Watching the Obama speech:
It looks very much as if the president is oblivious to everything we’ve learned about social programs and educational reforms in the last 40 years—and by “we” I include policy analysts on the left as well as right. The guy never indicates that he is aware that we’ve tried a whole bunch of the same stuff he wants to try and evaluated it repeatedly and—read my lips—it doesn’t work.
John Derbyshire response:
Now, one of the grandest experiments in education ever undertaken in the U.S.A. was the Kansas City project of 1985-97. Vast sums of money were spent on that city’s schools, with a total effect that was actually negative – test scores declined, drop-out rates rose. It was a complete fiasco, though it conformed to the very best Obama-ist drunken-sailor principles.
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In your own recent book you talk at some length about the Coleman Report of 1966, which more or less predicted what the result of the Kansas City experiment would be, 20 years before the event. Apparently nobody in Kansas City knew about the Coleman Report.
In your opinion, would public education in the U.S.A. today look any different if the Coleman Report had never been published? Would it look any different if conscientious social science had all ceased completely, for ever, in 1966?
But education is the last refuge of policy never-never land, and I grant your point. Maybe the increasing examples of vouchers and charter schools owe something to evaluations of education, but otherwise – mushy curriculum, touchy-feely self-esteem programs, the insistence that all kids can succeed on the academic track, refusal to be honest about what needs to be done to rescue inner-city schools – a lot of good policy analysis has been just as ignored as you say.