Teacher Evaluations and Superstition
28th December 2010
Arnold Kling looks at education.
There is a term that Daniel Klein alerted me to called “white hat bias.” What it means is that findings that favor a popular political viewpoint will be published, while those that contradict that viewpoint will tend to be discarded. So many people have a vested interest in believing that teachers make a difference that one has to be very wary of white hat bias in studies that purport to show such differences.