Measuring Catholic school performance

Public Interest, Spring, 1997 by Neal Derek

In wealthy suburbs, the public provision of services often works quite well. As a rule, sanitation crews keep the streets clean, the police answer 911 calls, and public schools educate children. But in the low-income neighborhoods of our nation's capital and other cities, the streets are not clean, crime is rampant, and public schools are in disarray. Many politicians who oppose vouchers in any form portray themselves as the true friends of the urban poor. However, they offer no viable alternative to vouchers; and meanwhile, economically disadvantaged families in our cities continue to suffer.

1 The paper, "The Effects of Catholic Secondary Schooling on Educational Attainment," was published in the January 1997 issue of the Journal of Labor Economics.

2 The NLSY is a panel data set that follows over 10,000 young persons from 1979 to the present. These young people were born between 1957 and 1964. Therefore, they attended high school during the 1970s and early 1980s. For each respondent, I calculated detailed measures of family background and home environment. I also determined the population of the student's county of residence. If a county contains more than 250,000 persons, I designated the county as an urban county. I tried more restrictive definitions: However, the benefits of Catholic schooling appear to be greater when the urban sample is restricted to even larger counties.

3 Because the NLSY contains a supplemental sample of economically disadvantaged white students, both of these numbers understate graduation rates for the typical white student. If we remove the economically disadvantaged whites from the urban sample, the public-school graduation rate is 79 percent and the Catholic school graduation rate is 90 percent.

DEREK NEAL is an associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago.