Sutherland's latest: Rhetorical cherry-picking or just good old-fashion intellectual dishonesty?

The latest smokescreen from The Sutherland Institute’s pro-voucher message factory gives Utahns a textbook look at how to cherry pick pseudo-scientific sources for rhetorical purposes.

“The empirical evidence underscoring the correlation between increased academic achievement and higher parental involvement is overwhelming," said Paul Mero, president of The Sutherland Institute.

The Web site links to a flier with a headline titled, “Vouchers work everywhere they have been tried.” (My emphasis)

Pshaw.

One of the two sources the flier cites to back up that gross overstatement is “School Choice: The Findings,” which was published this year by the Cato Institute. Its author apparently is Herbert J. Walberg.

The Cato Institute does not produce objective policy analyses. Its "studies" are not products of a rigorous academic peer-review process. Answers to its questions are framed within a libertarian worldview. Results are intended to promote libertarian solutions.

Libertarian input yields only libertarian output.

Cato does what Cato does because that's what its uber-conservative sugar daddies demand.

Here's a list of some of them:

• Castle Rock Foundation. Established by the Coors Foundation as a way to fund conservative projects outside of Colorado;

• Koch Family Foundations. Financed via the oil and gas fortunes of Fred G. Koch, a founding member of the John Birch Society;

• The John M. Olin Foundation. In 2001, gave $20,482,961 to fund right-wing think tanks including the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Project for the New American Century, which enabled neo-conservatives to openly advocate for total U.S. global military domination and lay intellectual framework for what has turned out to be the debacle in Iraq;

• Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. According to Media Transparency, “The overall objective of the Bradley Foundation is to return the U.S. - and the world - to the days before governments began to regulate Big Business, before corporations were forced to make concessions to an organized labor force. In other words, laissez-faire capitalism: capitalism with the gloves off. … It has seen its greatest successes in the areas of welfare ‘reform’ and attempts to privatize public education through the promotion of school vouchers .... ”;

• Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation. In 2002, gave $22 million to fund radical causes; donated to an organization that pays poor women, especially those addicted to drugs, either to be sterilized or to undergo long-term birth control.

Walberg, author of the study cited by The Sutherland Institute, is a longtime school-choice advocate/academic who has worked at conservative think-tanks legitimized (in too many cases in exchange for generous endowments) by name-brand universities.

According to the Cato Web site, Walberg sits on the board of directors at the Heartland Institute, a Milton Friedman-loving, Al Gore-hating organization in Chicago that wants to privatize America’s K-12 education system ... and pretty much everything else.

(Joseph Bast, president of Heartland, has written that he considers voucher programs to be springboards to the long-range goal of privatization. "Soon, most government schools will be converted into private schools or simply close their doors. Eventually, middle- and upper-income families will no longer expect or need tax-financed assistance to pay for the education of their children, leading to further steps toward complete privatization." As of March 2007, eight Utah lawmakers sat on Heartland's “Board of Legislative Advisors”, including Utah Senate Majority Leader Curt Bramble.)

Paul Mero says, “Vouchers work everywhere they have been tried.” Does he mean they work well? If that’s the case, he's not particularly well informed.

Mero's rhetorical vision has not been clouded by research intended to independently evaluate established voucher programs, including the following:

• A U.S. General Accounting Office review of privately funded voucher programs in New York, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C., that found no significant differences in general student achievement;

• A review of a voucher program in Washington, D.C., by researchers hired by the U.S. Department of Education that showed no difference in achievement levels;

• A study by the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education of the voucher program in Cleveland, Ohio, that found no significant increase in the achievement levels of students in voucher schools;

• Or an exhaustive seven part series published by The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that, at best, showed mixed results after vouchers were introduced.