Fwd: PFAW Commentary on Paul Peterson / NCES Study

[Peter Campbell <campbellp@mail.montclair.edu>]

FYI - interesting debunking of the debunker Paul Peterson on the  
recent ED study comparing public and private schools.

Peter

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Kevin Franck <kfranck@pfaw.org>
> Date: August 7, 2006 7:53:10 AM CDT
> To: Kevin Franck <kfranck@pfaw.org>
> Subject: PFAW Commentary on Paul Peterson / NCES Study
>
> Hello Friends, I wanted to let you know about a commentary piece I  
> wrote on the NCES private school / public school study and Paul  
> Peterson’s efforts to discredit it. The piece is currently featured  
> on educationnews.org. The full text is below.
>
>
>
> Feel free to forward this on to anyone who has an interest in  
> defending American public education, and please let me know if you  
> have any questions about this piece or Paul Peterson.
>
>
>
> If you have a chance, stop by PFAW Public Education Homepage to  
> find out more about our education work.
>
>
>
>
>
> Thanks!
>
>
>
> Kevin Franck
>
> Senior Education Policy Analyst
>
> People For the American Way
>
> 202-467-2346
>
>
>
> Cutting Through Right-Wing Spin on Public Education
> When the Going Gets Tough, Privatization Proponents Get Paul Peterson
> Monday, August 7, 2006
> People For the American Way
> By Kevin Franck
>
> Let's say that someone invented a pill that supposedly makes  
> children grow faster. To measure its effectiveness on children from  
> two different countries, you would assemble a sample group of each  
> and measure their growth over time. But what if the children in one  
> of the countries already tended to grow at a faster rate? This  
> would certainly skew your results. The question would be how to  
> isolate the effects of the pill by accounting for pre-existsing  
> differences in growth rate.
>
> The authors of a recent education study faced this very question  
> when they tried to compare the effectiveness of public schools and  
> private schools. Conducted by the National Center for Education  
> Statistics, the study compared the test scores of students in  
> different schools and initially found that private school students  
> scored higher. But they had not yet accounted for demographic  
> characteristics – e.g. parental income and education level, the  
> number and quality of books found in the home, etc. – that affect  
> student test scores irrespective of the quality of school attended.  
> For instance, children in private schools tend to come from  
> wealthier and more educated families and therefore tend to score  
> higher.
>
> The NCES researchers sought to compare the effectiveness of public  
> and private schools, so they devised a complex statistical formula  
> to control for demographic differences among students. Once they  
> controlled for the factors that give private schools an advantage  
> they found that public schools performed as well as, and in some  
> cases better than, private schools.
>
> Critics of public education predictably discounted the study's  
> findings. A senior research fellow at the Milton and Rose Friedman  
> Foundation, an organization that advocates publicly funded  
> vouchers, implied that anyone who believes public schools perform  
> better than private schools might be on drugs. Right-wing education  
> scholar Chester Finn claimed that coverage of the study said more  
> about the media than the state of public education.
>
> And this week a familiar face joined the right-wing stampede to  
> neutralize the NCES study. Paul Peterson – a media savvy political  
> science professor at Harvard – released a report claiming that the  
> study got it wrong. He took the study data and then applied his own  
> statistical formula to it, effectively negating the researchers'  
> sophisticated adjustments for demographic differences. After waving  
> his statistical wand over the data he went on the offensive,  
> arguing that the study actually proves that private schools perform  
> better than public schools.
>
> Peterson makes the most of his Harvard credentials, but he is more  
> a political animal than a scholar. His work has been funded largely  
> by organizations dedicated to promoting right-wing ideology and  
> policies, such as the John M. Olin Foundation and the Lynde and  
> Harry Bradley Foundation. Olin supported the work of Robert Bork,  
> Phyllis Schlafly, and Bill Bennett, and Bradley funded the work of  
> notorious Bell Curve author Charles Murray, whom the organization's  
> former president once referred to as “one of the foremost social  
> thinkers in the country.” Both organizations have sought to produce  
> academic-sounding rationales for right-wing policies; their grants  
> to Peterson are no exception.
>
> Peterson has a history of re-analyzing and re-interpreting data  
> from studies whose findings run counter to his own right-wing  
> policy preferences and then announcing that things are not as they  
> seemed. For instance, researchers at the University of Wisconsin in  
> 1995 found no appreciable difference in academic performance  
> between Milwaukee public school students and children who attended  
> private schools via publicly funded vouchers. But Peterson reworked  
> the data using a different set of assumptions and found that –  
> surprise – there actually was a significant gain. John Witte, the  
> lead University ofWisconsin researcher, said that Peterson's  
> analysis was so riddled with mistakes that it could not be taken  
> seriously.
>
> In 1998, researchers at the University of Indiana published a study  
> which found that the Cleveland voucher program had no effect on  
> student achievement. Again, Peterson went into action. He claimed  
> that the study was flawed because it used test scores he considered  
> “implausible” because they had been reported by the Cleveland  
> public schools. He then thoroughly reworked the study and concluded  
> that – surprise again – the data show that the voucher students  
> actually performed better than their public school counterparts. He  
> reached this conclusion by tweaking the statistical formula used to  
> tabulate the results and replacing the supposedly implausible  
> scores with others, which were derived from a test developed and  
> administered by an organization which ran voucher schools in  
> Milwaukee.
>
> Paul Peterson is a conservative political operative in the guise of  
> a scholar. His work is funded – and celebrated – by right-wing  
> groups bent on privatizing public education. Is it any wonder he  
> always manages to reach the same pro-privatization conclusions?
>
> Every school day in America , thousands of teachers work hard to  
> help students grow into thoughtful, responsible citizens. The  
> recent NCES study shows that their hard work is paying off.  
> Tragically there are public schools that struggle, and those  
> schools need honest, effective, and research-proven reform. We need  
> to continue the debate about school reform, but we must remain  
> committed to honesty and to our public schools. But quasi-academic  
> proponents of privatization, like Paul Peterson, are committed to  
> neither.
>
> Kevin Franck is Senior Education Policy Analyst at People For the  
> American Way