The Evidence Is In: Private Schools Make Good Citizens

As the 2024 Presidential election approaches, there is rightly a renewed focus on the United States’ civics education crisis. On the most recent Nation’s Report Card, civics scores dropped for the first time ever, with fewer than one in four students scoring proficient. Voter participation remains low, especially for young people. There are real concerns about our ability to maintain a thriving democracy.

At the same time, across the country families are demanding educational options outside of the public school system. According to polling from the yes. every kid. foundation, nearly 70 percent of Americans believe that making K-12 education more flexible would improve the overall education system. In 2023, elected officials responded, with eight states passing legislation to give families options to use public funds to pick a school that best fits their child—and thousands of families are now exercising that option for the first time by enrolling their child in a private school.

This raises a critical question. As more families opt for educational options outside of the public school system, how will civic outcomes be affected?

Our research team, which included Alison Heape Johnson, Mattie Harris, and Sarah Morris, set out to answer that vital question. We collected all the empirical studies of the effects of private schools around the world on various civic outcomes and combined those results in a peer-reviewed meta-analysis just published in Educational Psychology Review. We found that private schools outperform public schools in forming citizens, particularly in promoting political tolerance, political knowledge and skills, and voluntarism and social capital. Religious schooling especially produces positive civic outcomes. In other words, increasing private school choice may help, not hinder, democracy.

To generate our findings, we employed the latest and most rigorous meta-analytic techniques. Our data, which included 531 statistical findings from 57 empirical studies, varied across context, time, geographies, demographics, type of school, and specific civic outcome. The oldest data in the study were drawn from 1982, and the most recent data were from 2020; more than a dozen countries were represented.

On average, we found that private schooling boosts any civic outcome by 5.5 percent of a standard deviation, or roughly two percentile points, over public schooling. While a small positive finding, it is statistically significant.  At a minimum, private schooling does not reduce any of the civic outcomes in comparison to government-run public schooling.

Notably, religious schooling seems to play a particularly positive role in shaping civic outcomes, with a boost of 7.6 percent of a standard deviation. Even for the outcome of political tolerance, arguably the toughest test for religious schooling effects on civics, we found that there is, at worst, no effect relative to public schools. The effect of any religious private schooling on civic outcomes is positive in comparison to secular private schooling, which produces civic outcomes similar to public schools.

These findings surprised us. After all, most countries established their public school system specifically to prepare children for their citizenship duties. Supporters of public schools assert that government control of schooling is best suited to fulfill the public purposes of education and be held accountable if they fail to do so. They assume public schools to be more effective at teaching civics because such schools tend to draw upon a consistent set of curricular materials and use trained and certified teachers to instruct students in standardized ways. As political philosopher Amy Gutmann has written “…public, not private, schooling is … the primary means by which citizens can morally educate future citizens.” 

But as our results show, it’s clearly not so simple. In contrast to the one-size-fits-all approach of most public schools, the private school system is pluralistic. Children learn a specific conception of the good life, often situated within a religious tradition. Defenders of private schools argue that public schools tend to be products of the democratic political system but not necessarily pillars of it. They argue public schools largely serve the interests of powerful elites and can be intolerant of certain political, ideological, and religious values. Many private schools encourage students to confront controversial, value-laden issues, which are often avoided in public schools so as not to ruffle feathers. These factors could help explain the positive civics outcomes we observe for private schools.

This isn’t to say that all private schools do an excellent job when it comes to civics. But it is often assumed that there is something about the structure or purpose of public schools that makes them inherently better at shaping civic outcomes. The empirical evidence does not support that contention.

There is an emerging consensus that our country needs to prioritize civics in our schools. As educators and policymakers determine how to proceed, we hope our study can be a useful resource. It may be tempting to point to growing interest in private schools as a contributing factor to the civics crisis. But the data do not support the concerns of harmful civic effects from private schooling, either paid for by parents or accessed through the increasing number of school choice programs sweeping the country. Based on the empirical evidence, private schooling does not threaten democracy. Educational pluralism seems to be a boon, and not a bane, for civic outcomes.