New Report: Public Schools As Good As Private

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Saturday July 15, 2006 · 3:41 PM PDT

2006/07/15 · 15:41

Remember the Sandia Labs education study requested by then-president George Herbert Walker Bush in the late 1980s? Bush had commissioned the study, fully expecting it to show that public schools did far worse than private ones -- and he intended to use these expected results as part of his assault on America's public school system.

But the Sandia study showed that public schools were generally just as good, and in many cases better, than private ones -- and so Bush suppressed the Sandia Labs study; it wasn't released publicly until Bill Clinton took office in 1993.

Fast-forward two decades. Another Bush is president, and another study shows pretty much what the Sandia study showed back in the late 1980s: That public schools are as good as, and in most cases better than, private ones. And what has been the fate of this new study? Follow me after the jump to find out.

This study hasn't exactly been suppressed, but it was held back for over six months and then released with no fanfare from the Bush-controlled Education Department, on a Friday afternoon so as to guarantee its being all but ignored in the shutdown of news cycles over the weekend.

Except that we have the Web now. We have blogs and DailyKos now. We can take stories that are buried -- only the NYT has bothered so far to report on this new study -- and pass them around.

So when you, as a public-school graduate, see some conservative touting the virtues of his or her private-school education, bear in mind that in all likelihood, you probably got a better education.

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