Tag Archives: Bruce Baker

Propaganda from The 74 and University of Arkansas

26 Nov

By Thomas Ultican – 11/26/2023

The 74 published a blatant propaganda piece on Monday (11/20/2023), based on “Still a Good Investment: Charter School productivity in Nine Cities,” a paper from the University of Arkansas’s “School Choice Demonstration Project (SCDP).” In this production, SCDP used its own previously debunked work to support ridiculous conclusions.

The Department of Education at University of Arkansas does not attempt to hide their anti-public school bias, as noted in the cited paper, “The College of Education and Health Professions established the Department of Education Reform in 2005.” Subsequently, “The School Choice Demonstration Project” was established and staffed by “leading school choice researchers and scholars” within the Department of Education Reform. (Page 3)

The paper’s executive summary states:

“In this study, we reexamine the productivity of publicly funded schools, using funding data from our charter school revenue report ‘Charter School Funding: Little Progress Towards Equity in the City.’ We also use achievement data from the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes’ (CREDO’s) city and national studies, the NAEP Data Explorer, and wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We have access to complete data for nine cities: Camden, New Jersey; Denver, Colorado; Houston, Texas; Indianapolis, Indiana; Memphis, Tennessee; New Orleans, Louisiana; New York City, New York; San Antonio, Texas; and Washington, DC.” (Page 4)

Phony Financial Data

The 74 used the following graphic to open their propaganda piece:

That $8,000 less per student claim is based on a previous SCDP study, “Charter School Funding: Little Progress Towards Equity in the City.” This September, researcher Mark Webber from Rutgers University posted at the National Education Policy Center: 

“The following problems have been repeatedly pointed out by disparate third-party reviewers. Yet there appears to be little or no willingness to move away from the flawed approaches, which continue to plague report after report.”

  • Inadequate documentation of data
  • Misunderstanding of financial transfers
  • Invalid conflation of individual schools and school districts as units of analysis
  • Invalid comparisons of student populations
  • Invalid comparisons of the functions of charter and district public schools
  • Unaccounted-for charter revenues
  • Neglect of the literature on charter school finances

In 2019, David S. Knight, University of Washington and Laurence A. Toenjes, University of Houston wrote “Do Charter Schools Receive Their Fair Share of Funding? School Finance Equity for Charter and Traditional Public Schools.” By focusing on Texas, they demonstrated how difficult this question is and that the answer showed no significant difference.

In 2021, school finance expert, Bruce Baker reported:

“A report from the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform asserts that charter schools, despite serving only marginally fewer children with disabilities than traditional public schools, are significantly shortchanged of funding for those children, in addition to being significantly shortchanged on funding in general. This assertion is erroneous because the report ignores substantial differences in the classifications, needs, and costs of children with disabilities in district-operated versus charter schools. To reach its incorrect conclusions, the report exclusively self-cites deeply flawed, self-published evidence of a general charter school funding gap, ignoring more rigorous studies yielding contradictory findings. The report adds no value to legitimate debate over the comparability or adequacy of general or special education funding of charter schools.”

 Fraudulent Testing Data

The SCDP report says, “Based on CREDO’s findings, we estimate that charter school students across nine cities perform 2.4 points (0.06 standard deviations, or SD) higher on the eighth grade reading NAEP exam and 1.3 points higher (0.03 SD) on the math exam, compared to matched TPS students.” (Page 5)

There are reasons to believe the CREDO findings are bunkum. They have exclusive access to the data they report on and their methodology is highly suspect. None of these studies are submitted for peer review.

CREDO is the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes, a part of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University in California. The Institute is a conservative center funded by groups like the Walton Family Foundation, a key part of the radical conservative movement to end our traditional public school system.

Macke Raymond is the head of CREDO. Her 2015 Hoover Institute Fellow’s profile says, “In partnership with the Walton Family Foundation and Pearson Learning Systems, Raymond is leading a national study of the effectiveness of public charter schools.” 

The Technical Appendix for the “Cities Studies Project” reports, using growth models without identifying which model and says:

“In our study, scores for all these separate tests are transformed to a common scale. All test scores have been converted to standardized scores to fit a ‘bell curve’, in order to allow for year-to-year computations of growth.”

The “Education Growth Model Handbook” lists seven types of growth models in general use and their requirements. Most growth models require vertical scales but that does not seem possible with CREDO’s use of multiple tests, many of which are not vertically scaled. Their mathematical conversions add a locus of error.

CREDO’s method does not compare charter school performance to actual public schools; rather, it creates mathematical simulations, called “virtual twins.” Business writer, Andrea Gabor, hired statistician, Kaiser Fung, to help explain the bias, inherent in CREDO’s approach. She reported that the “study excludes public schools that do NOT send students to charters, thus introducing a bias against the best urban public schools, especially small public schools that may send few, if any, students to charters.”

Professor Andrew Maul of UC Santa-Barbara noted when writing about a 2015 paper, “The study’s ‘virtual twin’ technique is insufficiently documented, and it remains unclear and puzzling why the researchers use this approach rather than the more accepted approach of propensity score matching.”

Earlier this year, Network for Public Education Director, Carol Burris, published “In Fact or Fallacy? An In-Depth Critique of the CREDO 2023 National Report,” stating “The virtual twin matching methodology gives rise to a second issue: the exclusion of about one in five charter schools due to a lack of a match in feeder public schools for charter school students.” (Page 6)

CREDO with its fancy math found that charter schools in the nine cities they studied outperformed public schools. However, there is no way to check the results since only they have access to the data. The graphs below were created by staff at the National Assessment of Education Progress, comparing eighth grade math and reading results for charter schools and public schools.

These are graphs of raw data, separated by type of school. Charter schools never outperformed public schools, making one wonder about CREDO’s results.

Conclusion

Since financial inputs and test-scores were determinative in this report, the rest of the report is just icing on a baloney cake. Even if based on pristine data, estimates of “lifetime earnings” are meaningless.

Patrick Wolf and his team should be embarrassed.

When the University of Arkansas puts out a study like this, it is amplified through rightwing media. The Center for Education Reform immediately posted an article, praising the recent work. The Indiana Capital Chronicle wrote how Indiana needs to shift more money away from public schools, based on this “research”. Epoch Times, The 74 and NJ Education Report all praise the Arkansas paper. Search engines also show a long list of links from the University of Arkansas and paper depositories where they upload their work.

If there is any push back, it would be an article from the National Education Policy Center or maybe something posted by Diane Ravitch.

It is interesting the choice industry has succumbed to lying, to make their case. The public school system is sound and taking it down while profiting is not happening.

This latest SCDP report is straight-up fraud.

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Embarrassing Paper from the University of Arkansas

27 Jul

By Thomas Ultican 7/27/2021

Masquerading as a serious education research paper, “Making it Count: The Productivity of Public Charter Schools in Seven U.S. Cities” is little more than a flawed propaganda screed. The authors from the University of Arkansas College of Education and Health Professions claim the superiority of “public charter” schools over traditional public schools (TPS) by employing thoroughly discredited methods. They repeat the same data manipulation malfeasance that has been debunked multiple times over the past decade.

The paper was produced by the School Choice Demonstration Project which resides within the Department of Education Reform. That department was established by the University Arkansas’s College of Education and Health Professions in 2005. Arizona State Professor Eugene Glass commented that the department is, “one of the strangest I have ever seen.” Glass reports that the Department of Education Reform was made possible by a $10 million dollar gift from the Walton Family Foundation plus another $10 million from the University of Arkansas’s matching gift program.

Subsequent to the big 2005 grant, Walton Family Foundation tax records (EIN: 13-3441466) reveal more than $30 million in grants to the University of Arkansas Foundation and school administration.

Inappropriate Numerators and Specious Denominators

The people at the School Choice Demonstration Project insist on using “public charter school” and “traditional public schools” to differentiate between charter schools and public schools. Charter schools are private companies that have a government license to provide schooling. Public schools are controlled by elected public representatives and must accept all students. Charter schools are not required to meet all public school rules of operation. Referring to charter schools as “public charter schools” and public schools as “traditional public schools” reveals a strong bias.

The authors attempt to compare testing results per $1,000 dollar funding between charter and public schools. They use manipulated National Assessment of Education Performance (NAEP) data. Another Walton Family creation, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University, used a “virtual twin” scheme to create the comparison data employed.

Business writer Andrea Gabor states that CREDO studies which compare charter schools with public schools start with two key assumptions “A) That standardized-test scores are an adequate measure of school quality and B) that creaming in charter schools does not exist.” Many studies dating back to the eugenics movement debunk standardized-testing for mistaking correlation versus causation and for not being able to compensate for the problem of error. A glance at state enrollment records confirms that charter schools practice creaming.

The CREDO method does not compare charter school test performance to actual public schools; rather it creates mathematical simulations. They use arithmetic magic to create the “virtual twin” schema that stands in for a public school students. This method introduces several biases that advantage charter schools.

The “Making it Count” paper gets its “inappropriate numerators” from CREDO. It is also where they get the theory for their wild claim that “public charter schools in our sample would produce $487,177 more in lifetime earnings than the TPS.”

The denominators in the paper’s calculations are based on school spending per student. The data used comes from a 2020 paper also produced by mostly the same authors; “Charter School Funding:  Inequity Surges in the Cities.” In this update of a previous report on the 2013-14 school year, they state, “Our most recent report updated that analysis by drawing upon data from the 15 metropolitan areas for the 2015-16 school year.” In other words, no methodology changes just an update.

One of America’s leading authorities on education finance, Rutgers University’s Bruce Baker, reviewed the 2013-14 report for the National Education Policy Center. In the introduction, Professor Baker wrote,

“A district’s expenditure can be a charter’s revenue, since charter funding is in most states and districts received by pass-through from district funding, and districts often retain responsibility for direct provision of services to charter  school students—a reality that the report entirely ignores when applying its resource-comparison framework. In addition, the report suffers from alarmingly vague documentation regarding data sources and methodologies, and it constructs entirely inappropriate comparisons of student population characteristics. Simply put, the findings and conclusions of the study are not valid or useful.” (Emphasis added)

Professor Baker noted that the report’s authors knew about their errors because “these issues have been extensively explored for decades and are fundamental and long-accepted components of virtually every state’s finance system.” He also pointed out that he and other critics have previously highlighted these flaws in papers produced by the same authors. This was the genesis of the “specious denominators.”

Baker addressed using the paper’s data for return on Investment claims,

“In only a handful of states are the majority of charter schools ostensibly fully fiscally independent of local public districts. This core problem invalidates all findings and conclusions of the study, and if left unaddressed would invalidate any subsequent ‘return on investment’ comparisons.“

The Authors

Corey A. DeAngelis is the national director of research at the American Federation for Children (DeVos), the executive director at the Educational Freedom Institute (Friedman), an adjunct scholar at Cato Institute (Koch), and a senior fellow at Reason Foundation. He was named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for his work on education policy and received the Buckley Award from America’s Future in 2020.

Patrick J. Wolf is principal investigator of the School Choice Demonstration Project where he has led or is leading major studies of school choice initiatives including longitudinal evaluations of school voucher programs in Washington, DC; Milwaukee, WI; and the state of Louisiana.

Cassidy Syftestad is a Doctoral Academy Fellow, Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Her previous experience includes working at the Koch Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute and Hillsdale College.

Larry D. Maloney is president of Aspire Consulting.

Jay F. May is founder of and senior consultant for EduAnalytics.

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