Update: Irony Still Dead!

Per this debate with Jay Greene, anonymous Education Week blogger Eduwonkette now says there is a problem with asymmetric information in the education information marketplace after previously decrying the lack of transparency in the field….In other news, town arsonist says “someone ought to do something about all these fires!”

2 Replies to “Update: Irony Still Dead!”

  1. You must be kidding. Apparently both you and Jay Greene now believe that blogging, publishing think tank reports, and publishing peer reviewed articles (in the case of Greene) are equivalent enterprises that should be subject to the same standards and practices. If that is the case, the education policy community should be very, very frightened.

    As far as I am aware, Eduwonkette does not issue mass press releases to accompany her daily blog posts. Nor, I hope, are her blog posts treated by anyone as evidence for or against any policy. If responsible readers find any of her ideas worth pursuing, they should follow up as appropriate. Either way, which is the more serious issue here–anonymous bloggers or our sloppy system of vetting think tank “research” which is actually used to inform policy?

    You should really get over this anonymity obsession and move on with your life.

  2. I don’t read Eduwonkette because she knows just enough to say stupid things. But since you linked…

    The problem is that education is not a car. And that there aren’t national measures for education outcomes that are comparable. So consumers who have the power to choose schools (in most cases affluent folks who can choose to live in whatever district pleases them most) rely on whatever data is available to make that choice.

    Eduwonkette must be young and naive too because there is a lot more data now than ten years ago. When I bought my first house, in 1992, there was almost no test score data out there to let me know what school district was performing. I relied on word of mouth from people I knew.

    It’s typical though of policy types to miss the forest for the trees when they get talking about the tricky tracky details of policy. We academics do the same thing in our own field.

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