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AboutThe Rhode Island Policy Reporter is an independent news source that specializes in the technical issues of public policy that matter so much to all our lives, but that also tend not to be reported very well or even at all. The publication is owned and operated by Tom Sgouros, who has written all the text you'll find on this site, except for the articles with actual bylines. Responsibility: Tom Sgouros
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Wed, 26 Jul 2006
Bush administration preserves welfare
Demonstrating that it really is all about power, the Bush administration held fast to its insistence that it not cut farm subsidies to US agriculture (story). Partly as a result, the Doha round of WTO trade talks have collapsed. This probably isn't all bad, since trade liberalization has been responsible for a tremendous amount of displacement and angst in both the developing world and in our world, but since the farm subsidies are in large part welfare for red states, it does show where the priorities really lie.
11:36 - 26 Jul 2006 [/y6/jy]
Fri, 21 Jul 2006
Comparing private and public education
An NCES report using real statistics to compare public and private school education. The prevalence of NAEP testing required by NCLB means there is now much more data with which to make these comparisons. That is, it once was the case that after you factored out race and class from the equation, there wasn't enough data left to make a comparison. But those days are past, for better or worse. A similar study came out earlier in the year, and was featured in The Shape of the Starting Line. See Lubienski and Lubienski (2006) here.
22:31 - 21 Jul 2006 [/y6/jy]
Mon, 17 Jul 2006
Valerie Forti, of the Education Partnership, had an op-ed in today's Projo attacking my report, The Shape of the Starting Line. But it's a peculiar critique, for a few reasons.
First, she suggests that I omitted mentioning the negative impacts of unionization in schools. But the findings she said were omitted about unions are right there on pages 33 and 34, in the section on unions, and there are four citations you can choose from for corroboration -- Eberts and Stone, Milkman, Argys and Rees, and Sanders and Rivers. Furthermore, I would dispute her characterization of Eberts and Stone's (and Argys and Rees and Milkman) findings that unionization has only "slight" effects. "Statistically significant" is indeed a term of art, but it doesn't mean "slight." Rather it means "large enough to remain measurable after discounting other effects."
Second, I appreciate her admiration for Linda Darling-Hammond, and her work on teacher quality, but discussion of teacher quality is in this report. Should she have looked on page 29, Ms. Forti would have seen that the report clearly does address teacher quality, and cites authors that differ with her interpretations only in degree. Hanushek, for example, cites teacher quality as second only to economic status in the UTD/Texas study, and Sanders and Rivers point out that teacher quality is worth as much as 50 percentile points to poor students, in a study of Tennessee schools, and those are both described in more detail in the report. The UTD and Tennessee data are, in my opinion, the best available to make these kinds of judgments. Perhaps a couple of mentions makes the report "virtually silent" on the issue, but it's as much mention of the issue as is made of many other important issues in the report. More likely, I suspect, she overlooked these citations in her reading. It's an understandable mistake—it's several dozen pages, and there's no index, for which omission I apologize. Nonetheless, "cherry-picking" and intellectual dishonesty are weighty charges, and I think people who make them should do better homework to back them up.
But the really peculiar part of the editorial is it's complaint about the report findings. As pleased as I am by it, it is little more than an elaborate bibliography, reporting on the hard work of many researchers across the nation and world. With that in mind, a reasonable response to its findings would be to cite other findings in disagreement, or to explain how my interpretations of others' research might have been incorrect. Forti doesn't really do either, so I can't respond effectively to her other points.
The findings of the Starting Line report are essentially a description of how the world is: poverty has an effect on kids, as do good teachers, poor housing, early childhood education and good after-school programs. Ignoring the findings reported there is simply ignoring the state of the world. Denying the findings without citing other research is simply silly, like denying the saltiness of the ocean. The challenge we face isn't to spar over data and university affiliations, but how to learn from the data that's out there to create policies that really address the needs of our children. It doesn't hurt to know how salty the ocean is before you set out to build your desalinator, and I don't see how the data and findings presented in the Starting Line report can hurt in the effort to improve education in Rhode Island, and I am puzzled by her insistence that it will.
00:29 - 17 Jul 2006 [/y6/jy]
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