This year's grand prize is given to the Friedman Foundation for its impressive body of shoddy work, artistically combining exaggeration, misleading statements, skewed use of research, and unsupported conclusions. Perhaps the most worthy of these is a September 2007 Friedman handbook entitled, The ABC’s of School Choice. It purported to summarize the research on several forms of choice programs. Our reviewer concluded, "Evidence -- particularly on the issue of achievement -- is consistently abused in this report, both by misrepresenting individual studies (including those by voucher advocates) and misrepresenting the general body of research on choice."

Unquestioned faith that privatization in one form or another will solve educational problems was a pervasive think tank theme throughout 2007. Repeatedly, our reviewers pointed out instances where reports made an Olympian inferential leap to market remedies, even though the rest of the report provided little or no empirical support for that conclusion. Our two winners bounded the longest distance: a Cato report entitled, End It, Don’t Mend It: What to Do with No Child Left Behind and the Report Card on American Education, published by the American Legislative Exchange Council.

A May 2007 Friedman report trumpeted its finding that the nation’s "twelve [voucher] programs have saved a total of nearly half a billion dollars" (School Choice by the Numbers: The Fiscal Effect of School Choice Programs 1990 – 2006). Our reviewer, however, noted that even if the report’s flawed calculations were accepted, a savings of a half-billion dollars was "a savings of less than 1/100th of one percent of annual public school spending, or about 60 cents per child per year."

In How Much Are Public School Teachers Paid the Manhattan Institute author used hourly earnings data to contend that teachers are better paid than most white-collar professionals. This might have been impressive except, as our reviewer noted "this approach is fundamentally flawed because the [dataset’s] calculation of weeks and hours worked is very different for teachers and other professionals. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics – which publishes the [dataset] – has explicitly warned its users not to use hourly rates of pay in this exact same context."

Ohio’s Buckeye Institute, in Shortchanging Disadvantaged Students: An Analysis of Intra-district Spending Patterns in Ohio, argued against increased state funding for school districts on the grounds that those districts did not fairly allocate money to schools serving disadvantaged students. The review of the report raised serious questions about the validity of the calculations and conclusions. But beyond that, we were somewhat taken aback by the report’s novel argument which was essentially, 'Because we care about disadvantaged students getting insufficient resources, we recommend against more state funding.'

We give this special award to the Friedman Foundation, which places on page two of each of its reports a section entitled, "Our Challenge To You." The passage begins, "Our research adheres to the highest standards of scientific rigor," and it ends with "prove us wrong. Judge our work by scientific standards and see how it measures up. If you can find anything in our work that doesn’t follow sound empirical methods, by all means say so. We welcome any and all scientific critique of our work..." Over the first two years of the Think Tank Review Project, six reviews of Friedman studies were published. Two reviews included substantial praise, mixed with varying degrees of criticism; the four others generally described the Friedman reports as misleading and poorly grounded – certainly not adhering to "the highest standards of scientific rigor." Yet, notwithstanding the page two "Challenge," we have received no communications from the Friedman Foundation to date, and the key shortcomings found by reviewers have never been addressed by the Friedman Foundation. The Foundation has also not softened its penchant for publishing reports that selectively and misleadingly cite research and that routinely make grand and unsupported inferential leaps to arrive at policy recommendations arguing for privatization.