Bunkum Awards

Two university-based education policy centers have launched the "Think Tank Review Project" which takes key education think tank findings and subjects them to academic review. In a recent commentary in Education Week, the co-directors of the project argue that such a project is necessitated by the influence that think tank studies have, despite their lack of scientific rigor.

To publicize their efforts, they have created the 2006 "Bunkum Awards" for the most egregious examples of faulty or ideologically motivated research, choosing prominent target such as the Fordham Foundation and Harvard's own Paul Peterson. For each of the six "winners," they present both the piece itself, and a point by point academic critique of its accuracy.

Without a careful point-by-point comparison, I can't vouch for the accuracy of the critiques themselves. And it seems a little worrying that all of the research they chose to puncture are conservative in their conclusions, suggesting that the project may not be quite as non-partisan as it claims. But the general idea is promising. As Richard Posner argued several years ago, debate in the public sphere is entirely unaccountable, and is conducted at a level that wouldn't pass muster in a good undergraduate seminar, not to mention in a peer reviewed journal.

At the same time, academics have to take some responsibility for creating a void that the think tanks rush to fill. Not only the pace of academic production, but the choice of questions that are more motivated by disciplinary concerns than by public ones, has opened up a large niche for think tanks (of varying quality). What we need is a network of academics committed to working on public questions and getting their work to policymakers -- perhaps the good folks at the Think Tank Review would like to publish policy briefs through New Vision?