Timothy A. Hacsi
March 2002
This new book by Harvard ed school researcher Timothy A. Hacsi tours the reader through five contentious education policy questions (does Headstart work, does bilingual education work, does class size matter, is social promotion a good or bad thing, will spending more on schools make them better) and comes to the earth-shattering conclusion that politicians wrestling with these matters have not always based their decisions on what Hacsi would judge to be the best social science evidence. In fairness, he acknowledges that much of that evidence isn't really very good, that many education program evaluations are flawed, and that in many cases the best available answer isn't yes or no but, rather, "depends on how it's done." For the most part, however, he places greater faith in experts than in public opinion or the priority judgments of elected officials, and on several of these contentious issues he comes down firmly on the higher-spending side of the debate. While he doesn't quite finger a "great right wing conspiracy" for manipulating the other side, he comes close. I doubt that this book will put an end to any of these arguments, but by reading it you can at least get a sense of what's being argued about. Published by the Harvard University Press, the ISBN is 0674007441, it's 260 pages long, and you can get it through a bookseller or obtain additional information from http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/HACCHI.html.
