Friday, July 30, 2010

Joel Klein's Bald Faced Lie

I'll keep this post short and sweet, but I have not seen this mentioned elsewhere so I thought I'd share it. In a letter to parents regarding the testing fiasco, Klein wrote:

As you know, we have made dramatic progress over the last several years. But this year, the State changed the way the tests were graded.

Look at that first sentence. It is a bald faced lie. The state education department hired Harvard researchers and discovered that the tests had gotten easier over the last four years.

The second sentence, while technically true, gives the impression that the decline in scores is due only to the state changing its scoring. That is a lie by omission.

I don't know how parents can trust anything coming out of the DOE or that man's mouth.

2 comments:

NYC Educator said...

If they want to trust Joel Klein, all they need to do is read tabloid editorials.

Anonymous said...

What he meant was,

"As we told you, we have made dramatic progress over the last several years ON PAPER, which is all we care about until we can fully push through our agenda -- despite the kind of pushback, if only it were a word, you get when you're an iconic pioneering hero like myself. (Note to self: Since it's not a word, we may be able to get out of it on a technicality.) But this year, the State screwed us out of what we had going, TEMPORARILY. It's just a blip, a hiccup, a bump on the road that is the great educational privatization -- I mean, crusade."