First, I endorse Eduwonk's take on NAEP scores and their meaning in relation to recent state-specific assessment results. The recent dramatic test score gains in New York and now Maryland have produced a spate of circular reasoning on the part of the "NCLB is a conspiracy to destroy public education and pave the way for Wal-Mart to take over the schools" crowd. That argument holds that the pace of improvement and narrowing of class-based achievement disparities envisioned under the law are absurd and unrealistic--thus, the conspiracy. As evidence, they note that such improvement has never happened before. Now that it's actually happening, the argument is, apparently, that it can't actually be happening, because it's never happened before. Or something.  

Second, it's clarifying to read Eduwonkette's back-and-forth with Jay Greene. The basic problem is that she's jumbling up a discussion of peer review with a discussion of motive and and anonymity. Here she puts blog posts, think tank publications, and academic research on a single continuum of "credibility," asserting that peer-reviewed research is most credible, think stuff less so, and blogs least of all.  But this misses the obvious point that credibility and the processes used to ensure it are highly dependent on purpose. 

The purpose of academic research is to inform, to add to a collective body of knowledge. As a result, credibility assurance processes have been developed that make sense given that purpose, primarily peer review and transparency of sources and methods. Motive and authorship aren't as important--when I read an article in an academic journal, I'm less concerned with who did the work than how they did it, where the data came from and what methods were used for analysis. It wouldn't really bother me if authorship were attributed to "An assistant professor at Columbia University" as opposed to an actual named person; the format of academic research is such that the things I need to know to judge credibility are right there in black and white, or embedded in the journal's publicly stated peer review process.

The purpose of blogs, by contrast, as with all opinion writing, is to persuade. And the motive to persuade always comes from somewhere--agendas, convictions, ideologies, etc. Unlike academic research, opinions and arguments can't be evaluated purely on their own terms. And this is reflected in the credibility-assurance practices of organizations that are in the business of publishing opinions. Op-eds in the Washington Post, for example, always have a little blurb at the end telling the reader who the author is. There's a reason: Imagine if you read a column arguing that climate change isn't such a big problem after all, written by Jane Smith. If you saw that Jane was a p.r. flack for ExxonMobil, you'd take it one way. If you saw that she was the president of the Sierra Club, you'd take it another, and for good reason. Same words, different meaning. 

Motives and affiliations matter, particularly in the realm of opinion. That's why respectable publications like Education Week don't publish anonymous op-eds. Heck, they don't even publish anonymous letters to the editor. Why they've abandoned this logical, time-honored standard when it comes to their officially-endorsed blogs, I really don't understand.