As we were saying yesterday, when a study's results are too useful and fit one side's needs too snugly, be suspicious, be very suspicious.
Mark Kleiman was suspicious about the glad tidings revealed in a University of Pennsylvania study of Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship, Texas, faith based program, which enjoyed the patronage of the then Governor Bush, and after the Penn study, was hailed at a Washington news conference by the now President Bush. There's just this one little problem:
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LATEST RESEARCH FROM PROFESSOR HAROLD HILL
Here's a sure-fire method for producing a "successful" program: measure your successes, and ignore your failures. Works every time. What's astonishing is how easy it is to get some academic to write it up, how willing the newspapers are to report the resulting "study" as if it contained actual information, and the many politicians will then cite your "success" as scientifically documented fact.
It's rare for a study to get as nakedly thorough a debunking as this one gets from Kleiman. Read, enjoy, learn, and remember; I'm guessing there's going to be a lot more of this kind of propoganda.