Giving Compass' Take:

· Education Dive discusses a recent study from the journal Educational Researcher which shows that, when considering socioeconomic factors, there are no real advantages for students who attend private school instead of public school.

· What are the differences between public and private schools? What factors influence student success? 

· Read more about private schools and the effects of private school choice.

The 74 notes the prevailing idea of private schools and the private school life as glamorous, citing media and entertainment that reinforces that idea — from movies and books like "Harry Potter" and "The Catcher in the Rye," centered around fancy prep schools where kids wear expensive-looking uniforms and live on picture-perfect campuses. Without any adjustments, if you put a public school student next to a private school student, you’d probably find that the private school student had better grades, higher performance levels and lower aptitudes for risky behaviors, the authors found.

If this were the only comparison, there would be no case to justify public schools being superior to private schools. But this apparent superiority doesn’t actually come from students going to private school, the study says — it comes from the circumstances that got them there, like having affluent parents, and made them more likely to have brighter futures.

This anti-private schools idea goes against the views of the public — a majority of which seems to favor school choice — and the Trump administration, which has focused heavily on this concept. Back in February, the president’s proposed education budget, which was ignored, included an unprecedented level of school choice. Trump’s a big supporter of school vouchers, or state-backed coupons that let parents choose where to send their kids to school.

Read the full article about private schools by Jessica Campisi at Education Dive.