Each year, the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado presents its annual Bunkum awards.
These are awards that acknowledge the very worst think tank reports of the year.
Be sure to review previous winners of this not exactly coveted dishonor.
Drum roll, please!
The “Three’s a Harm” award goes to…(open the envelope)…the Friedman Foundation!
Here is a quote from the ceremony itself:
“After being shut out of the 2010 and 2011 Bunkum Awards, four-time winner Friedman has returned in spectacular fashion. Seldom does a report hit the “trifecta:”
- Erroneous information
- Faulty reasoning
- Inspired chutzpah
The problems begin with the report’s claims that test scores and dropouts have not shown any visible improvement between 1992 and 2009, during which time school staffing increased 2.3 times. Even setting aside problems with the staffing claim itself, our reviewer points out that the report’s fundamental premises asserting no improvements in test scores and an increase in the drop-out rate are flat wrong. In reality, there has been clear improvement in NAEP scores for all student subgroups, particularly students of color and younger students. And despite the change to a more stringent definition of drop-outs, graduation rates have increased, helping to raise college attendance to historic highs.
Soaring on the wings of flawed reasoning, with a strong updraft of chutzpah, the report’s author jumps from his platform of sham evidence to deliver three unsupported recommendations: a call for class size increases, a call for cuts in administrative and teaching staff and a call for increased school choice. As our reviewer points out, US public school class sizes are larger than those in our “competitor” OECD countries and are, in fact, larger than the idealized and attractive small classes in the private schools the Friedman Foundation touts. Small class sizes are apparently only bad and wasteful when they are in public schools. Similarly, there is the inconvenience that charter schools divert a higher proportion of their spending into administrative largesse.”
Accordingly, not only does the report’s call for increased school choice have no visible relation to the data, it undermines two other recommendations from the same report. It uses bogus information to draw ungrounded causal conclusions that in turn lead to an unsupported series of recommendations that are in conflict with one another. Our judges were amazed.”
The second Bunkum award is titled: “The ‘Trust Us, There’s a Pro-Voucher Result Hiding in Here Somewhere.”
Another drum roll! Among many contenders, the winner is: The Brookings Institution and Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance for “The Effects of School Vouchers on College Enrollment: Experimental Evidence from New York City.”
Again, to quote from the citation for the award:
“These authors wander aimlessly around a data wilderness, searching for positive evidence about school vouchers. Their report attempts to make the case that New York City partial vouchers of $1,400 per year to attend private elementary schools for three years had later positive impacts on college attendance, full-time college enrollment and attendance at selective colleges for African American students. It received lavish media attention, including a foot-stomping commentary by the report’s authors in the Wall Street Journal that scolds President Obama for what they regard as his outrageous failure to line up behind voucher policies.
To help understand the problems with this report, let’s all mentally travel to Sunnyside, Nevada, which hit a high temperature of only 14°F on January 17, 2012. Even while the world was experiencing record heat, Sunnyside posted a record cold for that date. If we wanted to distract attention from overall warming trends, we might lead with this and other cherry-picked data. It’s an old trick that often works, if nobody pays attention to the overall trends and if nobody questions the cherry-picking.
Yet this is essentially the approach used by the Bunkum-winning Brookings report, which finds positive college-related impacts for African American students (but not for other students) who had received vouchers back in elementary school. The researchers, of course, had no a priori reason to think that African Americans would benefit in this way from vouchers, when other students do not. They simply explored the data, found lots of results showing no voucher benefits and then found this one (akin to Sunnyside, Nevada) that helped support their advocacy of vouchers…Buried on p. 12 of the report is the statement that for the total sample, there was “a tiny insignificant impact.” As for the claims of a positive effect on college attendance of African Americans, there were no statistical differences between ethnic groups. Yet the authors chose to trumpet a positive effect for African Americans.”
The third award–the “Noblesse Oblige” award– went to the Public Agenda Foundation for its report “What’s Trust Got to Do With It?”
In this bizarre report, Public Agenda recognized that parents don’t like it when their local public schools are closed, but they need to be “educated” to what is best for them. Or as the award committee wrote:
“Reading this report, one learns about a problem that few of us knew existed. Apparently, there is a great deal of confusion in disadvantaged communities where wealthy strangers have arrived laden with school-turnaround gifts. The patrons of these communities are inexplicably and unjustifiably seen as patronizing—or even as destructive intruders. Fortunately, the Public Agenda Foundation has stepped up with this report which outlines ways to help members of these communities to get their minds right.
The report examines why citizens have proprietary attitudes toward their community school and why they resist external “change agents” who are intent on improving those schools for the citizens’ own good.
In the view of this report, these uninformed and parochial parent attitudes are obstacles to the re-making and improvement of community schools. According to its authors, “Many parents do not realize how brutally inadequate local schools are.” As a result of their ignorance, parents have raised irrational and unwise objections to firing teachers due to low test scores or to their school being closed, privatized, broken-up.”
The “Scary Black Straw Man” Award goes to: The Center of the American Experiment for “Our Immense Achievement Gap: Embracing Proven Remedies While Avoiding a Race-Based Recipe for Disaster.”
The Awards Committee wrote:
“The nature of this irredeemably awful report is betrayed in the title, which seeks to alert readers to the evidently toxic combination of policy ingredients that, in the fevered imagination of the authors, amounts to a “race-based recipe for disaster.” Moreover, the imagined carnage would not be confined to the kitchen. In the apocalyptic metaphorical landscape of this report, aspects of our transportation system are also at risk: A “train wreck” resulting in massive “liabilities” of “billions of dollars” is the likely result of state policymakers colluding, in their promotion of race-based school reform policies, with advocates for busing and school funding. Our judges quickly checked the acknowledgements section to see if Chicken Little was listed as an advisor.
This exercise in hysteria was precipitated by a Minnesota Department of Education report on concentrated poverty and segregation, along with three other reports published by equity-focused organizations. These reports suggest policies such as a continuation of existing pro-diversity efforts, establishment of state standards for when equity could be considered achieved, a sharper focus on existing programs, and the encouragement of voluntary fair housing and magnet school programs.”
There you have it, folks. More evidence of advocacy disguised as research.
My one disappointment in the awards ceremony was that I was hoping that the Brookings Institution would win special recognition for firing me last June because I was “inactive.” As it happened, on the same day I was fired, my latest book was #1 in social policy on amazon.com, a statistic that often shows a high level of activity.
Way funny!
My favorite quote form the article:
Re: Scary Black Straw Man…”The author’s stated passion for closing the achievement gap, accompanied by an equally passionate rejection of initiatives sensibly designed to close it, raises obtuseness to the level of performance art.”
Obtuse as performance art…we should all remember that one!
Thanks Diane and Bunkum Awards for a great laugh.
Regarding the Noblesse Oblige Award, when I read the description, a passage from Ch. 22 of Invisible Man came to mind. Brother Jack, explaining the Brotherhood’s lack of concern for the will of the people in Harlem, says, “We do not shape our policies to the mistaken and infantile notions of the man in the street. Our job is not to ask them what they think but to tell them.” It’s that amalgamation of hubris, condescension, bigotry that lies at the heart of such education reform strategies.
NEPC embarrasses itself. Any judge in the nation will recognize that the organizations ridiculed by NEPC are the ones actually doing what Forum for Education and Democracy claims to do. The clearheaded efforts of Kettering’s David Mathews (former HEW Secretary, university president, and author of Reclaiming Public Education by Reclaiming our Democracy) deserve more respect. Bump the public education doomsday clock forward big time for NEPC’s blundering call–assuming anyone pays attention to NEPC, that is.
From the report:
PUBLIC AGENDA
Nearly all of Public Agenda’s opinion studies on K-12 education are available online at http://www.publicagenda.org. Moreover, the website’s section for ‘public engagers’ houses guides to planning and moderating community conversations, video discussion starters, and reports on what other communities have done. Public Agenda’s primer on public engagement reviews the basics. It’s at http://www.publicagenda.org/files/pdf/public_engagement_primer_0.pdf.
THE KETTERING FOUNDATION
The Kettering Foundation has worked with communities nationwide exploring ways they can use community conversations and other engagement practices to address local and regional challenges. The Foundation’s research and publications on public education, available at http://www.kettering.org, are especially useful. The Foundation’s recent work on community responses to the achievement gap is summarized in the video, No Textbook Answer, available at http://www.kettering.org/achievementgap.
THE NATIONAL ISSUES FORUM (NIF)
The Issues Forums are a “network of civic, educational, and other organizations and individuals, whose common interest is to promote public deliberation in America.” Over time, it has “grown to include thousands of civic clubs, religious organizations, libraries, schools, and many other groups that meet to discuss critical public issues.” Not surprisingly, the website at http://www.nifi.org contains practical advice on how to organize and moderate community forums, and NIF has prepared a number of citizen discussion guides on K-12 issues that are useful in getting local conversations started.
Eric,
NEPC did not give the Bunkum award to David Mathews or the Kettering Foundation. It gave the award to a hugely embarrassing report about how to persuade parents who don’t want their public school to close. I was in one of the focus groups, as it happens, and I urged Public Agenda not to dismiss the views of the parents and to recognize that the parents might be right.
Thanks, Diane.
You (well, intellectual honesty) forced me to take a closer look. Bottom line is probably that no one seems to be applying the Kettering/Mathews work to the Broader/Bolder agenda. That would all but ensure failure of Broader/Bolder.
Some comments motivated by the report.
Apparently Ohio contributors to Great Lakes/NEPC are unaware that Ohio’s (constitutionally mandated) accountability requirements have forked from Kettering Foundation’s engagement strategies. Who is asking “How ‘choice work’ facilitates a ‘change process’ that realizes an ‘improvement process?'” Ohio’s Senate Ed Committee chair, Kettering Foundation staff, and TQM specialists are nearly neighbors–but decisions get made in Columbus, with lawyers and lobbyists close by.
Report authors didn’t seem to know “reform” and “turnaround” are loaded terms, distinct from “transformation” and “improve/improvement.”
I sense too few forum iterations with too few adjustments to issue framing.
Expert participants (and NEPC reviewer) not fluent with Kettering Foundations publications:
Reclaiming Public Education by Reclaiming Our Democracy
Naming and Framing Difficult Issues to Make Sound Decisions
Framing Issues for Public Deliberation: A Curriculum Guide for Workshops
Naming and Framing Difficult Issues to Make Sound Decisions
Naming and Framing Difficult Issues to Make Sound Decisions (video)
Questions more in line with Ohio’s (pre-NCLB/pre-RTttT) school improvement strategy include:
– Would you like public officials to fulfill their legal obligations, especially the ones that improve outcomes for schoolchildren?
– Montgomery County, MD. received a gold medal (presidential) award for its efforts to improve public education. Would children benefit from a similar effort in your school district?
Second try at citations:
Reclaiming Public Education by Reclaiming Our Democracy
Framing Issues for Public Deliberation: A Curriculum Guide for Workshops
Naming and Framing Difficult Issues to Make Sound Decisions
Working Through Difficult Decisions
No Textbook Answers (video)
Eric, the Bunkum award went to Public Agenda, not the Kettering Foundation.
The Citizens’ Solutions Guide: Education by Public Agenda (2012) presents a broader/bolder approach (Approach Three): Give public schools the financial and community support they need to help all children learn.
Given the working relationship between Kettering Foundation and Public Agenda, the NEPC review insults southwest Ohio. The state’s teachers ought to withdraw funding if NEPC is unwilling to bring their work products up to Ohio standards. It’s not just being snubbed by a group 1200 miles away–It’s their indifference to allowing Ohio schoolchildren to benefit from the rule of law.
I would really like to see Edushyster or Perimeter Primate or someone else make a humorous list of the Top Ten Most Wanted for crimes against Education. Their crimes: corruption, theft, neglect, ignorance, arrogance, and exploitation of children. Maybe someone could create profiles of the Most Wanted and we all could vote. Can’t you just picture at #1 The Billionaire Boys Club. That way, we would have a clear list the enemies of a free Public education in America.
MAP testing and NWEA have a connection to the Friedman Foundation as follows. The Kingsbury Center is NWEA’s research institute. The Kingsbury Center granted a Data Award to James Woodworth who conducted research on VAM which compared the MAP test to TAKS for use in VAM. In his report http://www.kingsburycenter.org/sites/default/files/James%20Woodworth%20Data%20Award%20Research%20Brief.pdf he claims that the VAM used in MAP only misidentified 1% of the teachers. Woodworth also conducts research for the Friedman Foundation promoting school choice in http://www.edchoice.org/Research/Reports/The-Greenfield-School-Revolution-and-School-Choice.aspx
The NWEA fix is in.