They say you shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees. Unfortunately, several people in the education policy debate are doing just that. Researchers and journalists are focusing on the effects of education policies on standardized test scores while ignoring more important long-term outcomes such as crime and earnings. That’s obviously a problem.

Here’s a case in point. Matthew Yglesias, co-founder of Vox, just quoted five rigorous studies linking families’ schooling selections to student outcomes. Yglesias quoted snippets from the five abstracts finding no change in students’ test scores. The only problem is that he completely omitted all of the positive effects on long-term outcomes such as health, safety, crime reduction, and earnings.