The Politicization Of Educational Research
Last Friday, an analysis of the “value-added” contributions of public school teachers authored by a trio of economists, Harvard’s Raj Chetty and John Friedman and Columbia’s Jonah Rockoff, was unveiled with great fanfare, receiving prominent coverage by both the New York Times and the PBS’ Newshour. By all accounts, this study (hereafter, CFR) is both substantial, employing a database unprecedented in such work by its sheer size, and innovative in a number of new design elements and statistical measures. It appears that the large urban school district which is the subject of the CFR analysis is New York City, both because of the sheer size of the database (New York City is more than twice the size of the next largest school district, Los Angeles) and because of the fact that one of the co-authors, Rockoff, has a long history of working closely with the New York City Department of Education in the development and implementation of its now discredited and abandoned version of value-added measures, the Teacher Data Reports.
Given the importance of such a study, the method and timing of its release to the media is of particular note. To