Roland G. Fryer and Will Dobbie are economists who study charter schools, among other topics. Fryer’s research has been subsidized heavily by Eli Broad. For several years, he studied the value of incentives in getting students to post higher test scores or read more books.
Most recently Fryer of Harvard and Dobbie of Princeton posted a working paper about the outcomes of charter schools in Texas, which they originally posted in 206. The results are sobering for those who are selling charters as a replacement for public schools, overpromising the benefits of entrepreneurship.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/charter-schools-and-labor-market-outcomes
The abstract summarizes their findings:
“We estimate the impact of charter schools on early-life labor market outcomes using administrative data from Texas. We find that, at the mean, charter schools have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on earnings. No Excuses charter schools increase test scores and four-year college enrollment, but have a small and statistically insignificant impact on earnings, while other types of charter schools decrease test scores, four-year college enrollment, and earnings. Moving to school-level estimates, we find that charter schools that decrease test scores
also tend to decrease earnings, while charter schools that increase test scores have no discernible impact on earnings. In contrast, high school graduation effects are predictive of earnings effects throughout the distribution of school quality. The paper concludes with a speculative discussion of what might explain our set of facts.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
These results do not surprise me.
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Charters and vouchers would have to be near-miraculous to justify the level of elite attention, promotion and cheerleading they get. It’s flat-out ludicrous that our elite policymakers and politicians spend 90% of their time on 10% of schools- charters and private schools. That’s what capture looks like. It’s irrational because it’s not driven by need, it’s driven by ideology and ed reformers hiring other True Believers and excluding public school supporters.
There’s a flip side, too. When ed reformers capture government (federal, which they have completely captured and my state, which they have also completely captured) EVERYONE works on charters and vouchers, so public schools are neglected.
There’s a cost to this. The cost is a lack of investment and attention to public schools. That’s never mentioned but if you live in one of these ed reform states it comes clear within a decade. Public schools are the collateral damage they are willing to bear to conduct this experiment. They don’t tell public school families or voters that, but that’s how it plays out.
Go look at Betsy DeVos’ speeches. Ask yourself if these speeches reflect the reality of a country where 85% of families use public schools. They do not reflect that. The schools MOST children attend are a low priority.
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States need laws on the books that require students to return to a public school if and when a charter fails. The entrepreneurs should not get endless opportunities to use students for profit. Students should return to the public school with extra funding attached. The NAACP and other social justice groups should use the dismal results cited here to fight the privatization madness that is harming, not helping minority students, and the so called free market is harming, not helping public schools. States should be forced to fund their public schools equitably according to the needs of students.
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When public schools “fail” (by rigged measures), they are given to charter operators.
When charter schools fail, they are handed over to other charter operators.
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an essential point
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“…a negative impact on earnings.” That would be a negative impact on teacher earnings, current and future.
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No Excuses charter schools increase test scores and four-year college enrollment, but have a small and statistically insignificant impact on earnings”
Like Chetty, Fryer does not understand what statistical significance means.
If an effect is “statistically insignificant”, that means that, at the given (normally 95%) confidence level, one can not say that the effect is different from zero.
In other words, one can not legitimately claim that there is any effect at all.
One is NOT even justified in saying that it had a “small impact on earnings.”
The Harvard econ department (where Fryer resides and Chetty used to reside) REALLY needs to start requiring a VERY basic statistics course for it’s professors because many of them don’t have a clue about statistics.
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Incidentally, I have a problem with the use of Fryer’s results to support ANY claim (whether pro or anti- charter schools)
“Junk is Junk”
Junk is junk, it isn’t changed
No matter how it’s used
No matter how it’s rearranged
The junk should be refused
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“We estimate the impact of charter schools on early-life labor market outcomes. . . ”
I wonder if that early-life is pre- or post-natal.
And I wonder what OB/GYN docs think of the outcomes of that market.
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Good one. Economists have language that makes circular reasoning sound profound.
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Hah ha.
I suppose one could read “early life labor” as “birth contractions”, which would mean it was actually “inter natal.”
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Dobie and Fryer’s report will be added to the same stack that privatizers reject because the goal is exploiting other people’s children. As anticipated, Dobie and Fryer continue to reduce children’s experiences to how much they earn later and how they score on tests- an example of the barren souls of ed deform and Bill Gates. The wealthy, who fund the repetitive cycles of research, want more for their children and less for others, typical of the greedy, who will always be a scourge among us.
What is unconscionable is the university researchers, who take money and who by participating, legitimize the fraud that ed deform is about the betterment of America and the kids of the 99%.
The latest travesty is the government funding for private Tulane University (Vanderbilt before), which pays an all White staff of researchers, plucked from public universities, to churn out product improvements for privatized education.
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“Dobie and Fryer continue to reduce children’s experiences to how much they earn later and how they score on tests- an example of the barren souls of ed deform and Bill Gates”
Sadly, though that is indeed their goal, they don’t legitimately achieve it.
The idea that they can subtract out all other factors that can potentially impact test scores and “early life labor market outcomes” and isolate just the effect of the “charter schools” (which are not even all the same, not incidentally) is just absurd.
Its every bit as absurd as the idea that one can isolate the effect of a single grade school teacher on lifetime earnings (as Chetty claimed).
As I pointed out above, these people don’t even understand basic statistics, so why the hell anyone listens (to say nothing of reprints) anything they say is a complete mystery
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They’ve made it a self-perpetuating industry for people without conceptual reasoning ability.
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It looks like there has not yet been any ruling, but Fryer was accused of and put under investigation for sexual harrassment and barred from the Harvard Ed Lab he headed just a couple months ago.
“The Harvard office is investigating claims that Fryer engaged in “egregious” acts of verbal and sexual harassment by talking about sex in the workplace, making sexually inappropriate comments, and objectifying and sexualizing women, according to the Crimson.”
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2018/05/harvard_ed_researcher_roland_fryer_investigation_sexual_harassment.html
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Not Fryer’s kids in the wealthy suburbs, but other kids, “should be tested every day.”
Academic elites (singled out and created by the wealthy) assume they are shielded from accountability?
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Yes, and he resigned from his position as a member of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education contemporaneously with these accusations.
Here’s the video where he asserts that his own kids, in the wealthy Boston suburb of Concord need enriched curriculum, but urban kids should be tested everyday:
https://t.co/7939SIUR0O @48:30.
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No one has to guess very hard who funds Dobbie,…John Arnold.
Princeton doesn’t even have the ethical standards to require faculty to identify the size of the grants.
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Linda,
Thanks for that information. John Arnold has two favorite causes that his foundation funds: charter schools and attacks on public sector pensions
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Arnold’s also the funding behind the Penn Warren Budget Model. UPenn didn’t have the academic integrity to require the funders be listed, until I contacted them.
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Correction- Penn Wharton
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Arnold also funds the Urban Institute’s pension papers (Urban was viewed as liberal at one time). Reportedly, Urban and the Penn Wharton Budget Model are dating or married.
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