Wow! Catholic schools outperforming

I’ve been digging deeper into National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2022 Main NAEP assessment results.  I was looking for evidence about how private schools performed against public schools in the post-COVID world.

To my disappointment, as I looked at data captured in the NAEP Data Explorer, it turns out most private school results were not reported for 2022 – with one notable exception.

The Catholic private school system apparently was a major participant in the 2022 NAEP, and scores for this private system are available in the 2022 reports. And, the results provide more reasons why parents, regardless of income levels, deserve more school choice options.

I put together this table, which shows how the nation’s public school system and the private Catholic system compared for math and reading in Grades 4 and 8 for the three predominant racial groups.

The results are pretty consistent. In all but one case, which is for Black students’ Grade 4 math results, all of the scores shown for Catholic schools are statistically significantly higher than the national public school scores.

In a number of cases, the differences are notable. In reading, for example, in both Grades 4 and 8, the scores in Catholic schools for both Black and Hispanic students exceed the public school scores for the same races by more than 20 points.

To give you some perspective on this, “Analysts who study NAEP often use 10 points on the NAEP scale as a back of the envelope estimate of one year’s worth of learning.” Clearly, even a 10-point gap in NAEP Scale Scores is significant. A 20-point gap is dramatic. And, that is something even more modest income parents deserve an option to chose for their child.