In order to shed light on the effectiveness of private education, this paper undertakes an international study on impacts of private education spending on student academic performance, using the OECD’s PISA 2006 data. To circumvent endogeneity of the education spending, it relies on propensity-score matching and nonparametric bounding methods. The primary result from both methods is that the effect of private education spending remains only modest for all the countries examined in the PISA 2006 data. In terms of an elasticity, the largest magnitudes of the effect imply that a 10 percent increase in spending leads to no more than a 0.6 percent average improvement in test scores. Private education spending seems to have either little average impact on student academic performance, or a weak positive effect at best.