Bunkum Awards 2007

This year's grand prize is given to the Friedman Foundation for its impressive body of shoddy work, artistically combining exaggeration, misleading statements, skewed use of research, and unsupported conclusions. Perhaps the most worthy of these is a September 2007 Friedman handbook entitled, The ABC’s of School Choice. It purported to summarize the research on several forms of choice programs. Our reviewer concluded, "Evidence -- particularly on the issue of achievement -- is consistently abused in this report, both by misrepresenting individual studies (including those by voucher advocates) and misrepresenting the general body of research on choice."

Unquestioned faith that privatization in one form or another will solve educational problems was a pervasive think tank theme throughout 2007. Repeatedly, our reviewers pointed out instances where reports made an Olympian inferential leap to market remedies, even though the rest of the report provided little or no empirical support for that conclusion. Our two winners bounded the longest distance: a Cato report entitled, End It, Don’t Mend It: What to Do with No Child Left Behind and the Report Card on American Education, published by the American Legislative Exchange Council.

A May 2007 Friedman report trumpeted its finding that the nation’s "twelve [voucher] programs have saved a total of nearly half a billion dollars" (School Choice by the Numbers: The Fiscal Effect of School Choice Programs 1990 – 2006). Our reviewer, however, noted that even if the report’s flawed calculations were accepted, a savings of a half-billion dollars was "a savings of less than 1/100th of one percent of annual public school spending, or about 60 cents per child per year."

In How Much Are Public School Teachers Paid the Manhattan Institute author used hourly earnings data to contend that teachers are better paid than most white-collar professionals. This might have been impressive except, as our reviewer noted "this approach is fundamentally flawed because the [dataset’s] calculation of weeks and hours worked is very different for teachers and other professionals. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics – which publishes the [dataset] – has explicitly warned its users not to use hourly rates of pay in this exact same context."

Ohio’s Buckeye Institute, in Shortchanging Disadvantaged Students: An Analysis of Intra-district Spending Patterns in Ohio, argued against increased state funding for school districts on the grounds that those districts did not fairly allocate money to schools serving disadvantaged students. The review of the report raised serious questions about the validity of the calculations and conclusions. But beyond that, we were somewhat taken aback by the report’s novel argument which was essentially, 'Because we care about disadvantaged students getting insufficient resources, we recommend against more state funding.'