Representative Bureaucracy and Harder Questions: A Response to Meier, Wrinkle, and Polinard

Nielsen, Laura Beth; Wolf, Patrick J.

doi:10.1111/0022-3816.00081

Cited by 24 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…3.The simple correlation between minority teachers and Anglo students (-.76, see Nielsen and Wolf, 1999) alone generates a larger VIF (2.36) than the one they report. This is an obvious indicator that their VIFs were calculated incorrectly because by definition the VIFs for minority teachers and Anglo students must equal or exceed 2.36 in any regressions where both appear.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 81%

“…This specification test, therefore, is the panel analysis equivalent of stepwise regression, an atheoretical technique that relies on computers rather than theory to build models. 3 The simple correlation between minority teachers and Anglo students (Ϫ.76, see Nielsen and Wolf, 1999) alone generates a larger VIF (2.36) than the one they report. This is an obvious indicator that their VIFs were calculated incorrectly because by definition the VIFs for minority teachers and Anglo students must equal or exceed 2.36 in any regressions where both appear.…”

Section: Assertion 1: the Use Of Fixed Effects Modelsmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…We need to put this argument in context. Originally Nielsen and Wolf (1999) claimed that we omitted important peer effects and argued that students who attend school with better students are improved in the process. While we agree with this contention, we reject their original notion that better students means Anglo students.…”

Section: The Exclusion Of Percent Anglo Studentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Zen and the Art of Policy Analysis: A Response to Nielsen and Wolf

Meier¹,

Eller²,

Wrinkle³

et al. 2001

The Journal of Politics

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We thank George A. Krause and Jeff Gill for helpful comments. All statistical analyses were conducted in STATA and replicated in limdep. All data and documentation to replicate this analysis including the complete STATA output can be found at http://web.polmeth.ufl.edu/ or www-bushschool.tamu.edu/pubman/ Zen and the Art of Policy Analysis: A Response to Nielsen and Wolf AbstractNeilsen and Wolf (N.d.) lodge several criticism of Meier, Wrinkle and Polinard (1999).Although most of the criticisms deal with tangential issues rather than our core argument, their criticisms are flawed by misguided estimation strategies, erroneous results, and an inattention to existing theory and scholarship. Our re-analysis of their work demonstrates these problems and presents even stronger evidence for our initial conclusion-both minority and Anglo students perform better in schools with more minority teachers. 1 Zen and the Art of Policy Analysis: A Response to Nielsen and WolfPolicy analysis is an art not a rote exercise. It requires informed judgement at every step of the process and an understanding of the implications of methodological choices. This exchange illustrates the importance of that art. In "Representative Bureaucracy and Distributional Equity: Addressing the Hard Question" we presented two key findings-in school districts with more minority teachers both minority and Anglo students perform better. We also addressed several interesting but tangential issues including the anomaly of overall test scores, the linearity of the relationships, and how equity and performance were linked. Nielsen and Wolf (N.d.) lodge six specific criticisms of our work:1. The appropriate estimation technique is a fixed effects pooled regression.2. We omitted a key variable, percent Anglo students, in our model. 3.The relationship between minority teachers and student performance is not nonlinear.4. Minorities should be disaggregated into blacks and Latinos; when this is done, there is no relationship between minority teachers and minority student performance.5. The appropriate unit of analysis is the student not the school district.6. Substantively weighted least squares (SWLS) is used incorrectly.Even if Nielsen and Wolf were correct (and they are not), only one of these criticisms bear on our key findings; the others focus on peripheral issues. Our response demonstrates that Nielsen and Wolf are incorrect in assertions 1 through 5 and misinterpret assertion 6 because they failed to read the relevant work in this area. We deal with each criticism in order. The Use of Fixed Effects Models 2Nielsen and Wolf contend that we have underspecified models, specifically that based on a Hausman specification test we should have estimated our equations as fixed effects models by including a series of dummy variables to represent the unique characteristics of each individual school district. With a panel data set of dimensions N x T (where N is the number of unique cases and T is the number of time periods), there are a myriad of possible models (Balt...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 81%

Section: Assertion 1: the Use Of Fixed Effects Modelsmentioning

confidence: 87%

Section: The Exclusion Of Percent Anglo Studentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Zen and the Art of Policy Analysis: A Response to Nielsen and Wolf

Meier¹,

Eller²,

Wrinkle³

et al. 2001

The Journal of Politics

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“…First, it allows us to begin with a known baseline for judging bureaucracy's impact on school performance. Second, the methodological properties of this data set are relatively well known, not only having been discussed by Bohte, but also being the subject of a lengthy exchange between Nielsen and Wolf (2001) and Meier and colleagues (Meier, Polinard, and Wrinkle 1999;Meier et al 2001). 4 Using pooled data sets to estimate coefficients presents methodological challenges and choices that can influence inference (Baltagi 1995).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Of particular concern are serial autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity. There are a number of alternative estimation techniques to handle these problems, which have been discussed and adopted to varying degrees by others who have used this data set to model school performance (Bohte 2001;Meier, Polinard, and Wrinkle 1999;Meier et al 2001;Nielsen and Wolf 2001). The primary issue in pooled analysis is efficiency rather than bias; accordingly, we focused on making the hypothesis tests associated with each coefficient as reliable and conservative as possible (see below for specifics).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Mixed Relationship: Bureaucracy and School Performance

Smith

Larimer

2004

Public Administration Review

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A Mixed Relationship: Bureaucracy and School PerformanceWe argue the negative relationship between school bureaucracy and school performance that is commonly reported in the bureaucracy and educational policy literature is theoretically and empirically incomplete. Like most public agencies operating in complex task environments, we suggest that schools have to make trade-offs between the multiple outputs they are expected to produce. Bureaucracy plays an important role in determining the nature of these trade-offs: one that is more multidimensional than it is portrayed in the existing literature. We find bureaucracy's relationship with school performance depends on how performance is measured. It is negatively associated with test scores but positively associated with other performance measures such as attendance and dropout rates. This is consistent with an economies-of-scope perspective of bureaucracy, which emphasizes bureaucracy's role in managing the trade-offs inherent in pursuing multiple goals.

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Representation and Stability in Postwar Lebanon

Barak¹

2012

Representation

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Representative Bureaucracy and Harder Questions: A Response to Meier, Wrinkle, and Polinard

Cited by 24 publications

References 9 publications

Zen and the Art of Policy Analysis: A Response to Nielsen and Wolf

Zen and the Art of Policy Analysis: A Response to Nielsen and Wolf

A Mixed Relationship: Bureaucracy and School Performance

Representation and Stability in Postwar Lebanon

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