Congratulations to the Fordham Institute and Brookings Institution as this year's big winners in the Think Tank Review Project's 3rd annual Bunkum Awards, given to think tanks for publishing education "research" that is deceptive, sloppy, and lacks quality.

These well-funded think tanks were given the "Charles Murray Prize for Identifying Who Shouldn't Be Educated" for publishing Tom Loveless' alleged education research on "wasted energies."

"[Loveless'] back-to-back winners came only three months apart but both showed his enduring commitment to convincing policy makers that too much effort is spent academically challenging the wrong children," said University of Colorado Professor Kevin Welner in announcing this year's awards.

In "High Achieving Students in an Era of NCLB," published by the Fordham Institute, according to the project, Fordham tries to build a case that there is too much emphasis on low-achieving students at the expense of high achievers, who become "languid." The report does this by presenting "NAEP score comparisons of trends among high- and low-scorers, showing faster growth at the bottom of the distribution." Not so fast.

The Think Tank Project points out that although Loveless notes that one cannot make causal inferences from simple correlations, what does the report do? Just that: it "makes patent causal inferences to bolster its policy recommendations."