Who won the education ‘award’ nobody wants to receive?
There are education awards and then there are education awards.
In the first category — those that people in education don’t generally mind winning — we could put the $1 million Global Teacher Prize, given by the Varkey Foundation, the philanthropic arm of GEMS Education, which is the K-12 education company that owns and operates its own GEMS schools in a handful of countries, including Egypt, Abu Dhabi and Uganda.
The foundation, whose honorary chair is former president Bill Clinton, promotes the prize as “the Nobel” of teaching — as there is no actual Nobel prize in education — in an effort to show the importance of teaching in societies around the world. Its first awardee, in 2015, was Nancie Atwell, renowned founder of the Center for Teaching and Learning, an award-winning nonprofit independent K-8 demonstration school in Edgecomb, Maine, where she teaches seventh- and eighth-grade writing, reading and history. The second annual award will be given soon.
But nobody in education genuinely likes winning the Bunkum Award. Presented annually by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, it is given for what presenters say is “shoddy” educational research based on weak data, questionable analysis and overblown recommendations.
The award gets its name from Buncombe County, N.C., where, in 1820, Rep. Felix Walker delivered “a speech for Buncombe” on whether Missouri should be admitted to the United States as a free or slave state, and he rambled on so much that his colleagues yelled at him to stop. From then on, “bunkum” came to mean long-winded nonsense.
The 2015 winner was just announced, and it was the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. It was announced by David Berliner, the regents’ professor emeritus and former dean of the College of Education at Arizona State University, and you can watch the “presentation” in the video below. Berliner is a member of the National Academy of Education and the International Academy of Education, a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a past president of the American Educational Research Association, and a widely recognized scholar of educational psychology and policy.
Here’s the award announcement:
This year’s winner is the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, for Separating Fact from Fiction: What You Need to Know about Charter Schools. The National Alliance (NAPCS) describes itself as “the leading national nonprofit organization committed to advancing the charter school movement.”Separating Fact from Fiction is a fetching, sleek publication adorned with 15 charming photos of smiling children keeping watch over 21 easy-to-digest, alleged “myths” followed by responses that the report generously describes as “facts.” YetSeparating Fact from Fiction might more honestly be titled:Playing 21 with a Stacked Deck
or
Blackjacked! 21 Attempts to Club Sound Policy.Before turning to a small sampling of the report’s problems, however, we’ll offer a compliment: To the credit of the report’s authors, the 21 so-called myths do a good job covering many of the important issues raised by the rapid growth of the charter school sector. Alas, this comprehensive coverage is wasted. TheWho won the education ‘award’ nobody wants to receive? - The Washington Post:
