In regard to the comments by Nicholas D. Wolfwood on a recent thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=219x15690Mr. Wolfwood, I believe the evidence you cite is cooked data. Statistics are manufactured, manipulated and misinterpreted to distort and deceive all the time. Below I'll post historian Diane Ravitch's take on those NYC results. Like those of Duncan in Chicago, they are a sham.
Excerpts are from the Bridging Differences blog which Ravitch shares with Deborah Meier. I suggest you read the entire post and the links provided there:
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2009/09/the_secret_of_success_and_high.htmlI would like to engage you in one of your favorite issues, which is the use and abuse of tests. Over the past few months, as I was finishing my book, I became aware of the startling extent to which the New York State Education Department has manipulated the state test results. So, while politicians crow about their "success" in raising test scores (as if they had anything to do with students' learning!), it turns out that the tests have been rigged in recent years to produce higher scores. The more I learned, the more I wondered if New York was on its way to becoming a national laughing-stock.
I wrote two articles about this. The first one appeared in the New York Post in August under the headline "Toughen the Tests." The article actually was NOT a call to toughen the tests, but a call to tell the truth. I wrote it to alert our new state education commissioner, David Steiner, who assumes his position on Oct. 1, to the scandalous manipulation of test scores by the agency he will lead.
Have a look here too:
http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2009/10/in-midst-of-naep-findings-joel-klein.html And read Gerald Bracey. We lost him recently. Tactful he was not when exposing disinformation about our nation's public schools, but there was no equal to him in exposing the myths that have so long dominated the "failing public schools" narrative, including those largely meaningless international comparisons.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/22/AR2009102204549.html