ALEC report card

["Allen Flanigan." <Allen.Flanigan@USPTO.GOV>]

Gerry,

Have you seen this report card on American education from American
Legislative Exchange Council?

http://www.alec.org/meSWFiles/pdf/education2000.pdf

Seems like a prime candidate for your Disinformation Detection Agency.

These are comments I posted on Ednews bulletin board after a brief look at
this thing (someone had posted a link to it); perhaps you can tell me
whether my from the hip analysis is off or not.
-------------------------
 If you look at the
end where they explain how they achieved their rankings, they used two
things: Either SAT or ACT scores, and 8th grade reading scores
from the 2000 NAEP. Regarding the first measure, this is an apples and
oranges comparison, utterly invalid because they are two different
tests, and I don't see anywhere that they have been equated. They try to
fudge this by saying that they rely on a "rank" within the states
taking a similar test, but this is bogus. How do we know the states which
use ACT are comparable to those which use SAT? The bottom
line is, this is a meaningless comparison. Second, pegging the remaining
rating on 8th grade reading seems purely arbitrary. Why not use
4th grade science, or 8th grade math, or some composite of recent NAEP
results across a variety of subjects? It's baffling. The authors of
the study, one would expect, would be statisticians. Lefevre seems to be a
pundit with no data analysis experience. Rea Hederman Jr,
listed as a "Data Analyst" at the Heritage Foundation, has a Bachelors in
History and Foreign Affairs. Not exactly the kind of degree one
associates with statistical expertise.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from the ARN-L list, send command SIGNOFF ARN-L
to LISTSERV@LISTS.CUA.EDU.