Sowell Nov 7^th

Thomas Sowell commented on education in his column yesterday. He tries, quite unsuccessfully, to counter the negative publicity gained by new revelations about charter schools. To review a bit: a recent article pointed out that much of the advantage charter schools hold over public schools in test score results comes from charter schools dumping students likely to be less successful test takers back into the public school system which must accept them. Thus, the charter schools critics claim, the comparison is unfair.

Sowell takes considerable umbrage at this “unfair” designation. By some quirk of logic Sowell says, “This criticism ignores the fact that schools do not exist to provide jobs for teachers or ‘fairness’ to institutions but to provide education for students.” Here Sowell is partially correct. The criticism that charter schools dump expected low achievers back into public schools has nothing whatsoever to do with providing jobs for teachers. The part about providing ‘fairness’ (Sowell’s quotes) to institutions is quite different. If you want to know if charter school students do or don’t do better than public school students then you must start with a level playing field, otherwise any comparison of the test’s results yields nonsense.

Sowell then continues to insist that when charter schools produce good results they “should be celebrated and imitated, not attacked by critics because of their ‘unfair’ exemptions from the counterproductive rules of the educational establishment.” Sowell is now being truly ridiculous. These “…the counterproductive rules of the educational establishment” include starting with equivalent groups when evaluating treatment effects. This “rule” is universal when evaluating any treatment effect and is not confined to “the educational establishment.”

Sowell says that the students who remain can get a better education without them (troublesome students) around. “If the critics are right and getting rid of the influence of uncooperative and disruptive students contribute to better educational results then the answer is not to prevent charter schools from expelling such students, but to allow other public schools to remove such students when other students can benefit from getting a better education without them around.”

That’s absurd; the critics have pointed out that if you dismiss or otherwise force out of your school, children who are likely to be low achievers you change the mix so that your school will show higher test scores.  Sowell has massaged this result so that now the removal of these kids suspected of being lower achievers somehow improves the performance of those who are left. That has simply not been found; Sowell has made it up!