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October 28, 2005
Dishonesty In Education Reporting
Here's some more bad education news from Paul Peterson over at Frontpage Magazine.
Among the "talented tenth," those in the top 10 percent of test takers, reading scores have dropped four points since 1971 and math scores have not budged since first measured in 1978. So say the latest (2004) results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the nation's report card.
At the other end of the scale, dropout rates have actually increased since 1990, rising to 30 percent of all seventeen-year-olds. Among African Americans the dropout rate is running somewhere between 50 and 60 percent, a sad fact that remains one of the best-kept secrets in American education.
Peterson goes on to explain how a dropout rate of over 50 percent can be manipulated to look much lower. Most school districts base their dropout rates on the number of seniors who don't finish the year, while ignoring all those who quit as freshmen, sophomores, or juniors.
There's your hard working teachers unions and school administrations, doing what they do best.
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