Should education schools lose their monopoly on teacher certification? Rick Hess, Mary Diez, and James Fraser debate the proposition in the Spring 2002 issue of Education Next (www.educationnext.org). Other articles in the same issue describe how alternative certification programs for teachers are sometimes just as burdensome as traditional ones, summarize the scant evidence in support of teacher certification, and analyze the effectiveness of Teach for America teachers. On another topic in the same issue, Stanford political scientist Terry Moe shows how the annual Phi Delta Kappa survey of attitudes toward education has "cooked the questions" on support for school vouchers in order to generate an anti-voucher result. Moe explains that the organization dropped a neutrally worded question about vouchers in 1991 and added a question that was worded in a way that was more apt to elicit a negative response. As online pundit Mickey Kaus noted on his website (www.kausfiles.com), a smart special interest group would have used a biased poll question from the start, avoiding the need for embarrassing alterations.
"Vouchers: Was a Poll Question 'Cooked'?" by Richard Morin and Claudia Deane, The Washington Post, March 11, 2002