"Though private school students have long scored higher on the national assessment, commonly referred to as 'the nation's report card,' the new study used advanced statistical techniques to adjust for the effects of income, school and home circumstances. The researchers said they compared math scores, not reading ones, because math was considered a clearer measure of a school's overall effectiveness.

...The report found that among the private schools, Lutheran schools did better than other private schools. Nevertheless, at the fourth-grade level, a 10.7 point lead in math scores evaporated into a 4.2 point lag behind public schools. At the eighth-grade level, a 21 point lead, roughly the equivalent of two grade levels, disappeared after adjusting for differences in student backgrounds."

"Next fall, a stunning $55 million high school will open on the edge of Fairmount Park [in Philadelphia]. For now, it is called the School of the Future, a state-of-the-art building with features like a Web design laboratory and a green roof that incorporates a storm-water management system. But it may turn out to be the school of the future in another sense, too: It is a public school being used to raise a lot of private money.

A glossy brochure offers dozens of opportunities for donors to get their name or corporate logo emblazoned on the walls : $1 million for the performing arts pavilion, $750,00 for the gyms or the main administrative suite (including the principal's office), $500,000 for the food court/ cybercafe, $50,000 for the science laboratories, $25,000 for each of the classrooms, and so on. Microsoft, a partner in designing the school, has already committed $100,000 for the Microsoft Visitors Center.

For a cool $5 million, a donor gets the grand prize - naming the school.

'My approach is Leave No Dollar Behind,' said Paul Vallas, chief executive of the Philadelphia schools...."

Parents searching for a way to give their children help in the classroom need look no further than the ring finger on their left hand.  A new study published in the Journal of Divorce & Remarriage clearly shows that parents who make their marriage successful are conferring a remarkable academic benefit on their children - especially their daughters.

By using data for 265 seniors enrolled in a Colorado Springs public high school, researcher Barry D. Ham assesses "the impact of divorce in relation to students' academic achievement."  And the pattern is clear: "Adolescents from intact homes perform better academically and maintain better school attendance than do those students from either single-parent or remarried homes."

Ham calculates that in comparison with peers from other family structures, students from intact families earn GPAs that average more than 17% higher.  He further calculates a distinctively low rate of absenteeism among students from intact families, who missed 78% fewer class periods than peers from non-intact households.

While some have supposed that parental remarriage will erase the harmful effects of parental divorce, Ham finds that, overall, "children in remarried households performed no better than children in either single-mother or single-father families."  More careful parsing of the data, however, indicates that "when a stepparent is brought into the home, the males somehow benefit" while females do not.  Highlighting it as "one of the most significant findings of this study," Ham points to statistics indicating that "females were more negatively impacted" than males by living in a stepfamily created after parental divorce.

Ham does not comment on the irony of his findings in a social world in which feminists generally regard parental divorce and the stepfamilies it produces with indifference. He does see in his findings strong indications that, compared to peers in non-traditional homes, "those students residing with their two biological parents appear to be given an increased chance to excel educationally."