The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has awarded first-year funding of $100,000 to IPR Acting Director Joseph Altonji and Christopher Tabor (IPR-Economics) for a three-year study that may help determine whether private elementary and high schools provide a better education than public schools.

The running national debate over school choice heated up in June when the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the City of Milwaukee could use state-funded vouchers to send pupils to religious schools.

While the effects of Catholic schools on achievement scores and other outcomes have been heavily researched, “there is no consensus on the relative effectiveness of Catholic and public schools, or on the factors that influence the relative effectiveness of those schools,” said Altonji. He will serve as principal investigator for the new study and Tabor as co-principal investigator.

Earlier research by the two economists showed that effects of family background on test scores and post-secondary education are different for Catholic and non-Catholic students who attend public schools. This was also true in pooled samples of students attending Catholic and public schools. That work was based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of 1972 (NLS 72).

More recently, they found that the interaction between being Catholic and residential distance from Catholic schools has a strong effect on the decision to attend a Catholic school. The new study will build on that work, using both NLS72 and the 1988 National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS88), to determine how Catholic school effects vary with neighborhood and school characteristics, and student characteristics such as race, gender, parental education, and family income.

The researchers plan to examine the effects of Catholic school attendance on a wide range of variables that include test scores, teen pregnancy, probability of high school graduation, high school curriculum, achievement test scores, attitudes toward education and work, college attendance and completion, employment, and wage rates.

Much of the research controversy over benefits of a religious school education stems from the fact that selection into private schools is not random. The study will attack the selection problem for Catholic schools by using the interaction between religious preference and proximity to Catholic schools to statistically identify Catholic school effects while controlling for both proximity and religious preference.

The researchers will also analyze whether or not single-sex education makes any difference. They plan to use the inter-actions among religion, gender, and proximity to both single-sex and co-ed Catholic schools to help determine the costs and benefits of gender segregation in high schools.

They will focus on how single-sex education affects curriculum choices, achievement, juvenile delinquency, teen pregnancy, college attendance and major, career aspirations, labor force participation, and choice of occupation.

The two economists will also examine how gender effects may have changed over time. “For policy purposes it is useful to know whether the Catholic school effects persist in both single-sex and coed schools,” Altonji explained.

The researchers plan to issue a series of working papers on their findings.