Endangering Intelligent Conversation: Comments on the Latest Hanushekian Crisis Manifesto
Posted on September 16, 2013
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I had the displeasure of coming across this completely ridiculous and deceitful video the other day:
Which was created to promote Eric Hanushek’s latest U.S. education crisis manifesto. Around the 4:12 minute mark, the video jumps from crisis mode to policy solution mode, telling us how among U.S. States, Florida is a model for the way forward, and states like Wyoming and New York provide proof positive that money really has nothing to do with helping schools. That money doesn’t matter is a critical underpinning of nearly every reformy rant.
Now, most of what’s here has been summarized previously by Hanushek, and I have discussed this stuff previously on this blog.
This bizarre video got me thinking about a series of previous posts where I’ve looked across numerous indicators to try to tease out the relationships among them, across states. I’ve selectively scoured scatterplots of relationships between various state level indicators and outcome measures, but have not for a while now, simply stepped back and evaluated the correlations across all of them, and then tried to tease out what states, if any really do stand out.
Let’s start with the indicators and their sources.
School Funding Fairness: First up in my state level data set are a series of indicators fromhttp://schoolfundingfairness.org/
These indicators characterize the level of funding and effort in state school finance systems.