Arizona: Ladner

by David Safier

This is just me being curious. I rarely write about the Goldwater Institute, and especially about Matthew Ladner's work, without getting a fairly prompt response in the Comments. Recently I've been tag-teaming with others all over the country to question the accuracy of Ladner's Civics study, as well as 2 others he put together comparing public and private schools. They were all based on the same survey by the same company, Strategic Vision LLC, and evidence points to the conclusion that the results were faked.

G.I. may have been the victim here, but the results went out as emails and press releases sent all over the country, so if they're a sham, the rest of us are victims of bad information as well.

by David Safier

As you know if you've been reading this blog, I've had several bones to pick with the Goldwater Institute's studies comparing public and private school students in their knowledge of civics, tolerance of others and feelings about the schools they attend. (My criticism of the Civics study is here, and the criticism of the other two are combined in this post.) But here's one objection that never occurred to me until two faithful readers emailed me material that puts the polls themselves into question. (Hat tip to todd and to Eli Blake.)

It's possible the polling company, Strategic Vision LLC, simply made up the numbers in the surveys it gave to Matthew Ladner at G.

by David Safier

I was going to let Matthew Ladner's Monday morning G.I. email slide. It looked pretty reasonable to me at first glance.

Then someone told me to take a closer look, and showed me where to look. Oops. Foolish me.

Ladner questions a Republic article's figure for the number of private school students in Arizona in an article which said the state loses money on tuition tax credit scholarships. Here's the passage where he questions the numbers.

For starters, there are varying estimates of private school attendance in Arizona. Republic reporter Robert Hansen's estimation technique is highly dependent on this. The Arizona Private School Directory lists more than 3,000 more private school students than the National Center for Education statistics Hansen used in his research.

by David Safier

This is a damning-with-faint-praise segment of my regular Fool's Gold series looking at the inaccuracies the Goldwater Institute trades in. This time, the information isn't incorrect. It's just half of the story. So one gold earring out of two seems appropriate. Worn pirate-like. Also appropriate.

Last week Matthew Ladner wrote one of G.I.'s daily emails. The subject was a study out of Stanford that concluded New York's charter schools outperformed the public schools, controlling for the student populations. It looks to be about as good a study as you're going to find, and its results appear to be accurate. I