Newcomer joins longtime think-tank veterans in garnering prize for dreadful education research
Contact:
William Mathis, NEPC
(802) 383-0058
William.Mathis@colorado.edu
BOULDER, CO (February 3, 2011) – A surprise newcomer has walked away with top honors in the 2010 Bunkum Awards, issued annually by the National Education Policy Center as part of the Think Twice think tank review project. The Obama administration’s Department of Education gained the well-deserved recognition for the “exceptionally disappointing low quality” of the research summaries the department released in support of its Blueprint for Reform.
The Bunkum Awards each year acknowledge reports on education issues from think tanks and other sources that represent the worst of the worst when it comes to research quality. Past winners have been lauded for their shoddy methods, evidentiary cherry-picking, and tendentious reasoning.
For 2010, we identified eight outstandingly flawed reports, sorted into six categories. Brief descriptions of the awards are set forth below; for the full awards announcement, please visit http://nepc.colorado.edu/think-tank/bunkum-awards/2010
The “Good Enough for Government Work” Award, to the Obama administration for its research summaries in support of A Blueprint for Reform. Our esteemed panel of judges solemnly considered whether the federal government was even eligible for such an award. With so many resources at its disposal, the government seems to have an unfair advantage. But the Blueprint research summaries stood out in two ways that we felt needed recognition. First, they almost religiously avoided acknowledging or using the large body of high-quality research that the federal government itself had commissioned and published over the years. Second, they first raised our expectations with repeated assurances that recommended policies would be solidly grounded in research – only to then dash those hopes in research summary after research summary.
http://nepc.colorado.edu/reviews-obama-administrations-six-research-sum…
The ‘If I Say It Enough, Will It Still Be Untrue?’ Award, to the Heritage Foundation’s Closing the Racial Achievement Gap, by Matthew Ladner and Lindsey Burke. The award notes Ladner’s success in repackaging in many different venues and media his spurious claim that a series of Florida reforms, including tax vouchers and grade retention, “caused” racial achievement gaps to narrow in the Sunshine State. “Ladner’s fecundity isn’t really what sets this work apart. It’s his willingness to smash through walls of basic research standards in his dogged pursuit of his policy agenda,” according to our judges. “Nothing in the data or analyses of Dr. Ladner or the Heritage Foundation comes even close to allowing for a causal inference.”
See http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/learning-from-florida
The ‘F Double Minus’ Award, to the Heartland Institute and authors Herbert Walberg and Mark Oestreich for their 2010 State School Report Card, ranking states and DC on student achievement and other metrics. The cool part about these grading reports is that the imperious think tank raters get to assign awful grades to states and schools that have not adopted their group’s cherished reforms. The Heartland report was 2010’s most egregious exemplar of phony ratings, with the Education Trust’s Stuck Schools named as runner-up; both reports suffered from forced-distribution schemes that guaranteed some schools or states would fail regardless of actual performance.
See http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-2010-state-school-report
See http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-stuck-schools
The ‘Plural of Anecdote is Not Data’ Award. Our first award went to the Reason Foundation for its report Fix the City Schools arguing for “portfolio” school districts and citing improvements in student achievement in New Orleans in the post-Katrina era. The report relied overwhelmingly on attention-grabbing anecdotes yet ignored reasons unrelated to the portfolio approach – such as the massive exodus of low-income children from the city, plus a significant increase in resources – that could explain those improvements. Also garnering recognition, the Fordham Institute’s Charter School Autonomy contends that charter schools have been deprived of the autonomy necessary for them to deliver on the innovative practices they promised, yet the report bases its case on anecdotes. Despite the title, it fails to address autonomy in relation to financial performance, resource allocation, academic results, or other key school characteristics and outcomes.
See http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-fix-city-schools
See http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-charter-school-autonomy
The ‘Remedial Arithmetic’ Award, goes to the Cato Institute’s report They Spend WHAT?, which substitutes its researcher’s own calculations of school spending—including an inappropriate double-counting of building expenditures—for actual spending data readily available.
See http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-they-spend-what
The ‘Magic Potion’ Award, the final award of 2010, is given to the South Carolina Policy Council Education Foundation for its report, How School Choice Can Create Jobs for South Carolina, which blithely predicts that a voucher scheme will miraculously decrease the unemployment problem of five poor, rural South Carolina counties.
See http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-how-school-choice
Find the 2010 Bunkum Awards on the NEPC website at:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/think-tank/bunkum-awards/2010
The Think Twice think tank review project (http://thinktankreview.org), a project of the National Education Policy Center, provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound, reviews of selected publications. The project is made possible in part by the support of the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.
The mission of the National Education Policy Center is to produce and disseminate high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. We are guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education is strengthened when policies are based on sound evidence. For more information on NEPC, please visit http://nepc.colorado.edu/.