“It costs me never a stab nor squirm
To tread by chance upon a worm.
‘Aha, my little dear,’ I say,
‘Your clan will pay me back one day.’”

Dorothy Parker

The Education Department reported on Friday that children in public schools generally performed as well or better in reading and mathematics than comparable children in private schools.

The report, which compared fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math scores in 2003 from nearly 7,000 public schools and more than 530 private schools, found that fourth graders attending public school did significantly better in math than comparable fourth graders in private schools. Additionally, it found that students in conservative Christian schools lagged significantly behind their counterparts in public schools on eighth-grade math. The exception was in eighth-grade reading, where the private school counterparts fared better.

To date, President Bush and Education Secretary Margaret Spillings have not publicly commented on the study.

Why wouldn’t the president, who has desperately been looking for bright political moments to help him regain lost ground with voters, hasten to take credit for this occurence?  

The answer is simple: he can’t.

Since he was appointed president in 2000, Bush has consistently supported school choice models that enable and facilitate privitization. The lynchpin of Bush’s argument, along with other privitization advocates, is that public schools are thoroughly dysfunctional. By forcing schools into a competitive posture, the conservatives and neo-liberals argue, everyone will be better served. In essence, the market becomes the antidote for our social ills.

Such arguments, however, are problematic for several reasons. First, they fetishize the market in ways that obscure its historic disservice to our most vulnerable populations. Also, they ignore the empirical evidence that shows that school choice models tend to benefit people who are already privileged by the system, such as middle-class, highly educated, two-parent families. In other words, the same people who these models are supposed to help would be “left behind” (pun intended) in even worse conditions.

Despite these realities, President Bush is able to push his privitization agenda as long as Americans presume that nothing good can come from public schools. Studies like this one undermine such assumptions.

Bush supporters will inevitably point out the empirical limitations of this study, including the National Center for Educational Statistics’ admission that such comparisons are of “modest utility.” In fact, a Bush spokesperson immediately pointed to the limitations section of the study in order to challenge its credibility. To a certain extent, he’s correct. In a political world where “facts” are often bandied about with little concern for context and limitations, it is critical that we not read too much into any individual set of findings.

While we certainly shouldn’t overstate the insights provided by any singular study, the recent findings are nonetheless noteworthy, as they provide a powerful rejoinder to the narrative of inferiority that has been attached to public schools. Besides, who doesn’t believe that the Bush Administration would have held several press conferences if the findings had been to the contrary?

Most importantly, studies like these remind us that public schools are sites of possibility that should be nurtured rather than discarded into the neo-liberal trash heap. Hopefully, people will take notice and stand up.

“Too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.” – George Burns