News Media Fares Worse Than It Should
I know that I should be accustomed to news media misuse of statistics by now. But somehow that doesn't help.
"Charter schools fare worse than traditional", reads today's page 5A Birmingham News headline on an Associated Press story about a recently released study comparing charter schools to traditional public schools. Here's the lead paragraph in its entirety: "Fourth-graders in traditional public schools are doing better in both reading and math than students in charter schools, the government says in a report fueling fresh debate over school choice."
You would think the AP reporter would be a little more careful about disguising his agenda. The shame of it is that there is nothing wrong with writing a news story on this report, and it could have been done in a useful way. Instead, it's been hijacked and turned into propaganda.
First and foremost, nowhere in the article does the study explain whether the study compared charter schools to the specific traditional schools they were intended to replace. Surely the proper test for whether a charter school is worthwhile is whether the charter school is doing a better job than the traditional public school its students would be attending if it weren't for the charter school. In other words, it's simply not meaningful to compare a charter school's performance with some kind of national average performance for traditional public school, at least not for the purpose of determining whether or not the charter schools are a good use of public resources. But as the study comparies 150 charter schools to 6,764 public schools, it appears that this may not have been the purpose of the study. But that's the way the AP presented it.
Second, the lead paragraph says this study fuels "fresh debate over school choice". I suppose charter schools are a part of the school choice movement, but they are a small and unique part. School choice is about the money following the student to the student's choice of school, be it public or private. Even if this study proved what the AP wants it to, it says nothing about the merits of using public money to send students to non-charter private schools, or even about giving students free choice among those "traditional public schools" the AP is so excited about.
Finally, as anyone with a basic knowledge of charter schools knows, charter schools vary widely in philosophy, quality, track record, experience, etc. There are some terrific charter schools in the United States; there are also some terrible ones. The whole idea of a charter school is to use public money but not impose any particular standards. Free money; no rules (to speak of, anyway). (It's a mark of how bad public schools had become that an idea like this got off the ground in the first place. Imagine the government contracting for almost any other function on this basis!) The point is that it's not very helpful to look at average performance of all charter schools; surely the more relevant data would be the performance of the more successful charter schools. Those would be the ones with ideas worth imitating.
A carefully written story would have made it clear that charter schools as a whole, so far at least, don't appear to be raising students' performance to the "national average" of traditional public school performance. This does raise questions about whether "no standards at all" is really appropriate for charter schools, which are after all funded by taxpayers. But it doesn't say much of anything about whether "charter schools" are "worse" than "traditional public schools", as the headline and story lead imply.
"Charter schools fare worse than traditional", reads today's page 5A Birmingham News headline on an Associated Press story about a recently released study comparing charter schools to traditional public schools. Here's the lead paragraph in its entirety: "Fourth-graders in traditional public schools are doing better in both reading and math than students in charter schools, the government says in a report fueling fresh debate over school choice."
You would think the AP reporter would be a little more careful about disguising his agenda. The shame of it is that there is nothing wrong with writing a news story on this report, and it could have been done in a useful way. Instead, it's been hijacked and turned into propaganda.
First and foremost, nowhere in the article does the study explain whether the study compared charter schools to the specific traditional schools they were intended to replace. Surely the proper test for whether a charter school is worthwhile is whether the charter school is doing a better job than the traditional public school its students would be attending if it weren't for the charter school. In other words, it's simply not meaningful to compare a charter school's performance with some kind of national average performance for traditional public school, at least not for the purpose of determining whether or not the charter schools are a good use of public resources. But as the study comparies 150 charter schools to 6,764 public schools, it appears that this may not have been the purpose of the study. But that's the way the AP presented it.
Second, the lead paragraph says this study fuels "fresh debate over school choice". I suppose charter schools are a part of the school choice movement, but they are a small and unique part. School choice is about the money following the student to the student's choice of school, be it public or private. Even if this study proved what the AP wants it to, it says nothing about the merits of using public money to send students to non-charter private schools, or even about giving students free choice among those "traditional public schools" the AP is so excited about.
Finally, as anyone with a basic knowledge of charter schools knows, charter schools vary widely in philosophy, quality, track record, experience, etc. There are some terrific charter schools in the United States; there are also some terrible ones. The whole idea of a charter school is to use public money but not impose any particular standards. Free money; no rules (to speak of, anyway). (It's a mark of how bad public schools had become that an idea like this got off the ground in the first place. Imagine the government contracting for almost any other function on this basis!) The point is that it's not very helpful to look at average performance of all charter schools; surely the more relevant data would be the performance of the more successful charter schools. Those would be the ones with ideas worth imitating.
A carefully written story would have made it clear that charter schools as a whole, so far at least, don't appear to be raising students' performance to the "national average" of traditional public school performance. This does raise questions about whether "no standards at all" is really appropriate for charter schools, which are after all funded by taxpayers. But it doesn't say much of anything about whether "charter schools" are "worse" than "traditional public schools", as the headline and story lead imply.
posted by Under The Mountain | 5:28 AM
5 Comments:
I heard a national news report about the FDA's approval of over-the-counter sales of the "morning after" pill. It said it works by "supressing ovulation or preventing pregnancy." I think they meant terminating pregnancy. Hm. They also spent five minutes talking about how the Religious Right doesn't approve of the pill because...well...they are religious. They didn't mention any side effects or the real medical reasons this is a bad idea. It made me really mad. We're fools to think there is no agenda there! (Even if it's an overarching Evil agenda..)
Su
On a related note, I recently read that 90% of babies diagnosed before birth with Downs Syndrome are aborted, often (though certainly not always) at the suggestion or even under pressure from the physicians caring for the mother. We're "solving" the problem of birth defects. At some point, we'll begin to look askance at the parents who permitted a disabled child to be born.
Wow. If that happens, how far away are we from National Socialism? Not very, in my opinion.
Su
I'm glad they have these new color ultrasounds. Maybe we'll be able to improve that technology so we can abort all the non-blond, non-blue eye babies. Because if babies don't meet our standards, we should be able to kill them and try again, until we get one we like. If only we could figure out what their personalities will be like...
Anyhoo, good point about crappy reporting. But I'm still not convinced that school vouchers are the way to go. They are a way to go, and I don't really have a better answer, but I don't think they are the answer, just a band-aid.
And I think the whole idea of mixing capitalism with government is more flawed than we're willing to admit. Capitalism works when people have something to lose. ('My product sucks. If I don't improve it, I'm going to have to close this factory and lose a bunch of money.') Politicians have nothing to lose but face, and even that doesn't happen as often as it should. ('If we have to shut this school because it sucks, I don't lose anything, but man, those tax payers sure do lose a lot. But because of the magic of gerrymandering, I'll still get re-elected!')
Sorry for the cynacism. I'll do better next time.
So come on back soon!
Post a Comment
<< Home