Everything you know about education policy is wrong.
That’s the message of Manhattan Institute scholar Jay Greene, whose new book, “Education Myths,” is a kind of “freakonomics” for the education set: “Much of what people believe about education is as mythological as anything from Homer or Aesop,” he writes.
What kind of myths? Everything from schools are underfunded (“the money myth”), to schools are much worse than they used to be (“the myth of decline”). Since 1970, we’ve doubled per-pupil spending (after inflation), yet test scores and graduation rates have remained essentially flat. Schools aren’t worse, but billions of dollars haven’t made them any better, either.
Or take class size, for example. One random-assignment research study showed that smaller class sizes produced a modest academic benefit for students. But six years after California hired 50 percent more teachers to reduce class size, a Rand Corp. study found that test scores were increasing just as much in large classrooms as smaller classes and concluded smaller class sizes made no academic difference.
Read more here