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August 29, 2006
We get love from the AFTies
The AFTies have showered attention upon Edspresso lately, especially by blogrollling us. To show some appreciation, let me respond to a couple of recent mentions.
First off, John looks at this post and declares that I want readers to believe "that an objective, informed journalist visited a school and found that the federal school voucher program helped the school do great things". Actually, I don't think Gary Andres is objective, which is why I called him a columnist, not a reporter.
John then examined this post on the D.C. program, in which I quoted from a study on the program. John looks at this passage from the study...
"The most uncertain results for African Americans came from Washington, D.C. As can be seen in Table 4, no significant differences were observed in year one, a large impact was observed after two years, but no impact was observed at the end of year three."
...and finds me guilty of "monkey business".
Strangely enough, John doesn't list where the quote is found (gotta scroll down--it's at the bottom of page 11). And he also left out the rest of the paragraph, which helps explain the disparity:
First, because only 29 percent of the students in the evaluation continued to use the voucher after three years (as compared to 70 percent in New York City), third-year estimations are quite imprecise. Second, the voucher experiment in D.C. was contaminated by the inauguration of a charter-school initiative that gave families more choice than those available in New York City; indeed, 17 percent of the treatment group and 24 percent of the control groups attended charter schools in the third year of the evaluation. Finally the differences in the third-year results might be attributed to the more established private sector in New York City than in Washington, D.C. Catholic schools, the major provider of private education in the two cities, are better endowed and historically more rooted in the northern port city, whose Catholic, immigrant population dates back to the early Nineteenth Century.
In other words, the experimental and control groups were contaminated. However, for a similar experimental study of the D.C. program, go here. Key graph:
In some ways, the most striking results in terms of trends over time concern African-Americans in D.C. After one year, no significant differences were observed for African-American students as a group, but older and younger students experienced significant differences. While younger students may have benefited slightly from the voucher program after one year, the older students who switched to private schools scored significantly lower than their public- school peers after one year. By the end of the second year, however, these students seemed to have overcome the initial challenges of changing schools. Both younger and older African-American students who switched from public to private schools posted positive and significant gains. On the combined reading and math tests, younger students in private schools scored 9.3 percentile points higher than those who remained in public schools. Older African-American students in private schools scored 10.3 percentile points higher.
So I'm happy to clarify these matters. And I really do appreciate the linkage. Keep that sweet traffic coming--maybe we'll find more allies!
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Comments
On Gary Andres, I would've been fine if you'd named him or, better still, identified him as a staunch Republican.
On your decision to cite another study in this follow-up, you're just moving the goalposts. If I were to go through it and find it doesn't quite say what you're telling me it says, would you just move on to another study?
By the way, when I clicked on your link to the new study, it didn't take me to a study. It took me to an article in Education Next (not a peer-reviewed journal) about a study supposedly located at www.edmattersmore.org. When I click on that URL, there's nothing there.
So, go ahead -- tell me there's another study out there, and it really and truly proves that vouchers are the greatest thing since sliced bread. But don't expect me to click on any more of your links. Playing whack-a-mole with a series of flawed studies and broken links isn't my idea of fun.
Posted by: John at AFT | August 29, 2006 01:39 PM
