Superintendent Survey Doesn’t Support Fordham’s Conclusions
Contact:
Catherine Horn
(713) 743-5032
William Mathis, NEPC
(802) 383-0058
BOULDER, CO (May 3,2011) – A recent Fordham Institute report uses a survey of school superintendents in Ohio to argue for an increase in district authority instead of increased school resources. But a new review of the report concludes that it relies on a flawed survey and that its conclusions are not well-grounded in the survey responses.
The Fordham report was reviewed for the Think Twice think tank review project by Catherine Horn, an education professor, and Gary Dworkin, a sociology professor, both at the University of Houston. The review is published by the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado at Boulder School of Education.
Horn and Dworkin reviewed Yearning to Break Free: Ohio Superintendents Speak Out, a report based on a survey of 246 school superintendents, asking questions focused on reducing costs and expanding superintendents’ autonomy. On the basis of the survey, the report suggests that lack of money is not a serious problem for the state’s public schools. It also suggests that academic achievement would improve if superintendents were freed from state mandates and teachers union contracts.
Horn and Dworkin, however, find that the Fordham Institute report’s “conclusions are problematic because of the combined effects of non-representative sampling, leading or inappropriately worded items, and the conflating of opinion and fact.”
The report offered no peer-reviewed literature to substantiate the methods used or the validity of its conclusions. The mail-in survey’s weak response rate (40 percent of all invited superintendents), combined with an apparent failure to investigate for possible sampling biases, further call its conclusions into question.
Moreover, Horn and Dworkin point out multiple shortcomings with the design of the survey questionnaire. Perhaps most importantly to the report’s main argument, respondents were forced to choose between “significant increases in school funding” or “significant expansion of management authority over staff.”
As the reviewers note, the first option is hardly realistic in today’s economic climate. And when given the choice in another question, the superintendents offered an answer in some tension with the report’s broad conclusion: “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,” Horn and Dworkin write.
Ultimately, the report’s argument that granting superintendents greater autonomy, fewer mandates, and the right to hire and fire teachers and other employees at will would lift achievement scores lacks sufficient evidence, the reviewers note. “Merely because the superintendents [who responded] think that getting greater control over the hiring and firing of teachers will raise tests scores is not the same as empirical evidence that such a practice will raise scores.”
As a consequence of these and other flaws, the reviewers conclude that the Fordham report has little to offer policymakers.
Find the review by Catherine Horn and Gary Dworkin on the NEPC website at:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-ohio-superintendents
Find Yearning to Break Free: Ohio Superintendents Speak Out by The Fordham Institute and the FDR Group on the web at:http://tinyurl.com/3b9rplq
The Think Twice think tank review project (http://thinktankreview.org), a project of the NationalEducation Policy Center, provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound, reviews of selected publications. The project is made possible in part by the support of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.
The mission of the National Education Policy Center is to produce and disseminate high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. We are guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education is strengthened when policies are based on sound evidence. For more information on NEPC, please visit http://nepc.colorado.edu/.
This review is also found on the GLC website at http://www.greatlakescenter.org/