The Malfunction of US Education Policy

Abstract

A 2023 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title

The Malfunction of US Education Policy: Elite Misinformation, Disinformation, and Selfishness biased and inefficient information dissemination that has degraded US education research and policy since the year 2001, when a series of unfortunate disruptions began:

• first, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and federal imposition of an idiosyncratic and ineffectual testing program;

• second, the “big bang” reorganization of the US education testing industry from a stable, cooperative oligopoly run by psychometricians to a commercially competitive free-for-all with more opportunist and customer-pleasing ambitions; and

• third, the Common Core standards, which mandated homogenous lower content standards onto the still required NCLB testing structure.

Billions from the federal government and wealthy foundations have transformed many once-independent national education organizations into “cargo cult” dependents and promoters of the new order, intolerant of divergent points of view. The research and policy brain trust responsible comprised an alliance of convenience among two “citation cartels” of establishment and reform scholars and politicos, and an astonishingly cooperative and un-skeptical group of journalists. It succeeded in focusing attention on their work, while diverting attention away from a much larger universe of others’ work (by ignoring, dismissing, or demeaning it) that included a century’s worth of mostly experimental scholarship in the fields of psychology and program evaluation.