Experimenting with education [link]

This blog post describes a previous experiment in education, where vouchers were provided to students to send them to private schools . The post author (not the study author) suggests maybe pre-school stuff is more effective, so the results here should be interesting, as most of the achievement gap is observable by age 5.

It is nice to see this as an experiment rather than the Gates-foundation-style "here is what we want." But on the other hand, it's stuff that we've seen before without great success, and most teachers don't expect it to work well for causal reasons. You know the candle problem, where creativity to solve a problem actually decreases with the addition of financial incentives?

My hope is that if the study turns out negative, as my priors would predict, rich people actually stop throwing money at this sort of plan, and focus on things like reducing class sizes, changing the school year, increased parent involvement, etcetera.