GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

This is a case in which the press is being either unusually, monumentally stupid or unusually, monumentally dishonest. Since the school district my kids attend has a high-profile public academic high school that admits based on grades and test scores, we are used to discussions of achievement that take that into account; even the least-informed reporters generally grasp that issue.

However, there’s a long list of confounding factors that impact achievement that even savvy and honest journalists fail to grasp. Some of those factors are built into the system, such as the fact that charter schools admit only students who request them; some stem from deliberate dishonesty by school officials. Since most reporters fail to understand that and tend to take achievement statistics at face value, I’m planning today to work on a post for http://www.change.org (where I co-blog on the Education page) listing some ways schools can “juke the stats.”

However, I’m not a statistician (au contraire) and just understand these issues because I’ve followed them over the years. Mr. Pallas, you ARE a statistician — you could do that post much better than I could, and I SO wish you would. This should be lesson 1 for education reporters, but instead, many are utterly oblivious. In the Post’s case I’m inclined to believe it’s deliberate dishonesty, though — “check it and lose it” is the operative principle.