Third Way Think Tank Claims “Fresh Thinking” but Report Marred by Spoiled Analysis

Contact:

Bruce D. Baker
(732) 932-7496 ext. 8232
bruce.baker@gse.rutgers.edu

William Mathis, NEPC
(802) 383-0058
William.Mathis@colorado.edu

BOULDER, CO (September 22, 2011) – Who constitutes the middle class and how are their kids doing in school? Third Way, an organization led by centrist Democrats, claims in a report released last week that so-called “middle-class schools” are disadvantaged compared with wealthier and poorer schools. However, an independent review by Prof. Bruce Baker of Rutgers University finds that the report’s authors have an absurd view of who makes up the middle class and that the Third Way researchers misread their own data.

Baker, a school finance expert, reviewed Incomplete: How Middle Class Schools Aren’t Making the Grade, for the Think Twice think tank review project.

According to Professor Baker, the report “suffers from egregious methodological flaws invalidating nearly every bold conclusion drawn by its authors.”

The biggest flaw is the report’s definition of “middle class,” which includes “any school or district where the share of children qualifying for free or reduced-priced lunch falls between 25% and 75%,” Baker notes. “This classification includes as middle class some of the poorest urban centers in the country.” What this means is that the Third Way report drew conclusions about middle class schools by examining a data set that includes cities such as Detroit and Philadelphia. According to the most recent census data, Detroit is the poorest city in the nation; few people to consider Detroit to be middle class.

Besides that “crude classification” of middle class, however, Baker notes that none of the report’s major findings is supported by the data presented by the authors themselves.

For example, the report’s authors pay no attention to the fact that the schools they call “middle class” fall between higher- and lower-income schools on measures of student achievement. That is, schools enrolling lower-income students tend to have poorer achievement outcomes than schools enrolling higher-income students, and schools enrolling students with income levels between those extreme have outcomes in the middle. This is exactly what researchers should expect given the longstanding correlation of school achievement measures and the average incomes of the families those schools serve.

“This report provides no usable guidance for policy or practice,” Baker writes.

There is one small piece of value in Incomplete..., however, Baker concludes: “The report is an extreme exemplar of bad analysis and even worse reporting, thus offering an effective teaching tool for use with graduate students, education reporters and policymakers.”

The Baker review is published by the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education.
 

Find Bruce Baker’s review on the NEPC website at:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-middle-class

Find Incomplete: How Middle Class Schools Aren’t Making the Grade, by Tess Stovall and Deirdre Dolan, on the web at:
http://thirdway.org/publications/435
 

The Think Twice think tank review project (http://thinktankreview.org), a project of the National Education Policy Center, provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound, reviews of selected publications. The project is made possible in part by the support of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

The mission of the National Education Policy Center is to produce and disseminate high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. We are guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education is strengthened when policies are based on sound evidence.  For more information on NEPC, please visit http://nepc.colorado.edu/.

This review is also found on the GLC website at http://www.greatlakescenter.org/