2.) The constraint you refer to was one that I implicitly assumed when asking my question. It seemed frivolous to me to ask instead: “Are Paideia’s current students – who were previously students at other schools – learning more (relative to to the value-added distribution for their grade level) now than they were before the school existed?”. I assumed that this degree of clarity was unnecessary and trusted the reader to intuit certain basic constraints. Perhaps, that too was my mistake.

3.) You’re right; there may be no, or few, absolute truths in debates over educational interventions. Yet, I assert that there are meaningful insights to be gained from looking at education as subject to a production function. When we consider all the inputs into this production function, we find that student attributes matter a great deal. Characteristics like neighborhood effects, peer effects, family attributes exist on a quality spectrum and often, these characteristics crystallize in patterned ways in students. When I referred to certain students as “poorer quality inputs”, I was suggesting that these were students functioning as a nexus where poorer quality neighborhood, peer, and family effects crystallize.

Abstracting students and their characteristics will not lead us toward pure and ultimate truths in the economics of education. It can, however, furnish a meaningful paradigm to test interactions with specific educational interventions so we may arrive at general, useful conclusions about how education reform operates for different populations of students.

So, while there are no ’single formulas’, there are useful general principles and looking at inputs is a way of arriving at these principles.

Finally, your claim that we ask too much of schools is an interesting one. I do not doubt that there are manners in which we overburden schools, yet I also know that many schools are notoriously opposed to changes in institutional frameworks (a discussion for another day) that promote the kind of competition and incentives that are conducive to significant educational innovations. Certainly, that’s not too much to ask.

By what measure are you gauging a student’s “poor[ness]?”

I make no claims to an understanding of logic or logical reasoning, so I could be wrong to point out that the question “Are Paideia’s students learning more now than they were before the school existed?” does not acknowledge a rather basic constraint: Were the students in question even students prior to the school’s chartering and operation?

My view? We ask too much of schools. There’s no quick fix or single formula for success or failure in life or in society. We can’t look at policies in a vacuum. And we lose far too much when reducing persons and lives into a concept as abstract as an “input.”

Yes, testing may be given too much weight, but you’ve got have some way to measure the student from Moberly vs. Webster vs. Paideia to see what they know. With grade inflation and other subjective measures, every student ’should’ on the honor roll. (Favorite part of the book ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’: Teacher ‘We grade students from cooperative to life-threatening’ Reporter ‘Was he an honor roll student on that scale?’) Intelligence is a tough thing to define, but making sure that students have received certain knowledge is in the interests of everyone.