Moshe Adler on Chetty et al.
Recall the study at focus of now many posts on this blog? Written by Raj Chetty and two of his colleagues at Harvard, cited first in President Obama’ 2012 State of the Union address when Obama said, “We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000,” and more recently the focus of much attention when the judge in Vergara v. California cited Chetty’s testimony and the aforementioned team’s research as evidence that “a single year in a classroom with a grossly ineffective teacher costs students $1.4 million in lifetime earnings per classroom?”
Well, one of this study’s biggest critics, and most important critics as an expert in economics himself, has written a response to all of this. More specifically, Moshe Adler – economist affiliated with Columbia University and Empire State College, State University of New York and author of the 2010 book, Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science That Makes Life Dismal - first (in April 2014) wrote a critique of Chetty et al.’s studies for the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) during which he also compared this study from its first release in 2011 (cited by Obama) to its current 2014 version (cited by the judge in Vergara v. California) that can be found here, after which Chetty et al. wrote a response (in May 2014) that can be found at the bottom of the page here, after which Adler released a final response (in June 2014) that can also be found at the very bottom of the page here.
For those of you interested in reading all three pieces, all three are really quite critical to Moshe Adler on Chetty et al. |: