StickWithANose

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

I’ve watched with great interest over the past few years the evolution of Matthew Yglesias from being a popular independent blogger and university student to being a professional media pundit offering opinions on topics of which he has little to no experience or training.* Today, MY offers us an excellent example of ideology in action… The lesson: How to retain one’s ideological belief in the face of empirical evidence.

MY points us toward this piss poor article in the American Prospect on charter schools. Let’s deconstruct this crap first and then we’ll come back around to see ideology in action. After establishing the general disagreements over education policy and Arne’s infatuation with charter schools, the article sets up the typical he said -  she said frame that empties it of all social utility.

But education-policy experts are divided over whether charters, as a group, improve academic achievement. In the past six months, two high-profile studies of charter schools, both out of Stanford University, have attracted significant media attention. The first, a study of charter schools in 16 states conducted by CREDO, an education research group affiliated with the university, found that in math, only 17 percent of charters increase achievement over traditional public schools. The report’s authors called the results “sobering.”

The second, a close look at 75 New York City charter schools by education economist Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford professor and Hoover Institute fellow, couldn’t have drawn a more disparate conclusion. Hoxby’s study, comparing students who win charter school lotteries to those who lose them, found that New York charter students do 31 points better in math and 23 points better in English than their lottery-losing peers, who remain in neighborhood public schools.

As presented here, it is a classic case of two polar opposites with no middle ground and, most importantly, no history. There’s even the always entertaining name-calling…

In the aftermath of the Hoxby study’s September release, the Stanford researchers engaged in a vicious back-and-forth. Hoxby published a memo calling CREDO’s work “biased” because it did not use the lottery-in, lottery-out matching method and instead compared charter school students to their racially and socioeconomically similar peers in public schools… If more struggling students attend charters, as Hoxby contends, it would be unfair to expect their test scores to exceed that of public school kids across the board.

Despite being a cool narrative, the he said – she said framing does little to help inform the reader. Let’s start with Hoxby’s assertion that more struggling students attend charters than traditional public schools. Data from the NAEP study on charters puts that assertion to rest in that it shows that charters serve more socially advantaged students than do comparable traditional public schools. It also demonstrates that charters under-perform academically in comparison to traditional public schools as well. Perhaps more importantly, there is a long history of research that reach similar conclusions… Roughly 10% of charters out perform traditional public schools; 50% are equal; and 40% under-perform. It isn’t just the Credo study. [1][2][3]

As for Hoxby, she’s the darling economist of the American Right who never met a school competition idea she didn’t like. Her problem is always the same: selection bias. In this study, she is using the lottery system as her means of “randomizing” the data, but the problem is that the parents who GO OUT OF THEIR WAY to enroll and participate in the lottery system are a SELF SELECTING GROUP. It is a group that has higher educational attainment, cultural capital and income than their peers. [More] So, despite Dana Goldstein having been on this beat “for over two years”, she seems to have no idea that any of this evidence exists, and let me assure you that my links above are by no means exhaustive. All in all, it’s another crappy article on education policy.

However, MY’s reaction to the supposed controversy created in this crappy article is priceless.

Whatever you think of the methodological dispute here (Goldstein explains it well and I guess I side with Hoxby) the crux of the matter is that there’s substantial variation in the performance of different charters.

No reason to do a little research… I’ll just side with Hoxby, because she’s telling me what I already perceive to be true. To his credit, he does recognize that there is variation in performance, but it leads him nowhere but back to where he started. His assumption that charter schools make for good education policy is never questioned; his faith never wavers.

There is a wealth of information out there that is easily accessed by someone in his position that should lead him to not only the conclusion that there is variation in performance but to question the whole idea of charters. If, as Goldstein proclaims, liberals demand “truth” and “evidence”, shouldn’t “progressive” pundits do a little leg work before they make a truth claim? Nope, it’s all faith based. It’s all ideology. Neo-liberal to be exact…

* MY is just an example… My real interest is in the development of this phenomenon in general. Professional bloggers, like MY, have established their legitimacy on not being bloviating know-nothings propagating the village wisdom of the Beltway, yet it is becoming increasingly clear that they are becoming those very pundits only in different form.