Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has long championed private school choice as an alternative to public schools. But new federal data show their share of the nation’s schoolchildren fell from both the previous year and a decade ago.
Private school students show high educational attainment, the data show. More than 60 percent of private school students who graduated in 2017 enrolled in four-year colleges by that fall. The data also show that nearly all private school 12th graders in 2016-17 graduated high school, but this does not measure the overall graduation rate for members of the Class of 2017 who entered private schools four years before.
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