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The Empire Strikes Back (Part II)

The Empire Strikes Back (Part II)

How reliable is the research

By Lee Duigon / The Chalcedon Foundation
[Part I] [Part II]

Early this year, Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski, University of Illinois, published a statistical study that seems to indicate that public schools are better academically than charter, private, and religious schools. Their paper, “Charter, Private, Public Schools and Academic Achievement: New Evidence from NAEP Mathematics Data,” may be viewed at http://www.ncspe.org/publications_files/OP111.pdf.

As we saw in the first article in this series, this report has been hailed by the Religious Left and teachers’ unions as “evidence” that all criticism of the public schools is a pack of politically motivated lies. We also saw that this is not the position of Christopher Lubienski, the report’s co-author, nor is it the position of the U.S. Department of Education, the sponsor of the study.

In this article we’ll take a closer look at the study itself and some of the criticisms of it. But first it will be necessary to understand why these findings are so controversial. Full story...

http://www.chalcedon.edu/articles/article.php?ArticleID=290

Posted by Editor at April 26, 2006 06:26 AM