Pundits' Battle Exposes the Politics of Research

"What's criminal is for the media to clothe him in a mantle of objectivity or neutrality," he said. Finn cited an Education Week report that called the Center on Education Policy "a Washington-based research organization" but said the Friedman Foundation was a "group that supports greater choice in education." If the newspaper were even-handed, he said, it would have described CEP as a "group that favors increased federal education spending." Education Week reporter Michelle Davis said she used words from the groups' Web sites to describe them and mentioned Jennings's Democratic Party background in the article.

Gerald W. Bracey, a Fairfax County-based educational psychologist and research columnist who opposes what he calls the Friedman Foundation's campaign for "the elimination of publicly run schools," said Jennings "has indeed managed to get media to see him as impartial, in contrast, say, to me or Greg [Forster]."

But Jennings's statements "usually sound reasonable to me," Bracey said, while Forster and Education Next seem partisans for vouchers and other Republican Party positions.

Both sides seem to recognize the difficulty of accomplishing what Jennings has tried to do: figure out how state education departments and school districts are using the tools given them by No Child Left Behind. Forster even finds a few good things to say about Jennings's center in the Education Next article. "Education professionals looking for a detailed review of the policies, procedures, and regulations used under NCLB [No Child Left Behind] will find much that is useful in these annual studies and other CEP publications on NCLB," he said.

Finn and Bracey, who rarely agree on anything, expressed sympathy for Jennings's struggle to make sense out of state and local responses to the federal law that are varied and hard to measure.

"Survey data such as he gathers always suffer the weakness that you might not be getting the same information as if you sent a team in to look at what is happening," Bracey said.

Finn said Forster was right to point out that the Center on Education Policy surveys school system leaders and does not collect independent factual information. But he added: "That may be inevitable . . . as there's no obvious source of plain hard facts, at least in this case."

Doing good education research is hard enough without being confused by labels and slogans, several experts said. Alexander Russo, a former teacher and Democratic Senate staffer, said on his blog This Week in Education, http://www.thisweekineducation.com/ , that whatever one thinks of Forster's conclusions, his article suggests that more care be shown by those "who have tried to recast themselves as unaffiliated and independent quasi-academic voices . . . education reporters who might have to think about who they're quoting, and . . . the foundations who fund them to do good research."