The people who run the Think Tank Review Project have a newish book out: Think Tank Research Quality: Lessons for Policy Makers, the Media and the Public. Its point, according to one of the authors, Kevin Welner, is that thorough, meticulous and academic education research is largely ignored by the media and politicians. ?The conclusion,? Welner says, ?is not that there is a crisis of quality in education research. Instead, our conclusion is that the ways in which research affects policy-making are determined more by communications and networking strategies than by the actual quality of the research itself.? He writes especially disapprovingly of ?the selective use of research to bolster ideologically pre-determined findings.?
Here are some things worth knowing about Welner, his coauthors, and the Think Tank Review Project:
The Think Tank Review Project (TTRP), despite what its burnished title insinuates and its press releases explicate, does not really exist to review think tanks. It is a group funded by teachers' unions that mostly hopes to discredit classroom innovation, especially choice and competition, and to thusly peddle its own predictable agenda.
The history and development of TTRP is a dense stew of acronyms, accusations, and academese?unappetizing stuff. Yet, to understand the organization's evolution and purpose, dip a ladle?one must. TTRP was founded in 2006 by Welner and Alex Molnar, professors of education at, respectively, the University of Colorado at Boulder and Arizona State University (Molnar is also a coauthor of Think Tank Research Quality). It is a spinoff group, though, which evolved from the Education Policy Studies Laboratory (EPSL) at Arizona State that Molnar ran for several years. What type of work did EPSL do? In 2001, for example, it released ?Let the Buyer Beware,? a report coauthored by Molnar that lambasted the Mackinac Center?a state-based, free-market think tank?for putting out what EPSL called low-quality work deserving of skepticism. The report also wrote accusingly of the Mackinac Center: ?Notwithstanding its description of itself as ?non-partisan,' the organization supports market solutions for public policy challenges and opposes government intervention?positions that can be fairly characterized as politically conservative.?
The indictment is weak. An organization can believe in free markets, oppose government intervention, hold conservative viewpoints, and also be nonpartisan (that is, belong to no political party). Indeed, that and its vice-versa counterpart are the modi operandi of many if not most think tanks, from the Center for American Progress to the American Enterprise Institute. Does Molnar believe all of them are somehow deceitful? Mackinac, moreover, is overly forthright about its ideological allegiance: Its website is headlined, ?Mackinac Center: Free-Market Public Policy for Michigan.?
Juxtapose that frankness with the murkiness employed by Molnar and the old EPSL, which attempted to shroud an ideological agenda with academic jargon and offshoot organizations. The EPSL website (still up and running, although parts are defunct) is divided into four sections. There is the Commercialism in Education Research Unit (CERU); the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU); the Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC); and the Arizona Education Policy Initiative (AEPI). They are each accompanied by mystifying descriptions, e.g.:
The Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU), directed by Professor Alex Molnar,?conducts original research, provides independent analyses of research and policy?documents, and facilitates educational innovation. EPRU facilitates the work of?leading academic experts in a variety of disciplines to help inform the public debate about education policy issues.
This blandness and meaninglessness is intended to intimate impartiality. Yet EPSL and its derivatives were just as biased as the Mackinac Center, perhaps more so, and far foggier about their allegiances. On the bottom of the second page of ?Let the Buyer Beware,? EPSL notes that its research ?was supported by a grant from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.? Sounds innocuous enough. But the Great Lakes Center, itself a purported think tank, is basically a front group for the National Education Association, from which it received $250,000 in 2007?08. The Great Lakes Center was in fact created by the Michigan Education Association, the state's NEA affiliate and largest teachers' union. And the Great Lakes Center now funds TTRP.
Such are the origins of the TTRP organization?hiding a union-backed agenda behind phony academic dispassion. And what about its directors, Molnar and Welner? Unbiased judges? Not so much. While Welner believes vouchers are ineffective, his colleague Molnar outright dismisses them. In a 1997 interview, Molnar said of vouchers and charter schools: ?Oh yeah, they're completely unnecessary. They have nothing to do with improving the quality of public education.? And here, in that same interview, is the purportedly nonpartisan and academically detached Molnar on Republican Senator and former Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander and the conservative-leaning organizations that support Alexander's positions:
Oh, he's coming back. Right now they've got Lamar Alexander on IV over at the Hudson Institute, they're keeping that vampire alive. That's sort of their farm club. They give these felons cash flow to keep them in the public eye . . . These people are responding to the political ideology of their patrons. It's as simple as that. Lamar Alexander by all accounts is a bright guy. He's also probably a crook. He should probably be in jail. So I have no idea what Lamar Alexander believes or doesn't believe really. But I do know that he's certainly very, very responsive to the people that care for him and feed him.
Molnar cannot be taken seriously as an arbiter of the ideas of think-tank organizations that he clearly despises. And Think Tank Research Quality, of which he and Welner are authors, must be similarly assessed. In Welner's 2008 book Neovouchers, he promises to not fall ?into the trap of feigned objectivity.? It is, unfortunately, a trap that he has deliberately set for himself.
?Liam Julian