education, developmental psychology, research methods at UC Irvine
Irvine, CA
Joined December 2018
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Drew Bailey retweeted
can we pull ourselves out of the quantum foam?
The Planck scale for program evaluation
mysticsandstatisticsblog.sub…
@tw_watts
@drewhalbailey
Drew Bailey retweeted
The U.S. federal government spent nearly 2 decades funding "gold standard" RCTs for educational programs. What did we actually learn from all of that work?
Our new blog post takes on this question and asks whether we can do better in the future:
substack.com/home/post/p-218…
Drew Bailey retweeted
Hey folks! @drewhalbailey and I are starting a new blog about social science and policy.
Come for the social science takes, stay for the Warren Zevon references...
substack.com/@mysticsandstat…
Drew Bailey retweeted
New paper out today in Educational Researcher, in collaboration with Carolina Maldonado-Carreño, @drewhalbailey, Greg Duncan, @e_escallon, and @ErvynNorza
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.…
We examine what happens inside early childhood classrooms when a homicide occurs nearby
Drew Bailey retweeted
Ariely and a lot of “replication crisis” social psych contributed to an erroneous view of the human world, which is that little things cause big things. Instead, big things are caused either by other big things or systematically correlated agglomerations of little things.
Ariely is a much bigger issue than Arday ever was. Arday was an aberration, but nobody with a fully functioning brain takes any of that stuff seriously anyway. He was evolving in fields that are themselves aberrations. The real issue behind Arday was the people who hired him and their political agenda, as well as the fact that nobody dares to speak up against an obvious farce. Arday himself wasn’t the biggest issue in his own story.
Ariely, on the other hand, was supposed to be a serious scholar and a real “academic star.” I actually took one of his online courses and was quite impressed. A lot of smart people not only took him seriously but also devoted years of their lives to studying behavioral economics without knowing they were building on quicksand. That’s a lot of resources and years wasted.
I co-authored some papers linked in this piece. My work doesn't find that "Head Start has Never Worked". Indeed, we've written about how the effects of high-quality early education programs are sometimes positive, including in the long-term, on real life outcomes. 1/6
The New York Times claims that Head Start “works,” ignoring research showing that any improvement in cognitive skills among its intended beneficiaries fades out by third grade. Sadly, the Trump administration has backed off plans to pull the plug on this quintessential Great Society program, which has sucked up $240 billion in taxpayer funding since its inception in 1966. But if not now, when?
My latest in City Journal: city-journal.org/article/hea…
Reference 2: Head Start Plus: The case for piloting a Cadillac public ECE program
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.…
6/6
Bonus reference: for why fadeout doesn't necessarily mean a program "didn't work":
educationnext.org/why-do-mos…
7/6
Drew Bailey retweeted
Authors can't be trusted to run their own robustness checks.
In 17 AER papers, only 12/211 robustness checks "fail" with p > 0.05 (white).
In robustness checks chosen by 3rd parties, almost *half* of them fail (blue).
1/
I think this paper is really important. Favoring unbiased estimators can actually increase bias when coupled with selective reporting, and we have lots of reasons to think that economists are doing plenty of this.
Excited to share a new paper with @jfischman, just accepted at JEL.
We argue that empirical research tends to be biased and overconfident due to a weakness in the dominant econometric framework: insufficient attention paid to humans “in the loop” with the research process. 1/
Drew Bailey retweeted
Test score gains fade.
But long-term outcomes like graduation and earnings often persist.
So what does that mean for judging school success?
@drewhalbailey joins The Education Gadfly Show to discuss the fadeout effect.
Listen: fordhaminstitute.org/nationa…
Drew Bailey retweeted
📢 #EdWorkingPapers: @tw_watts, @EmmaRoseHart, & @drewhalbailey analyze 87 RCTs to assess persistence of educational intervention effects & find that fadeout is common. Intervention characteristics explain a small share of differences in persistence.
📄 bit.ly/4aGrXY4
Drew Bailey retweeted
Why do educational intervention impacts fade? Isn't catch-up a good thing? Are sleeper effects real? Does fadeout mean failure?
@drewhalbailey, @tw_watts, and I address these questions & more in an EdNext piece & 4 new working papers!
educationnext.org/why-do-mos…
Drew Bailey retweeted
🚨 New working paper!
How well do people predict the results of studies?
@sdellavi and I leverage data from the first 100 studies to have been posted on the SSPP, containing 1,482 key questions, on which over 50,000 forecasts were placed. Some surprising results below.... 🧵👇
A clear and compelling read on IES. I hope policymakers pay attention to this. There is a very strong bipartisan case to be made for continuing to fund the development, evaluation, and syntheses of evaluations of educational programs and policies.
Helping teachers learn what works in the classroom − and what doesn’t − will get a lot harder without the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences theconversation.com/helping-… via @ConversationUS
