NY Times Calls Out Trump Party's Religious Bigotry

While there is much to applaud in the editorial, the false portrayal of Trump’s war on higher education as an effort to fight anti-semitism undergirds the bogus rationale he uses to force universities to adopt policies in support of MAGA bigotry, racism, and anti-intellectualism.

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) March 19, 2026 at 8:54 AM

NYTimes Says Dems Should Appeal to Moderate Fascists?

WHAT HE SAID!!!!!!

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) October 26, 2025 at 11:31 AM

More Shameless, Misleading Headlines from the New York Times

The highest caste of Manhattan elites who comprise the New York Times Editorial Board has its vast army of reporters beating the bushes looking for any suggestion of evidence that Joe Biden could be, may be, might be unfit for office.  

If you are one of the hundreds of thousands who have already seen today's scary Biden headline without reading the story, then you probably think that Joe Biden probably has Parkinson's.  Here's the headline, above the digital fold, p. 1: "Parkinson’s Expert Visited the White House Eight Times in Eight Months."  

So there you have it, a clear suggestion that the good doctor was there to treat poor ole' Joe for god knows what. You have to get down to the third paragraph before you get to the news that neutralizes the Times's breathless headline:

It was unclear whether Dr. Cannard was at the White House to consult specifically about the president or was there for unrelated meetings. Dr. Cannard’s LinkedIn page describes him as “supporting the White House Medical Unit” for more than 12 years. His biography on Doximity, a website for health professionals, lists him as a “neurology consultant to the White House Medical Unit and the physician to the president” from 2012 to 2022, which would include the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump.

Records from the Obama administration, when Mr. Biden was vice president, show that Dr. Cannard made at least 10 visits in 2012 plus a family tour; four in 2013; one in 2014; four in 2015; and eight in 2016. Mr. Trump rescinded Mr. Obama’s voluntary White House visitors disclosure policy, so records are not available for his four years in office.

Dr. Cannard did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The White House would not comment specifically on the purpose of Dr. Cannard’s recent visits or whether they were related to the president. “A wide variety of specialists from the Walter Reed system visit the White House complex to treat the thousands of military personnel who work on the grounds,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said in a statement.

So let me send this suggestion to the headline writers for the Times, something more appropriate to go with their nothingburger story: "The Canard about Cannard." 

Because the Brahmin on the New York Times Editorial Board have made it their mission to destroy Biden's candidacy, they will obviously use any kind of shitty trick to incentivize non-reading headline gawkers to get this new rumor going viral on antisocial media.  And even sadder, still, it looks like the leading bed wetters of the Democratic Congress are following the Times's lead. 

Update 5:15 PM Central:

To illustrate the influence the Times has, here's the latest from the headline scanners at The Daily Beast, whose desperate grab for attention easily tops the bullshit Times headline: "Biden in New Crisis Over Parkinson’s Doc’s 8 WH Visits."

Tell Tom Friedman to Stop Weeping

 If I had ever subscribed to the New York Times for its editorials and paid opinionators, I would have cancelled a long long time ago. The editorial board's unceasing support of corporate education initiatives and racist testing schemes would be more than enough to never subscribe again, but then there's the smarmy manipulative candy-ass Republican, David Brooks, America's favorite middle brow intellectual, Tom Friedman, and a whole stable of other pompous neo-libs and libs who provide America's deciders with rationale aplenty for continuing to steer socioeconomic policy down America's white privileged highways.

And yesterday the Editorial Board had the audacity to conclude that the Board's knee-jerk fake liberals should decide who Americans get to vote for in America's most critical presidential election--ever.

Following the phony Debacle Debate Thursday night, Times columnists formed an immediate knee-jerk dogpile pushing Joe Biden to step aside, resign, or crawl under a rock. Tom Friedman wept, for god's sake, Nick Kristoff clucked, and Paul Krugman ciphered Biden irredeemably deep into the liability column of his presidential odds spreadsheet. 

CNN, meanwhile, belatedly published the fact check that it should have done on Thursday night during or following the "debate," during which time Jake and Dana mechanically read questions that could have been generated and delivered by ChatGBT. You can read here the details of the Insane Clown's 30+ lies that he repeatedly spewed into viewers' living rooms Thursday night. 

As Biden summed it up some hours after the debate, "how do you debate a liar?" Personally, I'm with Maryland's governor, Wes Moore, who quipped, "Instead of focusing on [phony] debate performance, let us please focus on presidential performance."

I am with the citizen who told CNN yesterday when asked about her take on the current fake debate frenzy, "I would rather vote for the corpse of Biden than Trump's lying face."

Brent Staples Leads NY Times Editorial Thought Disorders

In a New York Times editorial entitled "Confronting Segregation in New York Schools," education non-expert Brent Staples begins well enough by talking about efforts to desegregate NYC's segregated schools.  Such an editorial is among other recent ones at the Times that attempt to distinguish the Editorial Board's corporate education plan from the same one embraced by the Trump Administration. 

Near the end of the editorial, however, Staples cannot help but to veer back to the same old rutted road that he has traveled so many times before. 

It is not enough for those fighting segregation to implement a number of strategies to increase diversity in the schools.  This is especially true when such efforts threaten to upend the Times-approved plans to turn the profession of teaching over to the corporate psychology paternalists who would replace educators with neurological re-programmers who have been indoctrinated in the Seligman/Duckworth/KIPP methods of cultural sterilization and behavioral neutering.

. . . critics argue that Mr. de Blasio should take a more urgent approach to remaking schools that continue to fail low-income black and Latino students. That means strengthening the teacher corps where possible and replacing it where necessary.

The most glaring need for replacement is at the New York Times Editorial Board, but replacing an education ignoramus with someone knowledgeable would put in jeopardy the support at the Times for failed Wall Street education policies that have succeeded only in creating whole new industries that prey on the poor, berate their character and cultures, and accelerate the resegregation of American schools.

Mr. Staples: Here's What Happened to Black Teachers

As the chief education spokesman for the New York Times editorial board, Brent Staples' support for corporate education polices most often goes unsigned in his editorials.  This week, however, Mr. Staples has an editorial piece in the Times that asks, "where did all the black teachers go?"

For almost three decades, Brent Staples has refined the New York Times' editorial policy on education to support, unfailingly, the corporate education reform agenda that began in Charlottesville, VA almost 30 years ago.  It was in 1989 that GHW Bush called together the nation's governors to meet with the nation's leading CEOs to set a national education agenda designed to put corporations in charge of making education policy based on Reagan market ideology, and to put governors in charge of implementation of that policy. 

The year after in 1990, Brent Staples joined the Times editorial board.  It was the same year that one of the governors leading the Charlottesville Conference, Lamar Alexander, was named Secretary of Education and charged with promoting education privatization policies to end the "public school monopoly." The other governor in charge at the Charlottesville Conference, Bill Clinton, was elected President in 1992, which began the school privatization effort in earnest. 

Clinton used the bully pulpit to advance charter growth, and by the time Clinton left office the nation was seven schools short (1,993) of meeting Clinton's goal of 2,000 charter schools in the U. S. by the year 2000.

As a black man embracing white racist policies, Staples voiced support for the white elite corporate education policies and policy talk that has for centuries blamed the shiftless poor for their impoverished and oppressed conditions and their lazy and ignorant black teachers for falling short of expectations on standardized tests designed to humiliate anyone outside the white middle class for which the tests were normed.

With Clinton, accountability demands began to be ratcheted up with more testing, so that by the time GW Bush was appointed President in 2000 by the Supreme Court, Brent Staples, as the voice of the Times on education, was ready to embrace a multi-prong frontal assault on the disenfranchised and the public school teachers that serve them. 

Thinly veiled as a social justice initiative that would "leave no child behind," the NCLB Act put the Business Roundtable and the oligarchs with tax-sheltered corporate foundations in charge of making education policy to test, label, demonize, and shut down thousands of public community schools in favor of corporate charter schools. 

In New Orleans, hundreds of black teachers lost their jobs almost overnight when disaster capitalists took over NOLA public schools after Katrina.  Tens of thousands of others around the country lost their jobs as well, just as they continue today to lose them wherever charter school operators replace credentialed teachers with pedagogically-ignorant, culturally-irrelevant, and empathy-free Ivy Leaguers devoted to turning impoverished black and brown children into robotic versions of middle class white kids. 

Staples and the Editorial Board applauded the creation of a new category of white male overseers and white female missionary teachers to staff the corporate charters, which were charged by their paternalist philanthrocapitalist bosses with dehumanizing and culturally sterilizing the children of the poor, while grinding out, from the surviving high scoring charter children the test results that would be used to justify charter expansion. 

Today there are almost 7,000 charter schools, and thousands more KIPP Model schools planned and funded by nearly $400 million in federal funds each year and the tens of billions of dollars annually from starving state education funds.

Now Brent Staples, near retirement age, asks in his most recent signed editorial piece for the Times, "what happened to black teachers?"  What happened, indeed!

Having gone to segregated schools, himself, up through grade 4, Staples was handpicked in 5th grade to attend the all-white William Penn School in Chester, Pennsylvania.  There at the William Penn Elementary, in a school with the social capital and educational resources to allow his talent to shine, his voice to develop, his aspirations to open up, he flourished.  In fact, he won scholarships that allowed him to advance his education, so that today he holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Chicago.

If Mr. Staples were growing up today in a poor urban environment, such an intellectually precocious 5th grade child from a poor family would most likely end up in another segregated school like the punishing KIPP Model charter schools, where children in educationally-minimalist environments are beaten down until they become compliant and malleable enough to be molded by corporate happiness training into aspiring robots.

Black teachers, Mr. Staples?  Black and brown teachers who have not absorbed the white racism that imbues the KIPP Model schools want no part of this brave new world of total compliance training and child cruelty that you continue to support, as you hide behind the anonymity that your editorial board position affords you, except on the days that you put your name on a piece that pretends to care.

Teaching in Finland, Denigration in the U. S.

We know what to expect when the NYTimes moneymen call on their token minority, Brent Staples, to craft an Editorial of the Absurd on CorpEd's antiquated reforms that have effectively blown up public education along with the teaching profession.  Staples' most recent effort does not disappoint, as he uses the most recent PISA release to apply his pretzel logic and funhouse lenses to make sense of the U. S. middle-of-the pack-rankings.  Rather than regarding PISA as the most recent example of how CorpEd's policies have failed again to improve U. S. standings in the international testing contests, Staples does his best to make the Gates-Duncan backwards agenda to fit within what high scoring countries are doing to raise test performance moving forward.

I will focus on just one piece of the Staples' most recent muddle puddle, which deals with teacher quality:

. . . the most important effort [in Finland] has been in the training of teachers, where the country leads most of the world, including the United States, thanks to a national decision made in 1979. The country decided to move preparation out of teachers’ colleges and into the universities, where it became more rigorous. By professionalizing the teacher corps and raising its value in society, the Finns have made teaching the country’s most popular occupation for the young. These programs recruit from the top quarter of the graduating high school class, demonstrating that such training has a prestige lacking in the United States. In 2010, for example, 6,600 applicants competed for 660 available primary school preparation slots in the eight Finnish universities that educate teachers.

Compare that the U. S., where enrollment is down for education majors, salaries flat, and the profession marginalized by organizations like the New York Times Editorial Board and the Gates Foundation as being ineffective, untrustworthy, lazy, and unprepared by teacher prep programs with no standards.  See below.

The teacher training system in this country is abysmal by comparison. A recent report by the National Council on Teacher Quality called teacher preparation programs “an industry of mediocrity,” rating only 10 percent of more than 1,200 of them as high quality. Most have low or no academic standards for entry. Admission requirements for teaching programs at the State University of New York were raised in September, but only a handful of other states have taken similar steps.

It is notable here that Staples uses information from the corporate think tank, NCTQ, to make his judgments on teacher education program quality.  You may wonder about an organization like NCTQ that makes sweeping evaluations without a single question on teacher ed faculty expertise, training, research, or even student ratings.  And what are we to think of the newspaper of record leaning on a report shot through with shoddy methodology and a gaping absence of any research foundation.

But then we know opinion eschews evidence at the New York Times when it does not confirm the desired conclusion.

Do continue:

Finnish teachers are not drawn to the profession by money; they earn only slightly more than the national average salary. But their salaries go up by about a third in the first 15 years, several percentage points higher than those of their American counterparts. Finland also requires stronger academic credentials for its junior high and high school teachers and rewards them with higher salaries.

That's right--teachers in Finland are drawn to the profession because it is respected and valued. It is valued enough, in fact, the teacher education candidates are given full scholarships so that they do not enter teaching with a 20-30 thousand dollar debt from college loans.  Where is NYTimes opinion on funding teacher education candidates?  

And salary, let's do talk salary and "percentage points."  Beginning teachers nationally made $35,672 last year, compared to $44,259 for others beginning fresh out of college.  

And experienced teachers?  Let's look at some data from, uh, the New York Times, which reported that in the U. S. the "salary level was 40 percent below the averagesalary of other American college graduates. In Finland, by comparison, the veteran teacher’s salary was 13 percent less than that of the average college graduate’s."

But these facts do not impress the New York Times shills for the billionaires who use their bullies' pulpit to shape opinion.  At least that's the way it used to work.

Reader Highlights Logick of New York Times Editorial Board

Brent Staples and the other pampered fools on the New York Times editorial board are at it again, this time advising the new mayor on how to do to teachers what they  would never dream of doing to themselves.  Below is an excerpt on the seniority issue, followed by one of the 175 comments that lays bare the bankruptcy of thought that characterizes every utterance on education by the billionaires' boys at America's newspaper of record:

. . . . Seniority trumps everything and is treated as a proxy for excellence. Under current rules, a school that has an enrollment shortfall or budget problem and has to cut one of its five math teachers cuts the least senior teacher, period. In progressive systems like the one in Washington, D.C., which has made big gains on federal assessment tests, decisions about which teachers to cut are based on a combination of factors, including how they stack up on evaluations and whether they possess special skills. The goal is to keep the most talented teachers. 

Similarly, the salary schedule in New York is calculated to reward longevity, requiring 22 years to get to the top level. Teachers are also rewarded for work toward advanced degrees, but this coursework does not necessarily have any bearing on how poorly or well they teach. . . .

Response by James in Chicago:

If seniority doesn't matter, and youthful energy and smarts are everything, why stop with the teaching profession? Every business, including the journalism industry (are you listening, NYT?) should adopt a performance-based compensation system. For journalism, it shouldn't matter how long you've been reporting news. If a new graduate from an elite journalism school can write a better editorial at the New York Times, why not replace the old guard? Similarly, our military should forego seniority in its promotions. Newer, younger, and high performing soldiers should replace high ranking, experienced officers. The same with the airline industry. Let inexperienced but bright and high performing pilots replace those old, lazy captains who are protected by the unions. Hospitals should rid themselves of experienced doctors and replace them with new ones with Harvard smarts and youthful energy. Older corporate CEO's should make room for the new kid from Yale; maybe we can avoid more Wall Street crashes, mine disasters, and Deep Water Horizon-type catastrophes. 

 Anyway, this editorial is distinguished by an obsessive focus on teachers, which has prevented overdue acknowledgement of negative social conditions in many urban neighborhoods. That is very revealing.

New York Times Editorial Fails Another Fact Check on Charter Schools

The NYTimes Editorial Board is one of the most reliable voices for the corporate education losers who continue to double down on testing accountability policies and privatization schemes that now have decades of evidence to substantiate their failure.  Today's entry is on charter schools, which has this nugget:

The editorial states:

"A study published earlier this year shows that the typical New York City charter student learned more reading and math in a year than his or her public school peers."



This is simply a lie. Even if you give credence to the CREDO study, which has been critiqued for sloppy documentation and unexplained use of something called 
"days of learning," the results shows no impact for New York City charters in Reading (0.00), while showing significant charter impacts in Math (0.11) (see p. 53 of linked report). 



Given the Wall Street resource advantage that charters have and the fact that they accept fewer special education and ELL students, one would expect big differences in both reading and math, especially when the matched public schools are often the poorest in the district. 



And what is totally masked by measuring "charter impact" are the deepening knowledge proficiency gaps between the poor and the middle class. The result: children are left further behind in corporate charters that use total compliance and zero tolerance methods that no middle class parent would ever allow.

NY Times Continues to Blame Schools and Teachers for Poverty and Penury

The Business Roundtable's Rube Goldberg plan for evaluating teachers in Tennessee (and other venues with RTTT money) has met with almost universal disdain, a response that has brought CEOs running out of their penthouses to dictate responses for the corporate media editorial pages.

The New York Times, which never saw a corporate education idea it didn't like, published its own tribute to the current effort by the Oligarchs of Ed on Saturday, with an editorial in support of Tennessee's ridiculous plan based on "value-added" test scores and an observation instrument that assures that thousands of good teachers will lose their tenure, if not their jobs.  And thousands more will lose their love of teaching.

From the Times education experts on Saturday, which, with a date or two changed, could have been written any time during the past 30 years of school and teacher bashing:

Tennessee’s need to do better was underscored when the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation’s report card, ranked the state near the bottom in fourth-grade math performance, just ahead of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. These dismal results — slightly worse than those reported in 2009 — were made public earlier this month during legislative hearings on the evaluation system.

Yes, Tennessee test scores are abysmal, but, first off, let's at least get their ranking correct.  As you can see the scores from 1992-2011 below, NAEP numbers have been flat for a long time, with the flattest coming during the most recent and most intense test-and-punish period of the NCLB conflagration.

Tennessee NAEP Math
1992--211
1996--219
2000--220
2003--228
2005--232
2007--233
2009--232
2011--233

Tennessee NAEP Reading
1992--212
1994--213
1998--212
2002--214
2003--212
2005--214
2007--216
2009--217
2011--215

Most interesting, too, is the fact that the Sanders Miracle of value-added testing (TVAAS) started in 1992.  This is the same value-added miracle-turned-mirage that corporate water carriers like Brent Staples of the Times Editorial Board want to impose on the rest of the nation.

So with Tennessee test scores pancaked, some other states without the benefit of the Sanders Miracle have moved ahead, thus lowering Tennessee even further: 

Progress from other states [from 2009 to 2011] lowered Tennessee's rankings:
• From 45th to 46th in the nation in fourth-grade math
• From 39th to 41st in fourth-grade reading
• From 43rd to 45th in eighth-grade math
• From 34th to 41st in eighth-grade reading.

Most interesting for those who pretend to believe that more failed corporate education reforms will improve learning in Tennessee, or anywhere else, are facts related to education spending in Tennessee, which exactly matches Tennessee's testing rank among states.  A Compendium of State Education Rankings ranks Tennessee 44th in per pupil spending at $6,855 (based on NEA data from 2005).

Another coincidence, no doubt: a report earlier this year by U. S. News ranked Tennessee's kids, that's right, 44th in "smartness" based on NAEP data. 

And the biggest coincidence yet that relates to Tennessee's ranking on tests?  Only 5 other states (Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Arkansas) have higher percentages of children living in poverty than Tennessee, which is tied with Texas, South Carolina and Kentucky with 26% of its children living in poverty.

So Mr. Staples, you and the other privileged and invested education opinionators of the New York Times Editorial Board need to do more than you have done historically to educate the public on education issues.  Rather than doubling down on another generation of failed reforms that have deformed our public schools, why not examine the facts, rather than dismissing them in favor of foundation press releases?  Why not offer something to the 99% of your readers who are looking for illumination on the issues, rather than diversionary misinformation that you print to serve the hedge fund 1%ers of Wall Street?  Why not, in fact, read the most recent brief by the Education Writers Association, which points to the lack of research to back up the corporate education policies you are pushing?  Why not read, in fact, your own best reporter who has talked to people to Tennessee to expose the house of cards that you continue to prop up?

New York Times: Corporate Education Reform's Newspaper of Record

Brent Staples of the NYTimes Editorial Board has put his own unique brand of cynical and disingenuous stupidity on the NCLB waiver plan:

The 2002 No Child Left Behind Act focused the country’s attention on school reform as never before, but the law is far from perfect. The Obama administration is wise to address its flaws, since Congress is four years overdue in updating the law.

The Department of Education’s plan gives states that agree to several reforms — including stringent teacher evaluation systems and new programs for overhauling the worst schools — an exemption from many of the law’s requirements. It would permit the states to change the way they evaluate most schools for the purpose of compliance, allowing indicators other than just reading and math scores to be considered. And it would lift the law’s provision that all students be proficient in math and reading by 2014, which was never going to happen anyway because there were so many loopholes.. . . .

This is a masterful piece of dissembling. Notice that Staples does not mention the "stringent teacher evaluation systems" will be based principally on test scores in math and reading and every other subject in every grade, at least twice a year (we're looking for "growth," remember).  And notice that "new programs for overhauling the worst schools" does not mention the fact that Obama and Duncan have given new impetus to the charter "turnaround" option and have now given approval to New Orleans type "Recovery School Districts" that are based on replacing urban public schools with segregated corporate welfare charters at the rate of 5 percent of schools per year.  Ten years equals 50% of American schools, which is just about the percentage of schoolchildren attending urban schools.

Notice, too, that Staples does not mention that this waiver plan only lifts the 2014 proficiency demand if states are willing to drink the poisonous kool-aid brewed up by the oligarchs and hedge funders to corporatize schools.  Notice, too, that the Staples never acknowledges, even now, the impossibility of the 2014 targets, preferring to pretend that "loopholes" are to blame for not achieving the impossible.

And so Staples opines that Obama is wise to address the law's flaws, even as the Times is short on specifics about what those flaws are or were.  Could Staples mean the flaws that were pointed out in his newspaper, the New York Times, even before the "law" ever became law?  From the NYTimes on August 13, 200, in an opinion piece by scholars Staiger and Kane:

. . . .The trouble with this law in the making is that both the House and Senate versions would disrupt successful reforms that are already under way in many schools around the country. Unless Congress can agree to rewrite the formula for pinpointing a failing school, as some states and some members of Congress are now urging, this education bill — the most ambitious federal initiative in education in three decades and a centerpiece of President Bush's plans for his presidency — is likely to end as a fiasco.

The central flaw is that both versions of this bill place far too much emphasis on year-to-year changes in test scores. Under either, every school in America would have to generate an increase in test scores each and every year or face penalties like having to allow its students to transfer to another public school, being converted into a charter school or being taken over by a private contractor. . . . .

These "flaws" are the ones that Staples and the rest of Editorial Board ignored for almost 10 years as the public schools were blown up every year in every state in order to usher in the era of the segregated corporate welfare charter schools that the Times' Wall Street patrons were and are supporting.  Do you, Mr. Staples and the hedge funders who help you churn out your propaganda, remember the New York Times interview with state officials on July 17, 2001, wherein Missouri Assistant Commissioner, Stephen Barr, called the NCLB proficiency targets "an impossible dream"?  Do you remember the boatloads of research on the explosive effects of this most damaging "bill" that you ignored for the past 10 years?  Do you remember that the New York Times never reported the CREDO study that exposed the fact that only 17 percent of charters nationwide have higher test scores than matched public schools???

With these cheap charter chain gangs free now to expand without restriction in many states, could this be the reason that it is time to stop the school comparisons and begin the "growth model" era, thus making the poverty and opportunity gaps even more invisible than they are today with an NCLB system that even Brent Staples finally admits is flawed.

New York Times: The Paper of Record Ignorance on Education

If the New York Times had remained as steadfastly stupid on issues such as the economy, foreign policy or anything else besides its favorite whipping boy, public education, it would have long lost its standing as the newspaper of record. Yesterday's BS and bs-inspired (that's Brent Staples bullshit) opining on the virtues of using NAEP as a national metric for educational achievement continues an unbroken string of self-initated horse's ass making via their own editorial pages. Here is the relevant, or irrelevant, clip from yesterday's pile:

Congress has several concerns as it moves toward reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. Whatever else they do, lawmakers need to strengthen the requirement that states document student performance in yearly tests in exchange for federal aid.

The states have made a mockery of that provision, using weak tests, setting passing scores low or rewriting tests from year to year, making it impossible to compare progress — or its absence — over time.

The country will have difficulty moving ahead educationally until that changes.

Most states that report strong performances on their own tests do poorly on the more rigorous and respected National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is often referred to as NAEP and is also known as the nation’s report card. That test is periodically given to a sample of students in designated grades in both public and private schools. States are resisting the idea of replacing their own tests with the NAEP, arguing that the national test is not aligned to state standards. But the problem is that state standards are generally weak, especially in math and science. . . .

Entirely sidestepped here is the problem of NCLB's impossible 100% proficiency target, which is the real motivation behind the states' testing adjustments toward continued survival. With one of the best public education systems in the country, Minnesota, for all its supposed finnagling, now has almost half of its schools on the federal failure list. And, of course, Brent and the Boys at the Times do not mention Susan Neuman's admitted privatization rationale for NCLB, which was the ideology driving the impossible NCLB targets from the beginning. So instead of the liberal NY Times being morally outraged at the millions of teachers and students who have been ground up in this ideological crucible over the past 6 years, they, instead, spend good ink on calling for a counterproductive and pedagogically-bankrupt plan for national testing based on NAEP.

In case there is anyone on the Editorial Board who reads anything other than the recommendations from Checker Finn, here, alas, is an explanation from Jerry Bracey that even Brent Staples should be able to understand. Maybe. From the June 2008 issue of The School Administrator:

. . . . Adopting NAEP achievement levels would be a multifaceted, unmitigated disaster, but to demonstrate this we need to back up and take a look at how the NAEP achievement levels of basic, proficient and advanced came into existence.

Until 1988, NAEP was purely descriptive. Starting in 1963, NAEP’s conceptual father, Francis Keppel, and technical father, Ralph Tyler, wanted to create something different from a norm-referenced test on which about 50 percent of students answer most items correctly. On purpose, NAEP created items that the test designers figured few students would answer correctly along with items the creators thought most would answer correctly, as well as the usual items that about half the people would get right. In the same way a medical survey might analyze the incidence of tuberculosis nationwide, NAEP would survey the incidence of knowledge in the country.

In 1988, though, Congress created the National Assessment Governing Board and charged it with establishing standards. NAEP now became prescriptive, reporting not only what people did know but also laying claim to what they should know. The attempt to establish achievement levels in terms of the proportion of students at the basic, proficient and advanced levels failed.

The governing board hired a team of three well-known evaluators and psychometricians to evaluate the process — Daniel Stufflebeam of Western Michigan University, Richard Jaeger of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Michael Scriven of NOVA Southeastern University. The team delivered its final report on Aug. 23, 1991. This process does not work, the team averred, saying: “[T]he technical difficulties are extremely serious … these standards and the results obtained from them should under no circumstances be used as a baseline or benchmark … the procedures used in the exercise should under no circumstances be used as a model.”

NAGB, led by Chester E. Finn Jr., summarily fired the team, or at least tried to. Because the researchers already had delivered the final report, the contract required payment.

Flawed Uses
The inappropriate use of these levels continues today. The achievement levels have been rejected by the Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Education, the Center for Research in Evaluation, Student Standards and Testing and the Brookings Institution, as well as by individual psychometricians.

I have repeatedly observed that the NAEP results do not mesh with those from international comparisons. In the 1995 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, assessment, American 4th graders finished third among 26 participating nations in science, but the NAEP science results from the same year stated that only 31 percent of them were proficient or better.

The National Academy of Sciences put it this way: “NAEP’s current achievement-setting procedures remain fundamentally flawed. The judgment tasks are difficult and confusing; raters’ judgments of different item types are internally inconsistent; appropriate validity evidence for the cut scores is lacking; and the process has produced unreasonable results.”

The academy recommended use of the levels on a “developmental” basis (whatever that means) until something better could be developed. In 1996, the National Academy of Education recommended the current achievement levels “be abandoned by the end of the century and replaced by new standards … .”

Continuing Mischief
Here we are almost a decade into a new century and the old standards remain, causing a great deal of mischief every time a new NAEP assessment is released to the news media. No one is working to create new standards. Why? The use of the NAEP standards fits into the current zeitgeist of school reform as all stick and no carrot.

When the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Center for American Progress rolled out its jointly developed “Leaders and Laggards” in February 2007, the report lamented: “[T]he measures of our educational shortcomings are stark indeed; most 4th and 8th graders are not proficient in either reading or mathematics … .”

At the press conference announcing the report, an incensed John Podesta, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, declared: “It is unconscionable to me that there is not a single state in the country where a majority of 4th and 8th graders are proficient in math and reading.” He based his claim on the 2005 NAEP assessments.

Podesta could have saved himself some embarrassment had he read the recent study by Gary Phillips, formerly the acting commissioner of statistics at the National Center for Education Statistics. Phillips, now at the American Institutes for Research, had asked: “If students in other nations sat for NAEP assessments in reading, mathematics and science, how many of them would be proficient?”

Because we have scores for American students on NAEP and TIMSS and scores for students in other countries on TIMSS, it is possible to estimate the performance of other nations if their students took NAEP assessments.

How many of the 45 countries in TIMSS have a majority of their students proficient in reading? Zero, said Phillips. Sweden, the highest scoring nation, would show about one-third of its students proficient while the United States had 31 percent. In science, only two nations would have a majority of their students labeled proficient or better while six countries would cross that threshold in mathematics.

NAEP reports issued prior to the current Bush administration noted that the commissioner of education statistics had declared the NAEP achievement levels usable only in a “developmental” way. That is, only until someone developed something better. But no one was or is working to develop anything better. When I wrote an op-ed piece for The Washington Post (“A Test Everyone Will Fail,” May 20, 2007), an indictment of the achievement levels, I got feedback that officials at the National Assessment Governing Board were quite satisfied with the levels as they are. That can only mean NAGB approves of the achievement levels used as sledgehammers to bludgeon public schools. They serve no other function.