Does it need to be said? Conservatism is a religion. And like any religion their ideas are based in a notion of what settles well inside, rather than making decisions based on what works, or finding provable cause and effect. Our friend Grover gives an excellent example of this by showing a couple of graphs, and this ought to be enough. To him, it must be pattently obvious. I do not think that they are capable of understanding that they actually are a minority; they intuit that "of course, their thinking is right, therefore the majority of people must think the same"

Examples of this can be seen in the "debate" about evolution. They think that the "theory" developed from somebody's thoughts, so any other "theory" can be just as valid. The arguments they present show little understanding of scientific theory. Now if one takes this mindset to other fields, one can see this "theory" that tax cuts grow the economy rather than provide temporary stimulus; in religion, they will be the ones citing scripture as an answer to problems rather than making hard moral choices. The irony is that they talk about personal responsibility, but demonstrate a distinct inability to take responsibility by laying it on "rule of law" instead of thinking out the consequences based on history or experience. After all, just why are we repeating Viet Nam? Why are we dropping behind in the number of scientists? Why is our economy getting ready to tank?

dc

Your take on school vouchers, or your classification of that issue alongside Iraq as a "failure," is perplexing.

1. You're using ad hominem arguments. The fact that Caroline Hoxby got an Olin Faculty Fellowship in 1998-99 does not in any way disprove her research on voucher and charter schools, most of which was published later. Indeed, given that you yourself work for an ideological foundation, I'm not sure why you keep suggesting that anyone who ever got money from a foundation is under a cloud of suspicion. Do you expect that readers will apply this standard only to one side of a given debate?

2. You say that vouchers are a "failure." By what standard? There are several random assignment studies showing modest increases in test scores with vouchers. (See, e.g., Angrist et al., who found a 2/10 standard deviation increase, which is pretty big for educational interventions.) There are a few studies that have purported to disprove the former, but no study of which I'm aware claims that vouchers actually harm test scores. Even Martin Carnoy -- who seems to oppose vouchers -- found in his own research on Chile that "Catholic voucher schools are somewhat more effective than public schools," and that "non-religious schools are more efficient, by virtue of producing academic achievement at a lower cost."

At the same time, test scores aren't everything (right?) Vouchers also make parents happier; they may put some valuable competitive pressure on public schools; they tend to promote civic and democratic values among students; they sometimes allow students to attend more racially integrated schools; and they provide greater autonomy and freedom of choice to poorer citizens (in other contexts, liberals usually purport to believe that choice and autonomy are valuable).

If vouchers are nonetheless a "failure" to be equated with the Iraq War -- just because they haven't been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to cause massive increases in test scores - then pretty much every liberal education policy ever tried has been a "failure" as well.

This is so well written and the week-long discussion was cathartic. I am going to buy the book this weekend and I hope other posters do too. Anrig richly deserves our support.

Bless you, BevD!!!--Greg

Non-conservative foundations have funded tons and tons of studies, including some by EPI, that have found various public school innovations to be ineffective. The right often used those studies to support vouchers and charter systems that lack much in the way of accountability to the government.

I'm not saying parental satisfaction is worth nothing. I'm just saying it's not the standard by with the right held public schools in the past, with considerable justification (many parents generally have little way of knowing whether their kids are getting a "good education" relative to students at other schools.)--Greg

There are liberal innovations that have worked, mainly involving public school choice plans that enable low-income students to attend middle-class schools. See this report for more on that subject. The right's ownership of the educational reform agenda in recent years has largely sidetracked attention from that general strategy, though change is afoot.

Also, thanks to Amazon's "search inside" function, I see something else interesting, and that makes me think that this book shows a particular kind of bias that is endemic to virtually all public policy debates. That bias is this: You hold the opposite side's evidence to much higher standards than are applied to yourself.

Example: Just above in this thread, you point out that one of Caroline Hoxby's studies on charter schools has been criticized by an EPI report, which (if one reads that link) points out that Hoxby could have done a better job of controlling for race and socioeconomics. OK, fair enough.

But on page 183, you come out full force in favor of one specific policy: "But because the research is so clear that moving low-income students (whatever their race) from high-poverty to middle-class schools improves their performance without any negative impact on the students they join . . . as a matter of policy, voluntary socioeconomic integration can only help to reduce disparities by race.”

What do you cite for this? The only thing I see is in endnote 50: a Century Foundation report by Rick Kahlenberg. Look, I've liked Kahlenberg for 10+ years, and I think that he may be onto something here. But come on: His report doesn't control for anything at all when pointing out (on pages 3-4) that according to 2005 NAEP scores, poor kids in middle-class schools score better than middle-class students in high-poverty schools. This is just eyeballing a chart. There might be all kinds of selection effects, to say the least, that would explain such a disparity. (The same is true for Kahlenberg's citation of supposed success stories in North Carolina, for example, where he cites anecdotal reports of test score increases, but concedes in footnote 13 that he wasn't able to compare scores from before and after the policy, and his analysis on page 6 merely compares raw test scores across various counties.)**

So clearly, you're holding Kahlenberg to a much lower standard of proof than you hold Hoxby (or voucher studies in general). Based on a report that consists mostly of anecdotes and that controls for nothing, you're confidently predicting success from a particular policy; while at the same time you dismiss vouchers as a "failure" because of technical econometric analysis arguing that voucher studies didn't control for the right thing in the right way.

** You'd rightly jump all over this if a voucher advocate did it. I.e., if a voucher proponent came out with a study that merely compared the raw test scores in one county with vouchers vs. three counties without vouchers, and without controlling for anything or looking at pre-voucher scores, proclaimed vouchers a success because that one county's raw test scores were higher.

To be sure, we're all guilty of this sometimes. It's the perennial sin of intellectuals. Hence the findings of Taber and Lodge, the classic study by Lord, Ross, and Lepper, and more recent work by Koehler.

I've ordered your book and am really looking forward to reading it. Thank you for addressing these issues.

Two questions and one criticism and an observation:

1) Political labels often conceal more than they reveal. During the era or perestroika, some journalists labeled defenders of the Soviet system "conservative", and that's literally true. How long must a policy (e.g., "public" schools, Social Security) be in place for it's defenders to merit the label "conservative"?

2) Although political success often depends on framing the discussion, the underlying reality matters. The government of a locality is the major dealer in interpersonal violence in that locality (definition). A government grant of "title" to a resource to some individual is a grant of authority over that resource which includes the authority to transfer title to some other individual on mutually agreeable terms (definition). The system of private property (title) prevents the State from becoming bogged down in petty disputes over local issues. The scope of elective, democratic decision-making will vary. Would anyone propose a nationwide plebiscite over how many times I must chew my next bite of apple? All this is background to the second question: From State (government, generally) control of which industries does society as a whole benefit? Why do private contractors build roads while State (government, generally) employees maintain them? Why State (government, generally)-operated schools and not State-operated grocery stores? What decision-mechanism characterizes industries as likely candidates for State operation versus private operation? Your answer may create either a continuum or a dichotomous classification. My answer? You first.

My criticism:...

"The ideological inventors. Most of the conservative ideas examined in the book can be traced to an individual or very small number of people whose brainstorms lacked supporting analysis grounded rigorously in data and history. Examples include Milton Friedman’s school vouchers..."

"Ideological" is an uncomplimentary way to say "systematic". The antonym is "scatter-brained".

Milton Friedman's 1955 voucher proposal dd not have the benefit of empirical studies. How could it have? There were few pre-college tuition voucher programs in the US at the time. It is not the case, however, that Dr. Friedman's proposal "lacked supporting analysis grounded rigorously in data and history". Standard economic analysis applies to any industry, and off-the-shelf analytic tools informed Dr. Friedman's recommendation.

My observation:...

The nit-picky discussion of standardized test scores in State versus parochial schools does not really adress the voucher issue. It would be possible for students in voucher-receiving schools to do worse than students in State schools and for vouchers still to be good policy. It would even be possible for students in voucher-receiving schools to do worse than they would have done if they had stayed in State schools (derived from random assignment studies like Angrist), and for vouchers to be good policy. If unhappy parents remove disruptive students from State schools, vouchers would enhance overall system performance.

Pardon me for nit-picking, but if performance was the reason to pursue a voucher system, how is it good policy absent that? And if performance is not the issue, what's wrong with public schools? And if poor performance is largly the result of uninvolved parents, how does a voucher system alter that?

How does a voucher system meet the "if everybody did it" test? Eventually, all schools are private, and some schools have too many biddng for entry, because they have a good reputation of some sort. Those get priced out of reach of the voucher, and a second-tier system develops.

And if you were in the school business, would you rather service the masses or the elite? Any innovation, and most cutting-edge technology, will be available at the high-end schools but not the second tier.

Publicly-supported education can generate elites, as in England. Our system sought a different goal. I'm still OK with that goal, of shared community. 

Suggest you submit a discussion table post with some excerpts from and the link to that essay.

sPh

Disruptive students disrupt classes. I'm saying that overall (aggregate State school + voucher-receiving independent school) system performance could rise (by various measures) even if disruptive students did worse in their voucher-receiving schools, if teachers in State schools were then actually able to teach.

While I believe that policies which give to individual parents the power to determine the curriculum, the venue, and the pace and method of instruction would enhance overall system performance, I don't believe it would do so by the mechanism I suggested above. That was just a theoretical exercise. I suspect that a legal environment which included tuition vouchers good for some fraction 1/2

I can't decide what you're arguing in favor of.

BTW, as to #5, I note there are more and better groceries and auto mechanics in more expensive neighborhoods. As I said, therefore.

Those who think the range of quality found in public schools is an argument against them, in that it seems to inherently segregate along class lines, miss the point. It is not the public, i.e. government-run, nature that is the problem. It is that it is too local in its funding. Areas with weak property-tax revenues will get weak schools.

Vouchers can't help that, and may hurt by reducing the overall pool of revenue offered. 

In the Bush administration we have either connected friends lacking any oother qualification, i.e. Michael Brown, or those with qualifications from the wrong side, i.e. former industry execs or lobbyists running the departments charged with regukating those industries. 

Assuming non-property tax funds were constant, the property tax contribution is the main variable.

If the sole cause of poor maintenance and materials for inner-city schools is waste or theft, account for it, don't de-fund it. I'll take your word for the funding correlations, but it ignores the conditions within families and neighborhoods. That is, how conducive or deleterious to education is the social milieu?

There is always room for improvement, and this article on San Francisco's public-school choice system is intriguing.

"I'll take your word for the funding correlations"

You should go look it up, I did several years ago(through the department of education web site). It was interesting. As I recall looking over the data there is a general corelation to spending and state scores with interesting exceptions One is Washington DC with the highest per pupil spent and the nations lowest test scores and another that comes to mind is Utah with low spending and good test scores.

And back to the subject at hand , where conservative governments dominate the test scores are low, with again the exception of Utah. Must be something about those Mormen.

One of the best ways to improve the world standing of US schools is to reverse the civil war and give the south their freedom.

Also, California , who used to have a reputation of top schools, now is below average. Can we say Prop. 13?
Jack

Ah, I got ya, an if statement.

Like "If a frog had wings his a$$ wouldn't hit the ground"

Glad you cleared that up.

Jack

I. Let's keep the discussion civil, okay? You ever take any Math beyond third grade arithmetic? "If-then" statements are customary in Math. My initial point, that a focus on the standardized test score difference between students in State (government, generally)-operated schools and students in independent/parochial schools misses the mark, was a matter of simple math. From a policy-maker's point of view, the choice between support or opposition to school voucher legislation (absent considerations like geting re-elected) depends on the effects of parent control on the entire system, not on some sector alone.

Gerard Lassibile and Lucia Navarro Gomez
"Organization and Efficiency of Educational Systems: some empirical findings", pg. 16,
Comparative Education, Vol. 36 #1, 2000, Feb.

Furthermore, the regression results indicate that countries where private education is more widespread perform significantly better than countries where it is more limited. The result showing the private sector to be more efficient is similar to those found in other contexts with individual data (see, for example, Psucharopoulos, 1987; Jiminez, et. al, 1991).
This finding should convince countries to reconsider policies that reduce the role of the private sector in the field of education.

II. (Whiskyjack): "My sister-in-law taught, until she retired, in a low income public school. She now teaches in a private school. the difference between them , no disruptive students. Why? the private school doesnt take them."

Non-governmental agencies curently handle some of the problem students from State (government, generally) schools, under contract to school districts, including autistic students and "emotionally handicapped" (i.e., pain-in-the-butt) students. I was a teacher for ten years in the Hawaii DOE schools. The Hawaii DOE pays the Academy of the Pacific to take problems off their hands. Academy of the Pacific refuses only arsonists and kids who abuse animals (liability considerations). I visited their campus, and the classroom environment is much more conducive to learning than the DOE.

Malcolm Kirkpatrick --

"Substitute "grocery" or "auto" for school to see if this argument works in practice."

1) Poor inner city neighborhoods (and poor rural areas) are even less likely to enjoy convenient access to a full service grocery store than they are to a half-way decent school. Do a little research. And learn a lot more about how both markets and business work. You can't find an industry that better demonstrates how being poor translates into higher prices and fewer choices than the grocery industry.

2) You can't compare mass market product manufacturing -- of autos or any other sort -- where economies of scale apply, to a social service like education, with its costly infra-structure, high plant and maintenance costs and high (educated) labor costs. But doing so is a common mistake conservatives make.

As for your claim that the US public school system "originated in anti-Catholic bigotry" -- this an inflammatory interpretation of the facts that puts the cart somewhat before the horse. It's true that anti-Catholic bigotry was rampant in the 19th century. And it's true that the Catholic parochial school system was built in reaction to the fact that Protestant Christianity -- in a supposedly "sectarian" guise -- dominated the 19th century public or "common" schools ("common" meaning what we today would call "non-denominational" but not secular), as it dominated American society in general. But Catholics didn't form their own schools because their children were excluded, by bigotry, as students from the "common" schools -- they weren't -- they formed their own schools because the nation's dominant religion, Protestant Christianity, was presumed to be a natural part of the curriculum of those schools, while Catholic teachings were excluded (as were the teachings of non-Christian religions). They wanted their children to attend a school in which the curriculum was based in their own religion, and, they wanted to protect their children from exposure to Protestantism.

It's ironic that so many conservative Catholics today are willing to make common cause with fundamentalist Protestants who want Protestantism to once again dominate taxpayer supported schools -- with the expectation that they will be paid off for that support with taxpayer support for Catholic schools.

As for the notion that "assiduous lobbying" is the only thing that maintains public support for public education, I'm afraid that's wishful thinking. Public schools in this country are still primarily community schools -- that is, they are governed by and supported by taxpayers within the communities they serve. And the truth is that a majority of taxpayers, in an overwhelming majority of those communities, are quite satisfied with their local schools.

The unpopularity of vouchers rest in the fact that most taxpayers suspect (correctly in most cases) that voucher supporters' motivation is less about gaining improvements in education for the community at large than it is about gaining taxpayer support for their own selective, private interests.

(Tom Wright):"...(I)f you were in the school business, would you rather service the masses or the elite? Any innovation, and most cutting-edge technology, will be available at the high-end schools but not the second tier."
(malcolm): "Substitute 'grocery' or 'auto' for school to see if this argument works in practice."
(esmense): "Poor inner city neighborhoods (and poor rural areas) are even less likely to enjoy convenient access to a full service grocery store than they are to a half-way decent school."

If one chooses to live away from people, one chooses to live away from the goods and services which people provide. This argument applies to rural health care and groceries, but not (very much) to education. Books pass through the mail, and the internet makes much scholarship available. Consider the Tree of Life project, The Dog School of Mathematics, and various poetry websites, to name a few. Although inner-city convenience stores charge high prices (real estate is cheap but insurance is expensive), the suburban supermarket is a short bus or light-rail ride from the inner city.

(Esmense): "You can't find an industry that better demonstrates how being poor translates into higher prices and fewer choices than the grocery industry."

We disagree. See above.

(Tom Wright): "Publicly-supported education can generate elites, as in England. Our system sought a different goal. I'm still OK with that goal, of shared community."
(malcolm): "The US 'public' school system originated in anti-Catholic bigotry. It survives on assiduous lobbying by current recipients of the taxpayers' $400 billion + pre-college education subsidy."
(Esmense): "As for your claim that the US public school system "originated in anti-Catholic bigotry" -- this an inflammatory interpretation of the facts that puts the cart somewhat before the horse. It's true that anti-Catholic bigotry was rampant in the 19th century. And it's true that the Catholic parochial school system was built in reaction to the fact that Protestant Christianity -- in a supposedly 'sectarian' guise -- dominated the 19th century public or 'common' schools ('common' meaning what we today would call 'non-denominational' but not secular), as it dominated American society in general. But Catholics didn't form their own schools because their children were excluded, by bigotry, as students from the 'common' schools -- they weren't -- they formed their own schools because the nation's dominant religion, Protestant Christianity, was presumed to be a natural part of the curriculum of those schools, while Catholic teachings were excluded (as were the teachings of non-Christian religions). They wanted their children to attend a school in which the curriculum was based in their own religion, and, they wanted to protect their children from exposure to Protestantism."

The interpretation of "common" is correct. The rest of the history is mistaken. In the British colonies of North America, prior to the American Revolution, public policy wrt education varied considerably, from compulsory attendance at State-monopoly schools (inconsistently enforced) in some theocratic colonies (e.g., Massachusetts), through voucher-subsidized attendance at Church-operated schools (e.g., New York City), to official indifference to pre-college education (the Southern, agricultural colonies). This varigated pattern prevailed in the early post-Revolutionary US until a wave of (poor) Catholic immigration provoked an allergic reaction in the resident Protestant majority. When the Catholics asked for the same support for their schools which governments supplied to the (mostly) Protestant church-operated schools, the wealthier Protestant majority faced a dilemma: either hold taxes constant and see the per pupil allotment spent on their children fall or hold the per pupil budget constant and see their taxes rise. They choose neither, and instead "discovered" that the non-Establishment principle required an end to what had been, in effect, a voucher policy. Horace Mann rode a wave of anti-Catholic bigotry to a position of control over his very own pet bureaucracy. The schools which resulted from the nationalization of the education industry taught that part of the Christian religion which was common to all (Christian) faiths, from a English-language Bible, and, so as not to impose one interpretation, taught that students were to discern the meaning for themselves. This was Protestant doctrine; the Catholics took their Bible in Latin and salvation required the intercession of a priest. The Catholics bailed. Problem solved, from the Protestant point of view.

I. (Whiskyjack): "Sorry , an 'if statement' has little to nothing to do with math and much more to do with fiction. An 'if statement' supposes an impossibility as a solution to a problem and creating a desirable benefit."

The point about considering overall system performance instead of using the performance of one part of the system, to make policy decisions, is hardly hypothetical. The Lassibile and Gomez study considers overal system performance. Advantage, vouchers.

My objection weakens common voucher arguments, since I'm saying that the abundant evidence in favor of independent/parochial schools, from international studies, doesn't mean quite what voucher proponents imply. I consider it strong, just not quite as strong.

How can a policy which reduces f(x) for some individual x enhance the sum or average over all x in X? Easy. By example: Let's populate a cage with relatively long-lived herbivores (say, giant tortoises) and one large carnivore. A policy which separates the carnivore from the herbivores might enhance average longevity while decreasing (through starvation) the carnivore's life-span, right?

II. (whiskyjack): "Here is your 'if statement' trimmed of fluff: 'if disruptive students did worse in their voucher-receiving schools' (an impossible occurrence) 'system performance could rise' (the desirable benefit)."

Why is it impossible that students who leave the State schools could do worse? I don't think this will usually happen, but if some institution under contract to parents of disruptive students treated their emotional problems and let Math instruction slide, they could do worse in Math than if they had remained in State schools. Right?

There is some evidence that parents do not demand the same curricula as State bureaucrats. According to the chapter on the international experience with school vouchers in the Brookings/Urban Institute/CED study Vouchers and the Provision of Public Services, Math performance (as measured by standardized tests) is lower in countries which subsidize a parent's choice of school and which do not require that voucher-receiving schools administer standardized tests of Math than in countries which subsidize a parent's choice of school and which do require that schools administer standardized tests of Math. Reading scores, however, rise. "How would they know?" I hear you ask. Two different tests: internal (for parent and administrator purposes of evaluation) and the PISA or TIMSS.

So it seems parents' relative valuation of verbal versus Math fluency differs systematically from that of State Education bureaucrats'.

III. (whiskyjack): "any discussion of an "if statement" is mostly a waste of time except for mild entertainment."

Where was whiskyjack earlier?

(Tom Wright): "...if performance was the reason to pursue a voucher system..." and "...if performance is not the issue...", and "...if poor performance is largly the result of uninvolved parents...", and "...if you were in the school business, would you rather service the masses or the elite?"

(whiskyjack): "I just googled 'Academy of the Pacific' a private middle school of 150 students with a test requirement to get in. It ain't taken any special ed students today."

I said they take DOE rejects. That is the case. They don't specialize in retarded or physically impared, but they do take troubled kids.

The observation that Academy of the Pacific is a small school is certainly relevant. Hawaii has the largest average school size in the US (or close to it). The graduating class in Moanalua High School outnumbers the average North Dakota district's entire K-12 enrollment. The impact on student behavior is what most people would expect.

Mr. Kirkpatrick --

Let's see, you're proposing correspondence school as a dandy way to educate students in those communities (markets) that are too small and/or too poor to be efficiently or profitably served with real brick and mortar schools featuring accessible, talented falculty (and "cutting edge technology") in a market-based, voucher supporter school system? And yet, you claim that the market imperatives of such a system won't encourage a tiered educational system? Can you hear me laughing?

Then, to amuse us even more, you dismiss the problem of high cost and limited food choices in poor neighborhoods with the suggestion that people should hop on the bus to make long commutes into the suburbs for family grocery shopping. (Would that be with or without small children in tow?) Obviously you don't do the grocery shopping for your family, nor are you much familiar with public transportation -- at least not with the limits of public transportation in most suburbs, or, for that matter, many cities outside of New York, Chicago or San Francisco.

As for the history of public schools -- of course the "common school" movement is just one chapter (and a pretty time/place/region specific one at that) in a long and varied history of public education in this country. But, it was the chapter you were most referring to in the statements I was responding to. (As your further elaboration makes even more clear.)

I don't disagree that the teaching of Protestant doctrine in the common schools caused Catholics "to bail." Nor do I disagree that the majority of tax payers, who embraced the majority Protestant religion, objected to paying for schools based in Catholic religious teaching (of which they disapproved)

But, the unwillingness of tax payers, no matter what their religious affiliation (or, if they even have one), to have their tax dollars used to support other people's private values -- values they do not personally share and may even actively object to -- is a persistent reality of tax payer funded education, and a persistent source of conflict. Tax supported vouchers won't change that. In fact, that basic reality may be the most important factor in vouchers' political unpopularity.

(Whiskyjack): "California , who used to have a reputation of top schools, now is below average. Can we say Prop. 13?"

Proposition 13 was enacted in 1978. It was a property tax limitation initiative, not a school budget limitation injitiative. Here's the NCES on California per pupil expenditures (Constant 2005–06 dollars):

1969–70 1979–80 1989–90 1990–91 1994–95 1995–96 1996–97 1997–98 1998–99 1999–2000 2000–01 2001–02 2002–03 2003–04

United States $3,957 $5,353 $7,276 $7,284 $7,315 $7,328 $7,418 $7,615 $7,871 $8,125 $8,387 $8,629 $8,790 $8,886
Alabama 2,695 3,897 4,927 5,096 5,436 5,593 5,754 5,966 6,274 6,627 6,688 6,733 6,884 7,038
Alaska 5,580 10,938 11,875 11,147 10,628 10,547 10,307 10,175 10,163 10,351 10,474 10,679 10,786 10,817
Arizona 3,553 4,780 5,826 5,735 5,642 5,765 5,527 5,653 5,651 5,913 6,275 6,534 6,866 6,406
Arkansas 2,691 3,773 5,061 5,143 5,538 5,668 5,679 5,792 5,993 6,203 6,328 7,008 7,083 7,316
California 4,390 5,707 7,056 6,828 6,349 6,359 6,587 6,944 7,016 7,422 7,941 8,270 8,252 8,205

So, what you are saying is that California state spending on education went from a little above US average in the beginning of your range to somewhat below the US average by 2004. This is consistant with the assertion that their schools are now below average [ at least in spending, which does have a direct bearing ]
But what does this say about prop 13, which is directed at property taxes, and thus local spending?

Duplicate.

(Valdron): "Having been a teacher and knowing something about education issues..."

It doesn't show. I was a teacher for ten years in the Hawaii DOE (Secondary Math).

(Valdron): "I think this is all tomfoolery with numbers. This is just the Amway approach to education. Some cock and bull educational theory slapped together with a lot of selective statistics. The whole thing not terribly more sophisticated than one of those schemes to get rich selling each other hats."

I'd expect someone "knowing something about education issues..." would have more than ad hominem to offer. Where's Valdron's data, cites?

(Valdron): "You want to improve education: Small class sizes, make basic investments in infrastructure, streamline programs for different levels of achievement, and make sure there's lots of extracurriculars."

a) Beyond lower elementary, class size reductions over normal ranges are counter-indicated. More teachers means more spent on salaries and so less on other resources. A district which hires more teachers must hire from farther down the ranking of applicants. Those high-performing Asian countries feature high student-teacher ratios.

b) Class size reductions imply an enormous investment in infrastructure.

c) "Streamline programs..."? Explain. I might agree, depending.

d) "Extracurriculars". We agree. The world is an extracurricular program. Making room for more extracurricular programs means making less of school.

"...(S)tay away from 'separate but equal' school systems, private school systems, voucher systems, etc. etc. Cause that stuff is as toxic as crack laced with rat poison. Sure as shooting, it degrades the entire system."

Hmmm...

Gerard Lassibile and Lucia Navarro Gomez
"Organization and Efficiency of Educational Systems: some empirical findings", pg. 16,
Comparative Education , Vol. 36 #1, 2000, Feb.
"Furthermore, the regression results indicate that countries where private education is more widespread perform significantly better than countries where it is more limited. The result showing the private sector to be more efficient is similar to those found in other contexts with individual data (see, for example, Psucharopoulos, 1987; Jiminez, et. al, 1991).
This finding should convince countries to reconsider policies that reduce the role of the private sector in the field of education".

Joshua Angrist
Randomized Trials and Quasi-Experiments in Education Research
NBER Reporter, summer, 2003.

One of the most controversial innovations highlighted by NCLB is school choice. In a recently published paper,(5) my collaborators and I studied what appears to be the largest school voucher program to date. This program provided over 125,000 pupils from poor neighborhoods in the country of Colombia with vouchers that covered approximately half the cost of private secondary school. Colombia is an especially interesting setting for testing the voucher concept because private secondary schooling in Colombia is a widely available and often inexpensive alternative to crowded public schools. (In Bogota, over half of secondary school students are in private schools.) Moreover, governments in many poor countries are increasingly likely to experiment with demand-side education finance programs, including vouchers.

Although not a randomized trial, a key feature of our Colombia study is the exploitation of voucher lotteries as the basis for a quasi-experimental research design. Because demand for vouchers exceeded supply, the available vouchers were allocated by lottery in large cities. Our study compares voucher applicants who won a voucher in the lottery to those who lost. Since the lotteries used random assignment, losers provide a good control group for winners. A comparison of voucher winners and losers shows that three years after the lotteries were held, winners were 15 percentage points more likely to have attended private school and were about 10 percentage points more likely to have finished eighth grade, primarily because they were less likely to repeat grades. Lottery winners also scored 0.2 standard deviations higher on standardized tests. A follow-up study in progress shows that voucher winners also were more likely to apply to college. On balance, our study provides some of the strongest evidence to date for the possible benefits of demand-side financing of secondary schooling, at least in a developing country setting.

I reason axiomatically, here. 1). Most parents love their children and want their children to outlive them. 2) If you live among people there are basically three ways to make a living: i) you can beg, ii) you can steal, iii) you can trade goods and services for other peoples' goods and services. 3) Most parents accept #2 and prefer 2.iii for their children. 4 )Therefore, most parents want what taxpayers want from any education system: that children be educated to be contributing members of society.

See James Tooley on independent schools here, here, and here.

You may have been a teacher, but now you're just another used car salesman.

No offence, but I can smell the bullshit all the way down the street.

And if you are offended, so be it. Life is too short to indulge guys like you.