"Between 1989-90 and 2001-02 private school enrollment in kindergarten through grade 12 increased from 4.8 million to 5.3 million students.... Catholic schools have the largest enrollment of private school students, but the distribution of students across types of private schools changed over this 12-year period. For example, the percentage of private school students who attended Catholic schools decreased from 55 to 47 percent, with parochial schools (i.e., run by a parish, not by a diocese or independently) experiencing the largest decrease. On the other hand, during this period, the percentage of students enrolled in other religious private schools increased from 32 to 36 percent, with conservative Christian schools experiencing the largest increase. Also, there was an increase in the percentage of students enrolled in nonsectarian private schools, from 13 to 17 percent. This change in distribution from Catholic to other religious and nonsectarian private schools occurred at both the elementary and secondary levels."

(Source:  John Wirt, Patrick Rooney, Bill Hussar; Susan Choy, Stephen Provasnik, and Gillian Hampden-Thompson, "The Condition of Education 2005" [NCES 2005094], National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, June 1, 2005; http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2005/section1/indicator02.asp.)

"First the bad news: Only about two-thirds of American teenagers (and just half of all black, Latino and Native American teens) graduate with a regular diploma four years after they enter high school.

Now the worse news: Of those who graduate, only about half read well enough to succeed in college.

Don't even bother to ask how many are proficient enough in math and science to handle college-level work. It's not pretty.

Of all the factors combining to shape the future of the U.S., this is one of the most important. Millions of American kids are not even making it through high school in an era in which a four-year college degree is becoming a prerequisite for achieving (or maintaining) a middle-class lifestyle.

...Cartoonish characters like Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton may be good for a laugh, but they're useless as role models. It's the kids who are logging long hours in the college labs, libraries and lecture halls who will most easily remain afloat in the tremendous waves of competition that have already engulfed large segments of the American work force. "

(Source:  Bob Herbert, "Left Behind, Way Behind," The New York Times, August 29, 2005; http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/opinion/29herbert.html?th&emc=th.)

While Catholic high school students tend to do better academically than their public school peers, many sociologists dismiss these outcomes as selection bias, claiming that background factors that influence parents' decision to enroll their children in a Catholic school are responsible for these positive effects. Yet in a study that quantifies the extent of selection bias, economists with the National Bureau of Economic Research conclude that the independent effect of a Catholic education is indeed real.

The researchers crunch data from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey of 1988 that show, among nearly 25,000 students, huge Catholic high school advantages on graduation and college attendance rates and smaller ones on twelfth-grade test scores. Conceding that a wide range of "observables" suggest a fairly strong positive selection into Catholic high schools, the economists found the selection link to be much weaker, however, among high schoolers who also attended Catholic schools for eighth grade. By focusing on this eighth-grade subsample, a methodological improvement that improves the comparability with the public school control group, they tracked student progress through 1994.

Among those who attended Catholic eighth grade, the researchers found that family background and geographic controls explained only a fairly small amount of the difference in the higher Catholic high school graduation rate (OLS and probit estimates of the average marginal effect of 0.105 without controls; 0.084 with controls). Given that additional controls for eighth-grade educational measures yielded only slight modifications in the effect (from 0.081 to 0.088), the economists observe that the "stability of the effect is remarkable" and that the effect "is still very large" considering the graduation rate of 0.947 among students in the subsample. As they conclude: "Attending a Catholic high school substantially raises high school graduation rates."

A similarly substantial but more tentative effect was found in terms of the probability of these students being enrolled in a college two years after high school graduation. Among urban minorities in the subsample, the effects of attending a Catholic high school on the probabilities of completing high school as well as attending college were even stronger, yet the researchers cautioned that selection factors might fully explain the effect on college attendance of urban minorities.

Although the economists make no policy recommendations, their findings suggest that any reform of American education ought to place the proven "faith-based" approach on the table and look less at tinkering with public schools to improve educational achievement.