Adam Gamoran

President of the William T. Grant Foundation and emeritus professor at UW-Madison

[Adam Gamoran @agamoran]

New Research: Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky https://t.co/BehqhwrnIh

[EdTrust @EdTrust]

REMINDER: SVP Wil Del Pilar, Ph.D. will testify at a House Ed & Workforce Committee briefing, “Education in the Crosshairs, Part III: What Dismantling the Dept of Education Means for Students,” TODAY, 7/22 at 2:45pm.

Live stream here: https://t.co/OSXjG9e0qi

[Steven N. Durlauf @sndurlauf]

This policy will cause incalculable damage to the United States. Foreign students are integral to the intellectual life of universities and and a critical source of talent in the American scientific establishment.

I touch on this in

https://t.co/bOqFVTTF9A

I hope the @AAUP, @HdxAcademy, @NASorg will recognize that this threat to the knowledge enterprise is an order of magnitude more important than issues raised in the Vanderbilt-Washington St. Louis report.

[CALDER Center @caldercenter]

📰 New @educationweek op-ed by CALDER's @cedr_us & @uvaedu's Vivian Wong: If local leaders are to make evidence-based decisions, federal support for education research is essential to generating and validating the evidence policymakers rely on.

Read: https://t.co/U1amorYw8E

[NNERPP @RPP_Network]

Did you know? Deadlines are coming up for these @wtgrantfdn funding opps:
-Research Grants on Reducing Inequality, applications due July 29 https://t.co/Sx5SPRGcG8
-Research Grants on Improving the Use of Research Evidence, applications due July 29 https://t.co/Ticp0yXM08

[EdTrust @EdTrust]

“Juneteenth Was Freedom. Education Is Power.”

In a Juneteenth reflection, Denise Forte, president and CEO of EdTrust, reflects on the enduring connection between freedom, opportunity, and education equity.

Read her blog post: https://t.co/1q84oWtf9J

#Juneteenth

[Gary Orfield @orfieldtweet]

Treating children in special education in ways that assigned them fairly,avoiding segregating them from the mainstream, and expanding opportunities has been one of the great successes of U.S. ed. Trump admin is threatening their rights as part of assault on Ed Department. @The74 https://t.co/gRymw3Yu5C

[Dan Goldhaber @CEDR_US]

Worthwhile reading to re-calibrate what we should expect from tutoring programs.

[EdTrust @EdTrust]

The 2026 KIDS COUNT® Data Book from @annieecaseyfdn is now available. This year’s report includes an enhanced index showing how child well-being is changing over time across the nation.

[Tom Loveless @tomloveless99]

There have been members of NAGB who wanted to get rid of the long term trend NAEP (LTT) for years. Old-fashioned, focused on basic skills, too concerned with factual knowledge the critics charged. But to claim tthat LTT results have nothing to do with The Nation's Report Card is simply bizarre. Read the description of The Nation's Report Card here: https://t.co/FWfrbbSnhS

[SK Tedeschi @skedeschi]

I'm a middle eastern historian. My own family were made refugees. And this is my honest view of the Nakba (“catastrophe”) - the displacement of around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs during the 1947–49 war surrounding the creation of Israel.

A thread. 🧵

[NNERPP @RPP_Network]

Reminder: Intent to Apply forms for @Spencer_Fdn’s Racial Equity Research Grants are due May 4! https://t.co/5oAnP1yPdc

[EdTrust @EdTrust]

6/6 Read the latest blog post from EdTrust’s SVP Wil Del Pilar to learn more about what’s at stake and why federal action is needed now to protect Pell: https://t.co/q8rMB7Tr7P

[Adam Gamoran @agamoran]

I'm proud that @wtgrantfdn supported @Columbia research documenting the progress of this initiative. Partnerships like this one, between a university and a district attorney's office, show the value that research can bring to solving problems in the real world.

[Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez @BrooklynDA]

Today, my office brought together stakeholders of Project Restore, our violence intervention initiative supporting and investing in gang-involved youth to set them on a positive path. We discussed its success and learned lessons as we prepare to expand this transformative program

[Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez @BrooklynDA]

Today, my office brought together stakeholders of Project Restore, our violence intervention initiative supporting and investing in gang-involved youth to set them on a positive path. We discussed its success and learned lessons as we prepare to expand this transformative program

[Adam Gamoran @agamoran]

@caldercenter @CEDR_US @brbackes I’m pleased to say that @wtgrantfdn supported this insightful research.

[Steven N. Durlauf @sndurlauf]

This paper is receiving a fair amount of attention, primarily as ammunition in academic culture wars. The basic exercise is an LLM-based assignment of social science extracts to one of 10 ideology levels (right to left) that are defined by views of a set of political figures plus a Monthly Review writer.

The analysis does *not* provide credible evidence on ideological bias/imbalance in social sciences. It is disappointing to see academics tout the paper. I frankly doubt most of them have even bothered to read it and certainly have not thought about the empirical methods.

What are the problems?

1. Arbitrariness of ideology scale.

The exercise reifies a set of subjective choices about ideological categories and treats their putative rank order from 1 to 10 as cardinal measures of ideological orientation. Why is Tom Cotton and not Mitt Romney the choice for center right? Why is Joe Machin the anchor for the measurements, i.e. defined as a moderate? One can go on. There is no reason to believe the results are robust to different choices of figures for the various ideological categories.

2. Cardinal measures are inappropriate for ideological positions as used in the paper. Conditional on the choices of figures to rank order different positions on a right left scale, it is not meaningful to say the ideological distance between Cotton and Manchin is the same as between Manchin and Biden, etc. By implications the ideology scores for papers are not meaningful.

3. The ideology measurements are not interpretable even in an ordinal sense. The analysis assumes a scalar notion of ideology which is not tenable.

4. The exercise is a black box as to *why* an abstract is associated with the ideology of a particular figure. Without understanding how the association is done, substantive claims the papers under study cannot be made.

The article gives an example that illustrates the problem. Ronald Oaxaca's classic 1973 paper "Male-Female Wage Differentials in Urban Labor Markets" is ranked as 7, a match to Elizabeth Warren and thus "progressive". The abstract contains this sentence

"Culture, tradition, and discrimination tend to make restrictive the terms by which women may participate in the labor force."

which presumably is the source of the match. But anyone who knows the article also knows it is an exploration of how to identify discrimination versus other sources of Male/Female labor market differences. The method Oaxaca developed in fact provide a way to remove nondiscriminatory reasons for M/F differences. The only sense in which it is "progressive" is if one thinks that interest in the role of discrimination in labor market outcomes is sufficient to label a paper as progressive. This is obviously nonsensical.

More generally the association of a paper's abstract to a political positions does not distinguish between 1) the subject matter is putatively of interest to left versus right figures versus or 2) the paper's analysis has been affected by ideology.

This identification failure also undermines the paper's claim that social science has drifted to the left. Consider economics. It is certainly true that interest in inequality has increased in economics. This reflects, in my opinion, an intellectual enrichment of the field. I would go so far as to say inequality was understudied 40 years ago. Further, the openness of economists to sociological and psychological factors in understanding inequality has changed. If, as suggested by then Oaxaca example, the LLM used here codes papers on inequality as "left" then the purported ideological drift is scientifically desirable.

If one wants to criticize the role of ideology in social science, it is necessary to delve into the details of particular research programs and specific arguments and analyses. The type of exercise conducted in this paper is not informative.

[Adam Gamoran @agamoran]

@tomloveless99 Agreed. My comment: https://t.co/b07y5pG269

[NNERPP @RPP_Network]

Did you know? The full proposal (by invitation) deadline for @Spencer_Fdn’s RPP Grants is coming up on March 31! https://t.co/LfpMejOqDZ

[Dan Goldhaber @CEDR_US]

A fine summary and commentary by Checker Finn about Amber Northern's recently released report about the future of @IESResearch.

https://t.co/LsNqMw11nV

[Jennifer Doleac @jenniferdoleac]

@FriedrichHayek Have you read it?