New studies on vouchers are bad news for voucher queen DeVos.

[kstewart33]

It comes as Trump has pledged to provide $20 billion to the states for voucher programs.

Los Angeles Times:

...Studies of a few early voucher experiments in Milwaukee, New York and Washington, D.C., were equivocal at best, showing some modest improvement in test scores for some students and none for others.

That’s why the latest findings, which emerge from studies of statewide programs in Louisiana, Ohio and Indiana, have left education experts stunned. In a nutshell, they find huge declines of academic achievement among students in voucher programs in those three states.“These results are without precedent in the educational literature,” says Kevin Carey, director of the education policy program at the think tank New America. “Among the past results, none were as positive as these are negative.”

A study released last February by a team of researchers led by Jonathan Mills of Tulane University found that students in Louisiana’s expanded program lost ground in their first two years in the program. Those performing at average levels in math and reading — that is, at about the 50th percentile — fell 24 percentile points in math and eight points in reading after their first year in the program. In the second year, they improved slightly in math, though they still scored well below non-voucher students, and barely improved at all in reading.

Those results resembled December 2015 findings by Christopher Walters of UC Berkeley, Atila Abdulkadiroglu of Duke and Parag Pathak of MIT covering the Louisiana program’s first year, which found that participation in the program “substantially reduces academic achievement.”

Link: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-devos-vouchers-20170228-story.html

[gopiscrap]

1. Fuck her, she is such an asshole

[guillaumeb]

2. Privatizing schools is a money making opportunity.

Students, especially non-white students, count for far less than profits for the 1%.

[catbyte]

3. Vouchers are nothing but Educational Apartheid, and Charter Schools

have been a big fat failure here in Michigan. If our state is supposed to be some sort of model for the nation, our kids are in a colossal amount of trouble.

[Igel]

4. Very little useful info is available for vouchers.

Most of it is uncontrolled drivel that ignores the necessary categorization of such schools.

One physicist in Houston got it partly right. Rather than start with an assumption, he plotted data. Then he saw how things patterned. Some schools did very well. Others really sucked. There was no generalization available the included the full range of schools. Any average was misleading to the point of obvious dishonesty.

But he had no controls, which cut both ways. The piss-poor schools could be poor because of the quality of the institution or because of the students. The excellent schools' students were likewise not a random sample. The comparison with public schools was with a cohort minus those in the charter schools--and most charters I've seen really suck and bleed under-performing kids from the public schools (thus making them look better).

We trust the reports that confirm our beliefs. Best to have a critical stance, and first examine the quality of the data and the assumptions behind them.

[Doreen]

5. What makes anybody think she cares?

The poor will have the worst of education keeping the only available for low paying jobs to keep the rich comfortable. I think it is planned. What do you expect when you have a dictator?

[NightWatcher]

6. "Studies" is similar to "thinking" and "facts" and this administration don't do that.

Wave a bible at those studies and say "science demons, go to hell".