It’s really frustrating, but some reporters continue to mis-represent the scholarly literature on the effects of private school choice programs. We devoted an entire chapter in Education Myths to debunking “The Inconclusive Research Myth.” But like an un-dead vampire that won’t die even after you’ve driven a stake through it’s heart, reporters keep repeating as fact things like the following:
Studies have generally found no clear advantage in academic achievement for students attending private
schools with vouchers.
That statement was the conclusion of the famously unreliable and partisan Center on Education Policy. And reporter Tom Toch embraced it as an accurate summary of voucher research in his recent article in the Kappan. What do we have to do to stop reporters from repeating this falsehood?
This blog post from Adam Emerson at the newly launched Fordham blog, Choice Words, is a great start. Here’s a taste:
School voucher critics generally approach their job reviewing the research on school choice with unfair assumptions, and otherwise insightful commentators risk recycling old canards. This is true with Thomas Toch’s critique of vouchers in the newest edition of Kappan, which concludes that voucher programs haven’t shown enough impact to justify their position in a large-scale reform effort. Questions of scale can lead to legitimate debate, but we’ll get nowhere until we acknowledge what’s in the literature.
And Adam doesn’t even reference all of the gold standard (random assignment) research showing positive effects for students who participate in voucher programs, not to mention all of the rigorous studies finding that entire school systems improve in response to vouchers.
So why do people like Tom Toch, who’s not stupid or mean, fail to acknowledge this wealth of evidence showing benefits from voucher programs and just focus on crappy and mistaken summaries from hacks at CEP?
Posted by Jay P. Greene 
Jay P. Greene's Blog 