This might be a good time to share this information with the New York Times and other major newspapers. Thanks for sharing.

EdSector CMO Report: Who Lost Tom Toch?

Thanks to a couple of eagle-eyed readers (including MDM) for pointing out that the much-delayed Education Sector report on charter management organizations lacks the name — and apparently much of the content provided by — its original author, writer and EdSector co-founder Tom Toch.

Asked about the situation, Toch said, “I removed my name from the report because a good deal of my analysis was removed and, as published, the report does not reflect my research findings on the current status and future prospects of charter management organizations.”

Toch says he submitted the 20,000-word report in June, based on two years of investigation, but did not see anything further until a paper copy of the final report was shown to him this past weekend. A good deal of the candid commentary from those within the charter community “had been removed,” according to Toch. And the report recommendations were added on by someone else.

Toch can’t publish the original version of the report because of copyright issues but he points to several other pieces (in Education Week and the Kappan) that reflect his findings more completely, and notes that he will continue to write and speak on the issue.

July 27th, 2010 at 12:04 pm
Here’s something we can all (hopefully) agree with:

Let’s end the practice of placing the least experienced and least prepared teachers in our most challenging schools.

1) Thanks for clarifying that Education Next is just TFA in disguise. I’ll write that down so I don’t forget. Of course, none of these ratings and reviews have relied on appeals to authority as all have given evidence in their critique of the methodologies, but that surely doesn’t matter.

2) Great, now try examining that potential bias and offer justification for your assertions. You are implying you are the expert on research here, but your arguments (and lack thereof) tend to disagree with that sentiment.

3) So your dissertation has gone through more peer-review than, say, the Mathematica study? Even though it isn’t finished?

4) When you get that dissertation published, we can talk more about what “real research” looks like. In the meantime, you ought to work on the critical thinking skills that should accompany that PhD.

You clearly don’t understand research. It is incumbent to examine potential bias when response rates are low. Those not staying in education could definitely be more likely to not respond given the whole ego trip TFA people are on.

The dissertation has gone through more peer-review than most of the trash that Andy cites as evidence on this blog like the crap that public impact puts out or the UVA turnaround people. Worst evaluation ever.

When you finish your PhD and do some real research of your own, come back and we can have a discussion about research, Until then, you don’t even know that you don’t know what you are talking about.

1) Reread what I said: there hasn’t been a ranking of study methodologies with TFA doing the ranking. The figure you are referring to is a visual display for the Education Next Report Card. If you read more closely, it’s also not ordered 100% inversely to the positive nature of the findings.

2) Cool, so get back to me when you re-examine the Mathematica study, but maybe you should do so before you assert that studies like that one are invalid.

3) Still haven’t given any justification as to why we’d expect non-respondents to offer different answers than respondents. A sample of 2000 teachers should be large enough to make the results meaningful.

4) That you have clarified that your “dissertation will pass” doesn’t mean it’s alright to cite it as evidence. You probably should keep your ego in check until at least it’s published so the rest of the academic community can then judge it.

Some studies cited by TFA folks have small sample sizes. I know the NC one does. Ill have to re-examine the first mathematics study.

Dissertation will pass.

Dude–general research methodology says 62% aint so good and especially if you cannot validate that the non-responders were no different than responders. Which TFA cant do. “nuff said. And, at least I finished my PhD, unlike some ed reform bloggers.

Working o it while stopping the funding of TFA and KIPP.

1) Nowhere has TFA itself judged the methodologies of these studies, nor has anyone here defended a study because ‘TFA said so’.

2) What scale are you using to determine that a sample size of ~2000 students spread out over 100 classrooms–or 2029 teachers in the Harvard study– is small? The former even utilized random assignment to help further validate their sampling.

3) Since the dissertation hasn’t been finished yet, nor published, nor peer-reviewed, maybe you shouldn’t yet cite it as evidence.

4) You (and others) have not yet been able to substantiate this “62% response rate = bad” claim, nor has it been reasonably justified why it is that we should expect that this sampling invalidates the results. Maybe you ought to do this first before making faulty assumptions of my background.

5) That last paragraph would make a great mission statement for your new teacher prep program. I’m looking forward to hearing about all of your future successes.

Look at the sample sizes of the Mathematica and NC papers–Very, very small indeed. No one mentioned that, did they?

Dissertation is not yet complete. Will be finished this month.

TFA study is fatally flawed because of low response rate and no evidence that bias was not introduced due to low response rate. Guess you have not taken research courses yet.

Istead of relying on TEA, we could actually get great people to go and stay at such schools if we took the money from what is going into charter schools, TFA, and other such boutique programs for white people who want to feel they are helping poor kids before they make their millions and pour it into getting good principals and good teachers at schools with wrap-around services.