Nicholas Kristof seems to have a very big hatred for American public education. Did he go to public schools? Did he have horrible teachers? What does he have against this democratic institution that is part of the fabric of every community in the nation?

 

The Daily Howler, which catches journalistic fraud, lambastes Kristof for cherry-picking statistics to make American students look stupid.

 

In his latest screed against our schools and teachers, Kristof offers an example of a question on TIMSS where American students got a low score. There were 88 sample questions. Kristof picked the question where American students did the worst.

 

In a remarkably deceptive way, Kristof cherry-picked through that long list of questions. The question about the three consecutive numbers is, quite literally, the question on which American kids did least well out of all 88 as compared to the rest of the world.

 

Let’s make sure you understand that! Quite deliberately, Kristof chose the least representative example out of 88 possible items.

 

He led his column with that unrepresentative example. He then pretended it shows that stupid-ass Johnny “can’t count.”

 

Assuming the TIMSS data are accurate, why did American kids perform so poorly on that one question? We have no idea. We also can’t explain why American kids outscored every nation, including Singapore, on the question called “Median number of staff members.” But, by God, they did!

 

In fact, they outperformed all nations, including Singapore, by a wide margin on that one question. An equally dishonest person could cherry-pick that one example to advance the false impression that U.S. eighth-graders lead the world in math…..

 

Please. On the test to which Kristof referred, American kids basically matched their counterparts in Finland. They outscored glorious Sweden by 25 points, with its average score of 484.

 

Germany didn’t take part on the eighth grade level in 2011. It did participate at the fourth grade level, where its kids were outscored by kids from the U.S.

 

(Other scores in Grade 8 math: Great Britain 507, Australia 505, Italy 498, Norway 475.)

 

“We know Johnny can’t read; it appears that Johnny is even worse at counting!” It’s hard to imagine why someone like Kristof would want to write such a thing. But such deceptions are completely routine within our upper-end press corps. This has been the reliable norm for a very long time.

 

We know of no topic on which Americans are so persistently disinformed by American pseudo-journalists. Yesterday, Kristof took the dissembling and the deception to a remarkable low.

 

Kristof seems to get stranger by the month. As Shakespeare thoughtfully asked, “On what meat doth this our Times pseudo-journalist feed?”

 

Just for the record: The other examples Kristof presents are also cherry-picked. He had to sift through 88 examples to mislead his readers so.

 

Why in the world would a life-form like Kristof deceive his readers this way? Beyond that, what makes him so eager to denigrate American kids?

 

 

PS: Thanks to reader Chiara for bringing this post to my attention in the comments.