The Kentucky School News and Commentary Blog has an article “The Commish Tells It Like It Is” based on an Op-Ed from Business First in Louisville. The Op-Ed is written by Kentucky Commissioner of Education Jon Draud. In his doom and gloom piece, Draud once again makes an erroneous attribution for bogus data. He claims the US Census Bureau says Kentucky ranked dead last for education funding in the 2003-04 school year.
NOT SO!
That bogus ranking actually comes from a report from the National Education Association – not exactly an unbiased source, and certainly not in the same league as the US Census Bureau.
If you want to see real US Census Bureau state education fiscal rankings, look at Tables 11 and 12 in the latest “Public Education Finances” which IS a report from the US Census Bureau. You won’t find Kentucky ranking last anywhere in this real Census Bureau analysis.
Does anyone know what our teachers do to kids who make false citations in a paper? It apparently does not work for our Department of Education, unfortunately. I’ve been through this “it isn’t from the US Census” discussion with the department before, but as of the August 8 edition of Business First, the lesson that it’s not nice to mislead the public apparently has not taken.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
The “Commish” Tells It Like It Isn’t
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4 comments:
Thanks for the truth. Do the lies from the educrats ever end in their quest to devolve education from teaching knowledge to indoctrination in the mental disorder of liberalism?
Just wait. The "Commish" promises he'll go throughout the land singing the story of great progress since KERA was enacted. The spin has only begun.
Ahhh. One of the blogosphere's favorite games - competing data sets. Then, we bloggers add an accompanying story line chosen to support our pre-determined conclusions.
It's not science. But it's a fun read.
Just pick the data set that supports the story one wants to tell, and call everything else biased...ignoring one's own biases...as though they don't exist.
Cool, huh?
Passing a law that says schools will make social and educational problems go away and then underfunding that effort is the worst kind of hypocrisy. And, Draud is exactly correct to point out that Kentucky is in for a rough ride.
As conservative American education icon William Torrey Harris understood, extolling the virtues of universal education is one thing...but providing it is quite another. It's always easier to sit back and take pot shots while acting shocked that the underfunded effort produces less than the politicians' promised effect.
As I recall, you have called KDE out on the use of the statistic Draud quoted a few times before. Draud correctly says it comes from the NEA (NEA's 2007 Rankings & Statistics document) - and you suggest that it is necessarily biased as a result.
You cite a competing data set, also from the census bureau, that points toward a different conclusion.
Are you claiming BGI is unbiased? If so, why all the loaded words?
By the way, have I mentioned my own biases?
I believe that the strength of America was built largely on the ideal of universal education for all citizens - something I would expect true libertarians to praise - but something private school promoters have shown little interest in, historically. I wonder why that is. To many, the immigrant rabble needed to be "civilized" but not elevated.
I believe a prosperous future for Kentucky is dependent on an even higher quality education for all.
So to me, it hardly matters if Kentucky ranked 50th or 44th on competing reports. Both are a long way from 25th - which ought to be the absolute minimum criteria for any system that claims to desire high quality education for its citizens. All the reports tell me is that we're still shortchanging the kids.
But I suppose that's OK in a poor state.
But wait a minute. Kentucky was not always a poor state. How'd we get here?
The Principal’s rambling post mostly strays off the subject of the original blog item. That is a common disinformation technique to avoid coming to grips with the main concern, which is the simple fact that Kentucky’s education commissioner continues to mislead his readers regarding the true source of his dubious data.
Misquoting like this gets students in my local school district in lots of trouble (I know; I just asked our local superintendent). Why is The Principal willing to hold the state’s education commissioner to a far lower standard of accuracy and honesty than we expect of our students?
The National Education Association’s research is interesting, but clearly the NEA isn’t of the same, unbiased caliber as the US Census Bureau. The union exists to push the interests of its members, not the general public. As such, it can be expected to concentrate on information that forwards its selective agenda.
I’d like to hear from our readers. Do you think it’s fair for our state’s leading educator to repeatedly quote figures from an NEA analysis in his written comments and say they were actually from the Census Bureau, even after being challenged on this issue? The latest example of this consistent misquoting is only days old, found in the commissioner’s Op-Ed in the August 8th Business First paper (sorry, its subscription only) in Louisville. I had “called” the commissioner on this, as The Principal admits, a number of times before. Clearly, the commissioner isn’t going to correct his erroneous attribution.
So, what do our readers think?
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