It took two blog items here, and here, plus several phone calls, but the Kentucky Department of Education finally e-mailed corrected national scores for its new release of EXPLORE and PLAN readiness test data for Kentucky yesterday afternoon.
Unfortunately, the department didn’t own up in time to stop at least one news report from making reference to the non-existent scores, which shows that it is important to get this sort of material right in initial news releases – especially when the problem had already been pointed out last year.
Anyway, who says bloggers don’t matter?
Now, on to the good news in the next post just above.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Department of Education Corrects Erroneous Scores
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2 comments:
I hope you didn't hurt your arm patting yourself on the back for catching this miniscule error - which KDE corrected.
You were correct to point it out, but on the Richter Scale, this was no more than a 1.
Would that every public policy group would be honest enough to correct their errors, however small.
Richard,
I’m sorry, but this was no miniscule error.
The KDE did the same thing last year, repeating a single set of nationally normed scores from 2005 as though they were a multi-year set of separate and more recent scores for years 2006 and 2007.
I pointed out this “error” to the KDE at that time.
This year, however, not only did the KDE expand their train of fabricated scores to include 2008, but the KDE actually had the audacity to claim that the “trend” of these fictitious, perfectly flat scores was in fact a national trend.
This year’s addition to the “error” was a serious step up in the pattern of providing misleading information to make Kentucky look good.
Since this problem was already identified last year, and because it was never the less repeated and amplified this year, this is no miniscule error. It represents a historical pattern of data fabrication, and that isn’t going to pass muster.
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