Archives for the month of: December, 2019

The National Education Policy Center publishes reviews of research and reports from think tanks and advocacy groups.

In this post, Professor Jaekyung Lee of SUNY, Buffalo, reviews a report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute on the academic progress of children of color. To the surprise and delight of many, including me, TBF concluded that poverty reduction played a role in the academic gains in the past two decades.

Reviewed

by:

Jaekyung Lee

University at Buffalo, SUNY

November 2019

Executive Summary

A recent Fordham report highlights the historic academic progress of Black and Hispanic

groups over the past two decades at the elementary school level on the NAEP exam. From

this, the report offers the major claim, based on its author’s eyeball test, that the academic

progress of students of color is attributable “mostly” to poverty reduction. The report, how-

ever, also acknowledges that correlation is not causation and calls for systematic statistical

analysis to test the author’s proposition. This review responds to that call by examining the

validity of the report’s arguments around progress and causes, looking to expanded data

sources, including both family income and school expenditures. The review notes uneven

patterns of achievement among grade levels and refutes the report’s claim that flat achieve-

ment trends among 12th graders are a result of dropout reductions. My own analysis with

data suggests that poverty reduction has indeed been important, as has increased school

funding. Further, I raise critical questions about national progress towards both excellence

and equity. First, academic progress at the elementary school level is undercut by an off-

setting slump at the high school level. Second, in spite of the greater academic progress of

Black and Hispanic groups during the 1990s and 2000s, Black-White and Hispanic-White

achievement gaps remain substantial across all grades in core subjects. Third, despite prog-

ress in poverty reduction, racial inequalities in social and educational opportunities as well

as racial differences in economic returns to educational investment persist. Overall, the re-

port helpfully brings attention to the significant academic progress of Black and Hispanic

students over the past two decades, although it is incorrect to downplay the persisting racial

gaps or the phenomenon of the high school slump.

Key Review Takeaway: Report emphasizes significant academic progress of Black and Hispanic students over the past two decades, but is incorrect in downplaying the persisting racial gaps or the phenomenon of the high school slump.

Find Documents:

Publication Announcement:https://nepc.info/node/10079
NEPC Review:https://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/achievement
Report Reviewed:https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/fewer-children-left-behind

Categories Education Reform

The Saudi Trial for Khashoggi Murder Was a Cover-Up

By dianeravitch

December 26, 2019 //

Robin Wright describes the phony trial in Saudi Arabia intended to punish the assassins who killed journalist Jamaal Khashoggi.

its real purpose was to shield MBS, the tyrant who ordered a team of 15 hit men to murder an dismember Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Turkey. Everything that happened was videotaped by Turkish Intelligence.

She begins:

On Monday, the authoritarian kingdom of Saudi Arabia sentenced five operatives to death for the grisly murder and dismemberment of the Washington Postjournalist Jamal Khashoggi, at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, in October, 2018. Another three men were dispatched to jail; three more were acquitted. The outcome was, in the words of human-rights experts with whom I spoke after the verdict was announced, “typical Saudi justice.” The trial was held in secret. The government’s evidence was never publicly released. The convicted were never named, even in the verdict. And the few diplomats allowed to attend the trial had to swear that they would not disclose any details or identities. Most strikingly, the three men widely believed to be ultimately responsible for Khashoggi’s murder—including the powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, his close adviser, Saud al-Qahtani, and the former deputy head of intelligence, Ahmed al-Assiri—got off scot-free. “This is not a surprise. It is true to form,” Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch, told me. “The Saudis are compounding their stream of laughable lies with a laughable verdict.”

Both the C.I.A. and the U.N. implicated M.B.S., as the crown prince is commonly known, in Khashoggi’s murder. During the past two years, the ambitious young royal has consolidated Saudi Arabia’s five major branches of power under his gold-embroidered robe. He has also been the key Saudi liaison to the Trump Administration and a close ally of Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. Khashoggi, a former unofficial spokesman for the oil-rich monarchy, fled the kingdom in 2017 and took residence in the United States, where he became the prince’s most vocal and visible critic. Weeks before his death, Khashoggi told me that M.B.S., still only the heir apparent to the Saudi throne, had already become more autocratic than any of the previous six kings. He compared the prince’s absolute powers to those of Iran’s Supreme Leader: “He has no tolerance or willingness to accommodate critics.” In one of Khashoggi’s early columns for the Post, he says that he has to write as his conscience dictates. “To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison,” he writes. “I can speak when so many cannot. I want you to know that Saudi Arabia has not always been as it is now. We Saudis deserve better.”

M.B.S.’s culpability—and premeditation—was the issue implicitly on trial. The kingdom originally lied, saying that Khashoggi had walked out of the consulate shortly after he’d arrived. It took three weeks for the government to admit that he’d been murdered; it claimed that the execution was a rogue operation, despite the extraordinary planning required for a sophisticated covert operation on foreign soil. Turkey then released videotapes of two Saudi hit squads—comprising fifteen people in total—arriving in Istanbul the day before the murder. It had video of Khashoggi going into the consulate. Turkish intelligence recorded all that followed, including Khashoggi’s struggle to fight off Saudi security, his gasping suffocation, and the bone-sawing that followed, as his body was cut up into pieces. The Turks also had video footage of a body double—one of the men who had flown in for the operation—leaving the diplomatic mission dressed in Khashoggi’s clothing.

The U.N.’s report, released in June, concluded that “every expert consulted finds it inconceivable that an operation of this scale could be implemented without the Crown Prince being aware, at a minimum, that some sort of mission of a criminal nature, directed at Mr. Khashoggi, was being launched.” But, in announcing the verdict, the Saudi deputy public prosecutor, Shalaan al-Shalaan, declared that the investigation showed that “the killing was not premeditated. The decision was taken at the spur of the moment.” Last year, the Republican-led Senate passed a resolution—notably, with unanimity—blaming the crown prince for the Khashoggi murder, despite pushback from the White House.

The outcome triggered disbelief among Saudi experts. “Are we to believe these individuals conceived, planned, and executed the operations without direction and authority from Saudi leadership? Not likely,” James Smith, a former U.S. Ambassador to the kingdom, told me. “The Saudis do not want to solve the case. They want it to go away.”

Qahtani, the prince’s adviser, was also not on trial, despite widespread indications that he played a central role in the Khashoggi murder. He had masterminded the arrest of hundreds of dissidents. He has been identified by prisoners as an interrogator and torturer. Citing intelligence sources, Reuters reportedthat Qahtani ran the Khashoggi execution—in real time—via Skype. And he had long worked at the side of the crown prince. A few months before the murder, he tweeted, “Do you think I make decisions without guidance? I am an employee and a faithful executor of the orders of my lord the king and my lord the faithful crown prince.” Qahtani was moved aside after the murder; he has not been seen in public since then. Various reports from the secretive kingdom have suggested that he has been under house arrest, or has had his movements restricted, or has been occasionally allowed to travel within the Gulf. But nothing official has been released….

Whitson said, “Given that the chief architects of this murder were not even investigated or indicted—and I mean Qahtani and M.B.S.—there is no doubt that this trial was merely a mechanism to offer a theatre of process devoid of substance.” Agnès Callamard, a special rapporteur for the U.N.’s human-rights office who led the U.N. investigation, voiced similar outrage. “The hit-men are guilty, sentenced to death. The masterminds not only walk free. They have barely been touched by the investigation and the trial,” Callamard tweeted on Monday. “Under international human-rights law, the killing of Mr. #Khashoggi was an extrajudicial execution for which the State of #SaudiArabia is responsible. But at no point did the trial considered the responsibilities of the State….”

The verdict came just days after President Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes a provision that the director of National Intelligence submit to Congress—within thirty days—a list of the Saudis believed to be responsible for the Khashoggi murder, the subsequent coverup, or for impeding a fair and impartial investigation. The original bill, submitted by Representative Tom Malinowski, a Democrat of New Jersey, called for everyone on the list to be sanctioned and denied a visa. The final bill, stripped down by Republicans in conference, removed the punishment of sanctions. But it still called for publication of their names—which Saudi Arabia has yet to do partially or in full. “M.B.S. should already be on the list of shame for Khashoggi’s murder,” Malinowski told me. “If he thinks these verdicts are going to help him, then he’s badly miscalculated. Executing his henchmen for following his orders will be one more reason to include him on the list.”

Our friends, the Saudis. MBS, Jared’s best friend.

Categories Education Reform

Robin Lithgow: Boys Theater Companies During the Tudor Age, Part 1

By dianeravitch

December 26, 2019 //

Robin Lithgow, former director in charge of arts education in Los Angeles public schools, has written an engaging series about the history of “boys’ theater companies.”

This is Part 1.

She begins:

“Harken, I do hear sweet music: I never heard the like” and “we shall hear [in the choir of Saint Paul’s] the fairest voices of all the cathedrals in England … and to tell the truth, I never heard better singing.”

— Claude Desainliens, a French visitor to London in 1573

“Mom, I was just in Westminster Abbey, and there was music falling from the ceiling—the most beautiful singing I’ve ever heard. I thought it was angels, but then the choir door opened and out walked a whole lot of little boys!”

—My 18-year-old daughter, calling from a phone booth on her first day in London, 1995, having just heard the Westminster Boys Choir in rehearsal

* * *

A Bit of Little-Known History From My Book:

“In England, the training of boys’ voices for royal entertainment goes far back in history, deep into the Middle Ages. Sometime in the 12^thcentury, probably earlier, an ecclesiastical body of musicians and singers was organized to meet the spiritual needs of the England’s reigning sovereign. It still exists. Called the Chapel Royal, it is today considered the oldest continuous musical organization in the world. Traditionally it has been comprised of from twenty-four to thirty-eight men and from eight to twelve boys. Besides the Chapel Royal and the Westminster Boys’ Choir there are dozens of boys’ choirs throughout Britain, the Chapel Royal only being the oldest.

“No one knows when boy singers were added to the Chapel Royal or other church choirs, but they were probably present from the very beginning, their treble voices being thought to be the closest to the voices of angels. There was a religious pursuit of this purity of tone. Churches, abbeys and cathedrals were designed acoustically to capture it: massive sound boxes that amplified these “fairest voices.” Choir schools, attached to churches and training children for church choirs, played a role in the pre-reformation history of British education. They offered free education to able students. Their purpose was to assure a sufficient number of well-trained voices to supply the needs of the church. As we shall see, Erasmus himself attended a song school in Utrecht, perhaps because it was an opportunity for a free education. The earliest choirmasters were usually almoners, the men who distributed alms to the needy.

Categories Art, Arts Education, History

Garrison Keillor: Harper Lee’s Best Christmas Present Ever

By dianeravitch

December 25, 2019 //

I recently subscribed to Garrison Keillor’s free website called”A Writer’s Almanac.”

He told this wonderful Christmas story today:

It was on this day in 1956 that novelist Harper Lee (books by this author) spent Christmas in New York City with friends, and received a gift that changed her life. In 1949, Lee had dropped out of a law program at the University of Alabama and moved to New York City, the home of her childhood friend Truman Capote. Capote had just published his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) — which featured a character based on Lee, and he was a literary star. In New York, Lee found a job as a ticket agent at an airline. For seven years, she wrote on the weekends, but she never published anything.

She rarely got time off from work, so she wasn’t able to get home to Alabama for Christmas. That Christmas of 1956, she was homesick. Lee wrote: “What I really missed was a memory, an old memory of people long since gone, of my grandparents’ house bursting with cousins, smilax, and holly. I missed the sound of hunting boots, the sudden open-door gusts of chilly air that cut through the aroma of pine needles and oyster dressing. I missed my brother’s night-before-Christmas mask of rectitude and my father’s bumblebee bass humming ‘Joy to the World.’”

Lee spent that Christmas, like many others, with her closest friends in the city: a couple named Michael and Joy Brown, whom she had met through Capote, and their two sons. Michael Brown was paid by companies to write promotional “industrial musicals,” like “Wonderful World of Chemistry” for DuPont, which was performed 17,000 times. In the fall of 1956, he had written a successful industrial show for Esquire magazine, and he was feeling rich.

Lee and the Browns had a tradition of trying to exchange the best Christmas gifts for the least amount of money, and that year Lee’s present for Michael Brown was a portrait of an 18th-century Anglican writer and cleric. It cost her 35 cents. Lee couldn’t hide her disappointment when everyone had opened their gifts and there were none for her. The Browns told her to look in the tree, where she found an envelope addressed to her. Inside, it said: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.”

Lee thought it was a joke, and when she finally realized that it wasn’t, she protested, but the Browns insisted — they were feeling financially comfortable, and they thought she was talented and deserved a chance to write full-time. When she said that it was too big of a risk for them, Michael replied: “No, honey. It’s not a risk. It’s a sure thing.” She wrote: “I went to the window, stunned by the day’s miracle. Christmas trees blurred softly across the street, and firelight made the children’s shadows dance on the wall beside me. A full, fair chance for a new life. Not given me by an act of generosity, but by an act of love. Our faith in you was really all I had heard them say. I would do my best not to fail them.”

She went to work immediately, and just three weeks later she brought 49 pages of a new novel called Go Set a Watchman to an agent. By the end of February, she had finished the draft. Her agents suggested some edits, and by October of 1957 the manuscript was sent off to a publishing company without a title. The publishers liked it but thought it needed major revisions — most significantly, they thought that Lee should focus on the childhood, not the adulthood, of the novel’s narrator, Scout Finch. Lee spent two years reworking the novel, and came up with a new title: To Kill A Mockingbird. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) went on to sell more than 30 million copies and become one of the most beloved books in American literature.

Lee didn’t release another book until 2015, when she published what had been the first draft of To Kill A Mockingbird, now marketed as a sequel to it: Go Set a Watchman. She died in 2016.

Categories Literature

Merry Christmas!

By dianeravitch

December 25, 2019 //

Merry Christmas, Happy Chanakuh, Happy Kwanzaa.

Whatever you celebrate, have a great day!

Make it a great day by doing something kind for someone else.

Diane

Categories Education Reform

How to Talk to Your Family About Charter Schools During the Holidays

By dianeravitch

December 24, 2019 //

Jeremy Mohler of the nonpartisan “In the Public Interest” wrote a clear summary of the reasons to be concerned about charter schools:

The holidays are a time of joy and relaxation but also uncomfortable conversations with family. Will Uncle Tommy go on another rant about windmills causing cancer? Does grandma still think Russia is the only reason Trump won?

So, what should you say when someone starts dissing traditional, neighborhood public schools and hyping up charter schools?

Charter schools generally perform academically about the same as neighborhood public schools.

Study after study show that, just like there are high and low performing neighborhood public schools, there are high and low performing charter schools.

In fact, because some charter schools effectively exclude special education students or expel students with perceived disciplinary issues, charter school academic success often can be overstated.

Charter schools can drain school district budgets, taking resources from neighborhood public school students.

Research is revealing that, in many states, school districts and the students they serve are undermined by policies that prioritize opening new charter schools.

For example, California’s unchecked charter school growth cost San Diego’s school district $65.9 millionduring the 2016–17 school year. That’s $620 less in funding a year for things like nurses, counselors, and computers for each neighborhood public school student.

Charter schools have been co-opted into a market-based model of providing education with winners and losers.

While some charter schools are founded and run by grassroots groups of parents and educators, many are run by large, corporate-like chains, such as Rocketship and KIPP.

Wealthy donors and organizations like the family who owns Walmart are bent on privatizing public education through the creation of a parallel education system in competition with neighborhood public schools.For example, since 1997, the Walton Family Foundation has invested more than $407 millionin charter schools.

The seeds of today’s “school choice” movement were sewn in the years after desegregation.

Charter schools are more racially isolated than neighborhood public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the nation.

The vast majority of the school districts that have experienced state takeovers in the last 30 years are majority black and Latinx. Many subsequently were forced to allow for the creation of charter schools. Some middle and upper class, predominantly white communities are even using charter schools to opt out of neighborhood public schools.

This harkens back to the years following Brown v. Board of Education when southern legislatures enacted as many as 450 laws and resolutions attempting to discredit, block, postpone, limit, or evade school integration. Many of these acts allowed the re-direction of taxpayer dollars to benefit private schools, such as private school vouchers, as white Americans fled in record numbers from neighborhood public schools.

Even though most charter schools are nonprofit doesn’t mean the people who run them aren’t pocketing tons of taxpayer money.

Running a nonprofit charter school can be a highly lucrative undertaking. Some charter schools hire for-profit charter management organizations. Others rent buildings from real estate investors who specialize in charter school investment.

One charter school in California’s Bay Area rented school space at three and one-half times market rate from a company with business ties to its CEO. Through this and other schemes, the CEO diverted $2.7 million in taxpayer dollars without any supporting documents over a span of five years.

Public school systems should provide a great education to each and every student.

Students (and society alike) don’t need a public school system that creates winners and losers. They need smaller classes, better paid teachers, more support services, and cleaner and safer facilities.

Whatever you do during the holidays this year, don’t buy into the myth that the U.S. public education system is broken. There are countless neighborhood public schools around the country finding powerful and groundbreaking ways to educate students. There are hardworking, courageous teachers in every city and town across this land.

What’s broken is how we fund public education. Public schools simply need more resources, and, for that to happen, we don’t need anything all that complicated. Corporations must pay their fair share in taxes, and more resources must to go to the schools and communities that need them most.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Stuart Egan: A Christmas Lesson for Our Time

By dianeravitch

December 24, 2019 //

Stuart Egan, National Board Certified Teacher in North Carolina, is aware that he is surrounded by piety, not all of which is sincere. In this holiday season, he calls on his fellow citizens to recognize that the best way to be pro-life is to care for children who are already born.

Why are we not protecting the lives of those who are already born? I feel that being “pro-life” is not a matter reserved for the issue of abortion and the unborn, but should include those who are living and need help.

Hubert Humphrey once said in 1977, “the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

If you are “pro-life” then it would make sense that you would look to the welfare of those who cannot necessarily defend themselves without help like the “children, the elderly, and the sick.”

Is it not ironic that many who ran on a strict “pro-life” platform seem to be in favor of privatizing or redefining the very services that help sustain the lives of those whom they claim to champion.

Categories Education Reform

A Plea to Arkansas Officials to Keep Hands Off Little Rock Public Schools

By dianeravitch

December 24, 2019 //

Dr. Anika Whitfield is a leader of Grassroots Arkansas.

She recently posted an open letter to key state officials, including Governor Asa Hutchinson and State Commissioner Johnny Key.

She wrote:

Open Letter: State Oppression Denying Independence

The State of Arkansas continues to strong arm the LRSD with unwelcomed and unsolicited changes that continue to be forced upon us.

As three persons who have some authority and have taken an oath of responsibility to represent the entire state, yet you seem to not feel the need to respectfully and justly represent your Little Rock School District constituency.

Four years and 11 months into state control of the LRSD, you still have not established clear exit criteria and a plan for the LRSD to exit state control.

Four years and 11 months into state control of the LRSD, you continue to deny the LRSD community of our inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as you are murdering our schools and destroying the lives of students, teachers and educators with closures, punitive measures, bullying, and other forms of deadly violence; you have taken away our rights to vote, but continue to collect our tax dollars and use them in ways we have demonstrated are against our will and best interest- taxation without elected representation; and, you are abusing your power by forcibly imposing decisions on us that are denying our pursuits of happiness and have continued to deceptively label your forced violation of our human rights as “helping us.”

You continue to demonstrate that expecting m.o.r.e (moral justice, objective fairness, respectful responsiveness, and ethical equity) of you is apparently a futile expectation.

How many LRSD family’s lives have you been mandated to ruin in Little Rock?

How many LRSD community neighborhoods have you been mandated to destroy in Little Rock?

How many LRSD students have you been mandated to shift from public schools to private-public charter schools, detention centers, and/or prisons?

How many LRSD certified teachers and educators have you been mandated to force into retirement, terminate, reduce their benefits package, and reduce their salaries and/or retirement benefits?

It may require having a heart for Democracy, a heart for justice, and a heart for human love and respect to appreciate the words I have penned. If you are unable to understand what I am saying and asking, perhaps someone in your family or in your workplace can assist you in understanding.

It is my hope that we will not have to settle these matters with a legal battle that wastes precious time, money, and energy that could all be better spent investing in the lives of students, families, neighborhoods, and communities, not only in the LRSD community, but equitably, throughout our state.

In the Spirit of LOVE, Equity, Liberation and Democracy!

Rev./Dr. Anika T. Whitfield

Categories Education Reform

Ellen and Michelle Obama Give a D.C. Elementary School $100,000, But Valerie Strauss Asks Why the City Does Not Fund D.C. Schools’ Needs

By dianeravitch

December 24, 2019 //

Michelle Obama surprised the staff and children of Randle Highlands Elementary School in D.C. by bringing them a box filled with $100,000 cash to buy whatever they need for the schools.

Valerie Strauss wondered why the school is unde-resourced, why teachers have to dig into their own pockets, when the city has a large surplus.

What about the schools where Ellen doesn’t send a gift of $100,000?

It really is a wonderful gesture, but public schools should not have to depend on charity to meet their basic needs.

Watch the video if you can. It really is heartwarming, and almost makes you forget that the city is failing to fund its schools.

Strauss writes:

Former first lady Michelle Obama recently walked into an elementary school in the nation’s capital and delivered a box with a stunning gift: $100,000 in cash, courtesy of entertainer Ellen DeGeneres. Children and adults screamed and jumped for joy when they saw the money in a genuinely heartwarming scene (that you can see below in the video Obama tweeted). And why not?

For one thing, Obama is, according to some polls, the most admired woman in the world. Having her show up at your school is a treat by itself. What’s more, the school can certainly use the money.

All of the mostly African American students at Randle Highlands Elementary School in Southeast Washington come from economically disadvantaged homes, according to D.C. Public Schools’ website, and Principal Kristie Edwards said in the video that many of the children are homeless or in the foster care system. Edwards says in the video that her school is in one of the “roughest” areas of the city, but that her students know they can expect “love and a hug” when they come to school — and that they will be safe.

As the box was opened, Obama said, “Ellen is giving you guys $100,000 to help you cover whatever business that you have for the schools, whether it is for the food pantry or whether it’s computer programs. We hope this will make sure that you will not have to go into your pockets any longer for these kids because we know how amazing you guys are.”

So what’s wrong with this picture?

The problem certainly is not a visit from a former first lady or an entertainer trying to help a school.

Rather, the problems are:

The funding system in U.S. public education leaves the poorest schools with the fewest resources
School system budgets do not provide most teachers with all the supplies they need to do their jobs — and this has been baked into the process for many years.
The D.C. government has had multimillion-dollar budget surpluses the past few years, and Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) is in charge of the school system. Why are there campuses that don’t have all of the supplies they need?

In her comments at Randle, Obama said she and DeGeneres hoped the $100,000 would “make sure that you will not have to go into your pockets any longer.” The reference reflected the fact that at least 94 percent of teachers nationally, according to the latest federal data, spend an average of nearly $500 of their own money on supplies, often for basics such as paper and pencils, tissue and furniture.

Categories District of Columbia, Education Reform, Funding

Robert Kuttner: NY Times Brands Sanders and Warren “Far Left”

By dianeravitch

December 23, 2019 //

Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect takes the New York Times to task for its coverage of progressive candidates.

DECEMBER 23, 2019

Kuttner on TAP

The Times Brands Sanders and Warren as Far Left. The sheer ideological bias of the mainstream press continues to astound. Today’s offender is a piece in The New York Times (page B2 of the Monday print edition) with the headline “Democrats Are Cautious About Ideas on the Far Left.”

The Times’ examples are Medicare for All and free public higher education. Call me old-fashioned, but I always thought “far left” referred to such ideas as nationalizing the means of production. You know: Lenin, Fidel, Chairman Mao.

Free public higher education is about as far left as Lincoln’s land grant colleges. For more than a century, it was the norm in America.

The Times bases its conclusion on a survey which shows that 30.5 percent of Democratic respondents want public colleges to be free to everyone and another 31.6 percent want them free to all but the wealthy. So, depending on how you read the poll, you might conclude that 62.1 percent of Democrats want public colleges to be free for the vast majority of people. Does that make most Democrats far left?

Turning to Medicare for All, the Times survey finds that 58.4 percent of respondents want Medicare to be available to all, with the option of keeping private insurance, while only 24.7 percent want everyone on a “single government plan.” (Actually, Medicare comes in many flavors, but never mind.)

Yet the same poll asks respondents which candidate they most trust on health care, and … wait for it … 35.8 percent pick Bernie Sanders and another 33.2 percent pick Elizabeth Warren. In other words, 69 percent prefer Sanders or Warren on health care, and of course both favor Medicare for All.

So, by the Times’ definition, 69 percent of Democrats are evidently “far left.” What gives? Could it be that respondents have inconsistent, context-dependent preferences, depending on how the question is asked?

Well, yes, as any competent pollster can tell you. That’s just Political Science 101. The Times betrays three bad habits: overwriting headlines and stories, misunderstanding the dark arts of polling, and a not-so-subtle bias favoring the political center. ~ ROBERT KUTTNER