Muncie Times, Muncie, Delaware County, 6 June 2002 — Page 19

The Muncie Times, June 6, 2002, page 19

Private schools promote public

By Marie E. Gryphon Hoping to parlay America’s recent surge of patriotism into a permanentcultural sea change, President Bush recently announced a new federalprogram to boost civics education among American school children. A demonstrated devotee of ambitious federal cures for all that ails local schools, the President now plans to create federal guidelines to teach love of country, tolerance and democracy. But research shows that such values are more effectively promoted through state programs’that improve access to private schools.

Detractors often claim that private schools isolate and “Balkanize” school children, promoting segregation, intolerance, and nonparticipation in larger social and political processes. They could not be more wrong. The evidence shows that, in fact, private school children are more likely to demonstrate basic knowledge of American history and government, more likely to learn in racially integrated classrooms, and more likely to volunteer their time for charitable causes. First and most simply, private schools that effectively teach reading and math are unsurprisingly more

effective in teaching American history and government. To the extent that civic values spring from civics education, it is only logical that effective teaching institutions would teach civics effectively. Commentators have expressed great despair at students’ widespread iignorance of basic American history demonstrated by recent results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP test. Less well reported was the fact that private school students outperformed their public school counterparts by a wide margin in history. Catholic schools, with the highest proportion of low-

income private school attendees, performed best of all, demonstrating that good instruction, not socio-economic background, is key to a good education in American history and government. More surprising to some, private school students are more likely than public school students to learn with a racially mixed class group. It has long been an article of faith among school choice opponents that public schools are more “diverse,” and accordingly better prepare students for interaction with Americans of different backgrounds. Several studies, including economist Jay

spirit P. Greene’s recent work, show that the opposite is true. While the American public schools taken as a whole have a larger proportion of minority students than the private schools, individual schools and classrooms are more likely to be segregated in public institutions. Private institutions are more likely to have classrooms that resemble the nation in terms of ethnic diversity. Greene found that more than half of all public school 12th graders are in “segregated” classrooms, defined as classrooms that are either less than 10 percent or more than SCHOOLS on page 30

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