2010 was a banner year for bunk, leading to a new record of 24 reviews. Yet our awards can recognize only the true crème de la crème of bunkiness. This year’s victors include contributions from perennial frontrunners like Fordham, Heartland, and Heritage, but surprise winners included the South Carolina Policy Council Education Foundation, which until now had toiled unrecognized in the minor leagues. And we also were compelled to open the contest to an important new competitor – the U.S. Department of Education – which seems poised to contribute exceptional bunk for the foreseeable future.
This year’s Grand Prize goes to Secretary Arne Duncan and his U.S. Department of Education staff for the exceptionally disappointing low quality of their research reviews supporting their plans for the reauthorization of ESEA (aka, the Blueprint). 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.
The issues addressed in the Blueprint and the research summaries are certainly vital to the nation’s education system – standards, teacher quality, comprehensive education, special needs, safe and healthy students, and charter schools. But across the board, our reviewers found the work to be of inadequate quality. One reviewer was astounded that the administration did not mount a comprehensive defense of its central education policies. The research summary reviewed by another was described as a “political text that starts with a conclusion and then finds evidence to support it.” Then, there was the question of critical omissions – such as the complete absence of a rationale for the chosen accountability system and intervention models. In terms of sources, the research summaries were often found to be summarizing non-research. For example, only 10% of the 80 or so citations in the “Great Teachers, Great Leaders” summary referred to peer-reviewed research sources.
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