September 30, 2026 9:00 am
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
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:
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.
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It is not shocking that the WSF formula is based on faulty math and false assumptions. As someone that has followed privatizers for at least two decades, I believe the privatizers are schemers that intend to rig the reasoning to fit their desired result. Because there is some math behind their assumptions, many people believe the outcome must be a fact. Gates sold so many people on his lies and erroneous assumptions. His people created VAM, a so-called value add formula, to prove that teachers are responsible for students’ test scores. This falsehood is a zombie still haunting some uninformed school districts. Gates also created RTT on the assumption that competition is a positive that will force all those “lazy teachers to get off their butts.” It’s another fallacy.
Privatization is prone to falsehoods because their goal is political in order to gain access to public money. That is why privatizers champion “the money follows the child,” which is another scheme to destabilize public education. Does anyone truly believe public schools improve with less money? Their goal has always been to wreak havoc on public education by hook or crook.
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By retired teacher on September 30, 2026 at 10:28 am
While not directly connected to this post, it shows the cultural divide between the US and France. Americans have sheepishly accepted the serious under funding of our schools. In France Macron’s neoliberal education policies are literally under attack. Students are fed up with the large classes and buildings in disrepair in the public schools. I don’t advocate for us to do the same, but we should continue to fight the systematic dismantling of public education.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_EDm6wQgGY
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By retired teacher on September 30, 2026 at 11:44 am
Marguerite Roza gives “trainings,” leading to fake “Certificates in Education Finance” to school board members & journalists throughout the country, including to members of the NYC Panel for Educational Policy. Should have been called propaganda sessions, subsidized by the Gates Foundation, where she used to work. Instead they should have gotten trainings in how to evaluate excessive spending of vendors and consultants, via wasteful and corrupt contracts.
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By leonie haimson on September 30, 2026 at 10:41 am
These Gates-subsidized “trainings” are also offered via the Ed Writers Association, to better ensure that reporters are infused with their particular point of view.
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By leonie haimson on September 30, 2026 at 10:56 am