Raj Chetty Discovers that Poverty Matters After All
By John Thompson.
Hopefully, a new quasi-experimental study, The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children, by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren and Lawrence Katz will influence the domestic policy of Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration. Hopefully, Hillary will understand that this new research by Chetty et. al refutes the teacher-bashing policies promoted by Chetty, Jonah Rockoff, and John Friedman in their previous study of the impact teachers made on students. This prior study has been used to justify the use of VAM in teacher evaluations, and the elimination of due process for teachers.
The new Chetty et. al data shows that the place where children live has a major effect on the economic prospects of poor children. The old Chetty et. al commentary denied that the place where children went to school had an important effect on their outcomes.
The new Chetty shows that the 1990s Moving to Opportunity program improved the health of children who move to better neighborhoods and resulted in a 31% increase in their income. The old Chetty denied that peer pressure had a significant effect on teens and he leaped to the conclusion that it was the influence of teachers, inside the four walls of the classroom, that raised economic outcomes.
As the New York Times’ Paul Tough explains, school reform came from “liberal ptsd” from supposedly losing the War on Poverty. As the New York Times’ David Leonhardt, Amanda Cox, and Claire Cain Miller report, Moving to Opportunity was once seen as an example of an unsuccessful antipoverty program, and its “apparent failure has haunted social scientists and policy makers, making poverty seem all the more intractable.” Concluding that the battle against poverty was too hard, accountability-driven school reformers attempted a cheap and easy shortcut. As Stanford Professor Emeritus Larry Cuban says, these reformers tried to “deputize” teachers as the agents for breaking the cycle of generational poverty.
Test-driven school reformers pushed the bizarre claim that it was poor “teacher quality,” as opposed to the lack of jobs, segregation, and other complex, interrelated factors, that was the key to fighting extreme poverty. And, they did so in a way that was equally strange. Seeming to be oblivious to the dubious Raj Chetty Discovers that Poverty Matters After All - Living in Dialogue:
