Scott Elliot, the writer at the big media Dayton Daily News Education blog, Get on the Bus, provides more background information about John Tierney’s recent op-ed in the New York Times. For background, the Department of Education waited till Friday evening to release a report that showed public schools match or outperform private schools students when socio-economic background is factored in to NAEP scores. Tierney wrote a furiously anti-public school/union op-ed citing two studies funded by a voucher friendly right-wing institute.
Elliot dissects some of the problems with one of the studies:
It just so happened that both studies involved Paul Peterson, whom Tierney neglected to mention is often funded by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based school choice advocacy group with roots here in Dayton.
Most surprising to me was that Tierney reached way back seven years to cite this 1999 study:
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Don’t remember this study? Since it included Dayton, I remembered it. Let me help refresh your memory. This is the Paul Peterson led study that saw it’s conclusions renounced by the research group compiled the data. Here’s an excerpt from a story that ran in the Dayton Daily News in 2000:
An educational research company that compiled data for a school voucher study that showed blacks did better at private schools says gains in one city were overstated by the lead researcher.
The study, led by Paul Peterson, a government professor at Harvard and a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, examined three privately funded experimental programs in New York, Washington and Dayton.
It showed significant gains, based on scores on standardized math and reading tests, for black students who received vouchers to help pay for private school.
Mathematica Policy Research of Princeton, which gathered data in New York, has issued a statement that calls the findings premature and cautions against jumping to any policy conclusions, The New York Times reported in Friday’s editions.
`If you ask the question,When I offered students vouchers, did I make a difference in their test scores,’ right now you come away saying, `No, there’s no impact’ ” said David Myers of Mathematica.
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This was the best study Tierney could find to bolster the case for private schools? There hasn’t been a more definitive or independent study in seven years? I’m not sure how much he helped the cause.
1 Comment:
1 MichaelB
· Jul 31, 2006 at 12:10 am
Even if the study had shown that students who received vouchers clearly performed better in private schools – so what? Such data provides no basis for comparing public to private schools. It only tells what can happen to students when they transfer to better (or lower poverty) schools.
Change the word “voucher” to “variance” and you see this same experiment being carried out each year within our public school system. Parents who get their kids out of failing schools and into successful ones expect better results. It doesn’t matter if the “good” school is public or private.