Shooting the Wounded

Before he began writing his influental On Education column for the New York Times, Fred Hechinger was an editorial writer at the paper. He used a military metaphor to describe his work, and he did so only partly tongue-in-cheek. While the battle between opposing intellectual forces waged in the valley below, he would say, he took in the scene from the safety of the hillsides above. Only when the firing had ended and the smoke had cleared did he come down and fire away at the wounded.

I can't help but think that Hechinger, who died in 1995, would have done exactly that in the wake of the latest fight between education researchers over the nation's high school graduation rates.

As happens again and again in the education policy world, researchers identified with the two great galaxies in the education universe--those who support public education and those who attack it--have published competing findings, this time about the the nation's graduation rates or, more to the point, the percentages of students who fail to graduate.

On one side is political scientist Jay Greene, who argued recently that public school dropout ratese are higher than widely believed, 30 percent of the entire high school population.

Not so, says Larry Michel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, DC, think tank. The national dropout rate is about 20 percent, Michel and colleagues contend.

The ensuring fight between the two researchers and their enemies and allies is a perfect illustration of why many policymakers can't comprehend much of the conversation about education research, and why, when they can understand it, they don't trust it.

Like so many others in education, the Greene-Michel debate quickly devolved into a jargon-filled intellectual food fight.

Michel's organization takes money from teacher unions with a vested interest in casting public schools in a positive light, Greene's supporters charged. Greene is a voucher advocate with an anti-public education ax to grind, countered Michel's defenders. Greene runs a new, $20-million research center at the University of Arkansas-Fayettesville funded by the private school voucher-advocating Walton Family Foundation and another Arkansas foundation endowed largely by Wal Mart stock, they pointed out.

In truth, who's right in the Greene-Michel debate is largely irrelevant. Both Michel and Greene report that very high percentages of African American and Hispanic students fail to earn regular high school diplomas (Greene pegs the numbers at 50 percent for Hispanic and black students in high poverty urban school systems; Michel says the average dropout rate for blacks is 25 percent and 26 percent for Hispanics). Regardless of whether one buys Greene's numbers or Michel's, the nation has a serious problem that needs to be addressed.

But rather than focusing on this larger picture, the national conversation is mired in an unproductive, highly politicized debate over methodology. Where's Fred Hechinger when we need him.