" . . . they ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas, instead of trying to extract ideas from circumstances." — Charles Dickens, Great Expectations."First get your facts; then you can distort them at our leisure." — Mark Twain
"Facts are ventriloquist's dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may utter words of wisdom; elsewhere they say nothing, or talk nonsense." — Aldous Leonard Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop.
Some public policy questions have an empirical component. If the government decides to build a bridge there are questions of cost and structure that can addressed without regard to value judgments. Evaluating whether a particular bridge design is aesthetically pleasing does involve subjective judgment. Advocates who base their decisions on subjective judgments are sometimes not above hedging on empirical judgments so that empirical conclusions are made to serve subjective values. The unfortunate consequence of such hedging is public cynicism about any empirical judgments. People are given to believe there are no objective evaluations and all studies are deliberately distorted to compel value-driven conclusions. Such is the case with various studies about the effect of school choice on educational outcomes.
John Witte of the University of Wisconsin has been studying the effect of Milwaukee's school choice program. In that program, low-income families (predominantly African-American and Hispanic) are given $3200 in the form of a voucher to apply to tuition for elementary school children in non-sectarian schools. Witte, an opponent of choice, has produced a series of studies concluding that children that participate in the Milwaukee's school choice program fare no better than students who remained in the regular public schools.
More recently, Paul Peterson and Jiangtai Du of Harvard University have also studied the academic performance of participants of the Milwaukee schools. The situation in Milwaukee was particular amenable to a controlled investigation. More students applied for the choice program than there were slots available. The participants were chosen at random. Those students who were not chosen and remained in the Milwaukee public school system were an ideal control group. The Harvard study showed that in the first couple of years choice students showed little difference from the control group. However, in the third and fourth years, choice students show statistically significant academic improvement over the control group in government run schools. Although the senior investigator Peterson is a liberal Democrat, he has been generally supportive of school choice programs.
Faced with two studies by presumably reputable people, most of the public will simply believe the results of the study that agrees with their previously held views. The public will continue to believe that academic studies themselves can not be objective.
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