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Nothing Works Revisited
Posted by:
Eric Lichtenberger
()
Date: April 10, 2009 10:08AM
Please read the entire message........
I just got back from an Offender Workforce Development conference in Pittsburgh and felt the need to challenge each and every one of you. While I was at the conference a keynote presenter was going over a list of best practices related to reducing recidivism and proclaimed that correctional educational programs fell into the "did not work" category along with boot-camps, etc. The keynote presenter is a well-respected criminologist from George Mason University, named Faye Taxman. While I agree with her in that we haven't been able to perform clinical trials with random assignment to truly isolate the impact of our correctional education programs, there are many reasons why we this is not a practical research option for many of us. For the most part, withholding educational services from a group that has been defined as vulnerable violates ethical principles involved in research and it potentially opens agencies up for litigation. In other words, it is very difficult to perform true experiments in the social sciences, it is even more difficult to perform them in education, and even more so in a correctional setting. Even though we generally cannot perform true experiments, there are other things we can do to increase the rigor of our research and disseminate our findings, which should give us more ammunition in fending of this new round of "nothing works" allegations.
So my challenge to you is this:
1) if you have any evidence that your programs are making an impact, please share it. I'm pretty sure that the conference organizers are still accepting presentation proposals for international CEA conference in Madison (July). We all need to help each other and they best way to do that is through replication.
2) if you have the inclination to move beyond descriptive reporting, find a graduate student, university faculty member, or consultant to help you employ more sophisticated statistical techniques. There are some common techniques that could allow you to control for differences between your correctional education group(s) and your comparison group(s).
3) if you are comfortable with your study, disseminate the information to a wider audience that includes legislators, judges, the business community, civic groups, etc.
4) if you are doing these things already, we applaud you. ..
5) IF ANYONE KNOWS OF ANY OTHER WAYS WE COULD HELP EACH OTHER, PLEASE RESPOND TO THIS THREAD. For the most part, I was thinking while I was writing this and I was definitely bothered by what Dr. Taxman said about correctional education. What bothered me most was that it was sort of a footnote in her presentation.
I'll post a link to Faye Taxman's presentation as soon as the conference organizers make it available.
Eric Lichtenberger
Research and Evaluation SIG Chair
I just got back from an Offender Workforce Development conference in Pittsburgh and felt the need to challenge each and every one of you. While I was at the conference a keynote presenter was going over a list of best practices related to reducing recidivism and proclaimed that correctional educational programs fell into the "did not work" category along with boot-camps, etc. The keynote presenter is a well-respected criminologist from George Mason University, named Faye Taxman. While I agree with her in that we haven't been able to perform clinical trials with random assignment to truly isolate the impact of our correctional education programs, there are many reasons why we this is not a practical research option for many of us. For the most part, withholding educational services from a group that has been defined as vulnerable violates ethical principles involved in research and it potentially opens agencies up for litigation. In other words, it is very difficult to perform true experiments in the social sciences, it is even more difficult to perform them in education, and even more so in a correctional setting. Even though we generally cannot perform true experiments, there are other things we can do to increase the rigor of our research and disseminate our findings, which should give us more ammunition in fending of this new round of "nothing works" allegations.
So my challenge to you is this:
1) if you have any evidence that your programs are making an impact, please share it. I'm pretty sure that the conference organizers are still accepting presentation proposals for international CEA conference in Madison (July). We all need to help each other and they best way to do that is through replication.
2) if you have the inclination to move beyond descriptive reporting, find a graduate student, university faculty member, or consultant to help you employ more sophisticated statistical techniques. There are some common techniques that could allow you to control for differences between your correctional education group(s) and your comparison group(s).
3) if you are comfortable with your study, disseminate the information to a wider audience that includes legislators, judges, the business community, civic groups, etc.
4) if you are doing these things already, we applaud you. ..
5) IF ANYONE KNOWS OF ANY OTHER WAYS WE COULD HELP EACH OTHER, PLEASE RESPOND TO THIS THREAD. For the most part, I was thinking while I was writing this and I was definitely bothered by what Dr. Taxman said about correctional education. What bothered me most was that it was sort of a footnote in her presentation.
I'll post a link to Faye Taxman's presentation as soon as the conference organizers make it available.
Eric Lichtenberger
Research and Evaluation SIG Chair
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