Dive Summary:
- In a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece last month, the Brookings Institution's Matthew M. Chingos and Harvard's Paul E. Peterson proclaimed their new study's findings, which said that African-American students who attended private schools using a 1990s New York City voucher program were 24% more likely to enroll in college than black students who didn't win a voucher lottery.
- Now, in a paper published today by the National Education Policy Center, Sara Goldrick-Rab, an associate professor of educational policy studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, argues that the two scholars play down the study's true main finding: a total lack of "evidence that the vouchers were effective in advancing the participation of students in higher education."
- Chingos and Peterson defended their study in an e-mail to Inside Higher Ed, concluding, "The one result that can be reached with confidence is that the impact of vouchers for African Americans was positive. None of the issues raised in this commentary compromise that conclusion."
From the article:
From the high-profile perch of The Wall Street Journal's op-ed page last month, Matthew M. Chingos and Paul E. Peterson trumpeted the findings of their new study: that African-American students who used New York City vouchers to attend private schools in a 1990s program were 24 percent more likely to enroll in college than were black students who didn't win a voucher lottery. ...
