To some, it may come as a surprise that for all that is often said to promote civics education in the United States, the role of education and of schools themselves rarely figure into such curricula. Moreover, for all the debate about education policy, there are few resources laying out the plain facts about the effectiveness of various reforms.
For concerned citizens as well as students and scholars at all levels, Casey D. Cobb and Gene V. Glass’s book, Private and Public Education in America: Examining the Facts (ABC-CLIO, 2021), should prove indispensable. From the outset, Cobb and Glass make clear that their aim is to examine the facts about the debates between private and public education in the United States. Their analysis is framed as a series of 32 questions regarding private and public schooling, bracketed into six main themes, ranging from the fundamental differences between these models to the impact of school environment on education.
If there is a dearth of basic information about these topics, and if the debates surrounding them are particularly controversial, it is perhaps a result, as Cobb and Glass point out in their introduction, of the difficulty that comes with assessing differences in the realm of education. Unlike research in physical and life sciences, there are so many confounding variables in educational research, making causal relationships hard to establish. Cobb and Glass nevertheless account for many critical factors to present a detailed and balanced assessment of the fundamental differences between private and public schools. In doing so, they provide a necessary basis for deconstructing widespread myths.
Many of the questions Cobb and Glass delve into are mainstays of the conversation regarding privatization in education, such as whether students in private schools outperform their peers in public schools; whether political conservatives are the biggest supporters of privatization in education; and whether full-time virtual schools provide quality education. After posing each question, Cobb and Glass supply a summary answer and spend the remainder of the chapter going over the facts and findings that led them to that conclusion.
This method proves effective for these three seminal questions and many more. In this NCSPE excerpt, Cobb and Glass explore the impact of full-time virtual schools.
In all cases, Cobb and Glass weigh the pros and cons against each other before arriving at their determinations. For instance, in their chapter on the efficacy of market-based reforms (Question 5 in the book), Cobb and Glass highlight the arguments made by market advocates They note that these proponents focus on the role of competition to effect improvement. But the supporters of market reforms, Cobb and Glass write, tend to overlook the essential difference between private schools and their public counterparts—namely that a public good like education cannot be understood within the logic of the market—and provide ample evidence from researchers who have made similar inquiries to support this conclusion. In addition, Cobb and Glass offer evidence of how market-based reforms have ended up harming rather than improving public schools, going against the very arguments proponents make.
The method Cobb and Glass employ is perhaps most effective when considering newer phenomena in the privatization of education, where the debate is fresher and the research and data, sparser. This is best exemplified in the featured excerpt concerning whether virtual schooling affords students a quality education (Question 31 in the book). Cobb and Glass bluntly respond in the negative. They are also keen to note that virtual schooling not only has a negative impact on student outcomes but diverts precious public funds to commercially operated schools.
Throughout the book, Cobb and Glass make clear that the heavy marketing defining market-based reforms has obscured the facts about the differences between public and private education. Getting the facts to expose myths makes this book invaluable.
Chris Wortman
Research Associate, NCSPE
March 28, 2023