Taking Responsibility: Matt Drew for City Council

A few weeks ago I discussed the Durham Public Schools’ use of a statistical change to boost their AYP numbers.  Well, Bull City Rising got access to the raw test score data and ran the numbers, releasing their results on Monday.  Unsurprisingly, the majority of the gains that the School Board was touting were due simply to the counting of the retests, with the exception of some possible real gains on the fifth grade test.  Now what we need is some historical data so that we can compare this year to previous years, and measure improvement over time, if any.

Why is it that BCR is the only media outlet that bothered to do the math?  I don’t believe it’s because the school administrators can’t do statistics.  This raises a fundamental question: if we can’t we trust the data that is coming out of the school system to be free from bias, how do we deal with that?  How are parents and citizens supposed to evaluate our school system when the school administration and school board are deliberately misrepresenting performance statistics?  Of course, the irony here is that the real results were nothing to be ashamed of – but clearly, that’s not enough.  The school administration wants to believe that there really is a magic spell that will make our schools better.  They want to be wizards instead of muggles.

There’s no substitute for hard work.  There’s no substitute for market competition as a process that drives excellence, which is why Libertarians support vouchers and tax credits for parents who want more choices  about where they educate their children.  There’s no substitute for real statistics and the objective evaluation of progress.  There is no magic silver bullet program that will solve our problems.  We’re still just muggles, and that’s all we’ll ever be.