Flypaper

In December, Education Next published an article by Rick Hess called “Three Cheers for Imposter Syndrome” that, in part, argues that experts in education would be wise to be more humble. “And, since authentic humility seems to be in pretty short supply these days,” he writes, “I'll happily accept impostor syndrome as a useful facsimile.”

Impostor syndrome is “the fear that you'll be found out at any moment as an impostor who doesn't belong in your job or can't do an important task.” Conventional wisdom would tell us that the “impostor” is someone whose pedigree, depth of knowledge, and/or confidence doesn’t mesh with those of his or her peers. That certainly seemed to be what Hess was feeling when he himself felt like one as he waited to take his Graduate Record Examination.

“Listening to the knowing chatter of the students around me, I was filled with self-doubt,” he recalls. “The room seemed full of budding experts. I wondered how they could know so much and how I would ever keep up.”

But If we take a step back and look specifically at the world of education policy and reform, those who tend to suffer from impostor syndrome...

Last month, the American Enterprise Institute published a paper by Colin Hitt, Michael Q. McShane, and Patrick J. Wolf that reviewed every rigorous school-choice study with data on both student achievement and student attainment—high school graduation, college enrollment, and/or college graduation. They contend that the evidence points to a mismatch, specifically that “a school choice program’s impact on test scores is a weak predictor of its impacts on longer-term outcomes.”

This week, I plan to write a series of commentaries on the paper, which I believe is fundamentally flawed. I have several concerns, including:

1. The authors included programs in the review that are only tangentially related to school choice and that drove the alleged mismatch, namely early-college high schools, selective-admission exam schools, and career and technical education initiatives.
2. Their coding system—which they admit is “rigid”—sets an unfairly high standard because it requires both the direction and statistical significance of the short- and long-term findings to line up.
3. In their conclusions, they extrapolated from their findings on school choice programs and inappropriately applied them to schools.

That’s a lot to unpack, so I’m going to do this over several posts. I hope you’ll join me for the ride.

First, though,...

It may seem counterintuitive, but conservative organizations from the Heritage Foundation, to FreedomWorks, to the Club for Growth are pushing an education bill this year that would significantly enlarge the bureaucracy at the U.S. Department of Education. That’s right, the same organizations that have decried the “bloated education bureaucracy” and that give awards to members of Congress who are “fighting daily to shrink government and the federal bureaucracy” are urging Congress to significantly increase secretarial authority over K–12 and higher education.

Why are they doing this? To create a new federal education voucher program that would allow dollars to flow out of public schools and into private schools and businesses. As Congress draws to a close without a signature school voucher victory, these organizations are pounding the pavement to try and garner a big win while both chambers still remain under Republican control. The piggybank for this voucher bill is the Impact Aid program, which is the oldest K–12 federal education program and was created to support school districts impacted by a federal presence, such as military installations, Indian treaty or trust land, and other federal facilities.

The specific voucher legislation, the Military Education Savings Account Act,...

New York City’s high school choice program can be, depending on your perspective, refreshing or daunting. When it comes time to choose where they want to spend (hopefully) the next four years, every eighth grader in the nation’s largest school system gets a 600-page school directory enumerating over 700 high schools and program options, before submitting an application ranking up to twelve choices. In theory, this kind of education agora should create all manner of opportunities for students to ferret out just the right high school. But low-income, black, and Hispanic residents and those who do not speak English at home have proven more likely to choose and/or be assigned to high schools with lower graduation rates. Could a targeted intervention in the form of simplified information about school options bring order to chaos and enhance “match”? The short answer appears to be “yes” based on an experiment conducted by New York University economics and education policy professor Sean P. Corcoran and his co-authors, Jennifer Jennings of Princeton, Sarah Cohodes of Columbia, and Seton Hall’s Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj.

The four conducted a randomized field experiment in 165 high-poverty New York City middle schools during the 2015–16 school year, in which students...