SUBSCRIPT: Arne, as usual, was full of it when attacking another straw enemy... Research on the relative 'failure' of education training programs questioned
As every veteran Chicago teacher knows, Arne Duncan's career as an "educational leader" (with no qualifications) began with the rigging of data and various trickeries using so-called "research" to prove his political biases. The most notorious, as usual provided by the Consortium on Chicago School Research, was the "research" that showed that so-called "small schools" were better than big ones for young black and brown children (but not for wealthier white ones). And so, for several years, and at a cost of millions of dollars, Chicago got so-called "small schools" -- until the Gates money changed and decided that "turnaround" was the flavor of the Big Money Month.
Once Arne Was given the power by Barack Obama to play out his lies on the national stage, turnaround became one of the many "research based" bits of corporate nonsense that would morph from Chicago experiment to national policy. And while such as charter schools and turnarounds were devotedly pursued by the U.S. Department of Education, regardless of actual educational success with real children, there came upon the world new ones, most dramatically Arne's claims that schools of education were, generally, a "failure". At what and how proved, we weren't told (as usual with Arne's "research" all the way back to the Chicago days).
And so, in the course of time, researchers once again proved that some of the Arne "research" was full of shit. Or, as Teachers College reports, flawed:
Commentaries
"Evaluating Teacher Preparation Programs Using the Performance of their Graduates by Cory Koedel & Eric Parsons In a recent article the authors use data from Missouri to show that differences between traditional teacher preparation programs, measured in terms of the effects of their graduates on student achievement, are smaller than has been suggested by previous research in other states. Indeed, they find that most programs in Missouri are statistically indistinguishable from one another. The authors identify a technical error made in previous work to which they attribute their discrepant findings. In short, some previous studies have failed to properly account for teacher sampling, and in doing so, have overstated the extent to which graduates from different teacher preparation programs truly differ. This commentary considers the implications of this result in the context of the current policy push for more rigorous evaluations of teacher preparation programs.
