The 2019 Good Soil report, which presents data collected by the Canadian think tank Cardus and the University of Notre Dame, is monumental in showing the lasting effects various types of schooling have on their graduates. The results from graduates of Classical Christian Schools in particular are remarkable, and can help us understand the tangible ways that Classical Christian Education impacts a students' life after they leave high school.

Understanding the Data

There are two math concepts that really help you understand this data—especially the indexes that we are primarily looking at. The first is the concept of the median, and (more specifically) being above or below the median.

The median is the middle number in a list of data.

So, if you had a set of data that recorded how many times your husband washed the dishes in each of the last five months, it could look like this:

January – 10 times
February – 2 times
March – 15 times
April – 30 times
May – 5 times

The median would be 10 because if you listed the numbers in order from least to greatest (2, 5, 10, 15, 30), 10 would be the middle number in the list. In this example, it might seem that the median and the average might be very far apart, but imagine you tracked your husband over 300 months— and he did an average of 12 times a month. This would likely also be the median— 12 times. Half the months (150) he would have done more than 12, and half, less than 12.

The indexes used to show the data in this study all work off of the concept of percentage above or below the median. For example, when asked about readiness for college and career, students answered questions like what grades they got in college or whether they earned a degree. Questions like this were put into the index below and the different options were calculated as being above or below the median. Here is one of the bar graphs from the Good Soil Report:

For instance, in this case the public-school alumni had 10% more of their students providing answers that were below the median answer. So, that would mean that 55% of public school graduates' responses fell below the median, and 45% were above the median (55 being 10 points higher than 45). Thus, they score -10%. Alumni from Catholic schools, on the other hand, provided answers that were slightly above the median. Thus, their bar is at 2% in above the median.

Linear Regression

The other math concept is not as simple, but it still can be easily understood. It is called a linear regression. It helps us see more clearly the impact of the type of schooling with great confidence.

Imagine that someone was comparing two schools and found that the students at School A had an SAT Math Average that was 20 points higher than students at School B. The easy conclusion would be that School A is better at teaching Math (or at least Math for the SAT) than School B. However, someone might say, "Wait just a minute! School A might be in an affluent suburb full of wealthy two-parent families who all purchase tutoring for their children, and School B might be in a rural community being destroyed by the opioid epidemic!"

How do you figure out which school actually does better at teaching math for the SAT?

You need to do a linear regression. Simply put, a linear regression compares every known piece of data about every student to every other known piece of data about every other student. This allows us to sort out what the real impact of a particular type of schooling actually is. The Cardus Study indexes this data to help us see what the impact of the type of education really is. Here is the same bar graph about College and Career Preparedness after the linear regression was performed:

With those two conceptions in mind, you can easily digest all of the Good Soil Report data. When Veritas shows Good Soil report graphs, we will always use blue bars for raw data and red bars for data based on the linear regression.

Why Use These Metrics?

Researches wanted to discover two main things:

What are the relative differences in the responses of different groups of alumni; and
What is the magnitude of the differences between the responses?

“Percent above median” is used because the questions varied in format (1–7, 1–4, yes/no, etc.) so the raw data is difficult to understand at a glance. For this reason, a “cut point” was determined as the median for each question to get to a percent of respondents above or below that point.

Method for Gathering Data

The Good Soil report first draws from the established, well-known Cardus Education Survey, which was conduced in 2011, 2014, and 2018 and is regarded as one of the most comprehensive and valuable surveys of its kind among school practitioners, leaders, and policy-makers. This report "seeks to understand the life patterns, views, and choices of graduates from various kinds of non-governmental schools in order to assess their contributions to a shared good." (per the Good Soil report, page 7)

After Cardus released their 2018 report results, the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS), curious to see how ACCS graduates specifically stacked up next to those other types of schools, commissioned researchers at the University of Notre Dame to survey ACCS school alumni using the exact same questions and methods as the Cardus study. Per the Good Soil report, "to obtain a representative sample, the ACCS collected about 2500 alumni names and contact information out of which researchers selected about 300 for their random sample—a group as large or larger than any of the other sectors surveyed."

Using the same questions and methods as the Cardus study ensures that the Good Soil report data is affected by very little bias.

Bottom line: What does this mean?

What you will see as we walk through this data is that the type of education that you choose for your child has an impact on their future life, their beliefs, and the choices they make. This data should be very important for two groups of people: parents and patrons.

For Christian parents, the data should inform the educational choices you make for your children. If you value educational readiness and the encouragement of Christian convictions, the data points in some powerful directions.

For patrons, it is perhaps even more meaningful. Christians have poured resources in so many directions as they have attempted to have a cultural impact for Christ’s Kingdom. We have invested in everything from politics to anti-bullying campaigns with little cultural impact. This data provides hope for patrons who want to see the direction of culture changed.