Debate Rages: Response to TFA’s supposition that new brief is “retreat from evidence”
The debate rages. Yesterday, the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) released Teach For America: A Return to the Evidence. It is the sequel to the 2010 Teach For America: A Review of the Evidence. TFA hasresponded. Raegen Miller, TFA’s VP of Research Partnerships, has asked us to keep the dialogue going, so I will respond to his comments (See their comments linked and included in full below. We hope they respond in kind by pasting our response on their blog) about our NEPC brief on TFA. I focus on addressing Miller’s comments that are relevant for the general public who want to truly understand the impact of TFA.
Miller brings up three main concerns: How we chose which studies we reviewed, our review of Xu, Hannaway, and Taylor’s article, and our review of the Mathematica study. Let me address these concerns.
Miller implies that we cherry-picked studies to review. We make it clear in the brief that we focus on peer-reviewed articles, and we review all the peer-reviewed studies that have been published since our 2010 NEPC brief. This standard is not one we made up— peer-reviewed articles are widely seen as the gold-standard for quality of research. Peer-reviewed articles are refereed by other scholars (usually double blind) to ensure that the standards of the field and of the journal publishing the article are maintained. An article is published only after it has met these standards, usually after the reviewers’ comments for revision have been addressed, and after the article has been approved by multiple scholars and by the publication’s editor. This is in contrast to reports that are not peer-reviewed, which can be published by anyone. Although the latter can potentially be of higher quality than the former,