[Vision2020] The 2004 Fordham Prize for Distinguished Scholarship

[Melynda Huskey]

Contextual information:

The Fordham Prize, now in its second year, is awarded by the Thomas B. 
Fordham Foundation for  "major contributions to education reform via 
research, analysis, and successful engagement in the war of ideas."  
Previous recipients include Paul Peterson, a pro-voucher researcher, and 
Anthony Bryck, a proponent of Catholic parochial schools.

The President of the Fordham Foundation Board is Chester "Checkers" Finn, 
another proponent of school "choice."  Perhaps he should come to Moscow--the 
debacles in our charter schools might have given him food for thought!

Melynda Huskey

>From: "Dale Courtney" <dmcourtn@moscow.com>
>To: <vision2020@moscow.com>
>Subject: [Vision2020] The 2004 Fordham Prize for Distinguished Scholarship
>Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2004 06:01:46 -0800
>
>The 2004 Fordham Prize for Distinguished Scholarship
>
>Eric A. Hanushek: The economist of public schooling
>
>     University of Rochester economics professor Eric Hanushek was 
>"stunned."
>The year was 1981, two years prior to the publication of A Nation at Risk,
>the landmark Reagan-era indictment of America's schools. For days, Hanushek
>had been methodically sifting through more than 125 studies of school 
>reform
>done since 1965 to prepare a summary of the data for an upcoming
>school-finance court case. But the results of the literature review by this
>lifelong Democrat weren't turning out as expected. Most of the evaluations
>showed no relationship at all between the amount of money schools spent per
>student or per teacher and levels of student achievement. And for every
>infrequent analysis that suggested spending could boost student 
>performance,
>Hanushek soon stumbled on another study that indicated more resources could
>depress achievement, too.
>
>     Then there was the elephant in the room that education analysts had 
>long
>downplayed: since 1960, spending on students had soared and the number of
>pupils in an average classroom had dropped sharply-yet test scores had
>declined.
>
>     Hanushek's stark conclusions ran contrary to almost every tenet of 
>both
>the ed school establishment and the teacher unions. Not surprisingly,
>Hanushek, who had never courted controversy before, was soon treated as "a
>lonely kook." His heresy was to challenge what might be called the "'More'
>solution": more funding and more teachers, leading smaller classes, would
>enable poor children and minority youth to get the same educational
>opportunities as affluent kids. But in the debate that ensued over decades
>to come, a funny thing happened: Hanushek's unexpected, unwelcome findings
>were confirmed over and over again.
>
>     In more ways than one, Hanushek was an unlikely dissenter from the
>orthodoxy of the public school establishment. As a child growing up in the
>suburbs of Cleveland, he attended public schools from kindergarten through
>twelfth grade and developed a fondness for public education. A favored aunt
>was a teacher and principal in Cleveland's schools and, years later,
>Hanushek's own children would attend public schools from elementary school
>to graduation. Hanushek's father, the manager of a small manufacturing 
>firm,
>never attended college himself, and both parents drilled into young "Rick"
>Hanushek a sense of the importance of schooling at a young age. His
>undergraduate years at the Air Force Academy reinforced his belief that
>serving the nation and grappling with problems of inequality were worthy
>causes. But it was not until Hanushek enrolled as a doctoral student in the
>MIT economics department that he first studied issues of educational
>inequality in a sustained way.
>
>     At the time Hanushek obtained his Ph.D., faculty and graduate students
>down the street at Harvard were busy reassessing James Coleman's epochal
>1966 study of equal educational opportunity under the tutelage of Daniel
>Patrick Moynihan and Frederick Mosteller. Coleman's controversial 
>conclusion
>was that home environment and student peer groups outweighed school 
>"inputs"
>like facilities, curriculum, and personnel in determining student
>achievement. Hanushek refused to believe it. Through the aegis of his 
>former
>economics instructor, John Kain, Hanushek enrolled in the 
>Moynihan-Mosteller
>seminar, and soon co-authored a paper with Kain casting doubts on the
>methodological rigor and conclusions of the Coleman report. He devoted his
>1968 Ph.D. thesis to the Coleman report and racial inequality in the
>schools. "What drew me into the debate was that it seemed inconceivable 
>that
>schools didn't matter," says Hanushek. "And I thought-and still think-that
>the inequality of outcomes in the educational system and the black-white
>achievement gap was a disaster for the nation."
>     Hanushek has now reviewed some 400 studies of student performance and
>school resources and more than 275 analyses examining the impact of class
>size reduction on achievement. Under both headings, the vast majority of
>studies fail to find any link between resource levels and student
>performance. And in the small number of instances where a link is
>detectable, there is no strong or consistent pattern as to whether more
>resources help or hurt.
>     Meanwhile, the prima facie case against throwing money at school
>problems continues to grow. As Hanushek has demonstrated, real spending per
>student rose by more than 200 percent between 1960 and the 1990s, and the
>pupil-teacher ratio fell from about 26 students per teacher to 17, a drop 
>of
>about a third. Yet achievement has at best improved marginally, mostly 
>among
>minorities.
>     Hanushek's debunking of the "More" solution has been especially
>persuasive because he does not claim that schools are inconsequential or
>that nothing works. "I came to believe that James Coleman mostly got it
>right,'' he says. "The measured characteristics of schools, the usual
>suspects, don't count. But people misinterpreted that to mean that schools
>don't matter." Much to the frustration of his critics, who would prefer to
>dismiss him as a right-wing naysayer, Hanushek has argued throughout his
>career that there are huge differences in quality between teachers and
>between schools. His research, dating back to 1970, has consistently shown
>that good teachers have an oversized impact on pupil achievement.
>     In addition to his own groundbreaking research, Hanushek has had a 
>major
>impact on the methodology of education analysis. If economics is the dismal
>science, education research might be said to be sometimes dismal but rarely
>scientific. Inevitably, education researchers must tease out numerous
>variables in their assessments of school reforms: Is family background, the
>age of the child, the quality of the teacher, the size of the class, the
>nature of the neighborhood, or some other factor at work? The
>mishmash-evaluations that regularly follow have been likened to a soggy
>waffle.
>     Unlike medical researchers, or even social policy analysts who assess
>welfare and housing policies, education analysts rarely employ random
>assignment experiments to test K-12 interventions. They have similarly
>looked askance at economists' efforts to evaluate the efficiency,
>effectiveness, and productivity of school reform efforts. When Hanushek
>began his 1981 review on school spending, economists who studied K-12
>schooling essentially stuck to modeling the returns on human capital,
>calculating the financial payoff to workers for extra years of schooling.
>Almost single-handedly, Hanushek introduced the economists' study of
>production functions (i.e., how much will a measured change in inputs alter
>outcomes) into the world of education research.
>     In the two decades since a little-known economist at the University of
>Rochester first reported his unexpected findings about school spending, 
>much
>has changed. Hanushek's work is now the touchstone for other researchers in
>his field-a Google search for "Eric Hanushek" pulls up more than 13,000
>references. Hanushek himself has gone on to serve on four committees of the
>National Academy of Sciences, two of which he chaired, and an appointment 
>at
>the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in 2000. "In 1981, I was
>offering more of a hypothesis about the allocation of school resources and
>spending," Hanushek says. "Today, I think that hypothesis is pretty widely
>accepted as fact." Thanks to Hanushek's ingenuity, thoroughness, and
>tenacity, the one-time "lonely kook" of school reform now has plenty of
>company.
>
>To read Eric A. Hanushek's full profile, go to
><http://www.edexcellence.net/foundation/global/page.cfm?id=201>
>http://www.edexcellence.net/foundation/global/page.cfm?id=201

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