Private schools and school enrollment in Chicago

Chicago Fed Letter, Oct 2006 by Sander, William

Although Hispanic enrollment rates are slightly less than white and black enrollment rates at younger ages, they start to fall off more dramatically after age 15. By the age of 17, over 20% of Hispanics are not enrolled in school in the City of Chicago and almost 25% are not enrolled in the suburbs of Chicago. Enrollment rates for Hispanics are about the same as for blacks at age 18 in the City of Chicago; only one in two Hispanics are enrolled in school at age 18 in the Chicago suburbs.

Statistical estimates

I conducted statistical (probit) estimates of the probability that respondents age 15-17 were not enrolled in school (called the dropout rate). This procedure allows one to test whether private schools might have a significant effect on school enrollment rates in the Chicago region after controls are made for other background factors. The private school variable is defined as the percentage of grade school and high school students in the area in which they live (PUMA) that attended a private grade school or high school in 2000. The additional adjustments that are made to estimate dropout rates include household income, the householder's (parent's or guardian's) education, whether the respondent lived in a married-couple household, gender, age, race/ethnicity (black and Hispanic), whether the sample area was in the City of Chicago, and average household income in the sample area. Estimates were undertaken for all teens age 15-17 and by race and ethnic background.

For all respondents, a one standard deviation increase in the percentage attending private schools would reduce the dropout rate of 5.4% by a very modest 0.3 percentage points. It was also found that males and Hispanics were more likely to drop out, while respondents from more affluent and highly educated households were less likely to drop out of school. For non-Hispanic white respondents, the percentage attending private schools did not affect the dropout rate of 2.6%.

The results for blacks and Hispanics both indicated a more substantial negative relationship between the percentage attending private schools and the dropout rate. For blacks, a one standard deviation increase in the percentage of blacks in private schools (about 3 percentage points) would reduce the dropout rate of 5.7% by about one-sixth. Another way to look at this relationship is that if blacks attended private schools at about the same rate as non-Hispanic whites in the metropolitan area, private schools would be associated with reducing the black dropout rate by about one-half. For Hispanics, the negative relationship between private school enrollment in an area and the dropout rate was even more substantial. A one standard deviation increase in the percentage of Hispanics attending private schools (about 5 percentage points) would be associated with reducing the dropout rate of 13.3% to about 10.8%.

Conclusion

Although the vast majority of students in suburban schools graduate from high school, with a high percentage going on to college, this is not the case in the City of Chicago. In a recent study, the four-year high school graduation rate in public schools in Chicago was estimated at only 54%.7 Although the high school graduation rate is low in many large cities in the United States, the rate in Chicago is lower than in many other large cities. For example, in a study of the largest public school districts in the United States, the 2001-02 graduation rate was estimated at 51% for Chicago, while it was 66% for New York City and 59% for Philadelphia.8