by David Safier
I was going to let Matthew Ladner's Monday morning G.I. email slide. It looked pretty reasonable to me at first glance.
Then someone told me to take a closer look, and showed me where to look. Oops. Foolish me.
Ladner questions a Republic article's figure for the number of private school students in Arizona. It's in an article which said the state loses money on tuition tax credit scholarships. Here's the passage where he questions the numbers.
For starters, there are varying estimates of private school attendance in Arizona. Republic reporter Robert Hansen's estimation technique is highly dependent on this. The Arizona Private School Directory lists more than 3,000 more private school students than the National Center for Education statistics Hansen used in his research.
If you follow Ladner's link, you find that the Arizona Private School Directory is on the EducationBug website. I don't know the site. Funny name, but it may be perfectly reputable. Still, it's an odd choice for a source to contradict something that comes from the U.S. Government's National Center for Educational Statistics. Ladner might have reached a little higher for a more nationally respected source.
But let's look at the EduBug numbers. It says there are 54,176 private school students in Arizona. The Republic article says it's 52,000. If you do the math, you'll see there's a 2,176 student difference between the two. Ladner rounds that up to 3,000. Not even close.
Then EduBug breaks the students down by grade level and states that the largest number in any grade is in preschool, at 11,010. Unfortunately, I don't know if the NCES numbers include preschool students as well, but that number certainly jumps out at me when I look over the stats. Preschool has 2 to 4.5 times more students than any private school K-12 grade. If Ladner is going to use figures that break down the students by grade level, he should check to see how much of the recent growth in private school enrollment is in preschool where you can't receive tuition tax credit scholarships.
The thing is, some of Ladner's other analysis based on conjecture is reasonably good. He may even be right in some instances, though without facts to back up his ideas, they're only conjecture. But the one fact he pulls out as evidence against the Republic article is very, very weak. It's either the result of someone doing quick, sloppy research or someone beginning with his conclusions and working back to the "facts" that fit. Probably a little bit of both.
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It was a single survey. Email me a fax number.
The basic question is this. You published three studies, the one about Civics knowledge and the two that came out together, about tolerance and about attitudes toward school. I wanted to know if those were based on three separate surveys or if two or more of the studies were pulled from the same survey data. I also would love to see the raw survey results themselves. I know lots of polling services publish their raw data online, and studies often open their data for review.
What is the question?
Matthew.
I need to look at today’s Republic article more carefully, but you also need to read my post more carefully. I said that some of your conjectures probably made sense. I questioned your one fact, which you pulled from a questionable source and misrepresented. We can argue other points at other times, but you haven’t responded to your faulty use of math. You’re arguing a point I wasn’t making.
But I still have the same old question that’s troubling me. You’re quick to respond to most issues I raise, and I appreciate that, but you seem to be evading one question. Why the silence about the survey or surveys you used for your three studies comparing private and traditional public school students? I’m beginning to think you’re dodging the question for a reason.
The Republic has already backed off their estimate and increased the size of their savings estimate:
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2009/10/20/20091020taxcredits1020.html
A private school association is preparing to document a number of private school students above 60,000, which will increase the cost savings substantially by the Republic’s methodology.
The RAND Corp’s finding that private schools lose one student for every three in charter schools is Michigan is merely strongly suggestive for Arizona, but it makes an important point: there is nothing in the way of a control for “history” as Campbell and Stanley describe it in the Republic’s estimate. The world was not static outside of the creation of the tax credit-lots of other things happened-500 new and free school options being the most obvious among many others.
Feel free to switch back to your actual objections to tax credits now that a faux one has failed. Do try to be consistent in your standards however- I support an improvement in STO practices and have said so many times. If however allegations of corruption were grounds for eliminating an education delivery method, public schooling would have been shut down long ago.