The Leading 20 Education Next Articles of 2021

Our annual look back at the year’s most popular Education Next articles is itself a popular article with readers. It’s useful as an indicator of what issues are at the top of the education policy conversation.

When we crafted the introduction to this list a year ago, for the top articles of 2020, we observed, “This year, as our list indicates, race and the Covid-19 pandemic dominated the discussion.” Since then, a new president has been inaugurated, but our list signals that the public hasn’t entirely turned the page: both the pandemic and race-related issues attracted high reader interest in 2021, just as they did the year before.

Several articles directly or indirectly related to the pandemic and its effect made the top-20 list. The no. 1 article, “Pandemic Parent Survey Finds Perverse Pattern: Students Are More Likely to Be Attending School in Person Where Covid Is Spreading More Rapidly,” by Michael B. Henderson, Paul E. Peterson, and Martin R. West, reported on what the article called “a troubling pattern: students are most likely to be attending school fully in person in school districts where the virus is spreading most rapidly.” The article explained “To be clear, this pattern does not constitute evidence that greater use of in-person instruction has contributed to the spread of the virus across the United States. It is equally plausible that counties where in-person schooling is most common are places where there are fewer measures and practices in the wider community designed to mitigate Covid spread.”

Other articles whose findings related to the pandemic or had implications for education amid or after the pandemic included “A Test for the Test-Makers,” “The Shrinking School Week,” “The Covid-19 Pandemic Is a Lousy Natural Experiment for Studying the Effects of Online Learning” “The Politics of Closing Schools,” “Addressing Significant Learning Loss in Mathematics During Covid-19 and Beyond,” and “Move To Trash: Five pandemic-era education practices that deserve to be dumped in the dustbin.”

Articles about race-related education issues also did well with readers. “Critical Race Theory Collides with the Law,” “Teaching About Slavery,” “Ethnic Studies in California,” and “Segregation and Racial Gaps in Special Education” all dealt with those topics.

Perhaps the conflicts over pandemic policies and Critical Race Theory helped provide a push for school choice. Choice—whether in the form of vouchers, scholarships, or charter schools—was the subject of several other articles that made the top 20 list, including “School Choice Advances in the States,” “School Choice and the ‘Truly Disadvantaged,’” “What’s Next in New Orleans,” and “Betsy DeVos and the Future of Education Reform.”

Who knows what 2022 will bring? We hope for our readers the year ahead is one of good health and of continued learning. We look forward to a time when pandemic-related articles no longer dominate our list.

The full Top 20 Education Next articles of 2020 list follows:

 

1. Pandemic Parent Survey Finds Perverse Pattern: Students Are More Likely to Be Attending School in Person Where Covid Is Spreading More Rapidly
Majority of students receiving fully remote instruction; Private-school students more likely to be in person full time
By Michael B. Henderson, Paul E. Peterson, and Martin R. West

 

 

 

2. Critical Race Theory Collides with the Law
Can a school require students to “confess their privilege” in class?
By Joshua Dunn

 

 

 

3. Teaching about Slavery
“Asking how to teach about slavery is a little like asking why we teach at all”
By Danielle Allen, Daina Ramey Berry, David W. Blight, Allen C. Guelzo, Robert Maranto, Ian V. Rowe, and Adrienne Stang

 

 

 

 

4. Ethnic Studies in California
An unsteady jump from college campuses to K-12 classrooms
By Miriam Pawel

 

 

 

 

5. Segregation and Racial Gaps in Special Education
New evidence on the debate over disproportionality
By Todd E. Elder, David Figlio, Scott Imberman, and Claudia Persico

 

 

 

 

6. Making Education Research Relevant
How researchers can give teachers more choices
By Daniel T. Willingham and David B. Daniel

 

 

 

 

7. Proving the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Stricter middle schools raise the risk of adult arrests
By Andrew Bacher-Hicks, Stephen B. Billings, and David J. Deming

 

 

 

 

8. What I Learned in 23 Years Ranking America’s Most Challenging High Schools
Most students are capable of much more learning than they are asked to do
By Jay Mathews

 

 

 

 

9. A Test for the Test Makers
College Board and ACT move to grow and diversify as the pandemic fuels test-optional admissions trend
By Jon Marcus

 

 

 

 

10. Addressing Significant Learning Loss in Mathematics During Covid-19 and Beyond
The pandemic has amplified existing skill gaps, but new strategies and new tech could help
By Joel Rose

 

 

 

 

11. The Shrinking School Week
Effects of a four-day schedule on student achievement
By Paul N. Thompson

 

 

 

 

12. Computer Science for All?
As a new subject spreads, debates flare about precisely what is taught, to whom, and for what purpose
By Jennifer Oldham

 

 

 

 

13. The Covid-19 Pandemic Is a Lousy Natural Experiment for Studying the Effects of Online Learning
Focus, instead, on measuring the overall effects of the pandemic itself
By Andrew Bacher-Hicks and Joshua Goodman

 

 

 

 

14. School Choice Advances in the States
Advocates describe “breakthrough year”
By Alan Greenblatt

 

 

 

 

15. The Politics of Closing Schools
Teachers unions and the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe
By Susanne Wiborg

 

 

 

 

16. Move to Trash
Five pandemic-era education practices that deserve to be dumped in the dustbin
By Michael J. Petrilli

 

 

 

 

17. School Choice and “The Truly Disadvantaged”
Vouchers boost college going, but not for students in greatest need
By Albert Cheng and Paul E. Peterson

 

 

 

 

18. The Orchid and the Dandelion
New research uncovers a link between a genetic variation and how students respond to teaching. The potential implications for schools—and society—are vast.
By Laurence Holt

 

 

 

 

19. What’s Next in New Orleans
The Louisiana city has the most unusual school system in America. But can the new board of a radically decentralized district handle the latest challenges?
By Danielle Dreilinger

 

 

 

 

20. Betsy DeVos and the Future of Education Reform
My years as assistant secretary of education gave me a firsthand look at how infighting among education reformers is hampering progress toward change.
By Jim Blew

 

Congratulations to all of our authors!

— Education Next

P.S. You can find the Top 20 Education Next articles of 2020 here, 2019 here, 2018 here, 2017 here, 2016 here, 2015 here, 2014 here and 2013 here.

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Title: The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2021
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/top-20-education-next-articles-2021/
Published Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2021 10:00:11 +0000

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How Federal Government Composes the Guidelines for Schools

One of the more important yet least understood facets of federal education policy is “negotiated rule making,” a process which the U.S. Department of Education uses to craft the regulations that turn legislation into real-world policies that affect schools and classrooms. Especially with topics ranging from Title IX to school discipline in the spotlight, I thought it worth taking a look at how all this works. For the inside scoop, I turned to Michael Brickman, a former senior adviser at the U.S. Department of Education, where he led several major higher education regulatory reforms. Here’s what he had to say.

—Rick Hess

Hess: What is negotiated rule making?

Michael Brickman

Brickman: Negotiated rule making, also known as “neg-reg,” is a process that occurs before a new regulation is proposed. It enables regulated parties and regulators themselves to sit at a table and work out their competing interests—before rules are formalized and released to the public for input. Neg-reg was designed primarily for rule making related to “highly technical standards,” but the Department of Education is required by Congress to use neg-reg more often, especially in higher education. K-12 rules also occasionally require the use of neg-reg, such as for state accountability plans and the department’s guidelines on states’ use of federal funds.

Hess: Where did this come from?

Brickman: In 1982, an obscure federal agency called the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) suggested that the relationship between federal regulators and regulated parties was too adversarial, with parties merely positioning themselves to take any new rule to court as soon as it was finalized. The ACUS predicted improvement if both sides could sit at a table and work out their competing interests from the start. Thus, negotiated rule making was born.

Hess: How does negotiated rule making work?

Brickman: Neg-reg originally focused significantly on rule makings related to “highly technical standards.” Just last year, for example, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s rule making on accessible lavatories on airplanes convened a group of industry representatives, disability advocates, and experts in accessibility research. In cases such as this, the affected parties are obvious, and the range of policy choices are limited. As a result, a well-executed negotiation could accommodate the needs of people with disabilities without requiring airlines to do something impossible or prohibitively expensive. As an outsider to that process, this seems to me to be an example of neg-reg working in a way that it can be successful—by allowing parties with competing interests the opportunity to negotiate and propose a reasonable outcome within a narrowly defined set of policy choices.

Hess: Does it work the same way over at the Department of Education?

Brickman: Not quite. In most cases, Congress has allowed federal agencies to use neg-reg at their discretion if they feel that it would be a useful exercise. However, Congress has deemed that regulations relating to programs under Title IV of the Higher Education Act, which governs student loans, Pell Grants, and other issues, must be negotiated. Congress also mandates that certain parties must be involved in higher education rule makings, including “students, legal assistance organizations that represent students, institutions of higher education, state student grant agencies, guaranty agencies, lenders, secondary markets, loan servicers, guaranty agency servicers, and collection agencies.” Many of the key higher education stakeholder groups represent special-interest groups or ideologically charged advocates. While neg-reg for K-12 rule makings is not mandated with the same frequency, when it does happen, Congress requires representation from administrators, parents, teachers, paraprofessionals, and members of local school boards. Other relevant parties, such as taxpayers, may not have a chance to directly share their views and represent their interests.

Hess: What happens if all those groups don’t reach consensus?

Brickman: Failure to reach consensus allows the department to go through the normal notice-and-comment regulatory process and write any regulation it would like. It’s quite a disincentive for the Department of Education to be collaborative.

Hess: If the Department of Education can do whatever it wants when negotiators disagree, why should people get involved?

Brickman: The department has even less reason to compromise if few on the sidelines are actively engaged in the process. If the department does not anticipate much legal or public backlash, there might be little reason to give an inch, even if what they plan to do is quite radical. For example, consider higher education financing. Everyone has a stake in an affordable and accessible higher education system that ensures taxpayers are not on the hook for unreasonable costs or postsecondary education programs that provide little value back to the public. They should not expect such a system to simply materialize on its own though.

Hess: So, where does negotiated rule making fit in at the K-12 level?

Brickman: At the Department of Education, neg-reg has been much more of a focus in higher education rule makings rather than K-12 or other closely watched efforts such as Title IX. Nevertheless, the Every Student Succeeds Act requires negotiated rule making for new rules on state plans for school accountability using their chosen standards and assessments. Neg-reg is also required if rules are developed related to ESSA’s “supplement, not supplant” provision, which specifies that federal funds must not be used to replace existing state funding for a program or service. The Obama administration conducted neg-reg on these issues in 2016; they were unable to finalize regulations on “supplement, not supplant,” but they were able to issue regulations on assessments.

Hess: How can educators, school leaders, parents, or local officials learn more about ongoing negotiations?

Brickman: They should follow the negotiations by following the livestreams and watching for new information released by the department. They can then share what they learn with the communities they work with. Too many people are not even aware that these regulations are being developed, much less that they can have a say in the end result. By the time they find out, the rules have changed, and there’s nothing they can do.

Hess: Any advice on how people in schools and communities can help influence how the Department of Education writes all these rules and regulations?

Brickman: It is true that the department has significant power here, and there should be more conversation about whether that is appropriate. However, people can and do have a real voice. Writing in public forums, contacting members of Congress, and submitting substantive and constructive comments to proposed rules when they are published by the Federal Register are all more helpful than people sometimes think. When it comes to rule makings, the department must write substantive responses to any specific critiques and concrete ideas for improvement they receive about a proposed rule. But it’s not enough to engage on one’s own. Educating peers and others in your community is just as important. Bottom line, educators and citizens should do anything they can to bring sunshine to these often very difficult-to-follow government machinations with significant real-world implications.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

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The Education Exchange: Biden Administration Funds Use of Critical Race Theory to Guide Research

The Will Skillman Fellow in Education at The Heritage Foundation, Jonathan Butcher, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss the growing controversy over critical race theory and its place in the classroom.

Butcher’s report, “Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America,” co-written with Mike Gonzalez, is available now.

Follow The Education Exchange on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or here on Education Next.

— Education Next

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Los Angeles Selects Carvalho as Next Superintendent of Schools

Alberto Carvalho

The Los Angeles Unified School board announced it had agreed unanimously to select Alberto Carvalho as the next Superintendent of Schools of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Carvalho’s record in Miami-Dade was the subject of a feature by Ron Matus in the Winter 2020 issue of Education Next, “Miami’s Choice Tsunami.”

“Instead of resisting the inevitable forces of choice and customization that are re-shaping public education, Carvalho and Miami-Dade chose to harness them,” Matus wrote. “Carvalho’s popularity stems from his district’s ability to direct its own vision for change, and to document sustained progress.”

More from that article:

An incredible personal story is part of Carvalho’s appeal. He grew up in Portugal, the son of a custodian and seamstress. Six kids in a one-room apartment with no running water and no electricity. Carvalho, 54, was the first in his family to graduate from high school, and he left for America as an “unaccompanied minor” who spoke no English. He washed dishes. Worked construction. Lived in a U-haul that reeked of paint. As a waiter, he met former U.S. Rep. E. Clay Shaw, who encouraged him to go to college. He did, earning a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1990. Today, he speaks Portuguese, English, Spanish and French—and is one of America’s most decorated superintendents.

In October 2020, Michael Q. McShane documented for Education Next how Carvalho had delivered results without bloated budgets. “Miami-Dade County Public Schools Bucks the ‘Staffing Surge’ Trend,” was the headline on that article. “The Miami-Dade County Public Schools spends less per student than the only three larger districts in the country and still manages to deliver top-tier student achievement results,” McShane wrote.

In September 2021, Carvalho appeared on the Education Exchange podcast with Education Next senior editor Paul E. Peterson. The headline for that episode was “In Miami-Dade, 75 Percent of Students Are Enrolled in Choice Options.”

And in the Spring 2020 issue of Education Next, Susan Bush-Mecenas and Julie A. Marsh took a look at the context in Los Angeles, under the headline “Building on Shaky Ground.”

“Education reform in the City of Angels demonstrates the complexity and challenge of enacting and sustaining reform in a highly divided, politically charged urban context. Since the introduction of charter schools in the early 1990s, a few major reforms have taken hold. Others have made their splash and then dissipated like puddles in the desert,” Bush-Mecenas and Marsh wrote. “The sheer size of the city’s sprawling school district, often described as a “behemoth,” can make it intractable. Greater Los Angeles is home to 13 million people, and the Los Angeles Unified School District rambles across 720 square miles, including 26 cities, with management divided into seven board districts and six regional offices. As the second-largest school district in the country, L.A. Unified in 2019–20 enrolled nearly 420,000 students, with an additional 138,000 students in the region attending charter schools (the highest charter-school enrollment of any school district in the country).”

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The Four-Day Schoolweek Makes a Return

Under the headline “Schools Are Closing Classrooms on Fridays. Parents Are Furious,” the New York Times reports that “some public schools are going remote — or canceling classes entirely — for a day a week, or even for a couple of weeks, because of teacher burnout or staff shortages.”

In “The Shrinking School Week: Effects of a Four-Day Schedule on Student Achievement” (Research, Summer 2021), Paul N. Thompson of Oregon State University wrote for Education Next that he had looked “at student test scores in reading and math over a 15-year period to see what happens when schools switch to a four-day week.” The result? “clear negative consequences for student learning when schools adopt four-day schedules.” He wrote, “when students receive less than a full-time school schedule, learning slows.”

Thompson concluded: “If students and educators want to explore school calendars outside of the typical five-day-a-week schedule, we need to know how to structure flex time to enhance and extend in-school learning. Otherwise, we risk compounding the learning losses students have already sustained in the wake of Covid-19.”

—Education Next

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Title: The Four-Day Schoolweek Makes a Return
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Published Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2021 14:28:57 +0000

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California Educators Desire Commonalities in Civics Education

The original Star-Spangled Banner, which flew over Fort McHenry in 1814 and inspired the words of our National Anthem, as it was displayed in what is now the National Museum of American History.

Self-governance is hard. The founders thought each generation would need to attach to democratic principles and practices for the republic to survive. Expanded K-12 education became the major vehicle for promulgating democratic sentiments and civic engagement. Unfortunately, civic education has become diminished at present. A broad group of educators, myself included, has created Californians for Civic Learning to help remedy this situation.

Civic education has been neglected for several reasons, but among the most prominent are civics and history being squeezed out by excessive focus on reading and math, educators lacking an in-depth knowledge of our history and democratic ideals and practices, and the fear of becoming embroiled in controversial issues.

One of Californians for Civic Learning’s first projects was to develop a statement to support local and state educators who wish to expand civic education including the teaching of controversial topics but need ammunition to fend off extremist attacks or anti-democratic internal pressure from both left and right.

The statement listed Californians for Civic Learning’s core beliefs under the theory that the specifics matter in any public discussion and being for something is more powerful than just opposition or being dismissive. Then, it rejected extremes on both sides, which in many cases are causing educators to avoid or skew the teaching of these democratic ideals and practices. Some quotes from the declaration follow:

We believe schools should help students understand, cherish, and be willing to protect our democratic ideals, norms, and practices and pursue the continual struggle to make our nation “a more perfect union.”

We believe students should understand the organization and structure of American governance, the role of private institutions and community organizations, the issues that have tested our nation’s unity, and the opportunities to realize its ideals and practices moving forward.

We believe students should understand and commit to our democratic creed originating in the universal ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the ideals and structures expressed in our Constitution, including:

• the ideals of consent of the governed, majority rule with protections for the minority, the right to vote, periodic elections, the peaceful transfer of power, federalism and the separation of power, an independent judiciary, and protections against using government power to harass individuals or groups;
• individual rights and protections from the government
• individual responsibility for acting as a good citizen;
• liberty and autonomy to pursue individual or group goals;
• tolerance, equality, and respect for the humanity of fellow citizens and cultures regardless of race,culture, or opinion;
• the pursuit of justice;
• the rule of law, equal protection of the law, and the idea that no person is above the law;
• free speech, a free press, and freedom of religion;
• accountability and transparency of government and the idea that elected representatives must respect our institutions and be accountable for their actions, veracity, and lack of corruption;
• the importance of compromise based on discussion, deliberation, and truth grounded in evidence and facts; and
• the idea that the purpose of those in government is to further “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” of its people and protect the Constitution not enrich itself.

We believe students should learn America’s ever-evolving story and the stories of the various groups and cultures which have contributed to the creation of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic diverse country comprised of citizens from all parts of the globe. We believe students should learn when we have failed to live up to our ideals, such as slavery and discrimination, and the ongoing progress we are making to correct these evils.

We believe schools can no longer avoid controversial and complex topics, with global information flow in the palm of every student’s hand. We therefore believe instruction should be neutral and unbiased, where students learn the skills and dispositions to argue from facts and evidence without personal attacks, while listening to and understanding alternative viewpoints.

These value statements have changed and expanded over time and there are continuing disagreements over their meaning. But a good curriculum incorporating these values as outlined in the California History/Social Studies framework [rated among the five best in the country by the Fordham Institute] encourages citizenship grounded in these democratic ideals and habits. The framework also includes expositions of why these values are crucial to the health of our nation and what happens when they start to erode as has occurred in some failed democracies. As important, it recommends a history which includes our struggles to live up to those ideals which sometimes were successful and often fell short. Finally, the framework is a useful tool to combat extremist pressure groups.

What Californians for Civic Learning rejects:

We reject the ideas of some of the extreme left:

• instilling collective racial guilt in today’s children (while we support efforts to examine the horrors of our past and develop a passion for justice going forward);
• advocating that American democratic ideals and institutions as being hopelessly corrupted by racism;
• believing that race (or gender or sexuality) is the primary lens to view our history and that a person’s identity limits legitimate comment on discrimination; and
• discounting the progress the nation has made in becoming a more perfect union (granting that we still have a long way to go).

We reject the ideas of some of the extreme right who want to:

• present a whitewashed version of American history and civics;
• disregard the evils of slavery, slaughter, and discrimination in our past;
• refuse to address continuing injustice and racism in the present; and
• pass dangerous laws and school policies prohibiting content that doesn’t support their views.

A final note. Many advocates on both sides maintain that the ideas we reject are strawmen. Fine. If you don’t believe in these extremes than join the large coalition that desires civic education and a robust history.

However, many educators dismiss the idea that Critical Race Theory is being taught in schools by the disingenuous ploy of saying that CRT is a decades-old complex academic subject primarily confined to law schools and graduate studies and can’t be found in K-12 classrooms. They also argue that opposition to CRT means opposing teaching about racism. Yet, CRT’s progenies are being taught in some places and promulgated to teachers in trainings by the equity industry—white guilt, the illegitimacy of democratic ideals such as the rule of law, individual merit, color-blindness, and objective truth as being fronts for protecting male white privilege. They also advocate that the primary way of viewing society is through a narrow racial or gender lens so racial and gender identity conveying victim or oppressor status become paramount in viewing the world. Other important identities such as individual personality, place, job or profession, class, family status, religion, moral beliefs, political stances, etc., which describe the rich human complexity of each unique individual and the human condition are discounted.

Parents know what they see and hear. Yes, there are astroturf groups exaggerating CRT problems for political gain, but that does not negate valid complaints about CRT excesses. Most parents want schools to encourage empathy, compassion, respect, tolerance, magnanimity, and a willingness to fight injustice. These parents don’t want schools stoking shame, resentment, tribalism and hostility. Dismissing legitimate complaints as unfounded just jeopardizes public education by alienating such parents and losing their support for a more robust civic education.

As an example, in California, university CRT advocates on the committee to develop a guide to the newly mandated ethnic studies curriculum produced a document that was chock full of CRT ideas and language. It was rejected by the State Board of Education. A second draft was much more aligned to the ideas expressed above. The legislation provided $50 million for grants to local districts to develop an ethnic studies curriculum. Many of the advocates who developed the rejected first draft have repudiated the adopted second draft and are convincing some districts to submit proposals in keeping with the rebuffed first draft. Guidelines are being developed, so we shall see if they prevent such maneuvers.

Similar examples can be found in the previous New York City superintendent indoctrinating his staff and teachers in a variety of CRT ideas, the Virginia state superintendent promulgating comparable statements, or the enormous effect that CRT true believers have had on the curriculum in the top fifty elite private schools.

On the right, while it is true that many conservatives have agreed that slavery and the attempts to overcome racism should be included in the curriculum, there still are voices that don’t want teachers to teach anything negative about this country. Polls show significant portions of Republicans oppose schools teaching about the history of racism and about how the history of racism affects America today. Some even want to ban books such as the story of Rosa Parks or prevent students from viewing the Norman Rockwell painting of a little African-American girl braving the mob to attend school.

We believe that most parents and citizens will support the Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass approach emphasizing the importance of our democratic ideals and practices as a beacon for the continuing struggle to create “a more perfect union.” Our hope is that, if given the specifics of what should be taught, well-meaning educators will reject both extremes and assure that each student receives a powerful education in civic engagement.

Bill Honig is a former California State Superintendent of Public Instruction and former chair of the California Instructional Quality Commission, which developed the California History/Social Studies Framework. He is a board member of Californians for Civic Learning.

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Josh Angrist and the Search for Truth

“There’s no such thing as a research emergency,” one of my old bosses used to say. Try telling that to Josh Angrist, one of the 2021 winners of the Nobel Prize in economics, which he shared with David Card and Guido Imbens. When I was working closely with Josh and living in Cambridge, my then-boyfriend, now-husband quickly learned that if my cell phone ever rang before 8:30 a.m. or after 10 p.m., there was only one person who could be on the phone: Josh.

Josh Angrist

What drove these early morning urgent phone calls about running the computer code for just one more regression analysis? An incessant need to search for truth, and to do so now.

Josh’s work has two main strands. The first develops tools to derive evidence — “truth” — from naturally occurring phenomena in the world. This is the work for which Josh won the Nobel (or rather, since we are being precise here, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). The prize was announced in October and will be formally awarded December 10. The second strand applies those techniques to the real world, in many cases in the context of economics of education.

My trial by fire came while employed as a research manager at a center at Harvard, working with Josh on a project determining the impacts of Boston charter schools on test scores. I was a recent Swarthmore grad when I met Josh, and he used to tease me about how he didn’t get in, and went to Oberlin instead. I told him he was in good company.

Somehow, I must have passed the test, because I became his coauthor when the project continued while I was a PhD student. We used econometric tools that Josh developed to estimate the causal effect of attending a charter school. Using charter school lotteries that are used to admit students, we compared those who were offered a seat at the charter with those who were not, also accounting for who actually attended a charter. (If you want to see how Josh explains it, you can watch this video.)

We found that Boston charters raise standardized test scores, and lift 4-year college attendance as well. Lest you think this is a case of economists elevating results only that confirm the benefits of market influences, other work by Josh and coauthors shows that traditional public schools with similar flexibility as charter schools (“pilots”) do not boost test scores, and that some charters reduce test scores.

In the search for truth, as shown by his work on charters, Josh is non-ideological and willing to debunk conventional wisdom. Think of all the ink spilled in the New York Times on selective high schools like the famous Stuyvesant. When most people think of these types of schools, they often think of them as engines of learning, propelling students to new educational trajectories that will help them access the American Dream.

You might be surprised to learn there is little evidence that these schools improve test scores or, more importantly, boost college-going or college selectivity. But Josh’s careful research with coauthors, which compares students just above the threshold of the admissions cutoff, to those just below, shows exactly this: attending an exam school in New York City or Boston does not change students’ educational trajectories. Looking at a similar question in Chicago, Josh and coauthors found that attending an exam school under an affirmative action plan actually decreased math scores, because it diverted students from some high-performing charter schools, similar to those we studied in Boston.

Josh is willing not only to debunk conventional wisdom, but also to debunk his own research. Using the same technique he would later apply to exam schools, in a paper from the late-1990s, Josh and Victor Lavy compared students in grade cohorts just above and just below a cutoff for a class size rule (inspired by the Israel education ministry’s application of Maimonides’s rule for group size when studying the Torah). They found that when the rule induced students into smaller class sizes because of a requirement to add a teacher when the cohort size was above the threshold, test scores increased. Revisiting this technique almost 20 years later, an update to the paper found no such evidence of score gains due to smaller class size.

The search for truth is not always an easy path, and what gets anointed as truth, either by intuition and sometimes by early evidence, is not always the final answer. There are also questions of whose truth is elevated in conventional research designs. Josh not only searches for truth in his own work, but has committed to preparing a whole generation of economists to join him in the search, through his teaching, his papers, and his textbooks and video lessons. And he has succeeded. Some of his own work documents the spread of empiricism in modern economics research.

For my part, the spine of my copy of Mostly Harmless Econometrics is now broken, having referenced it so many times when coding or writing up a paper. And when I am sitting at my desk teasing out relationships in my data, or trying to craft the perfect sentence to convey a point, or deciding how to explain a tough concept to my students, I often think of my teacher and now colleague, Josh Angrist.

“What would Josh do?” And then I think about the counterfactual, strike one more adverb from my sentence, or find a real world example to inspire my students.

Building truth is a slow process: Regression by regression, paper by paper, talk by talk, student by student. A presentation to research partners or policymakers, a quote in the newspaper. Sometimes, especially recently, it seems like evidence does not matter and it will never change anyone’s mind.

But the quest for truth is not quixotic. A recent experiment with mayors in Brazil showed them policy-relevant evidence and found both that the mayors updated their beliefs about the policy and were more likely to implement it. Maybe if we work hard enough to uncover truth, and to communicate it, evidence will find its way.

Sarah Cohodes is Associate Professor of Economics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and a faculty research affiliate at MIT Blueprint Labs.

The post Josh Angrist and the Search for Truth appeared first on Education Next.

By: Sarah Cohodes
Title: Josh Angrist and the Search for Truth
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/josh-angrist-and-the-search-for-truth-nobel-prize-economics/
Published Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2021 10:01:52 +0000

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