Hello Gang,
An interesting article I saw today in the NY Times on school vouchers. Maybe they are not all people think they are.
Here is the link:
Thoughts?
It’s the NYT. Might as well come from the AFT
Agree with barrons.
This isn’t the first time studies have showed this and it won’t be the last.
To those dismissing ANY study out of hand because it is described in the NY Times - did you even look at the article? Click on the research links to see where the research is coming from and conducted by whom? Probs not. I know that you will not care, but think back to the 1990s when President Clinton was in the White House and Monica Lewinski’s stained dress was on the front page of the NY Times. Over and over and over. Look at the NY Times more recently, during the recent election period, and count the number of times when nonsense articles about emails showed on the paper’s front page, but VERY few articles talking about the policy ideas of the two major party candidates. It is only with VERY short term memory that one can dismiss the NY Times for being blindly anti-Trump or even too left. The NY Times has done much to anger mostly everybody. Remember when it was led by the nose into support for the Iraq War? Ahh, fond memories.
If you won’t consider ANY content in the NY Times worth a look, where do you get your news stories about research? As a daily reader of Fox News, I can tell you that you will NOT get such coverage from Fox. Research is complicated. Nuanced. And sometimes, policies that look good on paper do not fly well in the real world. And other times, it is the very evaluation/research process that leads to revisions in those policies that looked good on paper but did NOT work well at the beginning, but with the research feedback, the programs are improved. Before dismissing virtually everything that is printed in the NY Times, you might want to consider the pros of actual science and research.
The article cites to three studies published since 2015. For those of you who don’t like the messenger… can you cite to recent studies showing contrary results? Or point out specific flaws in any of those studies?
@barrons mentioned AFT. I am not familiar with that acronym.
@calmom, it is a lot more fun to just have a knee jerk reaction to bash the media than actually think critically about the content.
@MassDaD68 American Federation of Teachers.
Ah. Thx. So the implication was that the AFT is in charge of the NY Times or at least drive the content. Interesting take by @barrons.
Interesting is one way of putting it. 
He forgot the #fakenews tag.
For those of us who won’t read the listed sources, isn’t the following rather remarkable (bolding is mine)?
…
Wishin’ won’t make it so.
Here’s a link to that particular study: https://edex.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/publication/pdfs/FORDHAM%20Ed%20Choice%20Evaluation%20Report_online%20edition.pdf
I have had fairly extensive conversation with the NYT author on another story he did. He is a far from unbiased reporter. New America is a strong left leaning and funded group.
http://www.uaedreform.org/milwaukee-parental-choice-program-evaluation/–oldest major program in US
I fear that I will just accelerate the backfire effect, https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/, but I’ll try one more time.
If the reporting is biased, as alleged, the report must either be misconstruing the results or cherry picking the results. Neither case seems to be true.
If the argument is “It’s my money, I don’t want to support public education”, then the studies are not relevant. If the argument is “Competition will lead to better schools”, the studies are quite relevant and seem to disprove the hypothesis.
There’s also the factor that in most other parts of the world, including societies with higher performing K-12 students, parents aren’t allowed to choose which public school to send their kids and up until recently…parents mostly did defer to the expertise of their educators. However, the academic standards by the centralized board of education for the public K-12 tended to be set very high.
One illustration of this was an older HS alum who left the ROC(Taiwan) after attending finishing 5th grade at a regular public elementary school in a working-class neighborhood. Despite being placed in the SP/gifted classes in US public elementary and middle schools, he recounted he literally learned nothing new in math or most other subjects except English and US history/social studies until well into second semester of 9th grade at our STEM-centered public magnet.
And his older brother who graduated from our HS a couple of years earlier than him had the exact same experience…except he coasted until his junior year of HS because he had a year or two of middle school which included lab sciences most US students take in HS(biology/chem/physics with lab).
In short, the lack of parental choice/competition among public schools doesn’t necessarily preclude a good educational performance.
HUH?? In 2006 the State of Wisconsin mandated that Milwaukee schools make data available to the School Choice Demonstration Project. Those data allowed us to conduct a longitudinal evaluation of the MPCP and publicly report our findings. We have done so in a set of 36 reports released from 2007-2012 that document the participant, systemic, and community effects of the MPCP. Our main findings included that the program had a positive effect on a student’s likelihood of graduating from high school and enrolling and persisting in a 4-year college. We found little evidence that the Choice program increased the test scores of participating students, though our final analysis revealed a positive effect of the program on reading scores when combined with high stakes testing. There was no evidence of program effects on math scores. Competition from the Choice program appears to have boosted the test scores of students who remained in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), but those systemic effects of the program were modest in size. Because the maximum value of the voucher ($6,442) is substantially less than what the government pays to educate students in MPS, the state saves over $50 million per year from the operation of the program. These findings and many others appear in the reports provided below and in articles published or forthcoming in peer-reviewed academic journals.
The Fordham study you linked to shows Ohio’s voucher program improved reading and mathematics scores for affected students.
The scores improved for the students who stayed in the public schools, not the ones who took the vouchers and went to private schools.