Education professors misrepresent school choice yet again

Published September 12, 2019 2:48pm ET



They say some people never learn. Just two months ago, education professors Christopher Lubienski and Joel Malin published a piece in The Conversation completely misrepresenting the scientific evidence on school vouchers. Although University of Arkansas Professor Patrick J. Wolf and I individually corrected their erroneous claims, they are back at it again. And the misrepresentation and cherry-picking are just as shocking. Let’s set the record straight.

In their most recent piece, Lubienski and Malin claimed “seven of the nine [school choice studies since 2015] found that voucher students saw relative learning losses,” while none showed gains. What nine studies were they talking about? They didn’t specify in the piece. They have not clarified publicly on social media either. At first, I could not come up with a list of school voucher studies since 2015 that came out to “seven out of nine” negative and met any reasonable definition of “rigorous.”

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