School Effectiveness Within the Public and Private Sectors

Recent evaluations of public and private school effectiveness have examined national aggregates of student achievement. These aggregates mask the contributions of individual schools and do not reflect the underlying diversity in school quality within the public and private sectors. This evaluation, which employs data from the High School and Beyond study on approximately 30,000 sophomores in 1, 000 U. S. high schools, provides estimates of school effectiveness for different types of students in different kinds of schools. The analysis shows that the range in school effectiveness within the two sectors far outweighs the differences between them.