safety.
"In 1999, students ages 12 through 18 were victims of about 2.5
million total crimes at school," according to the study released
last month by the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau
of Justice Statistics. On the positive side, the percentage of student
crime victims decreased slightly between 1995 and 1999 from 10 percent
to 8 percent. And as the victimization rate declined, students seemed
"to feel more secure at school now than just a few years ago."
As might be expected, the prevalence of crime at school varied by type
of school. "In both 1995 and 1999, public school students were more
likely to report having been victims of violent crime during the previous
6 months than were private school students." Violent crime included
rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault.
In 1999, 2.5 percent of public school students and 0.3 percent of private
school students ages 12 through 18 reported being the victim of violent
crime during the previous 6 months.
School safety affected teachers as well. According to the report, in
1993-94, 341,000 teachers across the nation were threatened with injury
by a student and 119,200 were physically attacked by a student. Again,
the type of school made a difference. Thirteen percent of public school
teachers and 4 percent of private school teachers were threatened in 1993-94,
while 4 percent of public school teachers and 2 percent of private school
teachers were attacked. Public school teachers in cities were the most
at risk. "Teachers in public central city schools were about five
times more likely to be targets of threats of injury and about three times
more likely to be targets of attacks than their colleagues in private
central city schools."
Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2001 can be downloaded from the
Web at http://nces.ed.gov. The NCES
publication number is 2002-113.
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New Study
on Graduation Rates
Event dropout rates, status dropout rates, high school completion rates-the
world of education statistics is awash with ways to calculate how successful
schools are in seeing that high school students stay in school and get
diplomas. The Manhattan Institute last month tried to cut through the
confusion by issuing a report that computes graduation rates in a straightforward
way.
Jay P. Greene, who conducted the research and wrote the report, took
what he called a "remarkably simple" approach in calculating
the rates. He divided the number of graduates in a given jurisdiction
in 1998 by the number of eighth-graders in the same jurisdiction in 1993.
Before dividing, he adjusted the eighth-grade count to reflect demographic
shifts between school years 1993-94 and 1997-98.
The simple approach yielded startling results. Nationally, only 74 percent
of students who were supposed to graduate in 1998 did so. Moreover, the
results varied dramatically by race and ethnicity. While the graduation
rate was 78 percent for white students, it was 56 percent for African-American
students and 54 percent for Latino students.
Kaleem Caire, CEO of the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO),
called the results "another indication of the disastrous consequences
of trapping low-income families, mostly of color, in education systems
in which they have no meaningful options."
The National Center for Education Statistics, in its most recent report
on the Private School Universe Survey, said the 1998-99 graduation rate
for private schools was 98.4 percent. But NCES calculated the rate by
dividing the number of graduates by the number of twelfth-graders at the
start of the school year, a wholly different formula than that used by
Greene. Applying the NCES formula to public schools yields a 1998-99 graduation
rate of 91.4 percent.
The Greene report can be downloaded at www.manhattan-institute.org.
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CAPENotes
• As a renewed sense of patriotism surges across the country, the
White House has launched a new Web site to help elementary school students
learn some important lessons about American freedom. The Freedom Timeline
(http://whitehousekids.gov) includes
five stories that span U.S. history from 1777 to 1948. Though diverse
in subject matter (the Statute of Liberty, the March of Dimes campaign,
a Quaker spy from Philadelphia, etc.), the stories share a common theme:
America as a beacon of liberty. Teachers and parents should find the lesson
plan, quiz, and vocabulary list useful; children should find the stories
and graphics alluring. And when they finish the Freedom Timeline, kids
can take a White House tour with Spotty, the Bush's English springer spaniel,
and then learn new words with Barney, the Scottish terrier.
• What's an education philanthropist to do? The need for wholesale
school reform couldn't be more obvious, but in the past, dollars distributed
across the landscape of need have not always produced the hoped-for harvest.
Believing philanthropists should not waste their money backing no-yield
reform projects, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has produced a handbook
of advice for wealthy people who want to invest in school improvement.
The title speaks for itself: Making It Count: A Guide to High-Impact
Education Philanthropy.
"A system characterized by equity and excellence: that's our dream...and
we believe that nearly every philanthropist who gets involved in education
reform shares it," write Chester Finn, Jr., and Kelly Amis, the book's
coauthors. "We also believe it is possible."
Finn and Amis back their belief by detailing reform measures that are
working. Their spotlight of success centers on standards-based reform
and competition-based reform, the latter encompassing privately funded
vouchers, charter schools, and education tax measures. The authors regard
the two reforms as partners, rather than rivals, seeing standards as providing
objective information on how schools are doing, and competition as enabling
parents to choose those schools that are doing well.
Making it Count lets education donors know in no uncertain terms
that if they don't do their homework, their money can be sucked up by
the system without any trace of a difference in the lives of children.
The book provides some essential questions for philanthropists to consider
and a strategy they can use to produce results and avoid squandering their
resources. And though not its purpose, the book can also offer school
administrators, especially those responsible for convincing donors to
contribute to particular projects, some sound ideas on how to design a
program that attracts the success-minded investor.
The handbook is available free on the Foundation's Web site at http://www.edexcellence.net.
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