"Vietnamese students with a fraction of the educational budget"
I agree with you that pouring more money doesn't mean thing will get better, but costs are different for people living in America vs Vietnam. This is an unfair and dishonest comparison.
I agree with you that pouring more money doesn't mean thing will get better, but costs are different for people living in America vs Vietnam. This is an unfair and dishonest comparison.
This is an excellent argument against the current system. The reason why the worst students cost more to educate using the Gary Plan is largely because of expensive pull-outs, which isn't a problem under, say, Open Systems Instruction.[1] Under the current system they actually talk about Total Adjusted Pupil Units rather than students, which shows just how pervasive the problem is.
[1] C.f. Public Schools Should Learn to Ski
As far as I know there isn't much disagreement about the fact that school funding doesn't correlate well with outcomes, but there is obviously a lot of disagreement about how to translate this into actual reforms.
In terms of assessing the validity of the original research though, I get the feeling that in this case the answers you get are much more determined by the questions you're asking rather than by the methodology of the studies. Unlike, say, when you are trying to understand how the results of surveys on self-reported drug use correlate with actual drug use, and you need to read a 594 page PDF worth of research before you're able to say anything intelligent.[1] (Which I read last night for fun, which is why I know this.)
[1] http://archives.drugabuse.gov/pdf/monographs/Monograph167/Mo...