Malfunction of US Education Policy

A 2023 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic TitleThe 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 "e;big bang"e; 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; andthird, 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 "e;cargo cult"e; 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 "e;citation cartels"e; 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.