Fw: garbage

["Gerald W. Bracey" <gbracey@EROLS.COM>]

Kenneth Cooper, author of today's Washington Post story about the Owen
School has responded to a couple of my statements in my commentary of
earlier today.  My response to his response follows immediately below, but
you can scroll down in order to read his first.

JB


-----

Mr Cooper:


You are right.  You didn't use the word "percentile" in your story and you
didn't report any.  Without realizing it, I set a trap.  The second
paragraph of the two page
vignette on Owen School in the Heritage "No Excuses" report from Heritage
says "Last year's 5th graders, for example, posted a mean score at the 98th
percenitle in reading and the 90th in math."  I assumed you didn't read the
whole report, but thought you might at least have covered the vignette for
the Owen school which is less than two pages long.  If you read those
figures, I reasoned, you, as a journalist, should be suspicious.  But I
guess you didn't read them.

The point is NOT that poor black kids in Detroit can't outscore blondies in
Grosse Pointe.  The point is: NO school scores as high as Owen.  It's one
thing to have a substantial proportion at the 98th, another thing to have
that be the school average.  That is virtually impossible*.  Given that
there is only one rank above 98, an average of 98 means that virtually no
one scored below the 96th percentile.  If we assume that 50% of the students
hit the 99th, 20% the 98th, 20% the 97 and 10% the 96th, that yields an
average of 98.1.  That doesn't happen.  Anywhere.

Take Fairfax County, Virginia.  A high-scoring district.  Within this
high-scoring district, there is Thomas Jefferson School of Science and
Technology which creams the best of the best--of the 8581 juniors in
high-scoring Fairfax in 1997, only 391, 4.6%, attended TJ.  The admissions
people at TJ start with a high-scoring group of kids and then impose a
selectivity more severe than at outstrips Harvard or Stanford.  It means
that on average, just under 7 kids from each Fairfax elementary school wind
up at TJ.  Yet TJ kids get only to the 91st percentile in reading.  They do
manage manage the 98th in science and 99th in math, the primary subjects on
which they are selected.

At the 5th grade level, where Owen reported 98th, none of the 131 Fairfax
elementary schools with a grade 5 even comes close to 98th percentile.  The
closest is 89th and the district average is 77th.  I repeat, it is not
reasonable for ANY elementary school, or any school that does not select the
absolute best of the best to have an AVERAGE at the 98th percentile.

I'll believe the results at Owen only if you can get me permission to go in
with a standardized norm-referenced test of my choice, unknown to the
school, and my own test administrators (Carter's report says that the school
itself provided the test data for the achievement test, suspect in iteself).

As for the Heritage Foundation sponsorship, yes I'm bothered.  The "Mission
Statement" of Heritage says its "mission is to formulate and promote
conservative public policies...."  That policy about public schools is to
get rid of them.  As I noted in my "rant", the Vice President for
Educational Affairs at Heritage says that Carter's data make the case for
abolition.  Can you really expect a disinterested piece of research from
such an institution?  I trust reports from Heritage about as much as those
from the KGB.  There is a name for someone who would accept a Heritage
report at face value, and it isn't "journalist."


GWB

*This statement is true when speaking in terms of pupil results as Cooper
and Carter do.  Obviously, if we were using schools as the unit of
comparison, then the highest scoring schools would fall at the 99th
percentile--of schools.  But Cooper's and Carter's data are reported in
reference to pupil norms, not school norms.



----- Original Message -----
From: <cooperk@washpost.com>
To: Gerald W. Bracey <gbracey@erols.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 07, 2000 12:46 PM
Subject: Re: garbage


>
> I am going to violate my personal rule about ignoring your rantings to
> correct a substantial misstatement you have made about my story on Owen
> School. Nowhere in my does the word "percentile" appear. The Michigan
> Educational Assessment Program is a criterion-referenced test, not a
> norm-referenced one. When I write of percentages of Owen students who
> "passed" different MEAP tests, that means their performance was rated
> either as "satisfactory" or "proficient" by the state of Michigan.
>
> And you make a wholly falacious presumption that my story rests solely on
> Samuel Casey Carter's research for the Heritage Foundation report, whose
> sponsorship seems to trouble you so much. I'll also let you deal with your
> own presumption that poor black kids in inner city Detroit couldn't
> possibly outperform affluent white kids in Grosse Point, Mich. or Cherry
> Creek, Colo. without some sort of fraud being involved. There's a name for
> that sort of thinking, and I think you know what it is.
>

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