One of the chapters in my new book, The Malfunction of US Education Policy, relates my experience with a research center focused on educational standards and testing—for decades, the only federally funded research center on the topic. That experience was not good.
Long story short, it grossly misrepresented a study I managed that had been, ironically, funded by a federal agency. In addition, I was told that I could not attend a conference where my study was first misrepresented to the public, and an erratum promised for publication in the center newsletter never appeared. Misrepresentations continued for two decades and can still be found in several of the research center’s publications, available for free download online, paid for with your tax dollars and mine, and in journal publications of the center’s principals.
Because I cannot read minds, I cannot know the motivations of the research center directors, but two coincidences may provide clues. First, they were conducting their own (much smaller) project on the same topic—the costs of educational testing—at about the same time and may have viewed mine as competition for the attention they sought for theirs. Second, they apparently did not like my study’s results.
Evidence for the latter arose a decade later with a report from an amply funded study at a partner organization on the same topic. The authors’ estimates were, in their own words, “about six times higher” than previous estimates. I dissect their estimation methods starting on page 21 here.
As the research center was government funded, naturally there must have been some process available where I could lodge my complaint. That process started with the US Education Department’s official contact for the research center contract, the contract overseer, as it were. I made that contact, and was told he could do nothing, as he had no responsibility for “editorial” decisions made by the center.
In other words, research center members could say whatever they pleased about their and others’ work. Though the center was federally funded, its oversight, at least at that time, was no better than that typically found at academic journals, where whatever passes the cursory review of two unpaid volunteers enters the scholarly record. Once there, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to extract.