Contact: Jamie Horwitz (202) 549-492, jhdcpr@starpower.net
BUNKUM AWARDS FOR SHODDY EDUCATION RESEARCH ANNOUNCED
Grand Prize Winner Compares Charters Schools to Cancer – Where Cancer is a Good Thing
National Education Policy Center for the First Time Awards a “Get a Life(time) Achievement Award” to an Individual – Dr. Matthew Ladner, an Advisor to Jeb Bush’s Advocacy Organization
National Education Policy Center for the First Time Awards a “Get a Life(time) Achievement Award” to an Individual – Dr. Matthew Ladner, an Advisor to Jeb Bush’s Advocacy Organization
Boulder,
Colo. -- The National Education Policy Center (NEPC),
housed at the University of Colorado Boulder, has announced via online video
the winners of the 2011 Bunkum Awards –presented for the most compellingly
lousy educational research for the past year.
The video is now available for viewing at http://nepc.colorado.edu/think-tank/bunkum-awards/2011.
The 2011 Bunkum Grand Prize goes to the
Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), which received the “Cancer is Under-Rated
Award” for Going Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sector’s Best.
In its report, which advocated the rapid expansion of preferred charter
schools, PPI compared those charters to viruses and cancers.
PPI says that it “conducted research about when
and how exponential growth occurs in the natural world, specifically examining mold,
algae, cancer, crystals and viruses. We used these findings…to fuel our
thinking about fresh directions for the charter sector.”
“The Progressive Policy Institute deserves our
top award for combining a weak analysis, agenda-driven recommendations, and the
most bizarre analogy we’ve seen in a long time,” stated Kevin Welner, director
of NEPC. “This report spoke to us in ways matched by no other publication.”
Welner and the NEPC recognized the report for its
almost complete lack of acceptable scientific evidence or original research
supporting the policy suggestions, as well as its failure to make the case that
its suggestions are relevant to school improvement. To view the NEPC review of
this report, and for a link to the report itself, visit http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-going-exponential.
The NEPC also awarded its “Get a Life(time)
Achievement Award” to Dr. Matthew Ladner, senior advisor of policy and research
for Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education. This is the first time
NEPC bestowed an individual with a Bunkum Award.
“We’ve never before found someone with an
individual record of Bunkum-worthy accomplishments that just cries out for
recognition,” stated Welner. “Dr. Ladner’s body of Bunk-work is focused on his
shameless hawking of what he and the Governor call the ‘Florida Formula’ for
educational success.”
Specifically, Ladner argues that because Florida’s
test scores had increased during a time period when Florida policy included
things like school choice and grade retention, these policies must be
responsible for the scores. Yet decades of evidence link grade retention
practices to increased dropout rates, not to improved achievement.
Moreover, Florida’s recent test score results are
notably unimpressive, but Ladner continues to promote his favored policies, blaming
the scores on a slide in home prices and other factors he says are “impossible”
to determine. Learn more at http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/learning-from-florida.
NEPC’s other 2011 Bunkums (full descriptions are
available at http://nepc.colorado.edu/think-tank/bunkum-awards/2011):
- “Mirror Image Award (What You Read is Reversed),” to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for Learning About Teaching (2011 First Runner-Up). Although the Foundation touted the report as “some of the strongest evidence to date of the validity of ‘value-added’ analysis,” showing that “teachers’ effectiveness can be reliably estimated by gauging their students’ progress on standardized tests,” the actual data show only a modest correlation between teachers’ effectiveness and students’ test scores. http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-learning-about-teaching
- “If Bernie Madoff Worked in School Finance Award,” to ConnCAN for Spend Smart: Fix Our Broken School Funding System. This report promotes a “money follows the child” funding system that would have the effect of making funding even more inequitable by shifting funding away from students in poverty and those learning English. http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-spend-smart
- “If Political Propaganda Counted as Research
Award,” to the Center for American Progress and the Broad Foundation, for Charting
New Territory: Tapping Charter Schools to Turn around the Nation’s Dropout
Factories. Drawing on mysterious backwards-engineering techniques, the
authors of this report build a foundation for their findings and
conclusions that mimics real evidence. http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-charting-new-territory
- “Discovering the Obvious While Obscuring the
Important Award,” to Third Way for Incomplete: How Middle Class Schools
Aren’t Making the Grade. Mixing and matching data sources and units of
analysis to such an extent that it’s almost impossible for readers to
figure out which analyses go with which data, the report attempts to
convince its readers that middle-class schools are doing a lot worse than
we think. In fact, the results show the results of middle class schools to
be … in the middle. http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-middle-class
The word Bunkum comes from Buncombe County in
North Carolina. Buncombe County produced a Congressman, Representative Felix
Walker, who gained infamy back in 1820 for delivering a particularly
meaningless, irrelevant and seemingly endless speech. Thus, bunkum became a
term for long-winded nonsense of the kind often seen in politics, and today in education.
The National Education Policy Center unites a diverse group
of interdisciplinary scholars from across the United States. The Center is
guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education is strengthened
when policies are based on sound evidence. To learn more about NEPC, please
visit http://nepc.colorado.edu/.
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