This report carefully reviews high-quality empirical evidence from the last several years on the test score effects of three approaches to modifying the organization of schools: (1) starting schools later in the morning, (2) favoring K-8 grade configuration instead of junior high or middle school configurations, and (3) increasing teacher specialization by grade and subject. It estimates the earnings benefits of each intervention and, for interventions (1) and (2), compares monetary benefits to costs. The report concludes that benefits outweigh costs, although the rough cost estimates suggest that better data are required to draw definite conclusions. The report’s main conclusion is that organizational reforms deserve a more prominent place in education debates, and that individual school districts should carefully consider them alongside more popular reform options. The review points to a few shortcomings but concludes that the report’s analyses are solid and helpful and that the results are presented carefully and cautiously.

Two recent studies from the Center for American Progress raise a variety of issues about teacher pension plans. The debate centers around changing from the traditional defined-benefit plans to cash balance plans, where the teacher and the school contribute to a fund as a constant, defined, percentage of pay every pay period.

Both reports rely on bodies of evidence concerning: (1) how a typical teacher’s productivity (measured by a teacher’s impact on test scores) changes over her or his career, and (2) how teachers’ decisions to enter, stay, or retire from teaching depend on annual changes in the value of their pension plan. Unfortunately, there is limited evidence on these two questions, and conclusions about these matters are cloudy.  Shifting to a new pension design to save money — as California is contemplating — may have exactly the opposite effect; bolstering current plans may prove the more economical and practical approach.

While this review raises some concerns, these two new reports perform a service — particularly when read together — in raising issues in this developing area of policy inquiry. Moreover, both reports appropriately acknowledge the limited nature of our knowledge in this area and the small number of quality research reports that are available.

In this review of The New Teacher Project’s (TNTP) “fact sheet” on value-added (VA) analysis, Di Carlo argues that while VA models are sophisticated and have a lot of potential, we have no idea how they are best used or whether they will work. It is likely, he says, that poor models implemented in the wrong way would “penalize” critically large numbers of teachers for reasons beyond their control, as well as generate estimates that are too unstable to be useful for any purpose, even low-stakes decisions. Given that TNTP is actively involved in redesigning teacher quality policies in dozens of states and large districts, Di Carlo is disturbed that they don’t seem to know the difference between real risks and “myths.”

In this report, the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) claims that California charter schools are reversing the trend of low academic achievement among African American students and effectively closing the Black-White achievement gap. After a review of CCSA’s analyses and findings, however, it becomes clear that the claims are misrepresented or exaggerated. In the years under study, African American students enrolled in traditional public schools outgained those enrolled in charter schools by a small margin, although the charter school students started and ended higher. In addition, the authors present a regression model, with Academic Performance Index (API) scores as the outcome variable, that accounts for only 3-6% of overall variance. Based on this model, the percentage of African American enrollment is negatively related to API scores in both charter and traditional public schools, a trend that will not reverse the academic standing for African American students. In fact, the gap continues to grow, albeit at a slightly slower rate in charter schools. Finally, the report’s claim that charter schools are centers of innovation does not hold. Rather, as the authors eventually conclude themselves, there were no instructional practices observed in California charter schools that are not also present in traditional public schools.

The research report reviewed here concludes that many initially high-achieving students are falling further and further behind over the course of their years in school. The report intends to raise the alarm and to advocate for improved programs for these students. It is, however, a false alarm due to biased methodology and misleading arguments. The report’s norm-referenced framework guarantees “losers” as well as “winners,” regardless of any true improvement made by the students. Also, the “regression to the mean” effect produces a false illusion of a tradeoff of over-progress by low achievers at the cost of under-progress for high achievers. Finally, its prescription for stronger school accountability for high-achieving students under NCLB does not follow research-based guidance on how to improve student learning. Other research, including that conducted by this reviewer, finds that students who are high achievers and low achievers make approximately equal academic progress in reading and math, while the achievement gaps remain large. Moreover, a substantial part of the variation in student progress is attributable to teacher and school effects beyond students’ initial status and background characteristics.

Two authors of the report published a written reponse on October 30, 2011. That response is available here, and Dr. Lee's brief reply is published and downloadable below.

Incomplete: How Middle Class Schools Aren’t Making the Grade is a new report from Third Way, a Washington, D.C.-based policy think tank. The report aims to convince parents, taxpayers and policymakers that they should be as concerned about middle-class schools not making the grade as they are about the failures of the nation’s large, poor, urban school districts. But, the report suffers from egregious methodological flaws invalidating nearly every bold conclusion drawn by its authors. First, the report classifies as middle class any school or district where the share of children qualifying for free or reduced-priced lunch falls between 25% and 75%. Seemingly unknown to the authors, this classification includes as middle class some of the poorest urban centers in the country, such as Detroit and Philadelphia. But, even setting aside the crude classification of middle class, none of the report’s major conclusions are actually supported by the data tables provided. The report concludes, for instance, that middle-class schools perform much less well than the general public, parents and taxpayers believe they do. But, the tables throughout the report invariably show that the schools they classify as “middle class” fall precisely where one would expect them to—in the middle—between higher- and lower-income schools. 

(Note that in addition to the reply by Third Way and the Baker response below, Prof. Baker has blogged here and on other parts of his blog.)

Suggested Citation: Baker, B.D. (2011). Review of “Incomplete: How Middle Class Schools Aren’t Making the Grade.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-middle-class

Baker’s step-by-step analysis explains the complexities of comparing achievement gaps between higher- and lower-income students across states.  Raw comparisons are misleading because they rely on an incorrect assumption that the average of low-income children in one state is comparable to the average of low-income children in another.  New Jersey, for instance, comes in 5^th in a ranking of raw comparisons between states, but when the necessary corrections are made for the size of the income gap between higher and lower-income students, New Jersey comes in 27^th – with a smaller gap than in the average state.  

Charting New Territory: Tapping Charter Schools to Turn Around the Nation’s Dropout Factories argues for a more prominent role for charter operators in turning around perennially low-performing high schools. However, the report’s ultimate findings and conclusions are out of proportion to the strength of the research evidence on school turnarounds, charter schools, and charter management organizations, as well as to the data on which the analysis is based. As such, its recommendations are of little utility in guiding policy on charter management organizations as tools for turning around struggling schools. Further, the report fails to justify the general practice of converting chronically low-performing schools to charter status. Instead, the report reproduces familiar arguments for market-based school reforms that are grounded in little empirical evidence and that use our nation’s neediest schools—those serving primarily poor children and children of color—as laboratories for educational experiments, notwithstanding existing evidence that the experiments will not succeed. In doing so, the report distracts policymakers and practitioners from more fundamental and worthwhile questions about the types of policies that can secure the necessary conditions for all students to succeed.

Suggested Citation: Trujillo, T. (2011). Review of “Charting New Territory: Tapping Charter Schools to Turn Around the Nation’s Dropout Factories.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-charting-new-territory

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and the Foundation for Excellence in Education have embarked on a well-funded campaign to spread selected Florida education reforms to other states. These reforms include assigning letter grades to schools, high-stakes testing, promotion and graduation requirements, bonus pay, a wide variety of alternative teacher credentialing policies, and various types of school choice mechanisms. This policy potpourri was recently presented by Gov. Bush in Michigan, and the documents used allow for a concrete consideration and review. Regrettably, Bush’s Michigan speech relies on a selective misrepresentation of test score data. Further, he offers no evidence that the purported test score gains were caused by the recommended reforms. Other viable explanations, such as a major investment in class-size reduction and a statewide reading program, receive no or little attention. Moreover, the presentation ignores less favorable findings, while evidence showing limited or negative effects of the proposed strategies is omitted. Considering the overwhelming evidence that retention is ineffective (if not harmful), it is troubling to see Mr. Bush endorse such an approach. Finally, Florida’s real problems of inequitable and inadequate education remain unaddressed.

Suggested Citation: Mathis, W. (2011). Review of “Florida Formula for Student Achievement: Lessons for the Nation.”  Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-florida-formula

Class Size: What Research Says and What It Means for State Policy argues that increasing average class size by one student will save about 2% of total education spending with negligible impact on academic achievement. It justifies this conclusion on the basis that Class-Size Reduction (CSR) is not particularly effective and is not as cost-effective as other reforms. However, this conclusion is based on a misleading review of the CSR research literature. The report puts too much emphasis on studies that are of poor quality or that do not focus on settings that are particularly relevant to the debate on class-size policy in the United States. It argues that class-size reduction is less cost-effective than other reform policies, but it bases this contention on an incomplete accounting of the benefits of smaller classes and an uncritical, unexamined list of alternative policies. The report’s estimates of the potential cost savings are flawed as, in reality, schools cannot structurally reduce class size by only one student. Well-documented and long-term non-academic gains from CSR are not addressed. Likewise, the recommendation for releasing the 'least effective' teachers assumes a valid way of making such determinations is available.

This review is of The Comprehensive Longitudinal Evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program: Summary of Fourth Year Reports, published by the School Choice Demonstration Project, University of Arkansas. The report makes eight claims about the effectiveness of the program, most of them positive. On the key issue of achievement of students receiving vouchers, however, the report merely concludes that the program is not harmful. As the report’s title suggests, the evidence for all its claims is almost exclusively the researchers’ own work, with no reference to other academic literature. Importantly, none of their own referenced documents were peer-reviewed. Even as some of the report’s claims are in accord with the broader literature, their appearance in isolation makes for an overly simple evaluation of the MPCP.

Suggested Citation: Belfield, C.R. (2011). Review of “The Comprehensive Longitudinal Evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program: Summary of Fourth Year Reports.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-milwaukee-choice-4

Baker expresses concern that Passing Muster is an example of “…technicians working within the political arena…deferring judgment on important technical concerns that have real ethical implications.” Although the authors of Passing Muster claim no preference for specific types of evaluation systems, their rating system effectively suggests that value-added measures should be the benchmark for evaluating teacher evaluation systems, simply because they are available and not because they are good measures.  Baker calls on the authors to admit their bias: “When a technician knows that one choice is better (or worse) than another, one measure or model better than another, and that these technical choices affect real lives, the technician should – MUST – be up front/honest about these preferences.”

The report, Yearning to Break Free: Ohio Superintendents Speak Out, describes findings of a survey of 246 Ohio school superintendents about critical issues facing the state’s educational system. In particular, the intent of the study was to examine how superintendents might do more with fewer resources. The authors conclude that Ohio districts need increased managerial authority and control over state revenue streams and other funds; transformed collective bargaining rights; and repeal of automatic increases in teacher salaries. Such efforts, they argue, are imperative to improve the educational opportunities of all children in the state. But the authors do not provide evidence to support this latter claim. The combined effects of non-representative sampling, loaded or inappropriately worded items, and the conflating of opinion and fact make the report’s conclusions problematic. Myriad factors contribute to student achievement, including home and community effects, campus resources (material and non-material), as well as teacher competence which are not examined or considered. And, despite the reported finding that superintendents prefer greater autonomy in personnel and school policies over increased funding, the majority of superintendents also contend that they would see a trade-off of more autonomy with a decrease in funding as undesirable. While the report’s main thrust is to justify flat or reduced spending, the report lacks sufficient rigor to make it useful to guide policy or practice.

Suggested Citation: Horn, C. & Dworkin, G. (2011). Review of “Yearning to Break Free: Ohio Superintendents Speak Out.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-ohio-superintendents

Note that Steve Farkas, an author of the Fordham report, replied to the review, available at http://www.educationgadfly.net/flypaper/2011/05/critics-of-fordham%E2%8…

Horn and Dworkin responded to this reply, available at http://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/NEPC-Yearning-Farkas-Respo…

This Progressive Policy Institute report argues that charter schools should be expanded rapidly and exponentially. Citing exponential growth organizations, such as Starbucks and Apple, as well as the rapid growth of molds, viruses and cancers, the report advocates for similar growth models for charter schools. However, there is no explanation of how the dramatic growth observed by these “exponential growers” is applicable or desirable for charter schools. The report‘s critical shortcoming is the almost complete lack of acceptable scientific evidence or original research supporting the policy suggestions. The report presents nine “lessons” or suggestions that are essentially common and abstract aphorisms from the business world. Unfortunately, the report fails to make the case that the suggestions or references are relevant to school improvement. The research section of the report includes, in fact, only three references – all from the business literature. Such fundamental shortcomings greatly undermine the report‘s suggestions. Therefore, charter school leaders and policy makers should regard the nine suggestions as speculation rather than well-grounded policy alternatives.

Suggested Citation: Garcia, D. (2011). Review of “Going Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sector’s Best.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-going-exponential

ConnCAN’s Spend Smart: Fix Our Broken School Funding System was released concurrently with a bill introduced in the Connecticut legislature, based on the principles outlined in the report. However, the report is of negligible value to the policy debate over Connecticut school finance because it provides little or no support for any of the foundational claims that undergird its proffered solutions. Similarly, the report provides little or no validation that the recommended solutions would actually improve either the equity or adequacy of funding for Connecticut schools. In fact, unsubstantiated, and ultimately patently false claims in the report, if used to guide policy, would result in substantial funding disparities for needy students. Whether intended or not, the likely overall effect of these recommendations will be to remove some funding for schools serving English Learners and serving the state’s lowest-income families and shift that funding to charter schools, which generally serve few such children in Connecticut.

ConnCAN's response to this review can be found here: http://www.conncan.org/learn/blog/conncan%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cspend-smar…

Baker's reply to the ConnCAN response can be found here: http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/conncan-cluelessness/

Suggested Citation: Baker, B.D. (2011). Review of “Spend Smart: Fix Our Broken School Funding System.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-spend-smart

The primary claim of this Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance report and the abridged Education Next version is that nations “that pay teachers on their performance score higher on PISA tests.” After statistically controlling for several variables, the author concludes that nations with some form of merit pay system have, on average, higher reading and math scores on this international test of 15-year-old students. Although the author lists numerous caveats, his broad conclusions do not heed these cautions. The fundamental differences among countries in the types of performance pay system are not properly considered. Nations are simply lumped together as having or not having a performance pay plan. Also, the length of time the program had been in place in each country is not addressed and the unknown intensity of program implementations argue against drawing lessons from this study. The small sample size of 28 observations requires extreme caution in interpretation. For example, the inclusion or exclusion of a single country results in large shifts in the size of the reported relationships. That is, the numbers become unreliable and invalid. With any correlational study, attributing causality is problematic; the differences among nations could be due to any number of factors. Finally, the type of regression-based analyses used to support the performance pay conclusion does not properly consider that the background variables used in these analyses can vary in terms of relationships with student scores and have different definitions across the countries under study. Therefore, drawing policy conclusions about teacher performance pay on the basis of this analysis is not warranted.

Suggested Citation: von Davier, M. (2011). Review of “Cross-Country Evidence on Teacher Performance Pay.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-pisa-performance-pay

Performance pay plans for teachers are a hot topic across the nation, so the country’s largest program is bound to attract attention. But caution is advised. This is a state-sponsored program evaluation of Texas’ most recent incentive pay program rather than research, and it suffers from two major constraints: data not collected and questions not asked. First, although billed as “final,” data on teacher retention and teacher perceptions include only one award cycle, and student achievement data cover just two program years—not enough data to draw solid conclusions. In addition, little is known about how districts actually implemented D.A.T.E., or about such factors as school culture, leadership and class size. Second, the report primarily explores narrow descriptive questions about the Texas program—who participated and why, what design factors they chose to implement, and so forth. It does not consider broader questions such as whether incentive pay produces positive results, not just higher test scores, and under what conditions. The report simply answers the generally descriptive questions it poses, and its authors properly caution against drawing unwarranted conclusions beyond those questions.

Suggested Citation: Gratz, D.B. (2011). Review of “District Awards for Teacher Excellence Program: Final Report.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-district-awards

A report published by the Lexington Institute presents findings on the effectiveness of New Jersey’s Abbott v. Burke court decisions from the late 1990s through 2009. The report argues that the reforms ordered by the state’s supreme court failed to significantly increase student achievement despite what it terms as dramatic increases in spending. Based on these findings, the report argues that the increases in spending in these urban districts and their continued dismal student achievement rates make New Jersey, and particularly Newark, ideal for instituting a number of reforms. These advocated reforms include parental empowerment, increases in the number of charter schools, changes in teacher union contracts, and the enactment of private school choice policies (e.g., vouchers). The report cannot stand as a research document and provides little or no empirical evidence to support its critiques of Abbott or its recommendations for reform. It omits important parts of the existing research literature, such as NAEP data showing New Jersey as high performing and as closing the achievement gap. The Lexington report contains no methodology to speak of. Overall, the report has little or no use for informing educational reform in Newark, New Jersey or nationally.

Suggested Citation: Sadovnik, A.R. (2011). Review of “Reform with Results for New Jersey Schools.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://NEPC.org/thinktank/review-reform-with-results

Bruce Baker examines the costs and benefits of layoffs made by seniority versus those made by “quality,” as encouraged by Petrilli and Roza. He argues that the tradeoff is not between “keeping old, dead wood” versus “keeping quality teachers,” as it is often put, but rather the tradeoff between laying off teachers on the unfortunately crude basis of seniority only versus laying off teachers on a marginally-better-than-random, roll-of-the-dice basis. He concludes that the latter may actually be more problematic for the future quality of the teaching workforce.

Bruce Baker responds to a Star-Ledger article reporting higher test scores for charter schools than for district public schools. His review of student population differences in Newark schools and reanalysis of 2009 test results provide the basis of his argument that because N.J. charter schools tend to serve different populations than district public schools and to have high rates of attrition, the comparisons of test scores of the two sets of schools do not provide meaningful input into the policy debate about school reform.

Directed by Davis Guggenheim, Waiting for Superman offers what appear to be straightforward, commonsense solutions to inequities in schooling. The film argues that heroic action can be taken to fix what it portrays as the disaster of public schooling. The film disregards poverty as a factor in school performance and connection—and therefore never addresses anti-poverty measures as potential solutions to the problems it identifies. While it raises issues that demand attention, including achievement gaps, high drop-out rates in some schools and districts, and the need for committed, well-prepared teachers, it offers solutions that are simplified, ignore research evidence, and are built on false assumptions.

Suggested Citation: Dutro, E. (2011). Review of “Waiting for Superman.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-waiting-superman

The documentary film The Lottery, directed by Madeline Sackler, focuses on the battle between advocates for a New York City charter school provider, Harlem Success Academy Charter Schools (HSA), and those presented as charter school opponents. It uses the struggle of four students who hope to get into a charter school as a vehicle to examine how difficult it is for poor children to receive a high-quality education in America’s large urban districts. Unfortunately, while there is much that is very real and poignant about this film, its zealous advocacy for charter schools fundamentally misdirects viewers away from the actual evidence about the mixed results that they have achieved by charter schools.

Suggested Citation: Tate, W. (2011). Review of “The Lottery.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-lottery

Bruce Baker’s critique of the Return on Investment (ROI) Index for K-12 public school districts, published by the Center for American Progress, finds CAP’s analysis sorely lacking: it support neither the general findings conveyed in the report, nor the policy implications and proposals that follow from them.

The report summarizes evidence from five studies of student achievement in oversubscribed charter schools and two studies on charter school revenues and outlines a number of recommendations relevant to the federal role in charter schools. While many recommendations are reasonable, those related to charter school facilities and charter school finance are more likely to be disputed because they are poorly developed and based on a narrow and misleading view of the evidence. This review discusses and expands upon the evidence and recommendations presented in the report. The intent of the report is to guide federal policy in ways that can improve and expand charter schools, but weaknesses in the report and flaws in the conclusions and the process used to generate the report undermine its utility. The report can serve as an initial step in outlining some of the key issues that federal lawmakers should consider. Nevertheless, federal policies that will strengthen charter schools in the longer run—rather than expanding the number of charter schools in the short run—need to be based on a more accurate and representative body of evidence. Further, the process of formulating recommendations requires more than six voices and more than a day of conversations to develop a comprehensive understanding of vital issues as well as to build a consensus.

Suggested Citation: Miron, G. (2011). Review of “Charter Schools: A Report on Rethinking the Federal Role in Education.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-charter-federal

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s “Measures of Effective Teaching” (MET) Project seeks to validate the use of a teacher’s estimated “value-added”—computed from the year-on-year test score gains of her students—as a measure of teaching effectiveness. Using data from six school districts, the initial report examines correlations between student survey responses and value-added scores computed both from state tests and from higher-order tests of conceptual understanding. The study finds that the measures are related, but only modestly. The report interprets this as support for the use of value-added as the basis for teacher evaluations. This conclusion is unsupported, as the data in fact indicate that a teachers’ value-added for the state test is not strongly related to her effectiveness in a broader sense. Most notably, value-added for state assessments is correlated 0.5 or less with that for the alternative assessments, meaning that many teachers whose value-added for one test is low are in fact quite effective when judged by the other. As there is every reason to think that the problems with value-added measures apparent in the MET data would be worse in a high-stakes environment, the MET results are sobering about the value of student achievement data as a significant component of teacher evaluations.

Suggested Citation: Rothstein, J. (2011). Review of “Learning About Teaching: Initial Findings from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-learning-about-teaching

Bruce Baker responds to the general assertion that public education system is less cost-effective now than it was 30 years ago by arguing that comparisons in education spending over time are overly simplistic if they simply adjust for the value of the dollar. He specifies and discusses three major factors that influence the cost of education: changes in the incoming student populations over time, changes in the desired outcomes for those students, and changes in the competitive wage of the desired quality of school personnel.

A report from Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and the journal Education Next finds that only 6% of U.S. students in the high school graduating class of 2009 achieved at an advanced level in mathematics compared with 28% of Taiwanese students and more than 20% of students in Hong Kong, Korea, and Finland. Overall, the United States ranked behind most of its industrialized competitors. The report compares the mathematics performance of high achievers not only across countries but also across the 50 U.S. states and 10 urban districts. Most states and cities ranked closer to developing countries than to developed countries. However, the study has three noteworthy limitations: (a) internationally, students were sampled by age and not by grade, and countries varied greatly on the proportion of the student cohort included in the compared grades; in fact, only about 70% of the U.S. sample would have been in the graduating class of 2009, which makes the comparisons unreliable; (b) the misleading practice of reporting rankings of groups of high-achieving students hides the clustering of scores, inaccurately exaggerates small differences, and increases the possibility of error in measuring differences; and (c) the different tests used in the study measured different domains of mathematics proficiency, and the international measure was limited because of relatively few test items. The study’s deceptive comparison of high achievers on one test with high achievers on another says nothing useful about the class of 2009 and offers essentially no assistance to U.S. educators seeking to improve students’ performance in mathematics.

Suggested Citation: Kilpatrick, J. (2011). Review of “U.S. Math Performance in Global Perspective: How Well Does Each State Do at Producing High-Achieving Students?” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-us-math

Update: Paul Peterson, one of the report's authors, has posted a response to the review. The response can be found at: http://educationnext.org/no-matter-how-hard-you-try-you-cannot-deny-u-s…

Please also download and read Jeremy Kilpatrick's reply to that response, which is posted at the bottom of this page.

Bruce Baker evaluates Petrilli and Roza’s fifteen recommendations for how to stretch the school dollar as “quick and easy – generally ineffective and meaningless, or potentially damaging – revenue-neutral school finance fixes.” In addition, he faults the brief for failing to provide support for or analysis of its recommendations.