In Defense of "Private Schools and Public Policy": Reply to Kilgore

Abstract

Kilgore's critique of our paper (Alexander and Pallas, 1983) raises several questions regarding our conclusion that public schools-do about as well as Catholic schools in promoting cognitive achievement. We agree with Kilgore on only one point: the results we present are not all that dissimilar to those reported by her and her colleagues. What is striking is that we read their implications so differently. Kilgore takes issue with our conclusion that sector differences on test outcomes are small to trivial even before controlling for track enrollment. She is quite right, of course, that the statistics we present are constrained by the variance in the sector measure. We acknowledged our uneasiness with this in a footnote, but nothing in Kilgore's argument moves us from our original position. Consider Kilgore's hypothetical example. She says that the sector variable would account for about 5 percent of the variance in test performance (rather than from .003 to .013 which we report) if there were a sevenfold proportionate increase in the Catholic school enrollment.But who would ever anticipate such a radical transformation of our educational system? And even if -such a remote possibility were granted, is there any reason to expect that achievement processes under that organization would be at all similar to those observed in our data? We concede that our estimations would not apply in Kilgore's example, but that world doesn't exist and probably never will. Our results do characterize the situation that exists at present, though, which we think is far more relevant. Kilgore is not much impressed by our statistics, but she fails to tell us by what standard she judges present-day sector differences to be large. We know of none. Kilgore also criticizes us for not giving her and her colleagues credit for their many attempts to deal with the issue of selection bias. But our critique of their research was quite focused: they failed to deal adequately with the input-level differences in test performance which likely remain after socioeconomic and demographic controls. We do not think any of their procedures are satisfactory on this score, although the analysis they report which controls on curriculum membership (like ours) probably comes closest. Kilgore fails to comment directly on this aspect of our critique. As we said in our paper, she and her colleagues consistently have failed to acknowledge their lack of a suitable input control (or proxy) for competency differences between students in the two sectors. This remains true even through the present exchange and despite the fact that Kilgore's own model in her comment includes predetermined competency levels as an independent predictor of both sector and achievement. We resorted to curriculum controls as an admittedly less than ideal proxy for the elusive datum on input-level test differences. We argued that doing so was preferable to neglecting the issue altogether. Kilgore contends, however, that our procedure fails to credit the Catholic sector with whatever benefits derive from channeling a higher percentage of students into the academic track than is observed in the public sector. This is true and we made note of it in our paper. We argued, though, that there is stronger justification for treating track location as a student choice factor rather than an administrative one if forced to choose between the two. Kilgore offers no reason to think us mistaken. As was stated in our paper, we again grant that school policy differences are relevant to the curriculum placement issue, but we are not much impressed with Kilgore's attempt to take account of this empirically. From a schoollevel analysis, she computes the independentinfluence of sector on curriculum placement and then uses that figure to adjust our results on within-sector achievement differences. Her objective is to derive a measure of sector influence which subsumes both the direct effect of sector on achievement and any indirect effects This research was funded by Grant No. NIE-G80-0113 from the National Institute of Education to the Johns Hopkins University Center for the Social Organization of Schools. The conclusions and opinions expressed are solely the authors' and are not necessarily those of theNIE. Address all correspondence to the authors at the Department of Sociology, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218.