Robert Holland: Don’t knock ‘church schools’

Regarding the June 6 editorial “Public schools feel threat”: Your snide putdown of “private church schools” as lacking the quality of highly regulated public schools and posh private schools runs counter to fact and research.

Faith-based schools account for 80 percent of private school enrollment, and that is not just because their tuition ($5,330 on average for a Catholic primary school in 2011-12) is less than that for nondenominational schools. Parents like what they find for their children at these schools.

In a 2013 meta-analysis of 90 studies, Dr. William Jeynes of the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton, N.J. and California State University, Long Beach, found that students in religious schools academically outperformed students in public schools and did so with less of an achievement gap by race or income level. Moreover, they were better behaved than their public-school peers.

Those $4,200-per-pupil Opportunity Scholarships that you disparage could help many North Carolina families find schools for their children that deliver excellent education in a cost-effective manner.

This story was originally published June 11, 2016 at 6:00 PM with the headline "Robert Holland: Don’t knock ‘church schools’."