Data Vacuum: Only Larger Voucher Experiments Will Yield Answers. (Essay Review)
2002; Routledge; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1539-9664
Autores Tópico(s)Local Government Finance and Decentralization
ResumoSchool Vouchers: Examining Evidence By Martin Carnoy Economic Policy Institute, 2002. Rhetoric Versus Reality: We Know and We Need to Know About and Charter Schools By Brian Gill, R Michael Timpane, Karen Ross, and Dominic Brewer RAND Corporation, 2001. School Vouchers: Publicly Funded Programs in Cleveland and Milwaukee General Accounting Office, 2001. Hidden Research Consensus for School Choice By Jay R Greene, in Charters, Vouchers, and Public Education, edited by Paul Peterson and David Campbell Brooking Institution Press, 2001. Market-Based Reforms in Urban By Helen F. Ladd Paper presented at Seminar on Creating Change in Urban Public Education, December 7--8, 2001, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Vouchers for Elementary and Secondary By Isabel Sawhill and Shannon Smith, in and Provision of Public Services, edited by Eugene Steuerle, Van Doom Ooms, George Peterson, and Robert Reischauer Brookings Institution Press, 2000. What Research Can Tell Policymakers about School Choice By Paul Teske and Mark Schneider Journal of Policy Analysis & Management, 2001. In their sheer volume, reviews of small body of empirical work on school are beginning to eclipse research literature itself. It is not often that so much is written about so little, but scholars are jostling to have final word on what we know about as Supreme Court prepares to rule on their constitutionality. All of reviewers decry contentious political and ideological haranguing that surrounds public debate over vouchers, and many blame media for conspiring in frenzy. As a corrective, each promises a clearheaded, impartial account of empirical findings on school choice. Given expressed motives of reviews and modest size of their subject matter, one would hope that a consensus would emerge. Would that it were so. The authors find little about which to agree. Only in face of overwhelming and unambiguous evidence does any consensus emerge. When scholars survey nascent empirical literature on school choice, they see very different things and discern very different lessons. And they will continue to do so until more, and better, data are collected from larger, better-financed voucher programs. The Reviews Stanford University education professor Martin Carnoy declares his intent to interject a balanced perspective in an empirical literature written mainly by researchers who openly and actively support vouchers and media that report results from these analyses without necessary caveats and alternative views. Carnoy is deeply skeptical about positive test-score impacts observed for African-Americans in randomized field trials conducted in New York City; Dayton, Ohio; and Washington, D.C. He concludes: question to ask is not whether these latest Peterson-group reports overestimate private school effects, but by how much. (Full disclosure: Paul Peterson, editor-in-chief of Education Next, and I were among scholars conducting these evaluations.) Carnoy is no less critical of Jay Greene's recent analysis of Florida voucher program--or what Carnoy calls the latest round of voucher advocacy research. (See Letters, p.7, for debate between Greene and Carnoy. See Looming Shadow, Res earch, Winter 2001, for Greene's study of Florida A+ program.) Like Carnoy, Helen Ladd argues that evidence on achievement is at best preliminary, and if it supports claims of voucher advocates, it does so only under very restrictive conditions and for a very small subset of urban poor. However, Duke University economist is less distracted than Carnoy by supposed misrepresentations of voucher advocates posing as researchers and more impressed by an empirical literature that consistently turns up negative findings. …
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