Scientific American reports that data on the effects of class size reduction are inconclusive. According to Education Week, the same is true of data on the "whole school" reform effort. While education data exist in oversupply, they are of little use for policymaking, writes E.D. Hirsch in a column for the Hoover Institution. What turns data into usable information is interpretation, which teases out the separate factors that affect outcomes and assigns relative causality to them. The best recent attempt to interpret education data and draw policy conclusions from it was offered by the late Jeanne Chall in The Academic Achievement Challenge, the fruit of a lifetime of engagement with education research, Hirsch writes, but this book has had a negligible effect on policies and schools because it has not been widely disseminated. To the bookstore... "Education Policy and Information," by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Hoover Institution weekly essay, January 7, 2002
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