Three Kinds

We here at YPS will occasionally express our displeasure at the disgusting mess that American public schools have become. Part of this is due to watching what our friend’s children learn. Other parts of it are due to hanging out and drinking with teachers. Finally, the media, when it reports on schools, doesn’t fill us with a warm fuzzy feeling.

As it turns out, the media may have not been accurately portraying the true nature of the problem. Why not? The educrats are lying to them and everyone else. Apparently fudging the numbers has become a national pastime. Sweet!

Of course, my fair neighboring city is leading the way! (World-class, people, world-class!) In addition to the old news that Houston Independent School District blatantly falsified drop-out rates, we have some new tricks:

In a third of Houston’s 30 high schools, scores on standardized exams have risen as enrollment has shrunk. At Austin High, for example, 2,757 students were enrolled in the 1997–98 school year, when only 65 percent passed the 10th-grade math test. Three years later, 99 percent of students passed the math exam, but enrollment had shrunk to 2,215 students. The school also reported that dropout figures had plummeted from 4.1 percent to 0.3 percent. Rather than a sudden 20 percent drop in enrollment, the school had used a strategy of holding back low-scoring ninth-graders and then promoting them directly to 11th grade to avoid the 10th-grade exam.

Creativity! That’s what people like to see from their school districts, right? I’m not thinking so, but I don’t have kids. Maybe this is what you folks out there want for your progeny.

I’d point fingers, but I’m not sure who to blame. The problems are so endemic at this point that everyone involved has to be culpable in some way.

Oh, yes, the title of the post refers to the old saying that there are three kinds of lies – lies, damn lies, and statistics.