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The Washington Post editorial page has a lengthy recent history of misrepresenting the truth about American public education. Worse, it continues to support and advocate for “remedies” that do little to improve schooling.
The lead education editorial writer, Jo-Ann Armao, has made the claim that American public education is broken and teacher unions are to blame. She has consistently touted more testing, charter schools and abolishment of tenure as “the fix.” But Armao gets it wrong again and again, and again.
If unions impede student learning, for example, how does Armao explain high achievement in many strong union states (Maryland and Massachusetts come to mind), and bottom-of-the-barrel achievement where unions are weak or non-existent (the deep South, for example)? She cannot.
A USA Today investigation into cheating in the District schools under Michell Rhee found that for a school to be “flagged” for possible cheating a “classroom had to have so many wrong-to-right erasures that the average for each student was 4 standard deviations higher than the average for all D.C. students in that grade on that test, meaning that “ a classroom corrected its answers so much more often than the rest of the district that it could have occurred roughly one in 30,000 times by chance. D.C. classrooms corrected answers much more often.” When half of all the schools in the system are flagged for grossly abnormal wrong-to-right erasures on tests and “ the odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance,” then it’s more than likely that “some cheating” took place. And, even Rhee has admitted that “some cheating” may have occurred during her reign as superintendent of the DC schools.
But, in a fit of editorial obtuseness, The Post(Armao) said “there are many innocent explanations for changed answers.” The Post told the public, inaccurately, that Rhee and her cronies “were cleared by an outside firm.”
However, Rhee and her top minions, including current chancellor Kay Henderson, were very reluctant to have any kind of investigation. Consider also that the “investigations” that finally took place were quite limited. The school system refused to release the names of the schools that were initially investigated, and it refused to release the limited-in-scope “investigative” reports. In essence, the “test security” company, Caveon, that performed the very limited inquiries into the DC testing irregularities, performed much like the Wall Street ratings agencies (Fitch’s, Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s) that signed off on the toxic, collateralized securities peddled by the investment banks. Those agencies took the big fees and gave the banks what they wanted: AAA ratings for securities that were dogs. So too, Caveon took the money and looked the other way. It suggested, as did DC school officials, that all the red flags signaling rampant cheating might be due to students who just checked their work. Interestingly, that “checking” was virtually always from wrong answers to right ones.
Here’s how Post education reporter Bill Turque covered the DC limited inquiry:
“Caveon founder John Fremer said he was doing exactly what his client, DCPS, asked. Had it asked for more, he said, more could have been done. The Utah-based firm could have analyzed answer sheets at greater depth–far beyond erasure rates, which Fremer says are the crudest and least reliable marker for possible testing misconduct.”
“It could have searched for patterns of collusion, looking for unusual levels of agreement on answers among students seated near each other. It could have checked for logical inconsistencies in answer patterns, determining if students were doing unusually well on the harder questions while getting easier ones wrong. It could have gone back and looked at prior-year performance by students, or the performance of classrooms under certain teachers in the past.”
“I could do everything you could ever want done,” Fremer said.
Obviously, like the big bankers and hedge funders who caused the financial meltdown and still do not want prosecutors nosing into their corrupt practices, Rhee and Henderson (and others) do not want full scrutiny. They know what an independent, in-depth investigation –– like the one in Atlanta –– would uncover.
The Washington Post The Post ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, wrote fairly recently that when “Eugene Meyer bought this newspaper in 1933 he put at the top of his seven guiding principles…”
Two of those “guiding principles” are these:
‘The first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth can be ascertained,’ AND ‘The Newspaper shall tell ALL the truth so far as it can learn it.’
The Washington Post and its editorial page, including Ms. Armao, would do well to remember and abide by Meyer’s principles. But they seem to be having a difficult time of it.
