Kevin Welner asserts that a recent blog post in which I criticized him, his organization, and his colleagues ?avoids substance? and includes a ?broad intimation? of bias and some awful, hurtful, shameful ?personal attacks.? Basically, Welner cannot rebut any of my specific accusations, so he has chosen to pretend that they don't exist.
First, there is plenty of substance in my post. What Welner meant to write, I think, was that there was no substance in his own post, which brims with the intentionally measured but meaningless language of the academy. Second?a ?broad intimation? of bias? No, no, no: my post contained very direct accusations of bias?a bias dishonorably hidden behind phony academic dispassion. These accusations Welner has decided to ignore. And as for personal attacks: my post attacked things that deserve the assault, specifically Orwellian wordplay and?disguised agendas. Welner is clearly confused?it is his own colleagues who relish attacking persons; e.g., Alex Molnar, another ?dispassionate academic? who works with Welner, who has called Senator?Lamar Alexander a ?vampire? (see my earlier post for more on that).
Of course, this is all de rigueur in the realm of education academia. If you have nothing worthwhile to say, if you cannot counter the serious and real criticisms that have been launched against you, then you cry about personal attacks and overbroad salvos, and you publicly pine for that bright day when everyone will come together in bland faux-accord, when lions and lambs will share a room. But others are uninterested in this namby-pamby charade; they're actually interested in the truth. Was it Sun Tzu who wrote that you should never come to a blog fight without actual weapons?
?Liam Julian
Addendum:
Also, Welner wrote about my prior post that it contained ?nothing . . . about the specific merits of any think tank review itself.? Fair enough (it?was a blog post, you know?you can't get to everything all at once). So allow me to fix that oversight:
In 2006, Welner's group, the Think Tank Review Project, bestowed its ?Truthiness in Education? award on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute for ?The State of State Standards 2006,? which I coauthored. A look back at TTRP's review of the Fordham publication is instructive.
?The State of State Standards 2006? summarized five previous reports that judged the relative soundness of K-12 content standards, in five subjects, of 49 states and the District of Columbia and assigned grades to them. TTRP's supposedly impartial reviewer, Ken Howe (the same Ken Howe who coauthored a 2003 anti-voucher brief with Welner), found the Fordham report's grading to be ?seriously lacking in methodological rigor.? He concluded, therefore, that readers ?would be ill-advised to base any decisions about policy or practice on the grades? that Fordham assigned.
The first and most obvious point is that Howe criticized the standards study based on impertinent criteria. His write-up is comparable to a restaurant review that faults Nobu for not offering New York Stip. Which is to say that ?The State of State Standards 2006? was not a heavily quantitative study, and it never purported to be. Fordham's panel of experts (Howe bellyaches that they're not identified?yet in the acknowledgements, there they all are) assessed the mass of state standards based on qualitative measures in a number of categories and assigned each document a numerical rating. Those ratings were tabulated and translated to a simple A to F grading scale, which rendered the results more accessible to the policymakers and non-PhDs for whom the report was intended. This process is described generally in the 2006 document, and it is detailed carefully in the individual subject reports that ?The State of State Standards 2006? summarized, despite Howe's incomprehensible claims to the contrary.
Howe was further disgruntled that Fordham elucidated ?little description or defense of the procedure by which the [grading] criteria were developed and validated.? But the criteria need not be defended in this way. Fordham is an outspokenly biased organization: It believes, a priori, that English standards ought to specifically identify the books that students should read; that any passable set of science standards must cover evolution; that math standards should not be too eager to have young pupils use calculators; et cetera. Readers who find these beliefs objectionable are free to decline the Fordham report's conclusions, just as those for whom raw fish is distasteful can and should avoid dining at Nobu. It is foolhardy to grouse because a policy report that doesn't claim to be rigorously quantitative isn't rigorously quantitative, or to carp because it bases its judgments on principles that certain readers may reject. Perhaps Howe and the TTRP folks are offended simply by the blatancy with which Fordham and other, similar groups espouse their positions. One can plainly see how such blatancy might offend a crew that constantly masks its own biases.