Links for 11/29/10

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

The Coleman Report and its data have been exhaustively analyzed and reanalyzed. But this key finding has never been successfully challenged: School inputs—money, teachers, teacher credentials, etc.—have little correlation with pupil achievement and differences in achievement cannot be significantly accounted for by differences in school resources.

Pre-Coleman, the formula was simple. More money plus more teachers (and more whatever) made for better schools which yielded better results. Nearly everyone took this for granted. Yet Coleman showed that, by and large, it isn’t true. And of course that conclusion is why HEW found the report so awkward. For Lyndon Johnson was still president and had spent the previous two years persuading Congress that the way to end poverty and equalize achievement in America was to lavish federal dollars on the education system…

the single greatest change in American K-12 education these past four decades is that we now focus overwhelmingly on the results themselves—on measuring them, understanding them, comparing them, fretting about gaps in them, setting standards for them, creating assessment and accountability systems keyed to them, and devising new strategies to alter them…

That change can be traced pretty directly to the Coleman Report and its foremost interpreter, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan…

Vivek Wadhwa

Build a magnificent technology park next to a research university; provide incentives for chosen businesses to locate there; add some venture capital. That is the common recipe for harnessing higher education and industry to spur economic growth as prescribed by management consultants touting the "cluster theory" developed by Harvard Business School's Michael E. Porter.

Hundreds of regions all over the world have spent billions on such efforts; practically all have failed…

All of those are well-intentioned efforts to build Silicon Valley-style technology hubs, but they are based on the same flawed assumptions: that government planners can pick industries they want to develop and, by erecting buildings and providing money to entrepreneurs and university researchers, make innovation happen.

It simply doesn't work that way…

Lisa M. Krieger

Cal State took the lead in 2008 becoming the first and only university system in the nation to publish its graduates’ salary data. It’s available on a website launched after a federal commission called on colleges to do a better job of measuring and publicizing students’ academic success. Now other public schools are following Cal State’s example. Within the next six months, 300 public universities will post salary information…