| Sumario: | This article examines a study High School Beyond (HSB), designed to assess the impact of different kinds of schooling on how much students learned in the last two years of high school. It was found that juniors and seniors learn slightly more in Catholic high schools than in public high schools. The magnitude of this advantage is uncertain. The point estimates avenge 0.03 or 0.04 standard deviation per year in HSB, depending on whether the researchers focus on the typical Catholic-school sophomore or the typical public-school sophomore. But the confidence interval for the population value is very broad and the effect varies by test. The evidence that Catholic schools are especially helpful for initially disadvantaged students is quite suggestive, but not conclusive. In comparing different educational practices, researchers need data on the cumulative effect of many years of exposure to the practice in question. Studies based on one or two years of exposure seldom tell us much. First, they typically yield point estimates of the annual effect with such large sampling errors as to be almost useless. Second, without information on the cumulative impact of a practice over many years, researchers cannot tell whether short-term benefits persist over time.
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