Bright news! Bush initiatives help public schools catch up!

[Sauron]

Originally Posted by LionsDen

Under President Bush's education initiative, many public schools have caught up with and even surpassed private and Christian schools... excluding homeschools.

This is based upon 2003 data. Anyone have more recent numbers?

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/15/ed...EVIXvakNEg9JWw

More lies? And so early in the evening, too?

The NY Times article does not say anything about Bush initiatives helping schools at all. It merely says that public schools, in some instances, perform as well as private ones. No correlations are drawn to Bush administration initiatives. And, considering that the Bush administration has foisted the whole "No Child Left Behind" nonsense onto the states to pay for, it's hard to see how Dubya & Co. can get the credit for anything here.

Oh, and the fellow that Dubya turns to for education advice? Mr. "Houston Miracle" himself, Rod Paige? Turns out that he's a shyster and cooked the books on his education performance data. He's a liar and a fraud; I suspect he'll get a post in this Republican administration.

Now back to the NYT article that you deliberately misunderstood:

An Education Department official who insisted on anonymity because of the climate surrounding the report, said researchers were "extra cautious" in reviewing it and were aware of its “political sensitivity.”

The official said the warning against drawing unsupported conclusions was expanded somewhat as the report went through in the review.

The report cautions, for example, against concluding that children do better because of the type of school as opposed to unknown factors. It also warns of great variations of performance among private schools, making a blanket comparison of public and private schools “of modest utility.” And the scores on which its findings are based reflect only a snapshot of student performance at a point in time and say nothing about individual student progress in different settings.

Moreover, it had this very interesting thing to say about fundie-run bigot academies:

The report separated private schools by type and found that among private school students, those in Lutheran schools performed best, while those in conservative Christian schools did worst.

In eighth-grade reading, children in conservative Christian schools scored no better than comparable children in public schools.

In eighth-grade math, children in Lutheran schools scored significantly better than children in public schools, but those in conservative Christian schools fared worse.

So the only person around here who should be taking a bow is Angakuk, our resident Lutheran minister.