The Fordham Institute released a report this week written by one of their staff and a senior advisor to the Gates Foundation. It’s called Stretching The School Dollar. In many ways, it’s a perfect example of the thinking illustrated in yesterday’s Dilbert cartoon.
Thankfully, Bruce B. Baker has written a detailed critique of it that he accurately titles Stretching Truth, Not Dollars?
Here’s how he describes the Fordham brief before beginning his in-depth analysis:
The new policy brief reads like School Finance Reform in a Can. I’ve written previously about what I called Off-the-Shelf school finance reforms, which are quick and easy – generally ineffective and meaningless, or potentially damaging – revenue-neutral school finance fixes. In this new brief, Petrilli and Roza have pulled out all the stops. They’ve generated a list, which could easily have been generated by a random search engine scouring “reformy” think tank websites, excluding any ideas actually supported by research literature.
I wish he would have really told us what he thought of it without pulling any punches 🙂
It’s a long post, but well-worth the time…
Baker does a fine and thorough job. If you want to see Petrilli and Roza get their fannies handed to them, this is a must-read.
Now, if only we had a few billion dollars to spend making sure state lawmakers read it……