StickWithANose

This piece of craptastic think tank hackery offers up way too many falsities and howlers for me to parse through every one… I’ve got articles to write! So, I’ll just point out one instance of hackery in action to point, yet again, toward the method of spreading corporate propaganda in the early 21st century. Case in point:

Class-size reduction, which receives another large chunk of Title II funds, is popular with teachers and parents. But its extremely high cost raises questions about whether there are more cost-effective ways to boost student achievement. And research shows that giving students a highly effective teacher will have a much greater impact on their achievement than reducing class size.

For example, one study found that “the average difference between being assigned a top-quartile or a bottom-quartile teacher is 10 percentile points” on a scale of mathematics performance. In contrast, “a random assignment evaluation of a classroom-size reduction in Tennessee found that schools could improve achievement by half as much—5 percentile points—by shrinking class size in early grades.” Research on the impact of class-size reduction in later grades provides little support for its use as a strategy to raise student achievement. Furthermore, class-size reduction policies tend to exacerbate the shortage of effective teachers in high-poverty schools, thus undermining attempts to close achievement gaps.

What is going on here is that these hacks [Chait and Miller] are once again shilling for the Teacher Incentive Fund that ties teacher pay and promotion to standardized test scores. Their approach is to dismiss other tried and true policy approaches as being ineffective, or less effective, than what they’re pimping, but notice how they’re doing so. These public  intellectuals cite two “studies” to justify these assertions. But who conducted these studies? Why it’s the Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institute! So, their evidence comes from their own organization and another affiliated institution that is hawking the same wares as CAP, but this how the game is played. The world of think tanks is a self-referential world of epistemic feed-back loops.

Think tanks don’t do research in the conventional sense. In the academy, publishing research requires that you submit your work to a blind review process in which peers in your field review your work to ensure rigor and intellectual honesty. There is no such process in what think tanks produce. They are, to borrow a term from Stone, recycling bins that have a standard set of solutions in search of problems.

“Research” in the world of think tanks is a political process that is designed to further the policy goals of those who fund the institution, and it is produced in droves. [1][2] The beauty of it all is that each piece of “research” think tanks produce references other pieces of “research” produced by think tanks thus creating the veneer of legitimacy. It allows public intellectuals like Chait and Miller and professional bloggers like Matt Yglesias to make statements such as, “research shows…”, when in fact research literature usually says no such thing. More importantly, the tangled webs they weave make it virtually impossible to de-bunk their claims. Doing so would require that one travel down an almost endless number of self-referential rabbit-holes of hackery in order to de-bunk each claim in the epistemic chain. Who has the time or resources to do that?

This, my dear readers, is how policies are formulated, political knowledge is constructed, and political power is generated. Nearly a century ago, a very wise fellow did a beautiful job of articulating how this all works from inside one of Musollini’s jails, and he did so long before the age of the internet and the fragmentation of popular media. Political power is generated on the contested landscape of “common sense.” Those who can most effectively define what is “true” wins the day in politics…