Bunkum Awards Spotlight Shoddy Ed Research: Winner Says Charter Schools Should be Like Cancer
Boulder, CO (May 31, 2012)-- The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed at the University of Colorado Boulder, has announced via online video the winners of the 2011 Bunkum Awards presented for the most compellingly lousy educational research for the past year. The video is now available for viewing at http://nepc.colorado.edu/think-tank/bunkum-awards/2011.
The 2011 Bunkum Grand Prize goes to the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), which received the Cancer is Under-Rated Award for Going Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sectors Best. In its report, which advocated the rapid expansion of preferred charter schools, PPI compared those charters to viruses and cancers.
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Mirror Image Award (What You Read is Reversed), to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for Learning About Teaching (2011 First Runner-Up). Although the Foundation touted the report as some of the strongest evidence to date of the validity of value-added analysis, showing that teachers effectiveness can be reliably estimated by gauging their students progress on standardized tests, the actual data show only a modest correlation between teachers effectiveness and students test scores. http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-learning-about-teaching
If Bernie Madoff Worked in School Finance Award, to ConnCAN for Spend Smart: Fix Our Broken School Funding System. This report promotes a money follows the child funding system that would have the effect of making funding even more inequitable by shifting funding away from students in poverty and those learning English. http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-spend-smart
more . . . http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2012/05/bunkum-2011