RANKINGS Should private schools make their data public?

School-choice efforts are increasing the pressure for private institutions to be publicly accountable.
By JAY MATHEWS
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- Reshma Memon Yaqub, a writer for Worth magazine, graduated from a public high school and is accustomed to such schools providing all kinds of information to reporters. But when she began to contact private high schools for an article on getting students into Ivy League colleges, she said, "the door was slammed in my face."
Few schools returned her calls.
The National Association of Independent Schools in Washington, whose 1,200 members include some of the nation's best-known and most expensive private schools, told everyone not to cooperate with her, Yaqub said. A similar thing had happened, she learned, when The Washington Post and U.S. News & amp; World Report sought data to rate private high schools.
"It was as if these schools felt it was their God-given right to charge $20,000 a year ... and not be accountable to the public for the results," she said.
Patrick Bassett, the group's president, dismissed this as nonsense. "Independent schools are among the most accountable in the country," he said. "After all, if an independent school does not succeed, its students disappear."
Changing climate
But the pressure on private schools to divulge more information is increasing as parents gain a wider choice of schools, along with access to taxpayer dollars -- from federal and some local governments -- to spend on private education.
Even Bassett, whose organization has been the strongest critic of efforts to pull more data from private schools, agrees it is time for a change.
"The public wants some means by which to measure schools," he said.
Although lists such as Worth magazine's "Top Feeder Schools" to Harvard, Yale and Princeton are irritatingly misleading and simple-minded in Bassett's view, "we may have to get over that," he said.
He predicted that his association would soon discuss better ways to calibrate private schools -- such as calculating the percentage of their graduates completing college -- and urge each member to release the data.
Education experts say if tax-supported private-school tuition vouchers and other ways of funding private schools with government money become popular, private schools that receive such money will be obligated to report test scores, teacher qualifications and graduation rates, as public schools do now.
"I think it's very hard to argue that private schools receiving public funds should not be subject to the same information requirements as traditional public schools," said Doug Harris, assistant professor of education and economics at Florida State University and a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
A new demand
Some experts say private schools should provide more information, whether they accept public funds or not.
"I think their results should be as transparent as those of the public and charter schools, and they should be ashamed of themselves for trying to trade on status and reputation and rumor and exclusiveness, rather than hard evidence of educational effectiveness," said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in Washington and an education official in the Reagan administration.
Demands on private high schools for more information are relatively new. Most of the debate has been about how private colleges, not high schools, should handle rating enterprises, including U.S. News & amp; World Report's "America's Best Colleges" list. And some activists who otherwise agree on needed educational changes are not in accord on the private-school data issue.
Jeanne Allen, for instance, is president of the Center for Education Reform in Washington and, like Finn, strongly backs vouchers for ill-served public-school pupils to attend private schools. But she is also a private-school parent and thinks demanding more data from such institutions is wrong. "Private schools should not be expected to deliver the same kind of assessments ... as they are private and account for their success or failure directly to their patrons," Allen said.
Lisa Snell, director of the education program at the Reason Foundation in Los Angeles, said private schools are likely to provide more information once they find themselves in competition with high-quality public and charter schools.
"But the parents have to act as the enforcers," she said. "In a school-choice scenario, it becomes the parent's responsibility."
Keeping things in context
One private-school principal, Daniel McMahon of DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, Md., said he provides a lot of information.
"We regularly tell potential students and their parents our college acceptance rates, scholarship money earned, SAT scores, [Advanced Placement] courses and results, and numerous other things," he said.
Bruce Stewart, head of Sidwell Friends School in Northwest Washington, said he thinks context is essential in judging a school. Like most independent schools, Sidwell releases little statistical information about itself.
"It is my conviction," he said, "that persons interested in the quality of schools should look more at qualitative data and less at quantitative data, which often simplifies or even distorts the true value of a particular academic community."
The Worth magazine list proves his point, Stewart said. Frozen out by the private schools, Yaqub used college freshman directories to compile her list. She discovered that only 27 of the country's 36,000 public and private high schools sent a higher percentage of their students to Harvard, Yale and Princeton than did Sidwell Friends.
But Stewart still rejects the effort as a "quick and dirty" survey that says nothing about the high quality of teaching and other factors that draw students to his school.
There is no way, however, for private schools to stop parent advocates and journalists from finding and publishing more information about them, several experts said.
Marguerite Clarke, assistant research professor at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, said that if the schools don't release their own data, "someone else will fill the void."