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Friday, September 23, 2011

Third Way Responds but Still Doesn’t Get It! « School Finance 101

Third Way Responds but Still Doesn’t Get It! « School Finance 101:

Third Way Responds but Still Doesn’t Get It!

Third Way has posted a response to my critique in which they argue that their analysis do not suffer theegregious flaws my review indicates. Specifically, they bring up my reference to the fact that whenever they are using a “district” level of analysis, they include the Detroit City Schools in their entirety in their sample of “middle class.” They argue that they did not do this, but rather only included the middle class schools in Detroit.

The problems with this explanation are many. First, several of their methodological explanations specifically refer to doing computations based on selecting “district” not school level data. For example, Footnote #8 in their report explains:

Third Way calculation based on the following source: New America Foundation, “Federal Education