> I wrote the post below for other reasons, but I hope you find it
> enlightening for the context of US education. The short form is that the
> assholes in power do not want to spend money on education for the masses,
> especially the darker poorer masses, and they will go to any length to avoid
> it. There is an entire NGO cottage industry that can be counted on to
> produce any result requested to justify any public policy that reduces
> spending on public education. Obama came out of this kind of NGO environment
> as did his secretary for the department of education, and as did Michelle
> Rhee.
Yep I agree that these people ('education reformers') are totally pernicious, even when they're well-meaning, which some of them are. The whole discourse of 'reform' in the US has somehow managed to manouevre the issue away from proper public funding, pretty much taking the public resourcing as a given, and pitting the teachers' unions against 'the future' in the form of high-stakes testing, vouchers and charter schools.
That education production function stuff you mention is pretty funny, especially since the econometrics discipline itself has become pretty modest in its claims to certainty about real-world empirical stabilities. A lot of people in educational policy and research seem to have developed ‘economics envy’ in the same way some economists have ‘physics envy’. But the critiques of econometrics from the likes of Keynes, and even Friedman or Lucas, are even more applicable to using this stuff in education.
That said, stats are a vital part of educational research. And as the woman Doug interviewed the other week said, the numbers tend to be on our side, so we don’t need to fear them. Sometimes the reformers bury the lead, and scratching around below the surface you can find a whole different story.
The standard ‘effect size’ literature works by stripping away what groups of students have in common so as to isolate the effect of, say, class size, or phonics instruction. Reformers then trumpet that this or that thing has a high effect size. You can then get some really weird claims, for example that the effect size of socioeconomic status is relatively small, once you controlled for school. Of course, socioeconomic status has an effect partly _through_ sorting people by school. You just have to pay attention, and when in doubt, ask for the raw data – which ought to be freely available but often is not.
Cheers, Mike Beggs scandalum.wordpress.com