Abstract
Recent research by Coleman and his associates on the effectiveness of public and private schools has evoked a heated debate on the role of private schooling in U.S. education. All of the existing studies, however, have examined the short-term effects of school type–at most over a 2-year period. This study extends the debate on the effects of private schools to a longer term perspective. It appears from the present analysis that the enduring influence of school type on vocabulary achievement is nearly nonexistent, whereas the enduring influence on mathematics favors public school students. These results conflict with those of previous studies, and may be due to the longer term perspective of the research reported here. Examination of the enduring effects of private education should therefore be given a high priority in subsequent follow-ups of the High School and Beyond (HSB) study. Until that happens, it seems clear that any policy decisions based on HSB analyses to date are premature.
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