Tag Archives: evidence

I don’t know a lot about India, except that a whole lot of people live there and my parents love the food (Me? I’ll stick with hot dogs and mac & cheese). But then yesterday I found this story about a study of India’s education system (PDF): We find that the teacher performance pay program was highly effective in improving student learning. At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in comparison schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations (SD) in math and language tests respectively….

Update, 8/26: The witty voice of experienced education reformer Checker Finn eloquently notes that “the country’s most powerful education organization has fired a big grumpy shell across the bow of the country’s earnest and determined education secretary. This battle is joined.” I invite you to read his perspective. When it comes to the U.S. Department of Education doling out money to states for reform and innovation, is Colorado like the nerdy kid at the front of the class who sucks up to the teachers? That’s the colorful metaphor Education Week blogger Alyson Klein crafts to explain our state’s approach to getting Arne Duncan‘s “Race to the Top” money: If the competition for a slice of the $4.35 billion Race to the Top Fund were a K-12 class, Colorado would be the kid sitting right up front, wearing gigantic glasses, furiously taking notes, and leaping up to answer every single one of the teacher’s questions. The latest effort? A petition, sent to folks in Colorado, urging them to endorse the state’s bid. Hidden beneath the surface are concerns that Colorado might not meet the early expectations and be one of the top finalists.

I’m back from the beach, and thankfully didn’t get sunburned too badly. A lot went on while I was gone. And though I sometimes have to pick and choose what to write about when I’m blogging almost every day, trying to catch up on a week’s worth of news is — well, it’s like trying to build a tall sand castle just a few feet from the water’s edge. You get the picture. What you really don’t want to miss though is a great op-ed written by U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman for yesterday’s Washington Post. The good senator from Connecticut notes that vouchers must remain part of the solution to help kids with educational needs in our nation’s capital: There are low-income children in the District [of Columbia] who can’t wait for their local schools to turn around. Without programs such as this one, their opportunity will be lost forever.

Update: It looks like I have been out-sillied by Jay Greene, who has posted the original unedited draft of “too cool” Kevin Carey’s comments. I’m not very serious. Of course, you probably already knew that. Golly, I’m a little kid who writes about the world of education policy and occasionally cites Kermit the Frog and Cap’n Crunch. But I don’t think you quite get how un-serious I am. At least according to Kevin Carey from The Quick and The Ed blog:

I’ve pointed out to you the sad story of national education officials ignoring the positive results from the D.C. voucher program as they let the ax fall on opportunity for some very needy kids. The Wall Street Journal raised serious questions about the complicity of Education Secretary Arne Duncan in hiding the results so Congress could go ahead with shutting down the program. Questioning Duncan directly, the Denver Post‘s David Harsanyi pressed the issue further, finding that the Secretary’s story on one important count didn’t match the record: When I had the chance to ask Duncan — at a meeting of the Denver Post editorial board on Tuesday — whether he was alerted to this study before Congress eradicated the D.C. program, he offered an unequivocal “no.” He then called the WSJ editorial “fundamentally dishonest” and maintained that no one had even tried to contact him, despite the newspaper’s contention that it did, repeatedly. When I called the Wall Street Journal, I discovered a different — that is, meticulously sourced and exceedingly convincing — story, including documented e-mail conversations between the author and higher-ups in Duncan’s office. The voucher study — which showed progress compounding yearly — had been around […]

Every child is always a winner … Children just need better self-esteem … We only need to use positive incentives to help children learn more … Let’s reward the good but pretend like the bad doesn’t exist … I’m only 5 years old, and I get that this is marshmallow world nonsense. In fact, it’s the kind of silliness that makes many people question (sometimes fairly, sometimes not) the value of much of what goes on in public education. It gets even worse when the principle is applied not only to students, but also to teachers. At least if the union has its way. Witness the evidence from Chicago, a city with many failing schools: principal evaluations found only 3 out of every 1,000 teachers had unsatisfactory performance. While unions thrive on fears of bogeyman administrators who take out their vindictiveness on good teachers they don’t like, this evidence at least indicates the problem tips in the other direction. In any case, wouldn’t a more objective data system be better?

I’m only 5 (almost 6) years old, but I’m no dummy. The reason we all ought to be skeptical of the “it’s for the children” line is the political realities of how the money is spent. In his Pajamas Media column, Greg Forster unravels the uncritical support of our new President’s grand plans to throw billions of dollars at schools as part of a so-called “stimulus” package: I suspect that pretty much nobody in Congress really believes the Keynesian theory. There are two real motivations behind all stimulus bills. First, it creates an opportunity for politicians to claim credit for any good economic news that subsequently comes along. Second, it’s an excuse to shovel money at powerful constituencies, from whom you can later demand reciprocal support. It’s the latter reason that will determine how the new school spending in the stimulus bill will be spent. The money won’t go where it’s needed. It will go to the gravy train.

If you are going to enter a debate with Dr. Jay Greene over what the research on school choice says, you had better at least come in fully armed. Leo Casey, the blogger for the American Federation of Teachers, made the accusation that Greene cherry-picks evidence, but he probably wasn’t prepared for this kind of intellectual smackdown: If Leo Casey is going to make the charge of cherry picking and improperly citing evidence, he has to deliver proof of those charges. To the contrary, the facts indicate that Casey is the one cherry picking and improperly citing research. Is there a union for playing fast and loose with the truth? Maybe Leo Casey should join it. Oh, I forgot. He’s already a member of the AFT. By the time he had delivered this rhetorical punch, Greene had already dismantled Casey’s arguments in effective and short order. When will they ever learn? Never, of course. Admitting that 9 of the 10 high-quality school choice studies show solid evidence of academic gains would be self-defeating. (Then again, another new study has just shown positive results from the Ohio EdChoice voucher program.) After digging into the question of how well school choice works, […]

Over at Jay Greene’s blog, Greg Forster writes a long (but good) essay about the quality of school choice research. It seems the more evidence comes out, the weaker school choice opponents’ arguments get: What is one to make of all this? The more facts and evidence we provide, the more we’re accused of ignoring the facts and evidence – by people who themselves fail to address the facts and evidence we provide. I’m tempted to say that there’s a word for that sort of behavior. And there may be some merit in that explanation, though of course I have no way of knowing. But I also think there’s something else going on as well. One prominent blogger put it succinctly to me over e-mail. The gist of his challenge was something like: “Why don’t you just admit that all this evidence and data is just for show, and you really support school choice for ideological reasons?” Greg reminds us there’s a lot of evidence out there – both from Milwaukee and from Florida (and again) – that not only does school choice help boost results for students who make the choice but also that competition has a positive effect […]