Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
First you complain that I linked to a blog post, and then you regurgitate the entire post here (presumably thinking that there were a whole host of board regulars who, like yourself, become addled by working those link thingies that keep cropping up in hypertext documents). Were you dropped on your head a lot as an infant?
The poster, Mark Kleiman, is a professor of public policy at UCLA. Which is to say that his credentials to say shit about educational policy are substantially greater than yours. Slagging what he says simply because he's published it on a blog instead of printing it on paper is just dumb. (Congratulations: You walked into that one.) Compared to your ouevre here on this particular subject, his post compares favorably.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Don't you see? Follow the logical steps:
Because (1) sociologists have no standards,
(2) Kleiman, who holds a Ph.D. from the Kennedy School at Harvard, can be ignored, as can
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Why are you so focused on Kleiman? Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't most of the post not written by Kleiman? Most of it was some teacher whose was about to leave their job in the south’s opinion. What actual text in this blog was Kleiman’s? If it is not Kleiman’s prose does that mean it is OK to “Slag” on them because they are not Harvard trained professors?
Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
(3) the many academic articles considering the effects of teachers unions on education.
It's a neat trick. But if your idee fixe is that teachers unions are bad, then it takes something like this magic attack on sociologists to dispel inconvenient realities.
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I didn’t get that from the Blog did you. The poster seems to conclude that any conclusion that shows a positie connection between teacher’s unions and education is tenuous at best…
“In case it wasn't entirely clear: the chain of reasoning "Massachusetts has teachers' unions, and its students score better than students from Georgia, which mostly doesn't" is snark, not social science. “
“I checked with my colleague Meredith Phillips, who reports that to her knowledge (and Meredith sees all, knows all) the right sort of statistical study, controlling for the relevant background variables, has never been done.”
“As long as we're trying for social science, as opposed to snark, let's note that "unionization" probably isn't the right independent variable; what we want is some measure of the difficulty of firing a teacher, which might be measured in hours of effort by the principal or months of elaspsed time between the beginning and the end of the firing process.
In a quick conversation today, Meredith suggested that a convincing study would have to look at districts where the independent variable had changed for some exogenous reason; otherwise you'd be left with the suspicion that easy-fire districts and hard-fire districts varied on some unmeasured dimension that also correlated with school performance. For example, if districts where the teachers hate the principals, and vice versa, tend to evolve union contracts or administrative procedures to protect teachers from arbitrary firing, and if such districts also tend to have badly-performing schools, then protections will turn out to correlate with poor performance, even if there is no actual causal link.
All this illustrates an under-appreciated point: good policy-relevant social science is really, really hard, and ought to be left to really, really smart people such as Meredith. That's why I mostly confine myself to policy analysis and snark, which are much easier.
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