The Way of the Future: ESA over KKK

January 31, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

The United States began as an experiment in freedom, but has at times struggled with intolerance. America’s culture wars surrounding the assimilation of Catholic immigrants represented just such a struggle in the 19th and early 20th Century. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan successfully abolished private schools in Oregon. The KKK, you see, wanted to standardize Oregon Catholics into “real Americans.” If that thought frightens you, and it should, read on. It’s not enough to reject having the KKK standardize children, we need to embrace a customized education for all children.

The KKK aimed to do this in Oregon with a public school curriculum of which they approved and by banning private school attendance. Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down this incredibly illiberal measure in 1925. Today we should not only reject discrimination in schooling, but more fundamentally the notion that one size fits all. Americans can embrace customized education for all children and improve our 19th Century factory-like model of public schooling. We can do this by directly funding students through education savings accounts controlled by parents.

Looking past the ugly religious discriminatory intent of the attempt to ban private schools, this effort reflected a broader problem: an intolerant belief in a “one true way” to educate children. The Klan is not alone in having sought to control schools for their own purposes. Today we see groups on both the left and the right engaged in a never-ending battle over school curriculum. From Creationism to environmentalism to “Heather Has Two Mommies,” the struggles never cease. Worse still, American public schools fail to educate far too many of our students to an internationally competitive level.

Milton Friedman proposed a solution to these problems in the 1950s: separating the school finance from the operation of schools. This would allow parents far greater freedom to choose the sort of education they want, and reflects a liberal “to each their own” system. Over the years, advocates of greater parental choice have carried Friedman’s concept forward in the form of school vouchers and tuition tax credits. Vouchers are essentially state funded coupons that parents can redeem at public or private schools. Tax credits provide indirect aid for parents bearing the expense of a private education in addition to paying their public school taxes. The first modern voucher program began in Milwaukee in 1990, and over 26 voucher and tax-credit programs operate around the country.

Empirical research confirms significant benefits to parental choice, including Friedman’s central claim that it can serve as a catalyst for public school improvement. The need for improvement could not be clearer. Although America has a large number of excellent public schools, the recent PISA exam found that Hispanic and Black American 15 year olds score little better in literacy than their peers in Mexico. Mexico spends a mere quarter per pupil of the American average, and has substantially lower average family incomes. Those receiving the least from the status-quo have the most to gain from reform.

Last week,  Nick Dranias and I released a study for the Goldwater Institute proposing public donations to education savings accounts as a strategy for improving education outcomes. Parental choice supporters in multiple states have proposed public contributions to education savings accounts. Education saving accounts can serve as a new and more powerful method for expanding parental freedom and improving public schools. Parents should have full control over the education of their children, down to the penny, and multiple options in seeking the best possible education for their child.

ESA contributions represent a substantial improvement over school vouchers as a parental choice mechanism. Rather than simply choosing between schools, parents should be free to choose from a growing array of education services from a variety of providers. Today, students take classes online, can seek private tutoring, or enroll in community colleges or even universities for coursework.

Accounts for education and health care serve as important precedents upon which to build. Lawmakers must construct strong systems of state financial oversight and provide for the auditing of accounts. Near bankrupt states can save money by fashioning contractual agreements with parents to provide greater flexibility in return for smaller overall per pupil subsidies.

With control over funding, parents could purchase full enrollment at public or private schools. Alternatively, our parents might choose to have their child attend classes at a variety of providers, public, private or virtual. Allowing parents to save funds for later college and university expenses would provide a powerful incentive to consider cost-effectiveness from all types of providers, whether public or private.

Contrary to the demonstrably mistaken fears echoing through the parental choice debate, our existing public schools would grow stronger as a result. Public schools will always be the bedrock of our education system, but might evolve to resemble the course-by-course offerings of our universities, especially at the high-school level.

American parents deserve their own experiment in freedom. The question is not whether we should have public schools, but rather who should be in charge of them, and how many other options should our system provide. I believe the answers to these two questions are “parents” and “as many as possible.” Students all have unique needs and aspirations they are not widgets to be mass-produced. The time has come to let go of our attempts to standardize the educations of children, and instead give parents the liberty to customize them.

8 Comments | Education Savings Accounts | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

McKay Scholarship Mom Goes to War with Tenure in Florida Video

January 29, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

W*O*W, watch the video.

1 Comment | teacher quality, teacher union | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Education’s Long Forgotten Vision

January 28, 2011

(Guest Post by Sandra Stotsky)

An illuminating essay titled “Education’s Forsaken Vision,” by Avner Molcho, an Israeli historian, appeared in the Autumn 2010 issue of Azure, a publication of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. In it he presents an assessment of the shift in educational philosophy he has observed in Israeli public education since Israel’s founding. Evolving from a mission to serve the civic needs of a new nation as well as the mathematical, scientific, and other intellectual needs of a modern society—a mission that enhanced social cohesion despite wide differences in student achievement–the reigning view he sees today emphasizes student rights instead of shared civic values and promotes upward social mobility for students from low-income families as the chief purpose of public education.

Molcho’s purpose is to suggest that Israeli society would benefit from a revival of the central features of a classical education—its stress on intellectual goals and civic virtues. As justification, he points to the failure of the new mission for education to stimulate academic achievement in poor students or their upward mobility, despite increasing resources dedicated to these ends. In fact, he notes, achievement gaps between children of low- and high-income parents seem to have grown even as they all learn less, according to international test scores.

However, Molcho omits mention of the most recent expression in U. S. public policy of this problematic mission for public education, an expression that is likely to have undreamed-of negative effects on the school curriculum, academic achievement, and American society as a whole. U.S. educators have long looked for ways to improve the academic achievement of students from low-income families and, hence, their social mobility. The American public needs to learn what signposts U.S. education policy makers are following on the yellow-brick road to Oz. Otherwise, “Education’s Forsaken Vision” may soon become “Education’s Long Forgotten Vision” in both countries.

As is well-known, the original formulation of “equal educational opportunities” did not imply equal outcomes or the repudiation of intellectual and civic goals by the schools. Equity was understood to mean a fairer distribution of resources to raise poor children’s achievement. But as it became clear by the late 1990s that the increasing flow of federal and other funds to improve their “basic skills” was not changing the demographic profile of low achievers quickly, if at all, U.S. educators and policy makers redefined equity to mean equal outcomes for all demographic groups (except for boys and girls) and altered the goal line.

Stressing the “closing of demographic gaps” as the supreme goal of the schools, the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act set forth a utopian goal: proficiency for all students by 2014 as determined by state assessments. An additional accountability criterion required “adequate yearly progress” for each demographic group. However, no practically significant increases in achievement at higher grade levels resulted for low-performing groups after accountability was added to the formula (although there has been progress on basic skills in the early grades). And serious problems elsewhere were ignored by policy makers.

Not unexpectedly, schools focused on what mattered to NCLB–getting low-performing students to pass state tests. But NCLB offered no reward at the same time for, for example, increasing the number or percentage of students, regardless of demographic category, who moved from Proficiency to Advanced, or completed an authentic Algebra I course in grade 8, or passed more advanced mathematics courses in high school. Yet, the need to pay attention elsewhere was clear. On TIMSS 2007, only 6% of U.S. students were at the advanced level in grade 8 mathematics, compared to, e.g., 40% of the students in South Korea. As a November 2010 report noted, “the U.S. trails other industrialized countries in bringing its students up to the highest levels of accomplishment in mathematics.”[1] The report did not identify “any single cause of the relatively small percentage of students in the U.S. who are performing at a high level of accomplishment,” although the shortage of academically qualified mathematics teachers looms as a major cause.

Despite the stunning comparisons of percentages at the highest performance level, no alarm bells were set off and no policies incentivizing increases in mathematics and science achievement at higher performance levels were forthcoming. Instead, the new mission for education drove public policy in the Obama administration to higher utopian heights than the Bush administration had aimed for, with an even more intense focus on low-achievers and little attention to anyone else.

While early advocates of “equal educational opportunities” wanted more poor students reaching high academic goals, not a change in these goals, supporters of the goal of social justice were quick to see an idiosyncratic and shrunken secondary curriculum (as content-free as possible), accompanied by changes in pedagogical practices and classroom organization, as a quicker means to their desired ends. If academic credentials (i.e., a college degree) are what promote social mobility, then what needed fairer distribution to get low-achieving groups moving upward were the credentials, not necessarily what they were designed to reflect.

The first step in facilitating a more equitable allocation of academic credentials was development of national standards in English and mathematics loosely tethered at the secondary level to their traditional content. That step was completed with the help of the Gates Foundation, which paid for the development, review, post-facto validation, and promotion of the reading and mathematics standards Common Core released in June 2010, and which also influenced the selection of most of the personnel involved. Public officials and the media were repeatedly told by the developers of the standards that they were research-based and internationally benchmarked, even though independent subject matter experts and researchers indicated this was not the case.[2] To clinch the first step, the U.S.D.E. ensured state adoption of these skills-oriented standards (about 45 states so far) with the lure of Race to the Top competitive funds.

The next crucial step is the development of tests based on Common Core’s standards and the working out of important matters such as the quality and difficulty of the test items and the level of the passing scores. The U.S.D.E. is funding and supervising this step directly. So far as we now know, the U.S.D.E. also wants, in a re-authorization of NCLB, schools to ensure that all their high school graduates are “college ready” as determined by the passing score on high school level tests. If so, schools will be held accountable for a greater utopian reach than was expected in 2001.

Efforts are already underway to make sure that all “college ready” students can be successful in their freshman college courses. Public colleges are being asked to “align” entrance requirements and the content of freshman courses to Common Core’s secondary standards, not the other way around. And, to ensure that “college ready” students can graduate from a college degree program in record time, all of their freshman courses must be credit-bearing, not tagged as remedial. (Otherwise, these students could not be called “college ready.”)

This means, in effect, that those who pass the national high school tests, which are to be first given at the end of grade 10, can go right to a college that accepts them and earn college credit for the content of the grade 11 or 12 courses they skipped, if the content is deemed necessary for their degree program.

Does anyone doubt that public colleges will be under pressure to admit “college ready” students and produce equal group outcomes in retention and graduation rates? Like high school teachers, public college instructors will find it in their interest to produce equal group outcomes no matter how the outcomes are related to the content of what individual students know.

Once upon a time, making students “college ready” meant strengthening, not weakening, the high school curriculum. Selective colleges in the U.S. will likely be able to fill their freshman classes with students from schools in, say, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore. But how long can any modern society sustain itself if it ignores both the intellectual and civic goals of public education and believes that able students come only in a few colors.

[1] http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG10-19_HanushekPetersonWoessmann.pdf

[2] See http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/college-and-career for a critical review of the research base for Common Core’s standards, by Diane Ravitch and William Mathis for the National Education Policy Center.

See also the letter sent by Sandra Stotsky explaining why, as a member of the Validation Committee, she could not sign off on the final draft of Common Core’s secondary English language arts and reading standards, at http://www.doe.mass.edu/boe/docs/0710/item1.html?printscreen=yes&section=stotsky;

See also Appendix B, an analysis by mathematician R. James Milgram of the problems he sees in the final draft of Common Core’s mathematics standards, at http://www.pioneerinstitute.org/pdf/common_core_standards.pdf

6 Comments | instructional reform, school accountability | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Wonk Action Shots!

January 27, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

I just returned from a series of events put on by the Kansas Policy Institute and the Foundation for Educational Choice. Long suffering readers of JPGB might possibly recognize the topic if they turn their intuitive discernment nob to “11″:

Need another hint? Well, okay….

I met great people in Kansas, and had them ask very good questions. The NAEP shows that on average Kansas schools are good when compared to American states. The scores for disadvantaged student populations, including the growing Hispanic population, must improve if Kansas is going to go from good to GREAT.

Story in the Wichta Eagle here and a television news report here.

1 Comment | competitive effects | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Reason TV for School Choice Week Part Deux

January 27, 2011

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

My residual self image is having a hard time looking at this guy with gray hair…

3 Comments | vouchers | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

Who’s the Criminal?

January 26, 2011

In Akron, Ohio a woman who put her children in a better public school was sent to jail when private investigators hired by the school found that she did not live in the district.  Her father did and she sometimes stayed with him, but that was not enough to keep her out of prison for seeking a better education for her children.

Meanwhile, in Atlanta there is evidence of widespread cheating on standardized tests by teachers and administrators as well as a potential cover-up in the investigation of those accusations.  No one has gone to jail (and no one ever will) for robbing children of a quality education and then lying about their true achievement by cheating on the state test to hide that fact.

A few years ago Atlanta and other Georgia districts violated the state law to prohibit the social promotion of students who failed the 3rd grade reading test.  There was a procedure for exempting students if the schools and parents met and decided it was in the best interest of a student to be promoted, but many districts exempted virtually all of the students and did so without actually holding the required meetings.  They already knew what was best for children regardless of what the law said.

I could keep going with stories along these lines, but I think you get the idea.  So, who’s the real criminal here?

9 Comments | civic values, school accountability | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Bureaucratic Bloat – Bathroom Edition!

January 24, 2011

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Short version of this post: I clean my own toilet, therefore school staff unions should be abolished.

Long verson: I just had an article come out on bureaucratic bloat in Oklahoma schools, in which I noted that only half of the state’s K-12 public education employees are teachers. That’s pretty much par for the course nationwide.

(Before you ask, the breakdown looks similar if you do it by dollars instead of by headcount. I use headcount because it’s simpler – with dollars you have to navigate a more complex set of categories – and because there are categories of spending over which states have little control, such as debt service, whereas headcount is more flexibile.)

One argument I made was that instead of focusing on bloat in “administration,” we should really focus on privatizing services in the giant “other” category – bus, cafeteria, etc. Private companies already exist that can provide all those services better and cheaper. There’s no reason these functions should be performed by unionized civil servants under outrageously dysfunctional personnel rules that ensure substandard performance and with gargantuan nuclear exploding pensions that cost ONE TRILLION DOLLARS.

A disgruntled teacher writes in (anonymously) to say, among much else, that my argument is invalid because I don’t clean my own toilet:

 Not only do you expect us to teach our children, which I gladly and proudly do well, but you expect us to do so with out the assistance or limited assistance of janitorial staff, nurses, aides, bus drives and cooks. So we are to teach successfully as well as clean the toilets, cook their meals, take their temperature and drive buses (which we do anyway)…I wonder if Mr. Forster has someone that cleans his office and bathroom or if he does that himself?

(Read the letter in all its unabridged, unedited, undiluted glory here.)

Now, there are several problems here. As William F. Buckley once wrote: “I have seen non-sequiturs in my life, baby ones, middle-sized ones, and great big ones, but they all stand aside in awe at yours.”

First, I didn’t argue that teachers should clean their own toilets; I said we should hire private service providers to do it instead of using unionized civil servants. The teacher herself, curiously, seems to recognize this, but only in the non-toilet context; she complains elsewhere in the letter that under my argument “we are to contract out to professionals to provide meal service.” (I will leave unremarked upon her implicit acknowledgement that unionized civil servants cannot be considered “professionals”; unremarked upon as well will be the question of what this implies about teachers.)

The real problem with her argument, though, is that I do, in fact, clean my own toilet. The office in which I work does not hire janitorial staff. We are all responsible for cleanliness, including the bathrooms. On my first day, this fact was impressed upon me with some force by the administrative staff. And I’m proud to say that I have lived up to my responsibilities.

After all, I learned my skills through discipleship with a true master – the Li Mu Bai of toilet cleaning.

Sure he can walk on water – but does he clean it?

My first job in education was working for Jay Greene – yes, the Jay Greene – and we had no janitorial staff in that office either. In addition to our each taking responsibility for our messes daily, Jay appointed a regular schedule for comprehensive office cleaning. We each took a task – dusting, vacuuming, etc.

Jay always took the bathroom cleaning job. Every time. He told us this was his way of setting an example for the staff, citing a motto from the Israeli officer corps: “Follow Me!”

I still do.

So, if my arguments would be invalid if I didn’t clean my own toilet, doesn’t it therefore follow that since I do clean my own toilet, my arguments are valid?

8 Comments | money myth, teacher union | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster

Reason TV

January 24, 2011

I don’t find much on regular TV that I want to watch, especially since Lost went off the air.  But there is almost always new, exciting stuff on Reason TV, especially when I’m on it.

2 Comments | charter schools, competitive effects, vouchers | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

The Educationist View of Math Education

January 23, 2011

(Guest post by Barry Garelick)

In Jay Greene’s recent blog post, “The Dead End of Scientific Progressivism,” he points out that Vicki Phillips, head of education at the Gates Foundation misread her Foundation’s own report.  Jay’s point was that Vicki continued to see what she and others wanted to see: “‘Teaching to the test makes your students do worse on the tests.’ Science had produced its answer — teachers should stop teaching to the test, stop drill and kill, and stop test prep (which the Gates officials and reporters used as interchangeable terms).”

I was intrigued by the education establishment’s long-held view as Jay paraphrased it.  This view has become one of the “enduring truths” of education and I have heard it expressed in the various classes I have been taking in education school the last few years.  (I plan to teach high school math when I retire later this year).  In terms of math education, ed school professors distinguish between “exercises” and “problems”.  “Exercises” are what students do when applying algorithms or routines they know and can apply even to word problems. Problem solving, which is preferred, occurs when students are not able to apply a mechanical, memorized response, but rather have to apply prior knowledge to solve a non-routine problem.  Moreover, we future teachers are told that students’ difficulty in solving problems in new contexts is evidence that the use of “mere exercises” or “procedures” is ineffective and they are overused in classrooms.  One teacher summed up this philosophy with the following questions: “What happens when students are placed in a totally unfamiliar situation that requires a more complex solution? Do they know how to generate a procedure?  How do we teach students to apply mathematical thinking in creative ways to solve complex, novel problems? What happens when we get off the ‘script’?”

As someone who learned math largely though mere exercises and who now creatively applies math at work, I have to question this thinking. I believe that students’ difficulty in solving new problems is more likely to be because 1) applying prior knowledge to new or non-routine problems is hard for everyone, and 2) it is even harder for students who may lack the requisite knowledge and/or mastery of skills—not because they possess such knowledge and mastery.   So while the educationists distinguish between “exercises” and “problems”, the view refuses to distinguish between novices and experts.

Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist who teaches at the University of Virginia, finds the distinction between novice and expert to be quite important.  He maintains that it takes time and effort for knowledge to accumulate to the point that connections between learned material and new and difficult problems can be made.  Willingham refers to the difficulty that novices have with thinking critically as “inflexible thinking.”  In fact, he characterizes such difficulty as perfectly normal and to be expected among students.  Willingham argues that understanding the deep structures of a discipline such as mathematics is an important goal of education, “but if students fall short of this, it certainly doesn’t mean that they have acquired mere rote knowledge and are little better than parrots.” Rather, they are making the small steps necessary to develop better mathematical thinking. Simply put, no one leaps directly from novice to expert.

I was therefore extremely interested to see the sample problem of the Balanced Assessment in Mathematics (BAM) in Appendix 1 of the Gates Foundation’s preliminary report. The BAM is to be used to assess teacher effectiveness and according to the Gates Foundation’s preliminary report, “In comparison to many other assessments, BAM is considered to be more cognitively demanding and measures higher order reasoning skills using question formats that are quite different from those in most state mathematics achievement tests. There is also some evidence that BAM is more instructionally sensitive to the effects of reform-oriented instruction than a more traditional test (ITBS).”

The sample problem is reproduced below and is from the 8th grade mathematics assessment:

The diagram makes it clear how one is to count the number of tiles needed, so the first question is relatively easy.  Question 2 requires more thought, and the student must be able to extend the counting algorithm for the 4ft pond in question 1 to ponds of other sizes; i.e., they must understand that 4 is added to the product of the number of one foot long squares that fit on one side of the pond times 4, or 4n + 4 where n is the length of one side of the square pond in feet.

There are four additional questions that become increasingly difficult:  “How many paving stones are needed to surround a fish pond that is 20 feet by 20 feet?”, “Chris has 48 paving stones.  Find the size of the largest square pond the paving stones can surround.”  “The garden center sells many different sizes of square fish ponds. Write down a rule that will help Chris figure out how many paving stones are needed to surround square  ponds of different sizes.”  “The garden center decides to sell rectangular ponds.  Find a rule that will help Chris figure out how many paving stones are needed to surround rectangular ponds of different sizes.”

This set of questions is fairly challenging to beginning algebra students. (It is even more challenging if they have had no algebra at all, but since this is a problem for 8th grade students, I am assuming that they have had some experience with algebraic expressions and equations. This is not always a safe assumption but that’s a topic for another article.) The sample problem is illustrative of the type of problem that the education community deems coach-proof since it appears that memorization of problem solving techniques and “drill and kill” exercises will not work here.  But in fact, practice with some exercises would help students in tackling such a problem—specifically, having students express in mathematical terms certain situations described in English.  For example, “Three more than two times what John’s age will be in five years” (3 + 2(x + 5) ).  These types of exercises are frequently deemed by the education establishment to be inauthentic and irrelevant to the deeper underlying concepts of math unlike “reform oriented instruction” which purportedly provides such deep understanding through so-called authentic problems and a minimum of “exercises”.

Interestingly, the TIMSS exam—an international exam given every three years—also contains questions of this sort, as well as more straightforward problems.  For comparison’s sake, I looked at TIMSS eighth grade questions in algebra (found at http://nces.ed.gov/timss/pdf/TIMSS8_Math_ConceptsItems_2.pdf ) and found a similar type of problem:

This problem requires students to understand and ultimately express the relationship between the number of smaller squares on each side of the larger square, and the number of triangles contained in the square.  Question C, in fact, requires the student to be able to express the relationship mathematically in order to calculate the number of triangles.  The TIMSS report in which this appears provides some interesting data related to this question; namely the percent of students taking the test in each country that obtained the correct answer:

The top five scoring countries for this question ranged from 44 to 49% correct.  For the more straightforward problems the top five scores tend to be in the 70 and 80 percent range.   The US students obtained 19 percent correct for this problem; on more straightforward problems, the US scores in the 50 and 60 percent range. Thus, for all students, regardless of country, non-routine problems prove to be difficult.  Of interest, however, is that the five top scoring countries for this particular problem are Asian,  frequently criticized for using drilling and “inauthentic” exercises which they maintain do not properly prepare students for solving non-routine problems.

If Vicki Phillips’ statement about teaching to the test is any indication, however, the educational establishment will see what they want to see.  They will likely proclaim that the higher scores obtained by Asian countries on non-routine problems serves as evidence that the Asian countries use “reform-oriented instruction”.  Either that, or they’ll shrug their shoulders and say “It’s the culture; what can you do?”  (See http://www.educationnews.org/commentaries/104502.html )

In any event, whether the education establishment realizes it or not, the new generation of coach-proof tests that will be used to evaluate teachers, appear to be measuring the skills students are expected to be learning.  And by teaching what should be taught, teachers are teaching to the test, whether the Gates Foundation and its look-alikes realize it, like it, or not.

BIO: Barry Garelick is an analyst for a federal agency and is cofounder of the U.S. Coalition for World Class Math. (http://usworldclassmath.webs.com/ )  He plans to teach math later this year.

7 Comments | instructional reform | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene

Has the Washington Post lost their BS detector?

January 21, 2011

‘

(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

Valerie Strauss over at the Answer Sheet put up a guest post from a fellow Arizonan, Michael Martin, who is a research analyst at the Arizona School Boards Association, about the “real” source of Florida’s education gains.

I’ve never met Martin, but was taken aback a few years ago when he authored a column in the Arizona Republic claiming that the state ought not to take over the Roosevelt School District, one of the worst in Arizona. Martin made this claim based on the assertion that there was a massive incidence of lead poisoning in the district.

I thought that this was an extraordinary claim to make that ought to be incredibly alarming to parents in the district. I spoke to local health officials, who assured me that there was zero evidence to support such an irresponsible claim. I called on Martin to provide evidence to support the notion that South Phoenix kids had been turned into uncontrollable lead poison zombies.

Strangely enough, I never heard back from him. But other than that, I’m sure he is a swell guy.

Now in the WaPo blog, Martin spins a yarn about Florida NAEP scores which is far beyond absurd. The first clue that something is wrong here comes in the fact that the Arizona School Boards Association disavowed the “analysis.”

Good move on their part.

So go read the thing for yourself. People in the comments section began to decimate the Martin analysis, but the comments section is now closed. When they were closed, no one had yet made the most obvious possible criticism.

I’ll give you a hint: according the the National Center for Education Statistics there are 4,491 district run schools in the state of Florida.

4 Comments | journalism, money myth | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner

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