(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Noah Smith dresses up a few fussy methodological quibbles and one big, really dishonest bit of fakery in order to cast aspersions on my Win-Win report and distract you from the research consensus behind the curtain.
My report reviewed over 100 empirical findings on private school choice programs, showing that there is a very strong research consensus in favor of positive effects from such programs. Smith identifies two (2) cases where he thinks I ought to have used a different method to classify the findings. I disagree, but frankly, it’s not worth quibbling about. The research consensus in favor of school choice is still clear even if we were to accept Smith’s cavails.
His statement that “vouchers have generally disappointed” is totally unsupported by the evidence – and if he read my report, he knows it.
But his big, dramatic “gotcha!” is that I allegedly omit a well-known study with a null finding. That would indeed be a serious omission.
Unfortunately for Smith, the study he dramatically accuses me of omitting is not a study of private school choice. Here is the abstract with emphasis on Smith’s dishonesty added:
School choice has become an increasingly prominent strategy for enhancing academic achievement. To evaluate the impact on participants, we exploit randomized lotteries that determine high school admission in the Chicago Public Schools. Compared to those students who lose lotteries, students who win attend high schools that are better in a number of dimensions, including peer achievement and attainment levels. Nonetheless, we find little evidence that winning a lottery provides any systematic benefit across a wide variety of traditional academic measures. Lottery winners do, however, experience improvements on a subset of nontraditional outcome measures, such as self-reported disciplinary incidents and arrest rates.
From the very first sentence, Smith explicitly frames his whole article as an article about private school choice. For him to accuse me of omitting a study on private school choice because I omitted this study is dishonest.
Smith owes me an apology and a retraction. If he refuses, Bloomberg owes me a correction.
I’ll hold my breath waiting.
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