Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > July > 20
Thursday, July 20, 2006
NY Times Tierney picks the wrong study
New York Times columnist John Tierney earlier this week took up the cause of private schools who he says were unfairly spun as the big losers in a recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics.
Tierney’s take wasn’t exceptionally thoughtful. He took the usual anti-public school tack — scapegoating unions, dismissing public school success and making a case for the cost effectiveness of private schools, if nothing else. And mostly he talked off the top of his head, citing only two studies to support his arguments.
It just so happened that both studies involved Paul Peterson, whom Tierney neglected to mention is often funded by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based school choice advocacy group with roots here in Dayton.
Most surprising to me was that Tierney reached way back seven years to cite this 1999 study:
“The most scientific way to compare schools is with the kind of randomized experiment that has been conducted in New York, Dayton and Washington. In these cities, students from low-income families were given a chance to apply for school vouchers. After the vouchers were awarded by lottery, researchers tracked the voucher students in private schools and compared them with a control group: the losers of the lottery who remained in public school.
After three years, the white and Hispanic voucher students were doing as well as their counterparts in public school, and the African-American voucher students were testing a full grade level higher than the blacks in the control group.
Don’t remember this study? Since it included Dayton, I remembered it. Let me help refresh your memory. This is the Paul Peterson led study that saw it’s conclusions renounced by the research group compiled the data. Here’s an excerpt from a story that ran in the Dayton Daily News in 2000:
An educational research company that compiled data for a school voucher study that showed blacks did better at private schools says gains in one city were overstated by the lead researcher.
The study, led by Paul Peterson, a government professor at Harvard and a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, examined three privately funded experimental programs in New York, Washington and Dayton.
It showed significant gains, based on scores on standardized math and reading tests, for black students who received vouchers to help pay for private school.
Mathematica Policy Research of Princeton, which gathered data in New York, has issued a statement that calls the findings premature and cautions against jumping to any policy conclusions, The New York Times reported in Friday’s editions.
`If you ask the question,When I offered students vouchers, did I make a difference in their test scores,’ right now you come away saying, `No, there’s no impact’ ” said David Myers of Mathematica.
Researchers admit the gains among black students were concentrated heavily in Washington, where the improvement was twice as great as in New York and one-third greater in Dayton.
But Peterson stood by his conclusions, saying, “An average is average.”
The study measured test scores among 1,400 poor students given vouchers worth $1,700 a year to attend private school.
Researchers found that between 1997 and 1999, black children on vouchers raised their percentile rankings on standardized math and reading tests on average by 6.3 points.
Their scores were compared with a control group of students who were not awarded vouchers by lottery and remained in public schools. But the study, released about two weeks ago, found no similar improvements among other ethnic groups.
Advocates of voucher programs used the study to bolster support for their cause. But critics of vouchers criticized the study initially, saying it was tainted because it was done in cooperation with pro-voucher organizations supporting the three programs.
This was the best study Tierney could find to bolster the case for private schools? There hasn’t been a more definitive or independent study in seven years? I’m not sure how much he helped the cause.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, My Favorite Posts
Finally, new schools
NOTE: Today’s story had an error. Cleveland opens in January and Belle Haven and Wogaman open in October.
Dayton’s school construction program is a big, complex project that has taken a long time to bear fruit, but this month the city will begin to see its 2002 tax levy dollars pay off.
Here’s a photo of what the new Kiser Elementary School looks like on the inside:
(Thanks to DDN photographer David Munch for this photo and to DDN intern Nicole Lark, who taught me how to post photos at GOTB)
I think the very first planning meeting for the Dayton schools construction project that I went to was in 1999. If that seemed like a long seven years of waiting, the new schools will soon seem like they are opening all the time. Here is the schedule for when the 15 schools already in the pipeline will open:
2006
July: Kiser Elementary School
October: Belle Haven Elementary School and Wogaman Elementary School
2007
January: Cleveland Elementary School
July: Fairport Elementary School (interim name that will likely change for a new school at Gettysburg and Kings Highway)
September: Ruskin Elementary School
November: Stivers School for the Arts
December: Kemp Elementary School, Louise Troy Elementary School
2008
January: E.J. Brown Elementary School, McNary Elementary School (at Westwood Park site)
February: Thurgood Marshall High School (replaces Colonel White at the Roth site)
April: Horace Mann Elementary School
September: David Ponitz Career Technical High School (replaces Patterson next to Sinclair Community College), Dunbar High School
Click here for the complete list of which schools will be rebuilt vs. torn down.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, School Construction
