Bruce Baker is one of the stellar scholars in the field of economics of education. He is currently at the University of Miami. He is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning in Miami’s School of Education and Human Development.

In this post, he takes issue with the economic prescriptions of Margaret Roza. Her work has been embraced by the privatizers.

Baker begins:

My critiques of Marguerite Roza, the Edunomics Lab, and Education Resource Strategies — with receipts. Every quotation is verbatim from the linked post or article.

24 blog entries, Aug 2009 – Aug 2026 (and counting)

21 taking on Roza, from CRPE to Gates to Georgetown

4 taking on ERS or Karen Hawley Miles

3 on Edunomics graphs, so far

The short version

I’ve spent an embarrassing share of my career, seventeen years and counting, cleaning up after Marguerite Roza. It has come in two waves. The first ran from 2009 to 2014, when she was at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and then advising the Gates Foundation, and her work was all over the federal policy conversation. The second started in 2025, when the Edunomics Lab she now runs at Georgetown began handing state policymakers graphs so bad I made a video about them. Education Resource Strategies (ERS) comes up less often, but it keeps turning up in the same places. Its founder, Karen Hawley Miles, co-wrote the Houston/Cincinnati weighted student funding (WSF) “success story” with Roza. Stephen Frank presented ERS slides alongside Roza’s fabricated graph at the 2011 Regents symposium. And ERS graded Baltimore’s Fair Student Funding against Baltimore’s own formula.

It comes down to the same four problems, over and over:

  • Blame the districts. The claim goes like this: states have fixed between-district inequity, so the problem left is within districts, and weighted student funding fixes that. The evidence for that sweeping national claim turns out to be “one or a handful of deeply flawed analyses,” mostly Roza’s Texas Weighted Student Index study. That study checks schools against the district’s own spending priorities, not against what kids actually need.
  • Productivity without the arithmetic. Stretching the School Dollar, Curing Baumol’s Disease, and the USDOE productivity page that showcased them offer spending cuts relabeled as “cost savings,” without a single cost-effectiveness analysis. Hank Levin laid out how to do one back in 1983. It isn’t a secret.
  • Evidence that was simply made up. Roza’s 2011 “productivity curve” had no data, no definitions and no connection to anything real. Researchers in the room said the claims were “simply made up.” ERS’s contribution at the same event: all teacher pay above the starting salary is waste.
  • Money-doesn’t-matter graphics. Edunomics’ long-term trend graphs start the clock in 2013, the one year that all but guarantees spending up and scores down, then skip the cost adjustment and stretch the axes. Their scatterplots throw every school onto one chart with no cost adjustment and call the resulting cloud a finding.

Yes, my tone has changed. In 2011 I called this work “methodologically flimsy” and “hack research.” By 2025 I was calling it “intentionally deceitful,” and I stand by that. Once you’ve been told, repeatedly and in public, exactly why a graph misleads, and you keep putting it in front of legislators anyway, “sloppy” stops being the right word. As I put it on Bluesky: “for anyone still using this kind of garbage, you’ve been on notice for years.”

The peer-reviewed version is politer, but it says the same thing. I’ve never said within-district inequity isn’t real. It is. What I have said, with data (EPAA, 2009), is that the WSF showcase districts were no more responsive to student need than districts without WSF. WSF was sold on advocacy research that “identifies the politically motivated solution then seeks to prove that it works.” And you can’t fix a district its state has starved by rearranging what’s left inside it. My 2013 NEPC review gave ERS’s Baltimore analysis the same treatment: grading a formula against itself isn’t an equity analysis. It’s a tautology.

Please open the link and read the rest of Bsker’s analysis. This post analyzes what happens when economic analysis becomes untethered from the needs of students.