“Now you can look up detailed demographic information about thousands of private schools across the country and compare them to nearby public schools.”
ProPublica Releases New Private School Demographics Lookup
by Sergio Hernández, Nat Lash and Ken Schwencke
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Join us Jan. 31 at 3 p.m. Eastern for a live demonstration of this database’s features.
Private schools in the United States are, on the whole, whiter than public schools, with fewer Black, Hispanic or Latino students. This may not be a surprising statistic because private schools can often be expensive and exclusionary, but it’s not a simple one to pin down. There is no central list of private schools in the country, and the only demographic data about them comes from a little-known voluntary survey administered by the federal government.
While reporting our project on Segregation Academies in the South last year, we relied on that survey to find private schools founded during desegregation and analyzed their demographics compared to local public school districts. Our analysis of that survey revealed, among other things, Amite County, Mississippi, where about 900 children attend the local public schools — which, as of 2021, were 16% white. By comparison, the two private schools in the county, with more than 600 children, were 96% white.
In the course of our reporting, we realized that this data and analysis were illuminating and useful — even outside the South. We decided to create a database to allow anyone to look up a school and view years worth of data.
Today, we are releasing the Private School Demographics database. This is the first time anyone has taken past surveys and made them this easy to explore. Moreover, we’ve matched these schools to the surrounding public school districts, enabling parents, researchers and journalists to directly compare the makeup of private schools to local public systems. (snip-MORE. It’s interesting.)
Scottie's Playtime 
Hello. It is interesting that rather than pay for private church schools, fundamentalist religious parents are frantic to push their religious beliefs into public schools. Everything from teaching their church doctrines to banning the things their religion says is wrong, regardless of all the other parents wishes or other children of different beliefs. If they get their way that states must pay for religious schools then most of the white kids will go to well funded schools and the black / Hispanic / Latino, troubled, lower skills children will be stuck in lower performing schools. Segregation will be back and the current SCOTUS will support it. Sadly. Hugs
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