August 7, 2006 1:41PM # “Private Schools Better. NCES Study Bunk.” — Harvard Profs By [Andrew J. Coulson](https://www.cato.org/people/andrew-coulson) --- SHARE Last month, [a study](http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2006461) by the National Center for Education Statistics reported that private schools consistently outscore public ones, but that their advantage goes away after controlling for differences in student and school characteristics. In [my response to that study](https://www.cato.org/2006/07/16/the-school-choice-movements-greatest-failure/), I pointed out that some of the authors’ statistical controls were incorrect and others were misapplied, undermining their conclusion. Elena Llaudet and Paul Peterson of Harvard University have now [run the numbers](http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/pepg/pr/pepg0602PR.htm) after correcting for these errors, and the verdict is in: the private school academic advantage is real. That said, the central point of my earlier blog post remains: the current 10 percent niche of private schools in this country does not constitute a true competitive education industry. Yes, independent schools outpeform government schools, but according to the last International Adult Literacy Survey, nearly a quarter of 16-to-25 year-old Americans are functionally illiterate. We don’t need a system that’s a little better than this. We need a system that’s a whole lot better. We need real market reform of our entire education sector. ##### Related Tags [Education](https://www.cato.org/education), [General](https://www.cato.org/general), [Center for Educational Freedom](https://www.cato.org/center-educational-freedom) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).