Do private schools provide a better quality education than public schools? Many Canadians seem to think so. In a 2012 poll by Ipsos-Reid, two-thirds of Canadian parents said they would take their children out of the public system and send them to a private school if they could afford it. This is despite the fact that international rankings consistently report that Canada has one of the top public education systems in the world.

So why then would a majority of Canadians want to abandon public schools for private ones? There are likely a couple of factors at work here. First, private schools (especially the elite ones) do a good job of marketing themselves to parents. They often offer the promise of your child getting into the university of their (or more likely your) dreams, and going on to achieve great things. And it is true that many prominent Canadians (e.g. John Tory (open John Tory's policard)) have attended private schools in the past.

A second factor is that it is true that children who attend private schools generally have better academic outcomes than those in public schools. A look at the Fraser Institute’s recent ranking of Ontario elementary schools shows a disproportionate number of the top ranking schools are indeed private ones. Whereas only about 6 per cent of Canadian children attend private schools, over a third of the top scoring schools on the Fraser rankings are private. It is also the case that Canadian children in private schools tend to score higher on tests like the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), as well as have higher educational credentials as adults.

But the important question is not whether children who attend private schools have better academic performance. The real question that should concern parents, especially those considering spending considerable amounts of money on a private education, is to what degree do private schools actually produce these results?

We have a growing body of evidence to answer this question. In 2011, the OECD went deeper into analyzing the results from PISA and looked specifically at the role of private schools. It found that while students who attend private schools tend to perform better than students who attend public ones, this was primarily because these students tend to come from higher socio-economic status families. Furthermore, it concluded that “students in public schools in a similar socio-economic context as private schools tend to do equally well” and that “there is no evidence to suggest that private schools help to raise the level of performance of the school system, as a whole.”

In 2014, two researchers from the University of Illinois found that when you control for the socio-economic backgrounds of students, public schools in the U.S. often outperform their private counterparts. As outlined in the book The Public School Advantage, they concluded that the higher scores found at U.S. private schools occur largely because their students tend to come from privileged backgrounds, and once those backgrounds are taken into account, public schools perform at least as well and often better than private ones.

Perhaps it is not surprising then that Statistics Canada has just recently reported that the same trend also applies to Canadian schools. Looking at over 7,000 students from close to 1,200 schools across Canada, it found that those who attended private schools had better academic outcomes, but that this was primarily because “students who attended private high schools were more likely to have socio-economic characteristics positively associated with academic success and to have school peers with university-educated parents.” There was little evidence that the success of these students was the result of attending schools with better resources or higher quality instruction.

So while there may be good reasons to send your child to a private school, thinking that it will provide them with a higher-quality education is probably misguided. Canadian public schools do a pretty good job of educating our students. This needs to be better recognized so that more parents are confident in the quality of education their children are receiving.


    Sachin Maharaj is a PhD student in educational policy at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto and is a teacher in the Toronto District School Board

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