NIEER defends pre-K report

National Institute for Early Education Research Director Steve Barnett defended the group’s annual pre-K “Yearbook” in a blog post today, saying that the post written last week criticizing NIEER by Fordham Institute’s Checker Finn “relies heavily on innuendo and insinuation, topped off by outright error.”

Last week, Finn criticized the Education Department for entering into a contract with NIEER to collect and analyze the pre-K data because NIEER advocates for expanding pre-K. Not only has the department “outsourced the number-gathering [for the pre-K data] to a prominent interest group in the field, it has allowed that interest group to add its own spin, then issued the results in the guise of a government statistical publication,” Finn wrote.

In his response, Barnett defends both the contract with the Education Department and NIEER’s research methods.

“Why did NCES contract with NIEER to collect survey data on state pre-K? The straightforward answer is because these data are valuable and would not have been collected otherwise,” Barnett writes.


The Education Department responded earlier this week that public notice was provided about its intention to undertake the data collection and its content and it "did not receive comments suggesting the proposed collection or reporting approach was biased. The proposal to let this contract was also publicly advertised and no objections or concerns were raised to the sole-source contract.”