New in the Nonpartisan Education Review:
http://nonpartisaneducation.org/Review/Essays/v10n1.htm
The aggressive, career-strategic behavior of researchers in federally funded centers and think tanks creates many problems, including a loss of useful information and bad public policies based on skewed information.
But, two adverse consequences worry me the most. First, these badly behaved researchers are the only ones that most journalists and policy-makers pay any attention to.
Second, the effects of their bad behavior are spreading overseas. The education testing research function at the World Bank, for example, has been handed down over the past few decades from one scholar affiliated with Boston College’s School of Education to another (and all of them Irish citizens). True to form, they cite the research they like, some of which is their own, most of the rest of which comes from the censorial Center for Research in Educational Standards and Student Testing (CRESST), and imply that the vast majority of relevant research does not exist.
More recently, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published a one-sided study on educational assessment that ignores most of the relevant research literature and highlights that conducted at a certain US federal research center and several US think tanks. Their skewed recommendations are now the world’s.