Data Driven Nonsense--Few Credible Studies of Charter Schools
Teachers in the trenches have long suspected that the “data-driven” reforms being shoved down their throats by Gates, Broad, Walton, Obama, Duncan, Rhee, et al, had little credible data to back them up and little hope of improving educational outcomes for their students. An article in the latest issue of Science (reposted on EurekAlert) lends credibility to these suspicions.
According to UC San Diego educational economist JuIian Betts and Richard Atkinson, president emeritus of the University of California and former director of the National Science Foundation, most studies of charter schools "use unsophisticated methods that tell us little about causal effects." There are very few randomized studies. Most rely on comparisons
