Update: Dean Millot posts his second installment.
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Nobody Beats the Biz
Update: Dean Millot posts his second installment.
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Dean Millot is being fundamentally dishonest in that he misquotes me. He says that I argue: "In short, I see no problem with research becoming public with little or no review.”
In fact I wrote: "In short, I see no problem with research initially becoming public with little or no review." (See http://jaypgreene.com/2008/07/08/eduwonkette-apologizes/ )
The absence of the word "initially" makes quite a difference and sets up the straw man that he wishes to knock down. The issue is not whether research can benefit from peer review, but whether it is inappropriate to make it publicly available INITIALLY, before it has received peer review.
So much for Eduwonkette's praise of Millot's "measured, careful, and thoughtful analysis."
Hi Jay,
Three things:
1) With all due respect - though in this case Millot's post was specifically about your original post - this debate is not about you, and it puzzles me that you continue to see this as a referendum on Jay Greene. It's not. You're not the first and will not be the last to release non peer-reviewed research with a large PR office behind you. If you read back on Millot's blog since it started, or on Alexander Russo's blog, or on my blog, this is an ongoing debate, one that far predated your entry into the blogosphere.
2) I seriously doubt that the word "initially" was left out intentionally, and I don't think the issues at hand are different even if research is ultimately peer reviewed. What paper have any of us ever put through the peer review process that doesn't result in our conducting new sensitivity analyses, answering new questions, and as a result, presenting a slightly more nuanced storyline? Did your follow-up peer reviewed articles land themselves back in the press?
3) I suggest that you take some time and read back on Millot's blog, because he has a tremendous body of careful and systematic work up that make your claim that he is not "measured, careful, and thoughtful" a canard. That reputation extends well beyond the omission of one word - a word that doesn't even change the meaning of what you wrote - so you are really grasping at straws here to personally discredit those writing about a topic you'd rather see left untouched.
I suggest that readers check out this excerpt from Millot's post, and then read the whole thing:
"Greene argues that he was victimized by a strawman I set up last week. In his words, I asserted that Greene believes “research doesn’t benefit from peer review.” Readers will have to decide that for themselves by re-reading my post. I suggest that in his initial effort to swat down eduwonkette, Greene got cocky and overstated his own position. It is hard for him to say he does see some problems with his research for Manhattan becoming public with little or no review. Claiming to be the aggrieved party is his best chance of walking back the cat. But in making this claim, Greene is the one setting up the straw man.
I doubt any other edbizbuzz reader inferred that last week’s Letter From was intended to address the vast spectrum of education “research.” I think a reasonable person would understand that my comments were prompted by, and addressed to, a specific situation – the release of a study offered to the media, and by implication to policymakers, with all the fanfare of research subject to peer review, but without the peer review.
In that context, I addressed Greene’s statement of having “no problem with research becoming public with little or no review.” I did not say that Greene does or does not believe in the value of peer review as a general proposition. I suggested he ought to have a problem with this specific fact-pattern because 1) post-hoc review by the market is not a reliable means of quality control, and 2) there are no compelling reasons to forego the review process.
I’m arriving a bit late to this conversation, and I want to be careful not to simply repeat what’s already been said by Dean Millot, Sherman Dorn, Eduwonkette or the other posters here.
In Eduwonkette’s original post ( http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/eduwonkette/2008/07/the_trouble_with_the_education.html ), she linked to a published review of an earlier report authored by Greene and Winters: “even when researchers working in the policy advocacy industry make sloppy, indefensible errors - for example, when Greene and Winters used data that the Bureau of Labor Statistics warned against using ( http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-how-much-are-public-school-teachers-paid ) to show that teachers are overpaid - they're not approached with caution by the press when the next report rolls around.”
That review, written by Professor Sean Corcoran (NYU), was part of the Think Tank Review Project ( http://thinktankreview.org ), which I co-direct. Our project has reviewed, over the past three years, four different reports from Greene and Winters, offering some praise but also documenting errors: overstating effects, omission of key information, weaknesses in data and analyses as well as research design, unsubstantiated assumptions, poor use of existing literature, and (in the instance noted by Eduwonkette) inappropriate use of a database. Comparable mistakes have been found in most other think tank reports.
I’ll briefly note here that I see our Project, as well a comparable project started recently by the What Works Clearinghouse ( http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/quickreviews/index.asp ), as being part of a dialogue rather than as some sort of objective final word. In fact, that’s how I also see the blind peer reviews that I receive from journals, regarding my own work.
Here are the urls for the four “Think Tank Reviews” of Greene and Winters reports:
http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-effect-of-special
http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-getting-ahead-staying-behind-an-evaluation-floridas-program-end-social-promotion
http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-how-much-are-public-school-teachers-paid
http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-getting-farther-ahead-staying-behind-a-second-year-evaluation-floridas-policy-end-s
These reviews should not necessarily be taken as a criticism of the authors’ scholarship. If anything, it’s a criticism of the publication process used by think tanks. Most of us who publish our research have been humbled when our mistakes are pointed out in the peer review process, but we’ve also been relieved that those mistakes were identified before actual publication.
I’m also sympathetic to Jay Greene’s timeliness argument; the peer review and pre-publication process for many academic journals can take literally years. But think tanks could set up their own, streamlined peer review process, as I believe has been done at the Hoover Institution’s Education Next ( http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/about ). I believe that non-advocacy think tanks like Rand and AIR have also set up rigorous (although usually internal) review processes. My own policy center created, about three years ago, a streamlined peer-review process for the policy briefs that we release ( http://epicpolicy.org/publications ), and I’ve never regretted the decision. Even our think tank reviews go through an abbreviated peer-review process.
The other part of this conversation -- concerning the role of the press in reporting on different studies -- is also of great interest to me. I hope to add to that discussion here soon.
"In short, I see no problem with research initially becoming public with little or no review."
Wanting to invoke "initially" as the key word, but still sending out a press-release about the work seems to me to be wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
If it's "a preliminary result" it's a working paper tossed out to the world to have holes poked in it. If it has a press-release with it, most people would take it to be in its final form.
I'll also toss into this discussion a quote from physicist Juan Collar that impressed me when I ran into it on at Cosmic Variance (http://cosmicvariance.com):
I try to teach my students that a good experimentalist does not need any critics: he or she is his/her own worst enemy. If you don’t feel a sincere drive to debunk, test and revise your own conclusions, you should be doing something else for a living.