Hoxby Misrepresented In Article on Academic Debate

To the editors:

I was disappointed that the news article “Star Ec Prof Caught in Academic Feud” (July 8) on the debate between Harvard Professor Caroline M. Hoxby ’88 and Princeton Professor Jesse M. Rothstein ’95 focused so much on the personal aspects of the disagreement and so little on its scholarly impact which was the substantive nature of my conversation with Crimson reporter Javier C. Hernandez. This is not like the “cold fusion” debate of the 1980s in which a highly acclaimed finding, published in one paper, was subsequently invalidated.

First, the paper at the heart of the dispute (“Does Competition Among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers”) is one in a long line of research by Hoxby and others establishing a relationship between school choice and improved educational outcomes.

Second, the dispute is largely over how to define one variable specific to this particular paper -- it does not impact the findings in the rest of the literature or their interpretation.

Third, this is social science, and reasonable people can disagree about the most appropriate way to analyze the data (in this case, how to classify different rivers).

Caroline Hoxby is an innovative and creative scholar whose research has been extremely influential in the recent academic research and discourse on education policy and, indeed, in shaping the nature of policy itself. Her contributions to the broader intellectual debate go well beyond the findings in this one paper, a point all but lost in The Harvard Crimson’s reporting on this issue.

BRIGITTE C. MADRIAN

Philadelphia, Penn.

July 12, 2005

The writer is an associate professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.