John Thompson: Gates Foundation Teacher Effectiveness Researcher Seems to Supports the "Status Quo"
The National Bureau of Economic Research just published "School Choice, School Quality and Postsecondary Attainment" by David J. Deming, Justine S. Hastings, Thomas J. Kane and Douglas O. Staiger. Tom Kane, of course, heads the Gates Foundation's $400 million dollar "Measuring Effective Teaching" experiment, and yet his work provides little or no support for the policies preferred by Gates and other "reformers." In fact, the study confirms the judgments of teachers and education researchers who the accountability hawks condemn as the "status quo." If Gates and Kane had had any idea that their research would yield the results reported in this and other recent papers, it is hard to believe they would have started down their market-driven path.
As usual with the Gates crowd, the actual evidence found by these economists is as solid as their interpretations are convoluted and strange. They acknowledge that progress in improving urban high schools has been disappointing compared to elementary and middle schools. Kane and company add the weird explanation that research has been "largely limited to test score gains as outcome measures" because they were focused "almost entirely on elementary and middle school students,"as if the data-driven accountability movement has
