The Criticism

Greg Forster, senior fellow at the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, critiquing Jack Jennings, president and chief executive of the Center on Education Policy:

The media seem to see Jennings and the CEP as the voices of education research and reason, an enviable position at a time when nonpartisans are hard to come by. Jennings uses this highly desirable media perch to promote findings that he says are the result of empirical research conducted by the CEP. He says, for instance, that [No Child Left Behind] is too strict and is underfunded, that its more controversial requirements are unworkable and should be scrapped, that only big new state spending can help kids pass exit exams and that school choice is unproved and dangerous. Is this nonpartisanship or something else?

Jack Jennings wasn't always a professional 'independent,' 'nonpartisan' researcher. In fact, for the better part of three decades (from 1967 to 1994), he was one of the most powerful education policymakers on Capitol Hill, as a Democratic staffer for the House Education and Labor Committee at a time when the Democrats completely controlled the House. His influence over federal education policy was enormous: He worked on every major education bill that went through Congress in those years. . . . But how does a lifelong partisan congressional staffer change his spots and become a disinterested professional researcher who follows the evidence wherever it leads?

The answer, in this case, is that he doesn't.

The trouble with the studies is that they do not gather data about the issues they purport to examine. . . . The CEP claims to be studying not what the policies are, but how they are implemented and how they are affecting education. To examine implementation, the CEP relies exclusively on surveys of state education officials and interviews with public school staff. In other words, CEP researchers report as facts what the public school system says about how things are going in the public school system.