Hanushek is the conservative Hoover Institute's education economist who has appeared as a witness for the defense in more than a dozen education finance litigations. Lindseth is an attorney who has represented state defendants in a number of education adequacy litigations.
So there is plenty of financial incentive for them to support their dubious claims.
According to ACCESS Network's Mike Rebell, the new book continues their “slash and burn” tactics by exaggerating the extent to which expenditures for public education have increased in recent decades, dismissing the significance of the detailed cost studies that most states now use in budget analyses, and accusing plaintiff litigators of “almost always oppos[ing] significant changes in the way education funds are spent.”
The most extreme statements in the book are contained in the chapter entitled “The Effectiveness of Judicial Remedies,” which purports to document the extent to which student achievement has improved in the four states that they have concluded have had “significant” court-ordered remedies in place the longest, namely Kentucky, New Jersey, Wyoming, and Massachusetts. Focusing their analysis exclusively on certain student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), they conclude that in three out of four of these states “ while court-ordered dollars have brought a host of services and facilities for schools……these appear not to have generally brought the improved student performance so long sought and so urgently needed.” ( p.170.)
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