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.
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