
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
U.S. News and World Report’s story on the evaluation managed not to swallow the press release spin.
Over at the evangelical anti-religionists site, they’re celebrating their victory but warning their followers that the voucher boogey man might still arise
Over at Cato @ Liberty, Cato Vice President David Boaz makes the point that Secretary Duncan has claimed that vouchers can only help about 1% of DC kids, but that this is a supply side (funding) rather than a demand side issue. Boaz also notes that for all of Secretary Duncan’s talk of making “all the schools better” that he ran Chicago public schools for 7 years, and none of them were good enough for Barack and Michelle Obama’s children.
Also from Cato, Neal McCluskey makes the case that the bloom is off the rose of Duncan as a reformer. The Center for Education reform reaches a similar conclusion in Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain.
At Flypaper, Andy Smarick makes the point not to automatically assume that Secretary Duncan knew about the results of the program before Congress voted to kill it. Ed is Watching however responds with a number of questions about the conduct of the Department
UPDATE: Russ Whitehurst writes for Brookings that he finds it likely that Secretary Duncan did not sit on the results of the evaluation given the procedures in place. Fair enough. Whitehurst goes on to note that some procedures from how the Department conducted such business changed after he left in November 2008. His concluding paragraphs:
There is, however, substantial reason to believe that the secretary didn’t want to draw attention to the report. It was released on a Friday, whereas IES stopped releasing reports on Fridays several years ago when an important report just happened to come out on that day and critics accused the agency of trying to bury it. And there was no department press release or press briefing, which typically occur for important reports, including previous annual reports from this evaluation.
The future of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program is far more important than the contretemps over when the secretary knew what. Many in Congress are on the record that their support of the program in the future would be contingent on findings from the evaluation. Many cited the results from last year’s evaluation, which found no effects on academic achievement, as the basis for voting to terminate the program. Was that a smoke screen to cover their real concerns – separation of church and state, opposition by teachers unions, whatever – or did they really mean that they would be guided by evidence on the program’s effectiveness? The 2009 Appropriations Act provides that funding for the program will end next year UNLESS Congress votes to reauthorize it. There is plenty of time for Congress to hold hearings, deliberate, and make a decision that is informed by the most recent results from the evaluation.
If I were the Denver Post and Secretary Duncan claimed that the Wall Street Journal made no attempt to contact him, and then had that assertion promptly refuted by my own lying eyes, I’d be more than a little suspicious. Nor does it help much that they tried to deep six the report on a Friday afternoon. Nor as the Denver Post columnist noted, does what Duncan had to say about the program make a whole lot of sense. Furthermore, the Department may have sat on the report even if Secretary Duncan really didn’t know anything about it. It’s also possible that the results leaked, leading to a rushed effort to kill the program.
It is also possible that it really just does take 4 or 5 months to process a study, and that the unions issued their kill order and Congress moved quickly to comply. If Russ Whitehurst and Andy Smarick say that it is likely that this is what happened, I can accept that as a very real possibility and even as a probability.
None of this can possibly excuse however the shameful attempt to bury and spin the report, or the glaring difference between the rhetoric and reality on education policy emerging from this administration. If the administration is going to talk the talk on evidence based reform, they need to walk the walk.
Posted by matthewladner 
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)





