We have our own share of EduDeformistas in Louisiana. Perhaps you heard of the Seabaugh Solution? Well, that’s not the only one, merely one of the most documented one (with the help of a taped phone conversation between Superintendent John White and Representative Seabaugh, where White famously proclaimed where data was driven solutions were good, “but sometimes it was not a smart idea to use the data.” (Such as when the data doesn’t say what you want it too.) This has happened in St Helena too, where the Recovery School District filed a brief with the Federal Court in regards to their 50 year old desegregation suit stating allowing St Helena to add grades to their schools that were taken over by RSD would lead to resegregation (actually the RSD caused a dramatic decrease in white enrollment, not the other way around) and they also provided statistics backing up their “Reform” from an entirely different school district, not the middle school in St Helena RSD took over which is almost certainly the worst performing school in the state.
Thanks for this summary of two recent data scandals about Tony Bennett and Michelle Rhee.
Educational Deformers like Tony Bennett, Michelle Rhee, and others proclaim that they are “data-driven“.
They don’t tell you the rest of that slogan, however. It goes like this:
“…unless the data contradict what we keep claiming; in that case, then we fake or alter the data!”
In a secondary-school science project where a student fakes their measurements to get the “right” answer in their expeiment, it’s not so serious, though it’s not good there, either, because some of those dishonest students end up being dishonest researchers or scientists claiming breakthroughs that don’t exist. Many studies have shown that high-achieving college students admit quite readily to all sorts of cheating while they were students at the university. We see quite clearly many of them are making a mint continuing to do so as traders or bankers on Wall Street, as businessmen, as politicians, as bankers, and now as…
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Crazy Crawfish 