Spin Cycle: How Research Gets Used in Policy Debates--The Case of Charter Schools

Notes

Notes Chapter 1 1. The full text of the article is reproduced in appendix 2. 2. Sometimes referred to as scholarships. 3. Special programs within schools, or incorporating whole schools, that offer a special curriculum or emphasis designed to attract students from across the district. Magnets schools initially emerged as a tool for racially integrating schools without mandatory busing. 4. Programs, usually enacted at the state level, that make it possible for students in one district to attend public schools in another district that may offer a better or more appropriate program. 5. The advertisement is reproduced in appendix 2. 6. Quoted in John Horgan’s December 18, 2005, New York Times review of the book The Republican War on Science, by Chris Mooney. 7. Kevin Smith (2005) quoting Jay Greene, Paul Peterson, and Jiangtao Du (1996). 8. Smith quoting David Berliner and Bruce Biddle (1995). 9. I’ll have more to say about the Witte-Peterson spat and the Journal’s coverage of it in chapter 4. 10. To select a group that did not overly represent one side or another, I initially scored potential interviewees as either being strongly or moderately pro- or anti- or being mixed or unidentifiable on that dimension and selected those to approach so as to keep the overall group broadly representative. Along the way I added a few interviewees not on the original list, because of suggestions I received from other respondents. In one case, I subsequently decided that a researcher I expected to be moderately pro-choice and charter school should probably be counted in the skeptic camp and in analysis later in the book that person is so coded. 11. The interviews with funders tended to be more unstructured. This was because their organizational contexts and direct involvement with charter school research differed quite a bit, and I found it more productive to probe deeply on some questions than to force the interviews into a constraining format. 12. An advocate, as coded here, implies someone associated with an organization that promotes particular policy positions and may be either a supporter or opponent of charter schools. 255 Chapter 2 1 Accessed November 11, 2004, at http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/ list/ies/index.html. 2. Initially a department, education was promptly demoted to bureau status until 1979 (Vinovskis 2002). 3. Most of the others dealt with such issues as employment income transfers, health, and counseling. 4. More precisely, variations in school inputs did not account for much variance in student test scores once family background and class peers are taken into account. 5. As is often the case with rich and influential concepts, the notion of deliberate democracy is complex and the term is used with many variants. It includes some very practical efforts to construct forums in which citizens are given a chance to digest available data and analyses and engage in structured discussions, with evidence that participants’ views, at the end of such deliberations, vary in meaningful and desirable ways from the results of conventional public opinion polling (for example, Fishkin 1991; see also the Kettering Foundation publications at http://www.kettering .org/readingroom). It also includes more theoretical discussions of the specific core norms, processes, and rules of engagement that might be required for healthy and truly democratic discourse (Gutmann 1987; Gutmann and Thompson 1996; Macedo 1999). Chapter 3 1. Comments offered in anticipation of release of the National Center for Education (NCES) hierarchical linear modeling report on charters. 2. The figures are provided by Robert Smith, AERA director of meetings. 3. For an excellent biography of this complex and important leader see Richard Kahlenberg (2007). 4. This section draws from an earlier formulation in Jeffrey Henig (2006). 5. Accessed at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showplatforms.php?plat index=R1980 6. Support for the bill came from a coalition of strange bedfellows, including Republican governor Tommy Thompson, State Representative Annette “Polly” Williams, a Democratic, African American single parent of four children who twice chaired Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns in that state, and Howard Fuller, an African American community activist, who in 1987 had proposed creating a separate school district in the predominantly black portion of the city (Hess 2002). Williams and Fuller came around to vouchers out of frustration with the failure of the local system to respond to the black community’s demand for high quality schools in their neighborhoods. Integration, as implemented in the city, they felt had been structured more for the benefit...