The Friedman Foundation garners the MIBTIWSIOMT award this year for building two distinct franchises on little more than fixated false claims.

One set of five cloned state studies offered the repetitive conclusion that high school dropouts would be reduced and economic prosperity advanced if voucher programs were introduced in each state. Although severely handicapped by the fact that there is no significant evidence that vouchers will reduce drop-outs, the author hangs his hat on a single 1998 study. Ironically, the Friedman reports themselves criticize the very approach used in this cherry-picked article: reliance on administrative counts (such as reports of school principals) to estimate high school graduation.

Even more impressive than this first effort, the Foundation stamped out ten separate state surveys, all of which came to the conclusion that potential voters in each state endorsed private school vouchers. Admittedly, the surveys suffered from biased questions and were administered to respondents whose own responses showed limited knowledge of the educational policy issues they provided opinions about. But the important thing is that these respondents’ conclusions were substantially more pro-voucher than the Kappan Gallup poll responses on the same topic (except that the Friedman survey reports never mentioned the Gallup research). Perhaps most damning, the authors reached so far that their pro-voucher conclusions were not even supported by their own problematic survey data.