The Fordham Institute and the Brookings Institution jointly win the Murray for their articles authored by Tom Loveless. His back-to-back winners came only three months apart but both showed his enduring commitment to convincing policy makers that too much effort is spent academically challenging the wrong children.

High Achieving Students in an Era of NCLB attempts to build the case that concentrating on low-achieving children diminishes the growth of the higher achievers, who accordingly become “languid.” Dr. Loveless comes to this conclusion by presenting NAEP score comparisons of trends among high- and low-scorers, showing faster growth at the bottom of the distribution. “[T]his trend,” the report concludes, “suggests a missed opportunity to promote achievement among high achievers.” The Think Tank Project reviewer, however, pointed out a troubling inconsistency. The report correctly notes that its correlational analyses can not be used to draw causal inferences, but it also makes patent causal inferences to bolster its policy recommendations. This over-reach is most apparent in the foreword by Fordham's Chester Finn and Michael Petrilli.

Loveless returns to the ‘wasted energies’ theme in The Misplaced Math Student: Lost in Eighth-Grade Algebra, published by the Brookings Institution. In this piece, Loveless contends that having low-achieving students in algebra classes with highly proficient students dampens opportunities for the best students and dooms many lower achievers to failure. Only one peer reviewed article is discussed, and it comes to a different conclusion – so Loveless criticizes it for selection bias. His research method is to use state NAEP scores and correlate them with algebra-taking rates in each state. Finding no relationship he concludes that his hypothesis is sustained, despite acknowledging that his correlational findings should not be used to argue that causal relationships have been found. Sound familiar?