Following the Vergara v. California decision now two weeks ago (see three recent VAMboozled posts about this court decision here, here, and here), one of my mentors and still friends/colleagues – Gene Glass, Regents’ Professor Emeritus at ASU – wrote the following on his twitter and Facebook account about Raj Chetty’s and Tom Kane’s testimonies, testimonies that played key roles in the judge’s (unfortunate) decision ruling teacher tenure as unconstitutional.
Testimony in Vergara by Harvard profs. Does anybody–other than Judge Treu–really believe these guys?! Amazing! — These dudes must be in love with their production functions. How anyone but a know-nothing judge could buy this stuff is amazing to me. A bad teacher costs a class of 28 kids $1.4 Million in life-time earnings. Really? What do a couple of lousy economists cost society?
Glass then followed up with a comment: “Aristotle in Nichomachean Ethics: “We must not expect more precision than the subject-matter admits.” (Chp. 3)…after which a Facebook friend replied…”Aristotle was 2.13 times more effective than Plato at teaching Aristotle’s ethics.” Funny!
Anyhow, somebody else at The Becoming Radical seemed to come across this post and wrote another blog post around it titled, “The Very Disappointing Teacher Impact Numbers from Chetty.” To read more about what this author has titled the now “very famous” but still “mostly hypothetical” Chetty et al. study and what their numbers ACTUALLY mean, even if true and accurate in the real world, click here.
I am “somebody else”; thanks for linking 🙂
Even better!