Academic gains of students enrolled in public schools compared to students of private BIP-creativity elementary schools (that aim to promote the development of talent, intelligence & personality): no differences at the end of fourth grade

Who is ahead at the end of elementary school? Student achievement gains in private BIP-Creativity schools and public schools. Frank Lipowsky et al. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, October 2018, Volume 21, Issue 5, pp 897–927. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11618-018-0807-1

Abstract: The number of students enrolled in private schools has been growing continuously in the past years, especially in elementary schools. There is a variety of reasons for this development. Among other expectations, parents anticipate a superior education for their children and hope for bigger academic success. However, empirical results on the effectiveness of private schools are inconsistent and ambiguous, partly because many studies used cross-sectional data. Longitudinal studies investigating the development of elementary school students are especially lacking.

The present study compares academic achievement gains of students enrolled in public schools to students who learned in the so-called BIP-creativity elementary schools. BIP schools are private schools that aim to promote the development of the talent, intelligence and personality of their students. This study investigates the development of students in mathematics, reading and orthography over a 4-years period.

As the group of BIP-students is selected in terms of their socio-economic background, analyses were run in two ways. First, multilevel analyses controlling for student and class characteristics were performed. Second, a Propensity Score Matching based on school enrollment data was used in order to select a comparable group of students from public schools. Each BIP-student was matched to a student from the public schools that had a comparable socio-economic background and similar cognitive characteristics. Neither multilevel analyses nor mean comparisons of the matched samples could reveal any differences between the two groups of students in the three domains of academic achievement at the end of fourth grade.

Keywords: BIP-creativity schools Elementary school Private school Public school Propensity Score Matching