Schrag: Be Wary of Distorted Factoids in “California’s Year of Education That Probably Won’t Be”

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Schrag

As California approaches the "year of education" that won't be, what education consultant John Mockler calls the "schools suck" industry continues to churn out information falling somewhere between distorted and flat wrong.

Although California's fiscal problems are likely to limit "reform" next year to a lot of low-cost stuff, it might still be nice to get the picture right.

The most recent flagrantly false factoid appeared in a news story late last month asserting that California's is a "system in which fewer than half of all ninth-graders end up with a high school diploma."

In 2002-3 there were 520,000 ninth-graders in California schools. In 2006, the most recent year for which data are available, 349,000 (67 percent) got diplomas. But since ninth-grade enrollment is famously bloated by the thousands of students who are held back, the better base is probably eighth grade. Using that number (for 2001-2) 75 percent got diplomas.

That's still not great – especially considering the many black and Latino students who don't make it – but a long way from "fewer than half." And if you count those who get general education diplomas outside the regular school system, the count is still higher.

The "fewer than half" is just a symbol of the larger misapprehension that test scores are flat or declining, that schools were better in some past golden age, that they're top-heavy with administrators and that despite spending tons of money, they rank on a par with Mississippi and Bangladesh.