Deconstructing RAND : Education Next

In the summer of 2000, perfectly timed to shape the election debate over education reform, came a new RAND study that claimed to contradict the conventional research wisdom on the connection between school expenditures and class size on the one hand and student achievement on the other. “Our results certainly challenge the traditional view of public education as ‘unreformable,’” the study’s director, David Grissmer, said in an accompanying press release. “But the achievement of disadvantaged students is still substantially affected by inadequate resources. Stronger federal compensatory programs are required to address this inequity.” While academic studies usually retire to footnote-land, a well-orchestrated PR blitz pushed the RAND report to the front pages. It even earned prominent campaign mentions: Both presidential candidates commandeered the study’s findings to their own ends—Al Gore to support his proposal to lower class sizes, George W. Bush to trumpet Texas’s accountability system.