Caveat Emptor Award
The Lexington Institute

This year's grand prize is given to the Lexington Institute for its report "Immersion, Not Submersion, Vol III." This report purports to demonstrate the success of California's Proposition 227, an anti-bilingual ballot initiative passed in 1998 that emphasizes English-only teaching methods. The Lexington report's findings rest on a smorgasbord of bad data, severely flawed methodology, and a willful disregard of a large body of conflicting research evidence.

Truthiness in Education Award
The Fordham Institute

The first runner up is the Fordham Institute for two reports: "Trends in Charter School Authorizing" and "The State of State Standards 2006." In each case, Fordham authors collected data, analyzed the data, and then presented conclusions that their own data and analyses flatly contradicted.

Damned Lies Award for Statistical Subterfuge
The Manhattan Institute
Harvard Program for Education Policy and Governance

The Program for Education Policy and Governance at Harvard and the Manhattan Institute share the second runner up honor. The Harvard folks won for their "On the Public-Private School Achievement Debate," while the Manhattan Institute is being recognized for its twin reports "Getting Ahead by Staying Behind: An Evaluation of Florida's Program to End Social Promotion" and "Getting Farther Ahead by Staying Behind: A Second-Year Evaluation of Florida's Policy to end Social Promotion." Each of these reports demonstrated a flair for the resolute use of statistics to achieve a desired outcome. The Harvard report, however, deserves special recognition. Dissatisfied with the work of other researchers who found private schools to have worse academic results than public schools once student characteristics were accounted for, the authors of the Harvard report offered an alternative of, at best, tangentially related statistics that failed to factor in the student demographic differences that were supposedly at the core of the analysis.

The Cato Institution

The Cato Institution is recognized for "Giving Students the Chaff: How to Find and Keep the Teachers We Need." After sensibly describing the importance of high-quality teachers, the authors take a leap of faith, ungrounded in their own research or the larger body of existing research, to conclude that choice and vouchers offer the best strategy for recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers.

The Reason Foundation

The Reason Foundation is recognized for "Assessing Proposals for Preschool and Kindergarten: Essential Information for Parents, Taxpayers and Policymakers." This report relied on selective citation of research and then presented policy conclusions poorly linked to the limited literature reviewed as well as to the authors' own findings.

Ohio's Buckeye Institute

Ohio's Buckeye Institute is recognized for "The Financial Impact of Ohio's Charter Schools." Buckeye's report offers a wonderful illustration of the logical fallacy, "post hoc ergo propter hoc" (after this, therefore because of this). After noting that charter school growth coincided with revenue growth in urban school districts, the report announced the unfounded conclusion that the first caused the second.

Think Tank Review Project

The Think Tank Review Project provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think-tank publications. The project is a collaborative effort of the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University and the Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado.

Thirteen reports by 10 different think tanks were reviewed in 2006 by independent scholars. Reviewers for the Think Tank Review Project apply academic peer review standards to reports from think tanks and write brief reviews for the project web site. They are asked to examine the reports for the validity of assumptions, methodology, results, and strength of links between results and policy recommendations. The reviews, written in non-academic language, are intended to help policy makers, reporters, and others assess the merits of the reviewed reports.

The Think Tank Review Project is made possible by funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

Bunkum: Background

From the "MacMillan English Dictionary Magazine":