Private schools are not better than public schools

A 2006 national comparison of scores on the NAEP, the Nation's Report Card, for example, found no significant differences between public and private school fourth and eighth graders, afer controlling for socoeconomic factors and race. The exceptions were fourth-grade math, where public school kids did better, and eighth-grade reading, where private school kids did better. Similarly, an international analysis of PISA scores completed in 2012 found that 90 percent of the apparent test-score edge at private schools came from the socoeconomic advantages of their students and disappeared when you compared them to similary affluent public schools.

From The Test by Anya Kamenetz