by David Safier

I've written 5 posts about The Floridation of Arizona Education to balance the unbalanced coverage of "The Florida Miracle" which has come out of Goldwater Institute's Matthew Ladner — and which has been swallowed whole by the Republican legislature. Sadly, it has also been swallowed by some of the media.

During that time, Ladner has sent me 3 emails attempting to refute some of my ideas, then finally throwing up his hands and accusing me of "trying to throw mud in the water."

I'm going to excerpt his emails here and discuss aspects of them to show that, basically, he's got nothin', or next to nothin'. To avoid being accused of taking his words out of context, I've put the entire text of Ladner's 3 emails after the jump.

Forgive me for this long, deep-in-the-weeds post, but I want to do this right, and that takes time.

Let me begin with a line from the final email Ladner sent me after I completed the series.

It appears to my untrained eye that you are simply trying to throw mud in the water. Sigh.

To the contrary, Mr. Ladner, I'm trying my best to give a fair, complex analysis of Florida's educational reforms, even acknowledging the distinct possibility that they did increase students' reading skills. It only feels like I'm muddying the water because I'm not simply focusing on one fact — the increase in 4th grade reading scores — and accepting that as proof that Florida has made miraculous educational gains, and Arizona should adopt the reforms you decide you want to emphasize.

If anything Ladner wrote proves my assertion that he cherry picks facts so they fit his preset agenda — start with the conclusions you want, then find facts that "prove" them — it's this sentence from his first email.

Notice that scores declined between 1992 and 1998 (the year before the reforms).

The graph at right shows the percent of students scoring at basic and above in 4th grade reading. The dark brown line is Florida scores. If you draw a line straight across from 1992 to 1998, the percentage is close to identical. But if you look at the line describing what happened during those 6 years, you'll see a steep decline for the first 2 years, then a steep increase over the next four.

Any researcher who wants to understand Florida's increase in 4th grade reading scores has to look at the dramatic increase which began in 1994, 4 years before the Florida reforms began, and explain why the spike started there. But Ladner wants 1998 to be the year when the "miracle" began, so he pretends scores were flat or declining before that. (Ladner usually gets away with this kind of thing, because he's rarely called on his assertions by anyone who has looked into them carefully.)

Ladner cites 1998 or 1999 as the year the reforms began, which is interesting, because nothing much happened until 2002. So far as I can tell, all that happened from 1998 to 2002 is that schools were rated from A to F. Reforms like retaining 3rd grade students and instituting Just Read Florida didn't begin until 2002.

If Ladner wants to argue that simply giving the schools letter grades created a huge spike in reading scores, that's fine by me, but it's a pretty ridiculous assertion.

So we're left wondering, why did test scores increase dramatically from 1994 to 2002 without any substantive educational reform? I'd be interested in Ladner's answer.

Onward. From Ladner's 1st email.

I saw in one of your recent posts a link to Professor Haney and made the accusation that I have ignored his critique. In fact, I have refuted Professor Haney's critique in a peer reviewed article last year. I am unaware of any response: http://educationnext.org/demography-as-destiny-2/

Ladner is using the "straw man" line of attack here. First, I would love to know where I said Ladner has "ignored [Professor Haney's] critique." I can't find any place I said, or even implied that. In fact, I had already read Ladner's rebuttal, the one he linked to, so I know he didn't ignore what Haney wrote.

I only took 2 things directly from Haney's article — a few statistics, and a comment he made that holding students back can lead to those students dropping out of school. I didn't use Haney's argument about reading scores in my posts.

Ladner can read my arguments and suggestions about the inflated reading score increases starting with the 5th paragraph of my second post. In his email, he chose to ignore what I wrote and pick a fight with Haney. Basically, he bypassed my assertions.

And finally . . .

Ladner doesn't like my pointing out that Florida increased its education spending to implement some of its reforms. He basically says, yeah, Florida spent more money, but scores went up even in the years when there was no significant spending increase, from 1998 to 2002. Granted, he has a point. But I can also point out that there was a steady increase in reading scores from 1994 — before the reforms began — to 2002. So without either extra money or new reforms, the scores were on the upswing. Their continuation from 1998 to 2002 could as easily be attributed to a momentum toward increased scores as to the meager reforms enacted between 1998 and 2002.

And it's worth noting, Florida's per student spending was higher than Arizona's during that period. In 2007, the most recent figure I have, the gap is about $1400 per student.

My point is, and always was, that before Arizona falls for Ladner's "Florida Miracle" dog-and-pony show, we need to look at Florida's reforms more carefully. Ladner clearly objects to that, because he wants to lead the conversation in a predetermined direction, and that's easiest when he has a monopoly on the facts.

Here are my earlier posts on the subject:

1. Introducing: The Floridation of Arizona Education
2. The Floridation of Arizona Education: Reading scores
3. The Floridation of Arizona Education: Dropout rates
4. The Floridation of Arizona Education: a "tapestry" of reforms
5. The Floridation of Arizona Education: Summing up