Founder
Dr. John Jacob Cannell, MD
Founder, Friends for Education (1987) · Founder, Honest Education Alliance (2025)
John Jacob Cannell, MD, is a physician-researcher and advocate whose work on educational testing changed how America talks about “above average” schools.
In the mid-1980s, while practicing in West Virginia, he noticed that many adolescent patients labeled above average on commercial achievement tests could not read at grade level. Teachers—also his patients—described reused items and pre-test review. He founded Friends for Education, surveyed all 50 states, and published findings that every state claimed above-average elementary performance.
The work was confirmed by the U.S. Department of Education, covered by the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NBC, and 60 Minutes (“Teacher is a Cheater,” March 25, 1990), and contributed to pressure that helped reconfigure NAEP for state-by-state comparison.
In 2025 he founded the Honest Education Alliance to resume public advocacy for secure, independent measurement—because the structural problem he documented has not been fixed.
Selected education publications
- Cannell, J.J. Nationally Normed Elementary Achievement Testing in America’s Public Schools (1987). ERIC EJ374428. Overview · PDF.
- Cannell, J.J. How Public Educators Cheat on Standardized Achievement Tests: The “Lake Wobegon” Report (1988). ERIC ED314454.
- Cannell, J.J. “Lake Woebegone, Twenty Years Later.” Nonpartisan Education Review, 2006.
- Cannell, J.J. Thirty-Seven Years of Educational Fraud (Lake Wobegon White Paper, 2026).