Last July, I wrote about a struggling high school in D.C. where 100% of the seniors graduated and were accepted by colleges. The story appeared on NPR, and I wrongly assumed that they had done fact checking. I am not a reporter, and I do not have a staff to check out claims. NPR does. But they took the claim by D.C. administrators at face value, without checking.
Now NPR reports that the original story was fishy. Better late than never.
“An investigation by WAMU and NPR has found that Ballou High School’s administration graduated dozens of students despite high rates of unexcused absences. WAMU and NPR reviewed hundreds of pages of Ballou’s attendance records, class rosters and emails after a DCPS employee shared the private documents. The documents showed that half of the graduates missed more than three months of school last year, unexcused. One in five students was absent more than present — missing more than 90 days of school.”
“According to DCPS policy, if a student misses a class 30 times, he should fail that course. Research shows that missing 10 percent of school, about two days per month, can negatively affect test scores, reduce academic growth and increase the chances a student will drop out.”
The majority of the graduating class missed more than six weeks of school.
So now we understand how the reformers in charge of the DC school system got the graduation rate up. By lowering standards. By lying.
Remember Campbell’s Law.
“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
When you reward schools for higher scores, they will get higher scores, by hook or by crook. When you reward them for higher graduation rates, they will do what it takes—including lowering standards—to reach the goal.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
How did the reformers in charge of the DC school system get the graduation rate up? By lowering standards. By lying.
Well said.
Isn’t the correct name of this school Ballyhoo?
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
Is anyone keeping score on how many times across the country the reformers have lowered standards, cherry-picked students, bullied and abused children, and lied to make their private (get rich schemes for the owners and managers) schools appear better than the traditional, community based, democratic, transparent, real non-profit, public schools are?
There must be hundreds if not thousands of stories like this one.
NPR should be out of business for this. Utterly unexcusable. What the ____?
If every media company had to go out of business when they made a mistake, there would be no media except for the Alt-Right media machine that is a huge misleading mistake.
Find me a media company that says they are perfect, and they will be liars.
After all, Trump is perfect, if you listen to him or read his tweets, and he’s probably the biggest liar of them all.
Mistake? Are you kidding me? Doing absolutely no fact-checking is a “mistake”? Stenographically taking the word of DCPS about their “miracle school” was a “mistake”? Utter lack of curiosity and skepticism is a “mistake”?
People’s willingness to forgive – so long as it’s “our guys” doing it – is absolutely astounding. There is absolutely no principle that “our guys” can’t break without people being willing to defend them for it. This is why we’re in the mess we’re in. We’re getting raped and we’re telling our rapist it’s the best we’ve ever had!
You exaggerate too much Dienne. How do you live with all that PSYOP hate people like Steve Bannon crammed into your brain?
Hillary is evil – BS!
NPR must go out of business – BS!
Fox, Breitbart, Alex Jones, et al. are MUCH worse than NPR will ever be. Do you think they should close their doors too?
Trump is 100x worse than Hillary would have ever been, so why aren’t you cursing him and calling him evil?
Incidentally, mistakes are things we admit to and correct. This story does nothing of the kind. There’s not even a mention that they previously bought lock, stock and barrel into the “miracle” story” DCPS sold them. Not even a “we regret the error”.
Fact checking by NPR?
Ha ha ha ha ha!
It ain’t called National Parrot Radio for nothing.
Or as I called it after 9/11, National Propaganda Radio or National Pentagon Radio.
Yes, in the lead up to the Iraq invasion, I especially loved Scotty “The Quaker” Simon’s cheerleading for the invasion.
And his characterization of that invasion (with it’s Shock and Awe bombing campaign) as “humanitarian” and thus as a moral and just action.
Simon, a member of the Faker sect of Quakers, has since also supported regime change in Syria.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2012/06/04/scott-simon-npr-the-empire/
Of course, like most other mainstream media pundits, Simon and others at NPR simply took the word of the Bush administration as gospel truth.
Cuz that’s what NPR “journalists” do. Stenographer is the main job requirement
And in the case of Iraq, people like Simon were quite literally taking Dick-tation — of Dick Cheney’s words
Not one word in the later article about their previous article touting this school. I’d say shameful, but I seriously doubt NPR has the ability to experience shame.
If nothing else, they’re doing a fine job of giving truth to Trump’s attacks on the “Lame Stream Media”.
NPR rarely admits “mistakes”.
In fact, they have a habit of changing/updating articles on their website without any note of changes.
Sometimes an entirely different article is used to replace an original article that contained “errors”. NPR uses the original link and just swaps in the new article. The original just disappears. Poof!
NPR used to allow comments on their website but discontinued them because too many commenters were pointing out their “errors” (aka lies and biases)
There are comments on this article. Read them and weep. The article is a perfect invitation to racist explanations of the failures in DC schools, not to structural problems in the education reforms foisted on DC schools.
When we scratch the surface “reform’s’ claims, we find lies and massaged data. There is no miracle, just phony accounting. Next we’ll get “POTUS Mendax” saying, “I’d give the Washington D.C. schools a 10.”
This is also happening in medicine.
……
PATIENT DEATHS: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE OF QUALITY MEASUREMENT? – Doctors are avoiding some of the nation’s sickest patients out of concern that deaths or other poor outcomes following treatment could cause Medicare or insurers to cut their payments or shame them with poor marks on their health care quality measures, POLITICO’s David Pittman writes.
As policymakers try to rein in the nation’s nearly $3 trillion annual spending on health care, they’ve tried to tie payments to quality scores, which payers post publicly and link to higher reimbursement. But doctors and scholars say that many providers are avoiding patients who might make them look bad or cost them money.
“It breaks my heart because it’s undermining engagement of physicians with their patients,” said David Barbe, president of the American Medical Association, who added he often hears a colleague say he or she is avoiding a complex patient because it will “kill my scores.”
Yes, this is why the ed reformers and Obamacare reformers are so truly evil.
There are good reasons to use measurements. But sometimes it is very easy to see when measurements are nonsense and very damaging to the people who are supposed to be the ones they are helping.
Democrats actually address this because they are interested in facts.
Fake and greedy reformers will happily sacrifice the lives of many children and other people for power and shut down any real examination of the policies they claim are so successful.
Those fake reformers have no interest in reform at all. They are interested in power and money. Period. It’s a shame because there are improvements that could be made to public education but the ones offered by the fake reformers who only care about pleasing the billionaires who pay them are not about figuring out what works.
Public school funding is BELOW 2008 levels.
“K-12 spending in a number of states is still far below pre-Recession levels, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think-tank.
And those spending cuts have started to have a lasting impact on the quality of education students receive, said Michael Leachman, the organization’s director of state fiscal research who conducted the research. Classrooms are filled to the brink, he said, teachers have taken pay cuts, and academic results have lagged.”
Odd that there are so many ed reformers and yet public education just takes hit after hit.
Are they lousy advocates, or what? There are thousands of adults supposedly ‘improving’ public schools yet this is the result?
Why would NPR believe this story? Schools don’t turn on a dime like this, do they?
It just makes sense that it would be difficult and take a lot of work and time. Why would they think it was true?
Nope… these NPR folks apparently believe in silver bullets that can fix everything. Surely schools can turn on a dime if the right folks are in leadership. …. NPR Fake thinking is at the base of this NPR fake news.
Magical thinking is typical of the media. That’s the theory behind charter schools and TFA. The story is always the same: one teacher turns a class of totally disengaged, tough students into all-stars, all of whom go to Harvard, YALE and Princeton.
That magical thinking came from watching too many Disney fantasy films when they were children. They see every fake promise and lie from TFA and corporate charter schools as prince charming coming to rescue the princess from a witch or ogre.
I believe at this time that the State Superintendents of Public Instruction in bothLouisiana and New Mexico are TFA alums. Remember a big goal of TFA was to put TFAers in leadership positions. Are there other state supers who are TFAers?
Don’t forget the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy. How many public schools administers were programmed by Eli Broad to go out and wreck as much destruction to the traditional public school?
Count Seattle for one with Maria Goodloe Johnson. She closed schools that later needed to be reopened, a very expensive blundered.
Typical Broadie tactic
Fox News and the entire Alt-Right media machine is more than 1000 x faker than NPR will ever be. Anyone who only attacks NPR is a hypocrite and/or one of Steve Bannon’s minions working for the Alt-Right out to destroy the traditional media they can’t control.
Lloyd
On a scale of 1 to 10 of fakeness, Fox News is ∞ (infinity)
And ∞ ÷ 1000 is still ∞
My former wife, we are still friends even if we aren’t married anymore, told me she watches Fox News to see what the enemy is up to, but she also said she has to turn it off and walk away because it makes her sick to her stomach to listen to all the lies and hate.
Some DAM poet,
That’s exactly what Trump says. Infinity is infinity. Fake is fake. There is no reality.
Except NPR did a new report. Maybe that’s fake too. Maybe there IS 100% graduation rate at the high school but now NPR is just faking a story that there isn’t.
You can have bad and lazy reporting that gets it wrong. And you can have PROPAGANDA that intentionally presents lies to further a goal.
Bannon and other fascists get their way by convincing people to ignore any nuances.
What bothers me the most about this story is the larger issue. Does it really matter whether NPR was fooled or not fooled by a high school touting high graduation rates?
This country has lost its way and I blame the education reformers. They aren’t interested in figuring out how to address the problems of teaching severely at-risk students. They are interested in scapegoating public schools for their own greed.
I weep at the difficult position both teachers and administrators are put into. We need to give students a high school diploma like we did in the 1960s and 1970s that just means they graduated high school. It doesn’t make them “college ready” and able to take advanced Calculus and do well their freshman year. It means they have enough math, reading, writing and general knowledge to get by.
In England, students finish school at age 16 and only spend the last two years in comprehensives if they want to go to college.
We need to figure out a better way. And I believe if there weren’t unethical people who are more interested in promoting their own agenda than figuring out how to solve this problem, we could be serving students like that so much better.
Great comment. You, unlike most, seem to have a grasp of the broader context. For eons, only a tiny fraction of humans got university level education; the rest of us were peasants. Now we want most of the ex-peasantry to be equal to the elites. The reformers think we can expect schools to bring us from 2% to 70% college-educated in ten years, completely ignoring the invisible factors underlying the success of that historical 2% including, in many cases, vast stores of intellectual and cultural patrimony imbibed in the home beginning at a very early age. Schools might be able to lift up the ex-peasant class eventually, but, as I’ve learned from twenty years of teaching, knowledge transfer is a long and slow process; there is no really quick way to do it. Equalizing the heirs of the peasantry with the heirs of the patricians will likely take generations. If we get this generation from Square One to Square Three, their kids will start on Square Three and we can work on getting them to Square Seven, and so on. But the reformers are obstructing even this slow process as their beloved Common Core commits us to educational malpractice –neglecting the teaching of knowledge in lieu of fruitless skills practice.
Too many people on the left are now caught up in helping Trump and the alt right promote the view that all media is equally corrupt. They all lie so there’s no way to figure out the truth from a lie, period. Just sit back and let the nice guys in charge take care of it all for you.
Somehow, Diane Revitch’s very apt criticism of an earlier article by NPR has morphed into “look, more proof that the media can’t be trusted just like Trump told us — he’s so right”.
There is no longer any difference between making a mistake and getting something wrong and intentionally distributing propaganda.
President Obama “lied” when he said you could keep your health insurance. Trump lies about everything. No difference.
And that’s exactly what Trump and Bannon need for a fascist to rise. And like Nazi Germany, they could not have succeeded without the help of gullible people parroting their propaganda that it’s all a lie and everything is equally evil. And if you dare to point out the difference between Obama and Trump, you are guilty of what people here call “moral relativism.”
President Obama “lied” when he said you could keep your health insurance. Trump lies about everything. No difference.
No, Obama did not deliberately lie. It is more complicated than that. I’ve read the fact check piece on this alleged “lie”.
“In 2009 and again in 2012, PolitiFact rated Obama’s statement Half True, which means the statement is partially correct and partially wrong.”
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2013/dec/12/lie-year-if-you-like-your-health-care-plan-keep-it/
Lloyd,
I agree with you! But that does not stop that lie from being repeated non-stop.
We live in a country where more people thought Hillary Clinton was a crook than Trump was. And many of those people were on the left. They could see no nuance. Just like their counterparts on the right who KNEW that Obama had intentionally lied to them.
Just look at the comments here by supposedly thoughtful people bashing ALL the media. Doing the dirty work for the fascists while telling themselves they are doing such good.
Back in 2000 the willing fools repeated the lie that Al Gore claimed he invented the internet. Now they repeat the lie that there is a photo that shows Al Franken absolutely groping a woman’s breasts to sexually assault her. They insist that there is no difference between Franken and Harvey Weinstein and trying to make those distinctions is simply being a “moral relativist”.
And they help the right destroy the entire evil media just like the helped the right undermine the entire Democratic Party, helping to defeat Russ Feingold and other progressives because of the self-righteousness that has morphed into what helps fascism grow.
Why do more Americans think Hillary was a crook?
Because of decades of PSYOPs propaganda from the Alt-Right media machine against the Clintons and endless investigations that never convicted Hillary of anything. Clinton was guilty of having consensual sex with other women and cheating on his wife who seems to have forgiven him or accepted that was the way he was and no matter how many affairs Bill had, he always came home to his family.
Why did fewer people think Trump was less of a crook (except in New York)? Because Trump had only been on the political stage for about a year or two and the lying, conspiracy theory generating Alt-Right hate media machine wasn’t spreading lies and conspiracy theories about him non-stop 24-7 even after he stepped up on that stage.
Hillary is not perfect but no human is except for Trump (in his own mind).
The only things I knew about Hillary before the campaign was what I’d read from the lying, Alt Right media machine. Then during the presidential debates, I started to fact check all those claims, research her political history at Vote Smart.com and her factual history going back to her college years.
The result, my opinion of Hillary changed drastically when I learned more about who she really was than just the repeated crap we have been fed for decades. The far right and Trump learned their lesson from Hitler’s Nazis that if you want a lie to become the truth, you keep repeating it, but as Lincoln said, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time and I stopped being fooled by the lying Alt-Right conservative crap about Hillary.
I now think Hillary is a much better person than probably every president except maybe Washington, Lincoln, and Truman.
I think that NPR story is one of the best explanations of what is going on in schools that I have ever seen in public media. Thanks to WAMU, NPR, and also to Washington Teachers Union activist Erich Martel who has been pointing to these issues in the DC area media year after year.
The NPR reporters did their jobs. They dug into a tale that was too good to be true, What comes through is that teaching staff want to uphold academic standards but get in trouble when they do so. The politicians want the appearance that all is well.
In my suburban district, by the time I retired, it differed only by degree. School did work better for more of the kids. But outside of the “magnet/gifted and talented” track, few are prepared for math, science, and engineering, where the few good jobs are for this generation, because the fuzzy math curriculum did not work. Grading policy often required 50% as a minimum grade, which made it tough to average lower than a D. Teachers who tried to fail anyone got in trouble. When we had merit pay, it was often principals giving public money to their friends on the staff. That was so discredited repeatedly that it only lasted a few years, but the evaluation system with penalties for teachers who spoke up about low standards remains, and keeps the lid on the trash can. The need for remediation when students got to college was measurably high, and kids who need remediation tend not to last long in college.
Until the 1950’s, experienced teachers in schools were the instructional leaders. Then the power to decide curriculum and standards rose into a growing central administration and then to state officials with the power to decide curriculum, standards, and testing with no idea of the impact at the classroom level.
Schools will not improve until they run with the professional structure of professional institutions — such as hospitals, where experienced practicing professionals, guided by the findings of science, manage professional practices and standards.
— rick nelson
Rick,
I agree with your comment but I can’t salute NPR because it reported the story of the 100% graduation rate last June without any fact checking. I wish I had the resources and time to check every miracle story like this one. A 57% graduation rate in 2016, then a 100% rate in 2016. Claims like this are always false. Sorry my crap detector was not on high alert.
Thank you, Diane.
Rick you have a great deal correct above =>
” What comes through is that teaching staff want to uphold academic standards but get in trouble when they do so.” = promote grade inflation or be in big trouble.
Central Administrative control is weakening teaching.
“To improve a system requires the intelligent application of relevant data”
Unfortunately Central Admin displays no skill in either finding relevant data or intelligently applying anything.
— Dan Dempsey
A MOST PRESCIENT STATEMENT: “When you reward schools for higher scores, they will get higher scores, by hook or by crook.”