He proffers the proof in voucher fights

Jay Greene, who calls pure objectivity "fiction," combines research and advocacy to provide the statistics that boost the school choice movement.

DAVIE - His research has been lauded by Gov. Jeb Bush and discussed by members of Congress. The president recently appointed him to a prestigious panel. He is a regular on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal.

And in a case of researcher nirvana, one of his studies was cited four times last year in the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision on school vouchers.

But on a rainy afternoon in South Florida recently, Jay Greene is in his tiny office doing a radio interview with a station whose call letters he can't quite recall.

Greene, 36, is working hard to get out the word on his latest paper praising Florida's school voucher program. Judging by the long list of media outlets scribbled on a nearby white board, his outreach extends from the large and powerful to the small and hard to place.

Greene's research - and his talent for publicizing it - have made him one of the most influential voices in the contentious debate over school choice. He is a godsend to the voucher movement because time and time again his work has reached the same conclusion: Vouchers are good.

But traditional researchers question his objectivity. Some say Greene is one of those promising academics who traded obscurity for relevance, sacrificing objectivity in the transaction.

In his latest paper, Greene and co-author Marcus Winters found that vouchers spurred dramatic improvements in Florida's most struggling public schools. Again: vouchers good. Jeb Bush loved it. The teachers union hated it.

Greene resists the notion that he has become a "Researcher to the Right." Yet his work undeniably provides hard data and scholarly cover to policies driven largely by ideology. It enables voucher advocates to pepper their arguments with the phrase, "The research shows . . . "

Operating with a staff of three in a windowless, converted doctor's office in Broward County, Greene makes no bones about wanting to make a splash.

"I consider myself a professor with a really big classroom," says Greene, who especially wants to influence the "policy elite" he considers his primary audience.

"For 50 years, people have looked to academics as the guys in robes, the monks that you go to for neutral opinions and wisdom," said Greene's friend Frederick Hess, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "Now we know they've got their biases and opinions like everyone else. All Jay is doing is making this transparent.

"Is that laudable or dangerous?" Hess asks. "It's both."

If Greene and his staff are right-wing zealots who sold their talents to the highest bidder, they aren't keeping up appearances.

Their tiny office is a decorator's nightmare, featuring inherited furniture and drab gray paint. One of the desks is balanced on cinder blocks. They call the place their "research bunker."

Greene and his staff don't play the part, either. They are more likely to quote from The Simpsons than Milton Friedman. Greene, in fact, is a registered Democrat.

He makes a conflicted case for his political affiliation.

"All the things Democrats care about, I care about. I want to be in the party that is eager to help people who are disadvantaged," Greene says over lunch in an Indian restaurant. "I'm interested in their constituents, but not necessarily in their solutions."

Greene's mother was a teacher, devoting much of her career to the public schools in a Chicago suburb. Greene attended public schools. (He now sends his children to a Jewish day school.) He earned a degree in history from Tufts University, then a master's and doctorate in political science from Harvard.

How did the bright Jewish kid from the Chicago suburbs become the darling of the school choice movement?

In the early to mid-'90s, Greene seemed destined to be an academic who, as Hess puts it, "spends years nailing down something trivial and then communicates his findings in jargon." While at the University of Houston, he wrote a paper on the history of conflict between the executive and legislative branches.

His audience could only grow from there.

Greene then co-wrote a paper on an exciting new experiment in the Milwaukee schools: vouchers. The researchers declared them effective. Their findings were political dynamite. Greene and co-author Paul E. Peterson were lionized by some, pilloried and second-guessed by others.

Greene was hooked.

"I decided it was okay to be interested in matters of public importance," Greene says.

Greene eventually left academia. He now works for the Manhattan Institute, a think tank known for market-based solutions that often are labeled "conservative." Greene heads up the institute's education research arm.

He doesn't always favor conservatives. While he has repeatedly flattered Florida's voucher programs, the Bush administration took a hit last year when Greene rated the state's graduation rate the worst in the nation.

"They only love me when they agree with my findings," Greene says with a smile.

It's hard to say what generates more reaction: his findings or his methods.

Chester Finn, a former assistant secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan, now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, said in an e-mail that Greene is "one of the most fertile, prolific and imaginative (also dogged, intrepid) young education policy scholars in America."

Finn said Greene is not entirely a new breed. Other "conventional, liberal" scholars, he says, combine research and advocacy.

John Witte, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has a professional rivalry with Greene dating back to Witte's original research on the Milwaukee voucher program. After reviewing Greene's latest research paper, he said: "His studies are becoming less sophisticated. There's less to them as time goes by.

"I'm not aware," Witte says, "that he has ever done any research that did not reflect positively on school choice. It's just not realistic."

Such criticism does not seem to bother Greene.

He has little patience for the plodding pace and "uselessness" of so much traditional research. And he has even less patience for the "fiction" of pure objectivity.

Would it be responsible, he asks, to wait years to report on a voucher program's effectiveness when so much is at stake?

"We want to move the policy debate forward," he says. "I like the idea that our work is timely and useful."

Voucher advocates, he says, are "experimenting based on their visions of the world. I want some evidence that tells us what they're doing is helpful or at least not doing any harm."

In answer to the inevitable question, yes, Greene thought vouchers showed promise even before he started researching the subject. His readings in graduate school left him predisposed to believe in the logic of vouchers.

"I believe incentives work, and vouchers provide an incentive for schools to improve," Greene says.

The application of a business model to public schools puts Greene in the company of conservatives and libertarians.

The difference is that Greene doesn't take it as an article of faith that business principles work in education. If there is a setting where those principles might not apply, he says, it is the rough-and-tumble arena of a gazillion uncontrolled variables - the nation's public schools.

In the middle of the recent "release day" at his Davie office, Greene is worrying that the Christian Science Monitor might not take his opinion piece based on his latest paper.

Then he gets word that the national publication will run it. But they want a few changes. There is too much focus on the proposal for vouchers in the dismal Washington, D.C., schools.

Greene and co-author Winters look at each other for a moment. "Done!" Winters exclaims. He goes off to make the adjustments.

"We like to think of ourselves as a full-service think tank," quips senior research associate Greg Forster.

Greene is pleased. That's another check mark next to one of those publications on the white board, another opportunity to influence and inform.

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