It took several months to get as good of an answer to that question as possible.
Ohio lawmakers are eager to hold public school districts accountable for student outcomes on state test scores. Public school district test scores and report cards are posted online. But lawmakers have resisted efforts to increase testing requirements or requiring report cards for private schools.
Ohio law requires students who receive vouchers from the state to pay for private school to take tests, but not the same tests administered to their public school peers.
In March, after the 2023-2024 test scores came out for private schools, we accessed test scores from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce for both public and private schools. We downloaded the data in Excel spreadsheets and began to analyze.
While we realized it wasn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, it was the best data that was available.
Heavy data work was involved, combining data on public school proficiency in English Language Arts and math with data from private schools, identifying which private schools were in which local districts, and analyzing voucher usage. We originally tried comparing school-level data, but different elementary schools have different grade levels, so we used district-wide tests from grades 3-8 to keep the comparison as accurate as possible.
While it wasn’t perfect, what our reporting produced is the closest thing available to parents to a report card comparing the performance of public and private schools that is currently available.
We compared the results to previous research studies of private and public school test results. This is important to make sure that our data was not far off from previous results.
Lastly, we called people. We called experts in Ohio school policy that we’ve cultivated over years and asked them what they thought of what we’d found. We called the schools whose scores we’d analyzed and asked them how they would explain the differences between test scores.
We know issues surrounding the education of our region’s children and how taxpayer dollars are spent are important to our readers, and we will continue reporting on these topics. If you have any questions or story ideas, reach out to our education reporter Eileen McClory at 937-694-2016 or email her at eileen.mcclory@coxinc.com.
