Compare ‘Education Reform’ to Ineffective but Profitable Quick-Weight-Loss Schemes

John Viall compares the past 15 years of education ‘reform’ to the past 30 or 40 years of completely counterproductive weight-loss schemes — in both cases, the results are exactly contrary to what they were promised to be. In one case, we can see that America’s obesity rates are some of the worst in the world. In the other, we have certainly not ‘raced to the top’ on TIMMS, PISA, or any other international test, despite all of promises by both the Bush and Obama administrations.

He concludes (I added some color):

“For a sixth time the PISA test was administered in 2015.

Now, 15-year-olds from seventy countries and educational systems took the test. How did U. S. students fare?

The envelope please.

In reading U. S. students scored 497. In other words, after fifteen years of school reform and tens of billions wasted, reading scores were still down seven points.

Fifteen years of listening to blowhard politicians—and U. S. students averaged 470 in math, a depressing 23-point skid.

Surely, all that meddling must have done some good? No. Science scores averaged 496, still down three points.

Fifteen years of diet plans that couldn’t possibly fail and, metaphorically, we were all just a little more fat.

PISA scores had been the foundation on which all school reform was built; and after all these years, America’s 15-year-olds were scoring 33 points worse.

Remedial College Courses and Real Problems

From a recent discussion on the Concerned4DCPS list about a recent NYT article on the numbers of students taking remedial courses at the college level. I have taken the opportunity to revise and extend my remarks. If you want to read these in chronological order, start at the bottom.

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(From me:)

Hi, KPW,

First of all, thanks for at least posting something. I’ve gotten lazy and somewhat discouraged, myself and have posted very little of late.

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But as Virginia Spatz  has already written, when posting a link on something you think is significant, it would be helpful if you wrote a sentence or two explaining what it is that’s important (and whether you agree or disagree in part or completely with whatever is at the other end of the link))

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As we all know there is simply so much information out there that nobody can keep up with even a tiny part of the important stuff, so digesting it at least and passing on the essence can be a real service.

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Following some other links posted by I-forget-whom, I read up on the article you linked to,  and found that there are in fact a lot of distortions in the article.

 .

Yes, it is a scandal that lots of kids are taking on huge loans to take courses that are called ‘remedial’ and which earn no credit hours towards their graduation is a real scandal, but those ‘remedial’ courses of today were once upon a time courses that only a tiny, tiny fraction of students would even have taken before graduating high school back in my parents’ day. They were considered college-level work 80 years ago!

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(My dad, who earned degrees in history at Bowdoin and Columbia in the late 1930s and the early 1940s (he also worked summers in a defense plant in WW2 until he got polio — but that’s another story) once told me that “college algebra” was generally taken by bright undergrads. I have an old ‘college algebra’ textbook on my shelf.)

 .

(I have books that contain letters written by farmers who were removed from what’s now Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, complaining about their treatment and asking for help. Many of those mountain folks were illiterate, so the letters we do have are the very best writers, and the grammar, punctuation , spelling  and overall composition in many of the letters would embarrass most 6th graders today. There are no letters from any of the displaced black residents, but given that many of the adults had grown up as slaves and were only freed as a result of the defeat of the Confederacy and teaching slaves to read was illegal, and given that as far as I can tell there was not a single pre-National Park school for black kids in side the park boundaries, I guess that’s not to surprising)

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But guess what: nowadays, we routinely teach “college algebra” to seventh and eighth graders. Even here in DC’s public and charter schools.

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A very large fraction of the millions of kids who begin their freshman year at a 4-year university or college have already taken CALCULUS and got passing grades in both their HS but ALSO on the Advanced Placement Calculus exam – of which there are now two types: the very difficult one (Calculus AB) and then the f*^£-ing unbelievably difficult one (Calculus BC). On my blog I have stats and graphs that show that the growth in AP test completion in the US is, in fact, a striking example of exponential growth . See, for example, here: When I took my single AP test back in 1967, I was one of only 42,000 students who did so. But in 2011, there were nearly TWO MILLION students taking AP exams! (Yes, that is roughly a FIFTY-FOLD increase!)

Oh yeah – ‘exponential growth’ is a topic we teach to just about every HS student in America nowadays, and not just for compound interest problems involving bank accounts!

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Sure, the students don’t all learn all of it. Some kids at some schools instead run and chase and curse each other out in the halls when they are supposed to be in class, and if they do finally enter a classroom, some of them pay no attention whatsoever, and carry on loud conversations as if the teacher weren’t giving a lesson. It’s my impression that gradually any power or authority to maintain order and discipline has been taken away from teachers at many, many schools in DC – I don’t know about elsewhere. And while the total number of AP tests being passed in DC is on the rise, a lot of data is being kept secret, Erich Martel has discovered that at some high schools in DC, almost every person who sits for any AP exam earns the very lowest possible score – a “1”.

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Some schools of course do have consequences for misbehavior, class cutting and doing no work that really mean something, up to and including removing the child from the class or school either temporarily or permanently. Statistics show that certain schools (public and charter both, but largely charters) are permitted to use this remedy a LOT. Other schools are basically forbidden to do anything of the sort: there are no consequences for any misbehavior or lack of study. In some schools, no child is actually failed and held back, or required to transfer out, or anything else, no matter how many classes they cut or are tardy to. It matters not at all that they did absolutely no classwork or homework, passed no tests or quizzes, did not a single required project, and wrote not a single paper, in any class. Teachers are forbidden to fail students, and if they do, the grades get changed. Only at the 9th grade in DCPS are students actually required to pass their courses.

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Some schools don’t allow this sort of foolishness at all. But having enormous discrepancies in suspension and expulsion rates looks bad. My understanding from some KIPP staff is that after those schools were put in the media hot seat briefly for having high suspension totals, they reduced the number of suspensions, which resulted in significant numbers of kids who cut classes and walked the halls, much like elsewhere. There has got to be some sort of balance between being completely out-of-control and being something like a prison where the inmates are not allowed to speak to each other and must have every single bodily motion within prescribed limits, all day long.

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When reading that NYT article, please keep in mind why Benjamin Banneker back in the late 1700s was considered to be such a mathematical genius. Not just because he was one of the few African-Americans who could read and write, but because, he could also {gasp} solve problems involving proportions, linear equations, trigonometry and logarithms!!! DOUBLE GASP!

 .

That sort of “extraordinary” mathematical prowess was extremely rare back in those days – among even among whites (it being a crime to teach slaves to read or write at all.)

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Nowadays, we teach proportions to every child in elementary school, not just the prodigies like BB. Linear equations are taught to every middle schooler in America. Every single recent DCPS graduate must have at least been taught about trig and logarithms.

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Whether they actually learned those topics is a different story! Obviously, some do learn that stuff, and some don’t, and there has been lots of heated argument about the best ways of teaching those topics, but those extremely advanced topics of 1792  are taught to everybody today. At least in theory.

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So yeah, we do have some serious problems in our schools.

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On the one hand, we have widespread and amazing student accomplishments that put the past to shame, even here in DC’s public and charter schools.

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On the other hand, as today’s WaPo showed, we have much more segregation of the poor and brown in their own special schools than even 15 years ago.

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Partly as a result, there is also a really significant problem with kids who are completely and utterly turned off and feel like they can do anything they like (short of actual bloodshed) and not only get away with it, but be promoted to the next grade (unless they are a 9th grader, which many do repeat and drop out from). I think it’s worse today than it was before I retired, and I think I taught some in all 8 wards – that includes some summer school classes.

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And there is another problem: even if you do graduate from a fancy college, that bachelor’s degree just might qualify you to be a barista, a bartender, or a waiter. When I run across my really brilliant former DCPS math whiz students, only rarely do I find that they ended up going into STEM fields and staying there. I also know a bunch of science PhDs, brilliant folks, who have gotten out of science for various reasons — one is that they have to spend half their time jockeying for the right to remain employed by writing proposal after proposal, and not doing any science at all. This problem is not unique to the USA: Central America, Africa, the Middle East all put out millions of folks with all sorts of certificates and advanced degrees who can’t find work. Some come here or to Europe and end up working as drivers, parking lot attendants, and so on, a similar waste of talent, brainpower, and education.

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So again, don’t trust the source of that ‘study’, and almost everything on education from the WaPo and NYT editorial board has been amazingly wrong-headed.

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I submit that the bar for “remedial college courses” has been raised a LOT. Yes, we have some real problems, but this article completely ignores the successes. I suspect that the purpose of this article was to bash public schools and teachers, when they have actually been extremely successful in raising overall educational accomplishments.  But who are under the most vicious attack from a weird coalition of billionaires and their acolytes who have not accomplished any of the miracles that they have promised.

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Guy

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On May 18, 2016, at 11:32 PM, KPW  <concerned4DCPS@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

I don’t trust, I verify.  I share information for people to know what is going on and what is happening so that they can act or respond accordingly.  Information is power.  Those in the know and wise folks like you will explain what is really going on in your opinion or  based evidence.  From what I can see though, there are lots of middle class families that need a little remedial help and not all are scholars.  It’s not just the poor.

 ==================================

From: Guy Brandenburg gfbrandenburg@yahoo.com [concerned4DCPS]

First of all, don’t trust any study from “Education Reform Now”.

Sent from my iPhone

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On May 12, 2016, at 10:16 PM, KPW <concerned4DCPS@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

From The New York Times:

Guess Who’s Taking Remedial Classes

A new study shows that schools in privileged communities are failing to prepare significant numbers of students for college.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/10/opinion/guess-whos-taking-remedial-classes.html?mwrsm=Email

–KPW

Have a Superfantastic Day!

How the various DC publicly-funded high schools (charter and regular public) did on the PARCC in reading/ELA and Geometry

I present a couple of graphs so that interested DC locals can see how the students at the various public and charter schools did on the PARCC test this past spring in reading/ELA and in Geometry.

Not all schools are listed, because quite a few did not have enough students taking the test. At least 25 student were needed for their scores to be reported. If the school does not have a bar next to the name, that means that nobody at that school got a 4 or a 5. As usual, you can click on the graph to make it larger. I color-coded the bars: blue for regular DCPS and orangey-yellow for the charter schools.

For the sake of completeness, the following schools did not have at least 25 students taking the ELA test, so no score was reported:

• Ballou STAY
• Basis DC PCS
• Incarcerated Youth Program, Correctional Detention Facility
• Luke Moore Alternative HS
• Maya Angelou Academy at New Beginnings (formerly Oak Hill)
• Options PCS*
• Roosevelt STAY at MacFarland
• SEED PCS of Washington DC
• Washington Metropolitan HS

And the following schools had less than 25 students taking the math test, so no score was reported for the school:

• Ballou STAY
• BASIS DC PCS
• Cesar Chavez PCS for Public Policy-Chavez Prep
• Incarcerated Youth Program, Correctional Detention Facility
• Maya Angelou Academy at New Beginnings (formerly Oak Hill)
• Options PCS*
• Roosevelt STAY at MacFarland
• Washington Metropolitan HS

Just how flat ARE those 12th grade NAEP scores?

Perhaps you read or heard that the 12th grade NAEP reading and math scores, which just got reported, were “flat“.

Did you wonder what that meant?

The short answer is: those scores have essentially not changed since they began giving the tests! Not for the kids at the top of the testing heap, not for those at the bottom, not for blacks, not for whites, not for hispanics.

No change, nada, zip.

Not even after a full dozen years of Bush’s looney No Child Left Behind Act, nor its twisted Obama-style descendant, Race to the Trough. Top.

I took a look at the official reports and I’ve plotted them here you can see how little effect all those billions spent on testing;  firing veteran teachers; writing and publishing new tests and standards; and opening thousands of charter schools has had.

Here are the tables:

This first graph shows that other than a slight widening of the gap between the kids at the top (at the 90th percentile) and those at the bottom (at the 10th percentile) back in the early 1990s, there has been essentially no change in the average scores over the past two full decades.

I think we can assume that the test makers, who are professional psychometricians and not political appointees, tried their very best to make the test of equal difficulty every year. So those flat lines mean that there has been no change, despite all the efforts of the education secretaries of Clinton, Bush 2, and Obama. And despite the wholesale replacement of an enormous fraction of the nation’s teachers, and the handing over of public education resources to charter school operators.

 

This next graph shows much the same thing, but the data is broken down into ethnic/racial groups. Again, these lines are about as flat (horizontal) as you will ever see in the social sciences,

However, I think it’s instructive to note that the gap between, say, Hispanic and Black students on the one hand, and White and Asian students on the other, is much smaller than the gap between the 10th and 90th percentiles we saw in the very first graph: about 30 points as opposed to almost 100 points.

 

The third graph shows the  NAEP math scores for 12th graders since 2005, since that was the first time that the test was given. The psychometricians atNAEP claim there has been a :statistically significant” change since 2005 in some of those scores, but I don’t really see it. Being “statistically significant’ and being REALLY significant are two different things.

*Note: the 12th grade Math NAEP was given for the first time in 2005, unlike the 12th grade reading test.

 

And here we have the same data broken down by ethnic/racial groups. Since 2009 there has been essentially no change, and there was precious little before that, except for Asian students.

Diane Ravitch correctly dismissed all of this as a sign that everything that Rod Paige, Margaret Spellings and Arne Duncan have done, is a complete and utter failure. Her conclusion, which I agree with, is that NCLB and RTTT need to be thrown out.

 

Trends for DC & Charters & Nation in 8th grade NAEP reading scores, black students

Here we have yet another surprising graph showing how the scores for black 8th graders on the NAEP reading tests have been bouncing around for students in DC public schools, DC charter schools, DC as a whole, large US cities as a whole, and the nation’s public schools as a whole.

Tell me what you see:

What I see is that under the ‘leadership’ of Rhee and Henderson, African-american 8th graders enrolled in DC public schools (blue and purple line) are actually doing a bit worse than they did before mayoral control. However, the average scores for the their counterparts in DC’s charter schools (dotted orange line)  are rising quite rapidly and are now higher than the national averages for black 8th graders.

However, on the average, the scores for all 8th-grade black students in publicly-funded DC schools (black dashed line) on the NAEP since 2008 (when Rhee was installed – purple vertical line) seem to be following the trends that were in place before that date.

No wonder Henderson recently admitted that her administration had no real idea on how to make DCPS middle schools attractive to families. One might conclude that the DC African-American families and students who were motivated to do well in school have in many cases migrated to the charter schools, leaving the less-motivated ones behind.

As in my previous three posts, I had to do have my spreadsheet do some computation to calculate the scores for the charter schools. You can find the formula in my first two posts. I used the overall DCPS and charter school and DC total enrollments rather than the specific 8th-grade-level enrollments for each institution because the latter was too difficult to find and I suspected that it wouldn’t make a big difference. If anybody finds any errors, please let me know.

Trends on NAEP for 8th grade math, black students in DC, DCPS, DC charters, and nation

Yet another graph, this one showing how this year’s group of African-American 8th grade students did on the NAEP math tests in the regular DC public schools, in all DC publicly-funded schools, in the DC charter schools, in large cities across the nation, and in all US public school systems, going back to the early 1990s.

As usual, I had to do a bit of algebra to calculate what the average charter school scores were in the post-Rhee era, since those are not explicitly given anywhere. I give the explanation in my previous two posts.

My previous results seem to disagree a bit with those produced by NCES (by a couple of points). Therefore I used their data instead of what I calculated; the graph above is new as of 1/6/2014.

I still make these conclusions:

(1) Since the establishment of mayoral control of the schools, as a whole, the overall average for DC students in publicly-supported schools is following just about the exact same trends that were established from 2000 through 2007.  As a result, math scores for DC’s African-American 8th graders are now equal to those in large cities across the nation, which is a positive development.

(2) The DC charter schools seemed to have siphoned off the more motivated black 8th grade students and their families; as a result, scores for students in the regular DC public schools at that level in math lag significantly behind those of their counterparts in the charter schools, whose scores now surpass those of black 8th graders n the nation’s public schools as a whole and also those in large urban school systems as well.

As usual, if anybody finds any errors in my work, please let me know by leaving a comment.

Trends in DC on the NAEP for 4th grade reading, black students only: regular DCPS, charter schools, and pre- and post-Rhee

Here is a graph showing how African-American 4th students have been doing over time in Washington DC public schools and charter schools. I have drawn a clear dividing line at year 2008, because the scores before that were under the influence of DC’s former school board and superintendents. After that time, DC has been under a chancellor answerable only to the mayor.

You may notice that the blue, black and purple lines separate after 2007. That’s because NAEP began reporting separate scores for DC’s regular public schools and for all publicly-supported schools, though not for the charter schools as a bloc. As a result, you have to do a little bit of linear algebra to calculate what the average scales were for the charter schools from 2009 onwards. (I used essentially the same equation that I did in the previous post. Please write me a note if you think I made an error.)

As usual, we can see that since the late 1990s and up until Rhee took over, the overall trend in all large cities, in the nation’s public schools, and in DC’s publicly-supported schools was upwards on this test. (Yes, I know, these are not scores that follow the same kids year after year, but for whatever reason, the group of kids answering these tests are in general getting more answers right every two years.) Before that, i.e. from 1992 to 1998, scores bounced around or went down.

After Rhee took over, those scores seem to have entered another bouncy period. In fact, in DCPS, the scores on this test in 2013 were only back up to the level of 2007. There is a clear demarcation between the scores in the charter schools (blue line) and the regular public schools. The line for the charter schools seems to follow the trend from 1998 to 2007.

If I knew nothing about the politics of EduDeform, I would wonder why the WaPo editorial board is claiming victory.

 

 

And another look at those NAEP TUDA scores for DCPS

For those who don’t like looking at graphs, this time I will let the NAEP TUDA authors speak for themselves. I copied, and paste here, what I think were their most important conclusions.

If you would like the short version, here it is: Gaps between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ (i.e. between whites and blacks, whites and hispanics, and the poor and non-poor) either grew or stayed the same.

That’s not good. And it’s completely at odds to the stated goals and claims of the educational “reformers” like Michelle Rhee, Kaya Henderson, Arne Duncan, and all the rest of the billionaires who line their pockets.

All of the rest, except for my notes in black italics, is taken directly from the NAEP website.

Score Gaps for Student Groups:  Fourth-Grade Math, NAEP TUDA, DC Public Schools

• In 2013, students who were eligible for free/reduced-price school lunch, an indicator of low family income, had an average score that was 49 points lower than students who were not eligible. This performance gap was wider than that in 2003 (21 points). [emphasis added]
• In 2013, Black students had an average score that was 59 points lower than White students. This performance gap was not significantly different from that in 2003 (60 points).
• In 2013, Hispanic students had an average score that was 51 points lower than White students. This performance gap was not significantly different from that in 2003 (57 points).

Score Gaps for Student Groups: Eighth-Grade Math, NAEP TUDA, DC Public Schools

 [There were not enough 8th-grade white students in DCPS in 2003 for NAEP to  be able to make a measurement. Now there are.]

• In 2013, students who were eligible for free/reduced-price school lunch, an indicator of low family income, had an average score that was 42 points lower than students who were not eligible. This performance gap was wider than that in 2003 (18 points).
• In 2013, Black students had an average score that was 62 points lower than White students. Data are not reported for White students in 2003, because reporting standards were not met.
•  In 2013, Hispanic students had an average score that was 53 points lower than White students. Data are not reported for White students in 2003, because reporting standards were not met.

 

Score Gaps for Student Groups Fourth-Grade Reading, NAEP TUDA, DC Public Schools

• In 2013, students who were eligible for free/reduced-price school lunch, an indicator of low family income, had an average score that was 58 points lower than students who were not eligible. This performance gap was wider than that in 2002 (25 points).
• In 2013, Black students had an average score that was 68 points lower than White students. This performance gap was not significantly different from that in 2002 (60 points).
• In 2013, Hispanic students had an average score that was 50 points lower than White students. This performance gap was not significantly different from that in 2002 (55 points).

 

Score Gaps for Student Groups, Eighth-Grade Reading

• In 2013, students who were eligible for free/reduced-price school lunch, an indicator of low family income, had an average score that was 40 points lower than students who were not eligible. This performance gap was wider than that in 2002 (17 points).

More on those supposedly wonderful DCPS NAEP TUDA scores…

In this post, let us look at how the District of Columbia Public Schools fared on the Trial Urban District Assessment sub-set of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. I think you will agree that there has been no significant change in trends if you compare the pre-Rhee era and the post-Rhee era, which we are in now. None of these graphs were made by me: I merely copied and pasted them from the NAEP website, and added a little color and a few labels.

The next graph shows the average scores on the NAEP for 8th-grade math for DC Public Schools and for all large-city public school systems in the US. You will have to look very hard to notice any change in slope for the lower, blue line, which represents DCPS, on either side of the orange vertical line, which separates the pre-Rhee era from the post-Rhee era.

The next graph shows the average scores on the NAEP for 8th-grade reading in DCPS and all other large urban school systems. There has been no large change in either the national scores or the local DCPS scores since 2002, but I guess the best we can say that after two periods of small declines after mayoral control was imposed in 2007, the scores actually went up a bit in 2013 in DC. However, DCPS students on the whole are a little farther behind other urban kids now, under Chancellor Henderson, than they were at any time in the era before Rhee. But the changes are not very large or significant.

The previous graph shows average Math NAEP scores for fourth-graders in DCPS and all other urban districts. Do you really see any big changes in the trends for DCPS scores? They have been going up rather steadily since 2003… It’s nice to see that DCPS kids seem to be catching up with those in other cities, but that was happening anyway.

My last graph in this post is for fourth-grade reading. It looks like I forgot to draw the vertical line separating the pre-Rhee and post-Rhee eras. Draw it in yourself. Do you see evidence of the supposed miracles that getting rid of 90% of the veteran teachers and school administrators, and hiring enormous numbers of inexperienced, highly-paid central-office administrators, has caused?

I surely don’t.

In a future post, I will actually dive a little deeper and ask how much of these changes (or lack thereof) are due to changing demographics….

I will also attempt to tease out how the privately-run charter schools in DC compare..

What About those NAEP TUDA Scores for DC?

You may have read the article in today’s Washington Post where Education DEformer-in-chief Arne Duncan claimed that the DC NAEP TUDA scores were “great examples for the rest of the country of what can happen when schools embrace innovative reforms and do the hard work necessary to ensure that all students graduate ready for college and careers.”

Oh, really?

Let’s remember that those “innovative reforms” started with the 2009-10 school year, though Chancellor Rhee took over at the beginning of the 2007-8 school year and fired a few hundred teachers the next school year.

Whichever date you use, a casual glance at the graphs published by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in their Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) shows that all those expensive billionaire-directed reforms have had nearly no effect in the District of Columbia, except for one: gap between the haves and have-nots is growing wider, not smaller. Otherwise, trends that began in 2002 or 2003 have pretty much continued.

It makes me wonder: Is Arne Duncan merely stupid and can’t even read simple graphs, or is he just a highly-paid liar and shill for the billionaires who have succeeded in hijacking our school system and in eliminating tenure for teachers, eliminating art, recess, PE and music for millions of inner-city students?

You decide, after looking at these graphs which I lifted from the NAEP TUDA website. The “Pre-Rhee” and “Post-Rhee” markers and some color and labels for clarity were added by me. Otherwise, I didn’t change a thing, and I didn’t have to do any complicated digging or perform any statistical tricks whatsoever to find these graphs.

First, let’s look at how students in DC Public Schools fared at the fourth and eighth grade, in reading and math, as compared with each other. Meaning, how did kids at the 75th percentile (top quartile) do, compared to the kids at the median (50th percentile), and compared to the kids at the 25th quartile (bottom quartile), over the past decade or so.

That was for fourth-grade math. All three of the green lines slant mostly up to the right, meaning their scores are improving, which is generally a good thing. But do you honestly see any big difference between the pre-Rhee years and the post-Rhee years? The only real difference I see is that the gap between the top scorers is getting gradually wider, which is NOT a good thing. The gap used to be about 39 points but is now 52 points.

The next one is for fourth-grade reading.

I’m not even going to complain that the bottom-quartile students are now scoring slightly lower than they were in 2009, since I know there is a lot of small random variation from one year to year because of the small sample sizes. However, NAEP themselves claim that the reading scores for the 25h- and 50th-percentile kids this year are NOT significantly different from what they were going back 6 to 8 years. And we can see that the gap between the top scorers and  bottom scorers seems to be a lot wider now.

Some great progress, huh? Definitely worth subjecting teachers to a random-number-generator called IVA in order to fire them randomly for that!

Now let’s look at 8th graders:

 

That previous graph was for 8th grade math students in DC public schools. Do you see any great changes in trends from the pre-Rhee era to the post-Rhee era. I surely don’t. Was this “change” worth getting rid of democratic local control of the school system?

Lastly, in this post, let’s look at the same sort of graph for 8th grade reading:

Here, the big trend seems to have been a fairly large drop-off in scores for the bottom quartile right after Rhee was anointed Chancellor, but those scores have almost reached the levels of 2002. Otherwise, no significant changes.

So, let me repeat the question:

Is Arne Duncan merely stupid, or just a liar?