NEPC Reviews Explained

"This is such a valuable service that you folks provide. I use your reviews in all of my classes. I can talk about the policy process until I’m blue in the face, but when I give them the original report to read, and then the review from your shop, they begin to see the construction of a policy position in a way I could never explain it otherwise."

· William D. McInerney, Purdue University

NEPC Reviews are expert third-party reviews of selected non-peer-reviewed publications. Using academic peer review standards, reviewers consider the quality and defensibility of a report's assumptions, methods, findings, and recommendations. Written in non-academic language, reviews are intended to help policymakers, reporters, and others assess the social science merit of a reviewed report and to judge its value in guiding policy.

Although America’s education policymakers have nominally embraced the idea of tying school reform to "scientifically based research," too many of the nation’s most influential education policy reports are based on little more than junk science. A hodgepodge of private "think tanks" and other institutions at both the state and national levels now wield significant and undeserved influence in policy discussions by cranking out an array of well-funded and slickly produced, ideologically-driven "research." NEPC Reviews expert third party reviews help policymakers, the media, and the public separate high quality research "wheat" from shoddy, ideological "chaff." See also NEPC's Shoddy Research Archive - Bunkum Award Winners 2006-2016.