A reader who calls himself or herself “Democracy” sent in a three-part commentary, posted a couple weeks back in the Comments.

This is part 2.

“Democracy” writes:

There’s no nuance, or explanation, in Lawrence’s piece. None whatsoever.
She says nothing about the pernicious effects of poverty, which affect (primarily) minority students ins the U.S. She states simply that “These shortcomings take their toll on the economy. And then she cites economist Eric Hanushek, of all people, to “explain” the ties between education and the economy (as if he knows).

Eric Hanushek is a conservative economist. He touts all of the conservative, corporate-style “reform” ideas for public education: school vouchers, more standardized testing, valued-added teacher evaluations, and “accountability.” There is little if any research to support these initiatives (and much to reject them), but that never gets in the way of Hanushek (or his brethren).

Hanushek has been caught fudging (and this is the polite term for it) his “research” on class size and achievement. He dismissed the results of Project STAR –– the rigorous, well-designed Tennessee state study that found significant achievement gains as a result of small class size in early elementary grades –– because “the kids were not tested before the program began,” that is, BEFORE they even entered kindergarten.

Hanushek has said that we have to stick with the “reforms” of No Child left Behind, because even if those “reforms” have yet to yield much, if any, of a return on the huge increases in time and money spent on the “accountability” of high-stakes testing, “over 75 years even a reform that takes effect in 20 year… yields a real GDP that is 36 percent higher ” than without “reform.” Hanushek even makes the claim that gains as small as 0.08 standard deviations result in (as Jay Mathews of The Post described it) “trillions of dollars more in the gross domestic production.”

If that’s the case (and it isn’t), then why have achievement gains over the last three decades, at the same time that the student population has become much more diverse, not led to robust economic growth, healthy budgets and well-funded social programs, and prosperity for all citizens in this country?

[Note: Hanushek makes the extraordinary statement that “Bringing all countries up to the average performance of Finland, OECD’s best performing education system in PISA, would result in gains in the order of USD 260 trillion.” Of course, what Finland does educationally to attain its achievement scores is antithetical to Hanushek’s conservative ideological dogma, and is directly contrary to the kinds of “reforms” he supports.]