my blog entry Monday<\/a> about confirmation bias. I haven't read the think-tank paper, but the first question that came to mind was "How many of the studies Forster reviewed are his own work or that of Jay Greene?" The second: "Did he cite any of John Witte's work?" The third: "Did he report effect sizes?" There would be an interesting exercise to try a meta-analysis on either of the main claimed "effects" of vouchers (especially claims of a competition effect), but I think it's best done by someone from who most readers would not expect to be strongly influenced by confirmation bias. <\/p>\nUpdate<\/strong>: At least a quick skim of the relevant paper suggests that the answers are yes, only one, and no (respectively). Since this particular "study" is being distributed by a right-wing think tank, I should note that I've seen plenty of confirmation bias from all ideological and philosophical quarters in education. If you're feeling the slightest bit smug about this entry, you need a quick knock on the head: when was the last time you<\/strong> cited only the study (or few studies) that came to mind that supported your own view?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Got this in the email yesterday: For skeptics who say school vouchers don't work, Greg Forster, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Educational Choice, decided to go back and review the data… I guess the press-release writer didn't read my blog entry Monday about confirmation bias. I haven't read the think-tank paper, but the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-Rp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3311"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3314,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3311\/revisions\/3314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}