Page2RRS

• 08 Jan 2009 14:36

  FACT-CHECKS AND BUZZ-KILLS! The facts can undermine pleasing tales. Consider Kristof’s column: THURSDAY, JANUARY 8, 2009Antoinette’s return: We should have mentioned this yesterday: Returning from her holiday break, Maureen Dowd noted that she once wrote a column accusing someone else of being “frivolous!” You can check it out in paragraph 7. You see something new every year. Obama’s promise: We were surprised when we read the front-page, lede story in today’s New York Times. In part, the headlines said this: “OBAMA PROMISES BID TO OVERHAUL RETIREE SPENDING/Potential for Risky Fight Over Social Security and Medicare.” Wow! Obama had “promised” to “overhaul” Social Security! And Medicare! Knowing he had a major story, Jeff Zeleny laid it right on the line in his opening paragraphs: ZELENY (1/8/09): President-elect Barack Obama said Wednesday that overhauling Social Security and Medicare would be ''a central part'' of his administration's efforts to contain federal spending, signaling for the first time that he would wade into the thorny politics of entitlement programs. As the Congressional Budget Office projected a record $1.2 trillion budget deficit for this year even before the costs of the nearly $800 billion economic stimulus package being taken up by the House and the Senate, Mr. Obama stepped up his effort to reassure lawmakers and the financial markets that he plans a vigorous effort to keep the government’s finances from deteriorating further. Speaking at a news conference in Washington, he provided no details of his approach to rein in Social Security and Medicare, which are projected to consume a growing share of government spending as the baby boom generation ages into retirement over the next two decades. But he said he would have more to say about the issue when he unveiled a budget next month.Should he follow through with a serious effort to cut back the rates of growth of the two programs, he would be opening up a potentially risky battle that neither party has shown much stomach for. The programs have proved almost sacrosanct in political terms, even as they threaten to grow so large as to be unsustainable in the long run. President Bush failed in his effort to overhaul Social Security, and Medicare only grew larger during his administration with the addition of prescription drug coverage for retirees. You’re right: The word “promise” doesn’t appear in that text. Nor had Obama provided “details of his approach to rein in Social Security and Medicare” during his news conference. But he’s headed for “a risky battle,” Zeleny warned—if he actually “follows through with a serious effort,” of course. At the Times, this was the day’s biggest story; the report appeared at the top of page one, all the way on the right. And we were surprised when we saw the report, because we’d already read the Washington Post—and we didn’t recall reading a word about Obama’s promise there. At the Times, Obama’s “promise” was the day’s biggest news. At the Post, had it even occurred? So how about it: Did Obama make a promise to overhaul Social Security? After reading Zeleny’s full report, we still weren’t entirely sure. You see, we read all the way to the end of his piece, and we didn’t find a single quotation of anything Obama had actually said about this matter! Three lonely words (“a central part”) were quoted in that opening paragraph. But that turned out to be the only quotation about this promise provided in the report! Obama “provided no details” about his approach? Judging from this front-page report, he also provided no words! Today, Times readers know that their incoming president has “promised” to “overhaul” Social Security—and they know this is the day’s biggest story. Meanwhile, readers of the Washington Post have barely heard a word about it! We thought again of the famous old joke, the one that’s known as Goldberg’s Law: “The man with one watch always knows the time. The man with two watches isn’t sure.”

  Upon rereading the Post: In paragraph 9 of a page-two report, Lori Montgomery provided a slightly longer quotation from Obama’s news conference—though she showed no sign of thinking he’d made some sort of newsworthy promise. To read your new president’s actual “promise,” you know what to do: Just click here.)
  
  Special report: Tell me a story!

  PART 3—FACT-CHECKS AND BUZZ-KILLS: A long-time reader e-mailed us about that hapless farm-state pol, the sock-less fellow who inspired Tom Brokaw’s daft, feckless story (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 1/7/09). “Does that mean the anonymous candidate adopted the Nantucket custom of not wearing socks in his home state?” our e-mailer wondered. “Or did he just not wear socks at all?” Then, our mailer puzzled further, thinking about Dear Jack:

  E-MAIL: Oddly, you rarely heard JFK’s character assessed by his pre-Jackie dress, which was described charitably as “careless” and could include mismatched socks. Also, representing a state that had a major hat industry in his time, Kennedy almost never wore a hat. There are photos from the early Mass. campaigns showing him carrying a hat, but few show him wearing one. Still, few people ever thought Kennedy was clueless about Massachusetts—or other things.

  Oddly? No. And a cynic would say that these silly stories have little to do with anything anyone “thinks.” Incomparably, we replied to our reader, explaining the use that is actually made of those “small, telling details:”

  REPLY: Oddly? No. These “small details” are carefully picked (or invented) to punish those pols the gang doesn't like, and to help those pols who are favored. Kennedy was (and remains) a god among NBC’s crew.

  I would assume the story means that the pol "went native" each summer on Nantucket, thereby showing that he "doesn't even know who he is." But these stories don’t have to make any real sense. They just have to convey the Group Judgment.

  Did it make any sense when pundits screamed about the three buttons on Gore’s troubling suits? (On cable, Arianna even imagined that she’d spotted four buttons—that “it’s just not the way most American males dress.”) Obviously, no: This Brief Group Obsession made no earthly sense—except as a transparent way to trash a pol whom the Village Press Corps now despised.

  In short, these were deeply dishonest people. They pretended to draw meaning from “small, telling details;” in the process, they changed the shape of your world. And even today, Brokaw’s prepared to insult your intelligence, again affirming such sheer-nonsense tales. But so it goes inside our celebrity “press corps,” a cohort devoted to various types of inane, simple tales. Some facts are simply “too good to check”—and some pleasing stories are too good to drop. Tomorrow, we’ll return to a familiar type of feel-good story—a familiar type of heartwarming tale in which favored people hatch miracle cures. But today, let’s ponder the role played by fact-checking, using a column by Nicholas Kristof which appeared just before Christmas break.

  As always, Kristof had noble intentions—intentions he was willing to state. Identifying himself as a liberal, he was determined to urge his fellow liberals to be more generous to the unfortunate. (“[Y]ou’ve guessed it!” he wrote near the end. “This column is a transparent attempt this holiday season to shame liberals into being more charitable.”) In the process, he penned a pleasing story—a story drawn straight from a pseudocon wet dream. Conservatives are more generous than liberals, the disappointed liberal admitted. Under the headline “Bleeding Heart Tightwads,” he started by saying how unhappy he was with his “findings:”

  KRISTOF (12/20/08): This holiday season is a time to examine who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but I’m unhappy with my findings. The problem is this: We liberals are personally stingy.

  Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.

  Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.

  Other research has reached similar conclusions. The “generosity index” from the Catalogue for Philanthropy typically finds that red states are the most likely to give to nonprofits, while Northeastern states are least likely to do so.

  The upshot is that Democrats, who speak passionately about the hungry and homeless, personally fork over less money to charity than Republicans—the ones who try to cut health insurance for children.

  Was it just our imagination? Or had Kristof put himself in a familiar place—a place where he was morally superior to liberals and conservatives both? Indeed, this piece struck us as such Vintage Kristof that we decided to fact-check his claims. We’re accustomed to columns like this from the scribe—columns in which he self-identifies as a liberal, while typing up claims which seem to come straight from pseudo-conservative spin tanks. But was his basic claim actually true? Are liberals “stingy”—are they “tightwads” and “cheapskates?” Are conservatives really more generous? We had, and still have, no earthly idea—and as we fact-checked, we couldn’t help wondering if Kristof knows the answer himself. Kristof had a wonderful story—a man-bites-dog tale, a tale which would endear him to those on the right. But was his story actually accurate? The facts about this matter seem quite murky—and Kristof’s sources seem less than reliable. First: Arthur C. Brooks, Kristof’s principal source, isn’t just any old author of books. He’s currently president of the American Enterprise Institute—the type of conservative “think tank” which does some perfectly decent work, but also churns all manner of dreck in our sad “culture wars.” Why didn’t Kristof note this connection? If you know, please tell us.

  Beyond that, what “study by Google” did Kristof mean? We’ll be honest—we didn’t even know that Google does studies. But even after trying to fact-check, we don’t know what Google study he meant. Even on-line, Kristof didn’t link to this study, or to any other source. Other Times columnists link with abandon. Kristof left us cold—in the dark.

  Of course, it doesn’t matter who makes a claim, as long as the claim is accurate. But is it true, what Arthur Brooks said? Do households headed by conservatives really give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals? We’ll only say this: After spending a chunk of time looking through some critiques of Brooks’ claims, we’d have to say we simply don’t know—and we’d be surprised if Kristof can really defend his assertions. We’ll link to a few critiques below—but there are some conceptual problems involved in these matters, and the data don’t seem to be hugely dependable. We’ll also link you to a critique of that “generosity index” by the Catalog for Philanthropy. Their cited claim seems a bit shaky too. But it helped make a pleasing story.

  Bottom line: Do conservatives give more than liberals? We don’t know, and we doubt that Kristof knows either. And yes, you typically do feel punked, when the primary source of a column like this turns out to be the (unidentified) head of a major conservative outfit. We found this column very annoying—in part because its claims seem so murky, in part because invidious claims of this type play such an unhelpful role in promoting our inane culture wars. As you’ll recall, we offered a similar complaint when John Dean wrote a poorly-argued book—a book which pleasingly said that conservatives are the big, very bad group.

  Such sweeping claims should be argued with care—but scribes will often prefer a good story. Kristof’s claims are pleasing from certain perspectives—they may have helped Arthur Brooks get his job—but his fact-checking seemed rather weak. But then, fact-checking just ain’t a strong suit among many modern upper-end scribes. Often, the facts will undermine simple tales—and many journalists favor such stories over the buzz-kill provided by facts. How poorly do journalists work with facts—the kinds of facts that can kill pleasing tales? Tomorrow, we’ll return to that bogus Holocaust tale—and to similar tales from the classroom.

  In case you want to waste your time too: How solid are the claims in Brooks’ book? It seemed to us, after doing some checking, that it would be quite hard to figure that out. One critique was offered at The Volokh Conspiracy, by Professor Jim Lindgren, not by Eugene Volokh himself. (Lindgren: “Although the liberal v. conservative split is the hook for the book, the data are not nearly as stark as the hype surrounding the book might indicate.” Just click here.) At the Boston Globe, Christopher Shea also wrote a critique which raised doubts about Brooks’ claims. “Brooks's book should keep scholars busy for quite a while, given its wealth of empirical claims,” Shea wrote. That said, we couldn’t find a lot of critiques of Brooks’ claims, one way or another. Our guess: It would be very hard to evaluate his work.

  In 2004, the Globe had also published a critique of that “generosity index” by the Catalog for Philanthropy. Matt Kelly reached this conclusion:

  KELLY (12/19/04): To be fair, one of the first people to admit the shortcomings of the Generosity Index is the creator of the index himself: George McCully, president of the Catalog for Philanthropy. He insists he only wanted to create a tool that drew attention to patterns of charitable donations and, ideally, prodded people to give more.

  McCully calls his Generosity Index "crude but telling." He's right about the crude part, although the "telling" remains to be seen. With data so slippery and definitions of "generosity" so elusive, it's hard to say how stingy, cheap, or average Massachusetts truly is.

  McCully had good intentions in creating that index. So did Kristof in writing his column—by his own admission.
  
  

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• 07 Jan 2009 10:21

  HE SMALL, INANE DETAIL! A farm-state pol was seen without socks! To Brokaw, this was a key detail: WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 7, 2009They can’t stop loving her: To borrow from the Ray Charles hit, They can’t stop loving her! Last night, Howard Fineman was Olbermann’s very first guest. Fairly quickly, his ardor exploded: FINEMAN (1/6/09): Don’t forget, as chief of staff under Bill Clinton, [Leon Panetta] saw the intelligence briefings every day, although some people have pointed out he didn’t know what was going on with Monica Lewinsky, so how good a spy could he be?...

  OLBERMANN: Well, congratulations! Six days into the new year and I heard that old familiar name once again. And that was Lewinsky.

  FINEMAN: Oh, why not?

  OLBERMANN: Well, that’s the record so far. Six is the longest I’ve ever gotten into a year since then.

  For certain male pundits of Fineman’s daft class, all roads still lead to Miss Lewinsky! They keep choosing to live their lives in dreams of yesterday. To Olbermann’s credit, he expressed mild pique with Fineman’s drift. But when his next guest drifted off to the same place, he was too tired to bother:

  JONATHAN ALTER: [Senate Democrats] are in a pickle here. And it`s a pretty amusing one for those of us who remember Roland Burris going back to the 1970s when I first met him in Chicago, and he was Casper Milquetoast of Illinois politics. And here he is in one of the most dramatic, you know, showdowns in recent Washington history.

  I was with a cameraman out there today, Keith, and he said that this was the biggest "cluster F" since Monica Lewinsky. You know, this was a big dramatic deal today when they had that little standoff outside the Capitol.

  OLBERMANN: Or, as I suggested, the greatest excitement in the senate since the caning of Senator Sumner.

  ALTER: Yes.

  Readers, can you see the way these people think? When Fineman was asked about Leon Panetta, it made him think of Miss Lewinsky. But then, when Alter was asked about Roland Burriss, he ended up there too. Those happy hours that they once knew! Olbermann himself was egregious last night; we’ll probably look at some topics tomorrow. But it’s been ten years since these fellows met Miss Lewinsky—and they still can’t quit her.
  
  Special report: Tell me a story!PART 2—THE SMALL, INANE DETAIL: Wouldn’t you know it? Another heartwarming-but-bogus, feel-good tale is debunked in today’s New York Times! (Motoko Rich does the honors again. You know what to do—just click here.) This time, it’s a plagiarized Christmas tale—a heartwarming story which was published, then taken down, by Beliefnet.com. As we noted in yesterday’s post: People love to tell Simple Stories—the type of tale which is “too good to check.” And uh-oh! Such stories have dogged American journalism over the past many years. In a rational world, journalists would be inclined to doubt Simple Stories—and they’d be inclined to fact-check. But in the past few decades, our public discourse has been fueled by a string of daft, inane tales. Consider the insulting nonsense penned by Tom Brokaw in the December 28 New York Times magazine. Dumb stories don’t get much dumber than this—or more typical of the dreck which has shaped our political discourse.

  Brokaw was penning a remembrance of the late Tim Russert, his long-time friend and colleague. As is required by Hard Pundit Law, he shaped his piece around an Approved Standard Notion: Russert was Everyday Man. After a bunch of silly blather comparing Russert to football’s John Madden, Brokaw got around to his story. It helps us appreciate the depth of the nonsense which still drives the multimillionaire, pseudo-journalist world:

  BROKAW (12/28/08): Tim had a special appreciation of Madden's powers of observation, like Madden's admonition to hotel guests not to sleep on the side the bed where the telephone is located because the mattress is more likely to sag from overuse. Tim believed the small, telling detail can say a great deal about the larger failings or vulnerabilities of a politician.

  A few years ago, he asked me to check on the prospects of a farm-state candidate for governor who spent part of every year on Nantucket and adopted some of the local customs. I called a friend in the candidate's state to get an assessment, and he said simply, ''He doesn't wear socks.'' Tim roared when I passed along the observation, and we often used that expression—''He doesn't wear socks”—as shorthand for politicians who were tone-deaf.

  We must rely on Brokaw for the truth of this story. But the tale is sadly typical of the way your discourse has been dragged down in the hands of these millionaire ciphers.

  Alas! “Tim believed the small, telling detail can say a great deal about the larger failings or vulnerabilities of a politician,” Brokaw reports. Sadly, this belief has led us down the path to ruin in recent decades. In recent decades, public ciphers like Russert and Brokaw have persistently peddled Silly Group Stories built around “small, telling details”—small details said to help us see some Big Major Pol’s tragic failings. Often these details were patently ludicrous: John Kerry ordered the wrong kind of cheese for his cheesesteak! Often, these details were factually bogus: Al Gore said he discovered Love Canal! (The press corps repeated this crap for a month, although it was patently false.). But transparent losers like Brokaw and Russert have dined out on such silly stories for decades. Way back in 1972, Ed Muskie cried about his wife Jane —until it turned out, twenty-four years later, that he quite probably hadn’t. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/28/07.
  

  By now, you’d almost think that people like Brokaw would have been shamed, by public events, into dropping this practice of telling these stories. But there he was, in the Times magazine, recalling yet another take with a “small, telling detail.” Good God! Some politician “spent part of every year on Nantucket”—and while he was there, he didn’t wear socks! To people as foolish as Brokaw and Russert, this is the sort of “telling detail” which lets us peer into pols’ souls. The sheer stupidity here is obvious. So too the apparent hypocrisy, if you know a fact Brokaw forgot to mention—if you know that Russert, the middle-brow king, “spent part of every year on Nantucket” too. In fact, he summered there, in a $6 million home; he’d jet there to write his self-glorying books about his sad, working-class background. And it didn’t take long for one savvy scribe to show the total hypocrisy involved in Brokaw’s silly new tale (just click here). At The New Republic, Jason Zengerle posted this photo of Russert on the island. The great man was wearing a pair of loafers—and sadly enough, no socks:

  

  Brokaw’s story was inane on its face—but people like Brokaw have ruined your lives with stories like this for at least several decades. Through some spreading mental defect, they seem to believe that their “small, telling details” actually show us the souls of Big Pols. Of course, the “small, telling details” they choose to spread tend to be aimed at Big Pols they disfavor. And uh-oh! When no such “telling details” exist, they have tended to dream details up. What kind of nation lets palace dwellers of this type keep changing the shape of world history? One more photo, from Brokaw’s actual piece. This photo shows the great Average Joe at one of his son’s high school football games:

  

  If you understand the genre, you know what this photo is supposed to convey: Timothy Russert, great though he was, was just a regular sports fan and dad. This has been standard NBC cant ever since Russert’s ascension to power. Russert was the working-class Buffalo fan; Brian Williams is the guy who adores all things NASCAR. In this way, NBC builds its audience, permitting the network to pay these ciphers their $10 million per year.

  Russert was just like the other dads, as we can plainly see in that photo. Except the other dads sat up in the stands, while Russert went down and posed by the scoreboard—posed there for a professional photographer who just happened to be nearby. The game was tied—and time was expiring. Why wasn’t he up in the stands?

  Yes, Brokaw and Russert have been deeply inane—but then too, they’ve also been deeply dishonest. At any rate, they and their cohort have simply loved the stories with those “small, telling details”—the “small, telling details” behind the daft tales which have now changed all our lives.

  By the way: Three cheers for Zengerle.

  TOMORROW—PART 3: Did Kristof fact-check?
  
  

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• 06 Jan 2009 12:23

  2009, TELL ME A STORY! The latest scamming-of-Oprah event helps display broken press culture: TUESDAY, JANUARY 6, 2009Texas escapes/experts don’t: Why do you ever go anywhere else? Weeks ago, we warned you against the growing tale concerning the greatness of the Big 12, noting there was no real evidence to support this growing conventional wisdom. Last night, Texas escaped in the end. But have you seen any sign of that alleged Big-12 dominance in the past week’s bowl games?

  Holiday Bowl: Oregon 42, Oklahoma State 31
  Cotton Bowl: Mississippi 47, Texas Tech 34
  Fiesta Bowl: Texas 24, Ohio State 21

  Don’t be misled by that Cotton Bowl score. Mississippi embarrassed Texas Tech; last night, Ohio State was able to compete on this level for the first time in years. (In September, Southern Cal beat them, 35-3.) And yet, Texas, Texas Tech and Oklahoma State were three of the four overpowering teams said to prove the Big-12's current dominance. Oklahoma may win Thursday night. But where has the dominance gone? As we told you: There were never any real facts on the ground supporting that recent conventional wisdom. But within our jangled modern culture, “experts” show little inclination to withhold or temper Group Judgment on the basis of objective facts. We’ll be discussing this problem all week (see below). But yes, it extends to football. Is nothing sacred in this life? Is there nothing our “experts” respect? Note: You’ll get one more dose of football facts this week. But you’ll have to wait until Friday.
  
  Special report: Tell me a story!PART 1—TOO PLEASING TO DOUBT: We humans love to tell pleasing tales—and some of us love to believe them. If you doubt that, consider the latest scamming-of-Oprah, which was described on December 29 in this front-page New York Times news report.

  (The New Republic had broken this story a few days before. For its first full report, just click here.)

  Mommy and Daddy, tell me a story! We think this was the most interesting news report we read over the recent vacation. It reveals the way the human mind is inclined to work—and the way our contemporary public discourse persistently flounders. Long story somewhat shorter: This latest scam involves a now-cancelled book about an alleged Holocaust experience. On December 31, Motoko Rich and Brian Stelter pondered the incident in the Times. (Headline: “As Another Memoir Is Faked, Trust Suffers.”) This is the way they began:

  RICH AND STELTER (12/31/08): In media circles, there is a joke about facts that are too good to check. This week, Oprah Winfrey and the New York publishing industry stumbled on yet another unverified account in the form of a Holocaust survivor who said his future wife had helped him stay alive while he was imprisoned as a child in a Nazi concentration camp by throwing apples over the fence to him.

  The story of Herman and Roma Rosenblat, who said they reunited years later on a blind date in New York, turned out to be fabricated, and over the weekend the publisher of his memoir, ''Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived,'' canceled the February release of the book.

  “This isn't the first time either a publisher or Ms. Winfrey has been gullible in the face of an exaggerated tale,” the writers noted as they continued—having cited their cohort’s joke about “facts that are too good to check.” For the record, the Rosenblats had been telling their story in public since 1995, when they entered the pleasing tale in a “greatest love story” contest—a contest they inspiringly won. Oprah hauled them onto her program in 1996, calling their inspiring tale “the single greatest love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we've ever told on the air.” In fairness, it was always possible that their uplifting story was true, and it wouldn’t have been all that easy for someone like Winfrey to fact-check it. On the other hand, in some later versions of the story, the sheer implausibility of the tale had been heightened. Rich and Stelter discussed the way the gullibles at Berkley Books got tooken in by the tale:

  RICH AND STELTER: Certainly, industry observers wondered how editors at Berkley and producers for Ms. Winfrey did not at least question the veracity of Mr. Rosenblat's story, given some improbable details. In the [now-cancelled] book, he wrote not only that he reunited with his wife in New York years after she threw apples to him over the fence, but also that he had actually gone on a blind date with her in Israel a few years earlier but did not recognize her when he met her again.

  ''You'd think somebody would say, 'Hmm, that's amazing, let's just spend an hour or a day seeing how plausible that is,' '' said Kurt Andersen, the novelist and host of the public radio program ''Studio 360.”

  Andersen wouldn’t be our first choice to comment on this matter, given his own silly love affairs with recent, dumb political tales. But within the culture of modern journalistic elites, certain facts are “too good to check”—and some stories are too pleasing to doubt. People love to believe pleasing, high-minded tales. And uh-oh! As we’ve shown you for many years, this brainless love of pleasing tales has driven a great deal of political “journalism” in the past many years. We thought of several things when we encountered this story. Here are a few:

  Education journalism: For the past forty years, journalists have rushed to promote feel-good stories about educational miracles in low-income schools—stories which seemed to be too pleasing to doubt. (Or to fact-check.) This practice continues to this very day—and it thoroughly tilts our education debates. When “journalists” engage in this type of conduct, they spit on the prospects of low-income kids. They turn these kids’ lives into feel-good novels, using low-income kids to give middle-class readers pleasure. More about this gruesome practice on Friday; it remains a major big deal.

  Political journalism: For at least three decades, political journalists have fashioned simple-minded tales about major pols—tales which were used to promote press corps theories about these pols’ character. During the mainstream press wars against Clinton and Gore, an endless array of absurd stories were invented about both the Clintons and about Gore; these stories were then recited by one and all—in some cases, by a wide array of journalists who plainly knew they weren’t accurate. But this practice predates those punishing wars. Did Edmund Muskie really cry in the snows of Manchester during the 1972 primary? David Broder (and others) said that he did—and the story helped re-elect Richard Nixon. Years later, Broder acknowledged that his story may have been wrong—and he said the story had been driven in part by his cohort’s pre-existing judgment about Muskie (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/28/07). Muskie was too emotional, these “journalists” thought. (Based on his conduct at poker games!) Soon, they were telling a pleasing Group Story about the guy—a tale whose central fact may, alas, have been bogus.

  People love to believe a good story. In theory, journalists are trained to doubt—and fact-check—such tales. But within this addled, inept, inane cohort, some facts are said to be too good to check—and some stories seem to be too good to doubt. This broken “journalistic” culture sent Bush to the White House. And uh-oh! We saw strains of this broken culture all over the press corps last week.

  TOMORROW—PART 2: Tom Brokaw, tell us a story!
  
  

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• 05 Jan 2009 14:07

  SLOWLY WE LEARN! Even after all these years, Krugman’s commenters don’t seem to know the way the discourse works: MONDAY, JANUARY 5, 2009Broadcasters, please rent a room: Good God! Broadcasters simply love to stick to pre-approved Simple Stories! At last week’s Rose Bowl, Herbstreit and Musberger began the day with a simple, scripted tale: Southern Cal has the greatest defense ever! And they kept repeating that inspiring story, even as Penn State’s offense pushed the Trojans all over the field during the game’s second half. We didn’t think anyone could do a worse job calling a game than this pair did at last year’s Rose Bowl, when they spent four hours overstating Southern Cal’s astonishing greatness. But they managed to top themselves last week. We’re major Pac-10 fans around here. But these guys need to rent a room the next time they get near the Trojans. As the fourth quarter wore on, it became possible that Penn State could tie the game (though it would have taken an onside kick). Anyone could hear the crowd noise building—but Kirk and Brent kept blathering on about aspects of Southern Cal’s past/future greatness. We couldn’t help wondering: If Penn State actually ties this game, will these two guys even notice? Is there anyone in the broadcasting world who will amend a pre-approved story when it’s challenged by facts on the ground? (And in the air: Penn State piled up 410 yards total offense.) For whatever reason, Southern Cal’s defense looked mortal last week—but two big scribes wouldn’t tell.

  SLOWLY WE LEARN: We saw a lot of revealing work during our week in the frozen north. As the week proceeds, we expect to comment on this piece by Nicholas Kristof, which we got to fact-check over the break—and on Tom Brokaw’s inane (and revealing) recollection of his colleague and friend, Tim Russert. Beyond those groaners, major pundits wasted your time beating up retrospectively on George Bush—while failing to note the active role they themselves had played in getting him into the White House. This piece by Bob Herbert was worst of the lot—but we saw similar work by Richard Cohen and Gene Robinson, and we thought Frank Rich briefly followed suit in yesterday’s column. Is Bush “a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever?” Frankly, we’re slow to accept Dr. Rich’s pronouncements, when we recall the fact that he spent years insisting that Bush and Gore were equally vapid—two well-matched peas in a pod.

  Meanwhile, for a fatuous phone-it-in column, could anything match this groaner by Herbert? Maureen Dowd at least admitted that she was on vacation last week. Weirdly, though, we were perhaps most struck by a batch of reader comments. The comments were appended to this relatively inocuous blog post by Paul Krugman.

  Krugman’s post is headlined “Katrina and Bush.” In this passage, he explains his reason for writing it:

  KRUGMAN (12/30/09): So everyone is talking about the Vanity Fair article in which Bush aides say that Katrina is what did him in. I don’t think that’s entirely true, but what I’d like to focus on is why Katrina was such a problem for Bush.

  Krugman presents two famous photos—photos which are quite similar. The first shows Bush looking out the window of Air Force One on September 11, 2001; the second shows Bush looking out the window of Air Force One as he flies over New Orleans shortly after Katrina. This second photo “was widely regarded as a PR disaster,” Krugman correctly writes, “because [Bush] seemed so disconnected. But it looks an awful lot like the first photo, of Bush on Air Force One on 9/11. And that photo was considered a wonderful picture of leadership in action.” Krugman goes on to offer his view of why the photos were viewed so differently—why one photo was “considered a wonderful picture of leadership” while the other was widely treated as a portrait of hauteur and indifference. In our view, the reason for this disconnect is fairly easy to explain: In large part, the press corps seized on the post-Katrina photo as a way to spread a new negative judgment it had finally managed to reach about Bush. In fact, Bush was doing nothing “wrong” as he swooped over New Orleans that day; governors and presidents routinely take aerial tours of disaster sites, and such excursions are routinely taken as signs of presidential concern. And many pundits had made an accurate point by that time: At that time, it would have hampered rescue efforts if Bush had landed and personally inspected the damage in and around New Orleans. But by this time, the press corps had largely turned against their “Bold Leader,” the one they’d invented and pimped in the earlier years, when he was running against Vile Gore, then leading his nation in a war against terror. And because the corps had reached a new Group Judgment, they did what they always do at such moments: They seized upon an innocuous photo, using it as a way to persuade the public to accept their new Group Outlook.

  Duh. They did the same thing in late 1997 when they invented and pimped the ludicrous Love Story canard; they did the same thing in 1999 when they worked themselves into an Official Group Fury about Hillary Clinton, the Cubs and the Yankees. But back in 1997, they were using an innocuous comment to turn the public against the loathed Gore. In the case of that post-Katrina photo, the press corps was using a meaningless moment to promote their new view of George Bush.

  In fact, the press corps does this all the time: Once opinion leaders have formed a Group Judgment, they seize upon some trivial statement, action or photo to bring the public around to that view. Simply put, you can’t understand our contemporary public discourse if you don’t understand this common practice. In the case of Katrina, it may be true that Bush was disconnected, inept, uncaring—but you surely can’t demonstrate such a thing from that innocuous photo. But so what? The press corps routinely takes short cuts of just this type in promoting its views to the public—and by now, they had turned against their Bold Leader. Result? In their standard, indefensible way, they used whatever tool was at hand to swing the public’s opinion. The press corps does this quite routinely; it’s an exceptionally basic part of the way our modern discourse works. But go ahead! Search the comments to Krugman’s post! You’ll see a long list of “high IQ” readers who seem to have no earthly idea of the way their discourse actually works. Instead, one reader after another takes an utterly foolish approach, insisting that there really is a key difference between those two photos—a difference which explains the different reaction the photos evoked. Why were the photos viewed so differently? A string of readers seem to think this was a purely “rational” process, with people responding to meaningful differences between the two famous photos. In our view, this reveals astounding cluelessness about the way our discourse works. Whatever you think of his post-Katrina performance, Bush is doing nothing “wrong” in that famous photo, and it’s utterly silly to claim that he was. Whatever you think of his post-Katrina performance, it was always completely silly to seize upon that innocuous photo as a marker of his lack of concern. But Brother Krugman has many readers who seem to have no earthly idea of the way our discourse actually works. Very, very late in this game, we still seem to lack the simplest idea of the way our narratives form. The press corps tells you the stories it likes. But go ahead! Read Krugman’s readers!
  
  

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• 23 Dec 2008 08:48

  N SEARCH OF THE QUICK EXPLANATION! Why did charter kids score higher? The editors spoke from on high: TUESDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2008Tis the season/North of Boston: We’re heading north for a week and a day or two, incomparably timing our trip to coincide with the holiday season. Below, we finish yesterday’s ruminations about DC’s charter schools:IN SEARCH OF THE QUICK EXPLANATION: Statistical illiteracy tends to prevail when the Washington Post discusses educational testing. (Example: Are this year’s tests are hard as last year’s? You can’t compare test scores unless you know. Have you ever seen the Post ask?) So no one should have been surprised when the editors offered those puzzling data about (low-income) kids in DC charter schools. Here’s that part of last weekend’s editorial—the part which made us glance away, cheeks burning in embarrassment: In fact, the report dealt with low-income students in DC charter schools, not with students in general—but that wasn’t why we averted our gaze. “Students in middle-school charters scored 19 points higher than their peers in regular schools on national reading tests,” the editors proclaimed. To recall why we blanched, then glanced away, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 12/22/08. In fairness, the editors’ blunder about those test score gaps was a minor part of this editorial. In their opening paragraph, the eds had done something much more significant—they’d tried to explain why DC charters were outpacing DC’s traditional schools. Assuming that students in the charters really are doing better, that’s a question which actually matters. And here’s the way the eds explained it, right at the start of their piece:

  WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL: Students in the District's charter schools on average outperform peers who attend the city's traditional public schools. They do so not because they come from more privileged backgrounds but because the charters are free to innovate and implement practices that work. The charter schools' success in educating poor and minority children should be celebrated, and it should help validate efforts by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee to bring similar changes to the traditional public schools. The charters' independence, so vital to their success, should be protected.

  Again, the editors misstated their factual claim from the jump; the news report on which this editorial was based concerned low-income students (in middle schools), not DC students generally. But quickly, the editors stated their larger view: In DC, charter school kids are scoring higher “not because they come from more privileged backgrounds but because the charters are free to innovate and implement practices that work.” That’s a very important judgment—and we don’t know why the editors feel so certain about it.

  Let’s return to the lengthy news report on which this editorial was based. In DC’s middle schools, charter kids are outscoring their peers in traditional schools, Dan Keating and Theola Labbe-DeBose said. (We’re assuming their data are accurate.) And sure enough! Right in the front-page headline in our hard-copy Post, a judgment was made about the cause of the score gaps:

  WASHINGTON POST HEADLINE (12/15/08):
  Gains Made In Educating City’s Poor Children
  Rigorous Methods, Ample Funds Linked to Improved Test Scores

  We think that’s a fair account of what the authors said in their report. They suggested two reasons for the charter schools’ higher scores; the charters have a funding advantage, they said, and the charters apply rigorous methods not often seen in the regular schools. Five days later, the editors voiced their own views—and skipped right past that funding advantage. The eds made the news report’s tale even simpler: Charter school kids are outscoring their peers “because the charters are free to innovate and implement practices that work.” Soon, the editors identified a few of these practices: “[L]onger school days, summer classes, an inclusive culture of parental involvement, and the power to hire teachers who are committed to a school's philosophy and dismiss teachers who aren't up to the job.” According to the editors, charters students are doing better because of those practices—and that’s the end of the story. No other explanations need apply. Charter kids are not doing better “because they come from more privileged backgrounds,” the editors specifically said. But is that true? We’re not real sure why the editors feel so certain. In their original news report, Keating and Labbe-DeBose also seemed to reject a traditional notion—the notion that charter schools may draw brighter, more ambitious students away from the regular schools. Unfortunately, their analysis of this possibility was rather superficial. In the following passage, we see the heart of their case. Because the question is so important, we don’t think this reasoning cuts it:

  KEATING AND LABBE-DEBOSE (12/15/08): The two public systems are, in general, educating students from similar backgrounds. About two-thirds of the students in both systems live in poverty, and more than 90 percent are minorities, according to school records. The traditional schools enroll a slightly higher percentage of special education students and students with limited English.

  Charter schools must accept any student who applies, using a lottery if they have more applicants than spaces. That prevents the schools from cherry-picking applicants. But each school is free to set its own rules on expelling students.

  Susan Schaeffler, who heads the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools in the District, said expulsions have not been a major factor. Almost all of the students at KIPP's three D.C. middle schools come from poor backgrounds, but the schools are among the highest-performing in the city. Within a decade, KIPP, a national charter network, plans to have 10 schools in the District, with a total of 3,400 students.

  “Our success is not from moving kids out," she said, but is attributable to a highly unified school culture that teachers and students embrace.”

  The authors say that charters and traditional schools “are, in general, educating students from similar backgrounds.” To establish this fact, they cite data about income and race—and about nothing else. But low-income students are not all alike, and the authors make little real attempt to address the long-standing, basic question about charters: Are the students who choose to attend these rigorous charter schools more ambitious, more determined, more focused than the students they leave behind? It would be hard to answer that question, of course, but the authors brushed past it quickly—and five days later, the editors treated it as a settled point. But this is typical of the way these eds work when discussing the public schools.

  By the way: Not all “low income” families are equally low-income. Are the low-income kids in the charter schools as low-income as the kids in the regular schools? We can think of a few simple ways to start to check, but the authors didn’t try to do so. Nor did they try to quantify the expulsions they mention above, seeking a sense of the role these expulsions might play in the charters’ success. In their report, a KIPP official tells them that “expulsions have not been a major factor”—and that’s where the matter ends. This is not an impressive attempt to examine these parts of their story.

  Assuming the Post’s test score data are accurate, why are low-income kids scoring better in DC’s charters? That’s a very important question. We think the eds should maintain open minds about possible answers—although such miracles rarely occur when the Post proclaims on the schools.

  In closing, three more basic points:

  First, if you read through the Keating/Labbe-DeBose piece, you will read about a lot of people in charter schools who are working very hard to succeed. How different are some DC charters? Here’s a quick overview:

  KEATING/LABBE-DEBOSE: Freed from centralized rules, charter directors have been able to rethink age-old structures, including the Monday-through-Friday, 8-to-3 schedule.

  At many charters, students stay until 5 p.m., with the extra hours devoted to more class time and extra tutoring. Many require students to attend Saturday classes and summer school. Schaeffler said KIPP students spend 47 percent more time in class than students do in traditional schools.

  It is not uncommon for charters to buy cellphones for the teachers and then tell students and parents to call anytime they need help.

  At Friendship's Blow Pierce middle school in Northeast, parents are asked to sign a statement promising that they will get their children to school on time each day, make sure they wear the uniform, complete homework on time, and attend classes on Saturdays and in the summer if their grades fall below a C average. The parents also agree to attend conferences and school events.

  School culture has vastly changed in these schools. In our book, the people who run these schools deserve praise and credit for their ongoing efforts. But: Are the low-income parents who sign those statements, thus sending their kids to these vastly changed schools, “the same” as the low-income parents who don’t? Are their kids the same as the kids left behind? The editors tell us the kids are the same—that the kids in the charter schools do not “come from more privileged backgrounds.” But low-income children are privileged—as opposed to some of their peers—if they have disciplined, focused, insistent parents. As always, the editors issue proclamations from high in Versailles. Do they know whereof they speak?

  A second point: Is there any possibility that testing is conducted differently in these ambitious charters? We have no idea, though it’s obviously possible. But you’ll see big newspapers ask that question when you see a cow jump past the moon.

  And then too, a final point, concerning DC’s low-income students as compared to their low-income peers in the rest of the nation:

  To review DC’s cores in the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress, just click here, then click through the pages of this “Trial Urban District” report. In Figure 2 (page 11), you’ll see that DC’s low-income fourth-graders scored lower in reading than their low-income peers from the nine other cities in this study. (The differences can be fairly sharp. In DC, low-income kids scored in the 18th percentile as compared to all other kids in the nation. In New York City, low-income kids scored in the 35th percentile.) DC’s low-income eighth-graders also scored lowest in reading (Figure 7, page 21). DC’s black kids are at the bottom in fourth grade reading—and are next to the bottom in eighth grade reading. We assume these data includes kids from traditional schools and charters, though the charts don’t specifically say.

  In DC, those facts are also part of this story. There is much more to say about this story than was found in the Post news report—though Keating and Labbe-DeBose included a lot of useful information. (Assuming their test score data are accurate.) But five days later, the editors blew fairly hard, offering the types of sage conclusion their high class now tends to prefer. They huffed and puffed, till we averted our gaze. Thus do our editors tend to perform in matters of low-income schools.
  
  

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• 22 Dec 2008 09:18

  IN SEARCH OF THOSE FAMOUS THREE R’s! The Post reviewed DC’s charter schools—and committed a statistical blunder: MONDAY, DECEMBER 22, 2008Stanley misses the sex: Darlings, Alessandra has been at it again, purring her views from inside the palace. “I miss the sex,” she purred at the start. No one could sensibly doubt that:

  STANLEY (12/21/08): I miss the sex.

  The nation is engrossed in an orgy of scandal, a 24-hour cable news burlesque of greed, graft, cronyism and corruption, with appointed villains so lurid and over-the-top they could be characters in “Bleak House.” (Even their names, Madoff and Blagojevich, have a Dickensian ring, like Skimpole or Pardiggle.)

  The most salacious news stories pivot on money, not mistresses, prostitutes or toe taps in an airport men’s room. It’s the 10th anniversary of Monicagate and the impeachment of President Clinton, and even the Fox News Channel cannot summon the energy to dwell on Linda Tripp or the semen-stained dress. (At the moment, muckrakers are studying Clinton donors, not doxies.)

  We weren’t familiar with the word “doxies” either. (Just click here. We assume she isn’t referring to dachshunds.) But then, we don’t miss—or obsess on—the sex, as Villagers frequently do.

  Darlings, these matters remain a big joke in these realms. But then, you may have understood that. Just keep reading:

  Burnett achieves Job One: In the Village, they simply love typing their favorite novels—and the old-fashioned “Major Dem scandal tale” is a time-honored winner. On yesterday’s Meet the Press, NPR’s Michele Norris teamed with NBC’s Erin Burnett to show us how a favored old tale can be easily conjured. And sure enough! In the process, they accomplished “Job One!” They got us back to the sex! At issue was a “new classic” question: Will the Blagojevich matter somehow involve or harm or discredit Obama? When David Gregory threw out the question, Norris reacted quickly. And as she did, she displayed a Key Novelist Skill: She repeated something Obama has said, then imagined what “it may have been better” for him to have said. The “difficult situation” has been created “by the Obama team in part,” she of course said:

  GREGORY (12/21/08): Is there some exposure here, politically, for Obama?

  NORRIS: It’s been—it’s a difficult situation for them, having been made by the Obama team in part because, at the outset, when he said, “My team had no inappropriate contact,” it may have been better to say, “Of course we were speaking to the governor.”

  GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

  It may have been better to have said something else, Norris mused, to Gregory’s satisfaction. And this is where the mind-reading started. Yes, Norris knew what Obama had actually said. But so what? Through her cohort’s unexplained powers, she somehow knew what the public had “heard:”

  NORRIS (continuing directly): Of course someone was speaking to the governor, because it would be unusual, very unusual if someone on that team—Rahm Emanuel sits in the Senate [sic] seat that was once held by Rod Blagojevich! So they said that there’s no inappropriate contact. What people heard, there is no contact.

  GREGORY: Right.

  The novelist is a clairvoyant. In reality, Obama had said there was no inappropriate contact between his team and the Blagojevich office. But being clairvoyant, Norris knew what “people” had actually “heard:” Obama had said there was no inappropriate contact, but people had heard something different! Norris, like the rest of her mind-reading cohort, seemed unembarrassed as she announced this key fact. And then, the discussion hit rock bottom. After a bit more mind-reading by Norris—after a display of lurid imagination by Gregory—a second fiddle jumped in the stew, haplessly saying this: BURNETT: Right. What—what defines the word “inappropriate?” GREGORY: Right.

  BURNETT: What does that mean? I mean, you chose that word. Was it a loaded term or not? I mean, “I did not have sex with that woman.”

  GREGORY: Yeah.

  BURNETT: I mean, terms mean something.

  Sorry, but no: You can’t get dumber. Norris’ novelization was sad. But this was sheer inanity.

  In this utterly hopeless passage, Burnett seems to say, several times, that she doesn’t know what the word “inappropriate” means! And apparently, she had been missing the sex, just like her sad neighbor, Stanley. It’s embarrassing to see this national figure making such an inane presentation—but it did allow her to do the thing her Village cohort loves best. It let her recite the string of words these life-forms prefer to all other words: I did not have sex [sic] with that woman! By the magic of novelization, Obama’s uncontradicted statement—his staff did nothing inappropriate, he said—had returned us to that woman, Miss Lewinsky, the one woman these life-forms ever loved.

  (No, that’s not what Bill Clinton actually said, almost eleven years ago. But people! The pundits were typing a favorite tale—a novel telling the one sad story these sad, empty ciphers can love.) The panel may have been missing the sex. A skilled scribe provided great pleasure.IN SEARCH OF THOSE FAMOUS THREE R’s: Our world would be a better place with a more competent public education discussion. Often, editors grouse about schoolchildren’s low reading scores—while failing to show much competence with those famous “Three R’s” themselves. Consider one part of this Washington Post editorial about DC’s charter schools. The editorial appeared in Saturday’s paper; the editors were reacting to a two-part news report which had appeared on the Post’s front pages (links below). As they started, the editors made a truly significant judgment—a judgment which strikes us as badly flawed, a point we’ll review tomorrow.

  But on the simplest level, how well do our journalists read, write and cipher when they discuss the public schools? At one point, the editors said this:

  WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL (12/20/08): A recent Post analysis confirmed the "solid academic lead" of [DC] charter students over those in [DC] traditional schools. According to The Post's analysis, students in middle-school charters scored 19 points higher than their peers in regular schools on national reading tests and 20 points higher in math. Charters also did better on such measures as attendance and graduation rates. Teachers in the charters are more likely to be "highly qualified.”

  Good grief. “According to The Post's analysis, students in middle-school charters scored 19 points higher than their peers in regular schools on national reading tests and 20 points higher in math?” Yes, this is a relatively minor part of a longer editorial. But this presentation by the Post is barely coherent. Readers should avert their gaze, out of embarrassment for the Post’s eds.

  For starters, the editors are simply wrong on a basic factual point. According to the Post analysis in question, it was actually low-income students in DC charters who outscored than their low-income peers in traditional schools by the specified amounts. By leaving that qualifier to the side, the editors missed the entire focus of their paper’s news report. That report focused on DC’s low-income students, not on DC students generally. This point was made again and again in the news report—but somehow, the editors missed it. When it comes to this basic point, the editors dont seam to have red their own newz report reel wel. But a second part of that highlighted statement had our analysts shaking their heads. “According to The Post's analysis, [low-income] students in middle-school charters scored 19 points higher than their peers in regular schools?” That statement doesn’t say much of anything at all—unless you say what test is involved, and unless you explain how big a gap in reading achievement that “19 points” may represent. Duh! On some reading tests, a 19-point score differential will suggest a large gap in reading achievement; on other tests, a 19-point gap might be quite minor. It all depends on the scale of the test; until the test has been named and described in some way, the editors’ numbers mean nothing at all. A 19-point score gap may be fairly minor—on a combined SAT score, for example. On some other test, a 19point gap may be quite significant.

  So the editors’ attempt at quantification told us nothing at all. But sure enough, that’s exactly the way this “information” was presented in the Post’s original news report, which was quite lengthy (more than 3000 words). Dan Keating and Theola Labbe-DeBose had penned the front-page report. And uh-oh! This was paragraph 9 of their 75-paragraph effort:

  KEATING (12/15/08): District children in both systems still fall short of national averages on standardized tests. But students in charter schools have been more successful at closing the gap. According to a Washington Post analysis of recent national test results for economically disadvantaged students, D.C. middle-school charters scored 19 points higher than the regular public schools in reading and 20 points higher in math.

  If you study one of the accompanying graphics, you might be able to deduce that the test in question is the (highly-regarded) National Assessment of Educational Progress—the so-called “nation’s report card.” (You might also see that we’re talking about 2007, the most recent year for which NAEP results are available.) But good grief! Keating and Labbe-DeBose were no more helpful than the editors when it comes to explaining those score differentials. Do the score differences suggest big gaps in reading and math achievement—or are those 19- and 20-point gaps relatively insignificant? It all depends on the scale of the test—and in the actual text of their lengthy report, Keating and Labbe-DeBose didn’t even name the “national test,” let alone offer any hint about what those score gaps might suggest. This is a striking bit of statistical illiteracy—a blunder so striking that we’ll assume it was made by unnamed editors, not by Keating and Labbe-DeBose themselves. But five days later, the editorial board discussed this news report—and the editors committed the same basic blunder. The board put those numbers into its piece—but by themselves, without explanation. those numbers tell us nothing at all. It’s like saying a child “weighs 122" without saying if that’s kilograms, or maybe pounds, or maybe about some other unit of weight altogether. Charter school kids scored 19 points higher? All by its lonesome, that number tells us nothing at all! But so it goes when our biggest news orgs discuss low-income education. What’s the truth about those score gaps? If our understanding of the NAEP scale is correct, those gaps, if accurate, would be quite substantial. Indeed, such score differentials would suggest that low-income kids in DC charters were doing much better in reading and math than their peers in “regular schools.” Indeed, those score differentials would be so great that they’d deserve a headline all their own. Let’s state the obvious: The Post should have explained what those score gaps suggest. And if they suggest what we think they suggest, a great deal more should have ensued. The Post should have explained what those score gaps suggest. But that sort of thing would occur in a different world, a world whose discussion of public ed is vastly different from our own. The editors looked like a bunch of chumps when they failed to explain what those score gaps suggest. But so it often goes in our world: News orgs lament the way schoolkids read, write and cipher, while failing to show elementary skill in their ownuse of those Three R’s.Tomorrow: The editors seek to explain why charter schools are doing better. That two-part news report: The Post did two front-page reports on DC’s charter schools. For the first report, just click here. The second report appeared one day later.

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• 19 Dec 2008 14:35

  WHY HER STORY MATTERS! We tried to learn why Rhee’s story had changed. Here’s why that actually matters: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2008When fiery liberal dogs fail to bark: By last night, the fever had broken. Pundits stopped imagining, parsing, speculating, pretending about Obama’s troubling ties to Blago. Instead, they discussed purpose-driven gay-bashing—and Caroline Kennedy’s background, of course. After a deeply disturbing delay, they’ll get their report from Obama on Blago at the start of next week. Which is disturbing, of course. That said, pundits staged ten days of punishing nonsense as they speculated, imagined and parsed. And here’s the good news: All over the web, liberals and progressives pushed back hard, often doing so with great skill. Well—all over certain parts of the web. In certain other precincts, those fiery liberal dogs didn’t bark. We know, we know—they’re our “nominal allies.” But we thought you might want to know what occurred at one fiery site. For us, it began late last Friday. Posting at Tapped, Tim Fernholz criticized the press corps’ clowning in the prior four days. And yet, his criticism of the press was restricted to one parenthetical remark, in a longer post about an Ed Rendell comment. And uh-oh! Though he did criticize the press, he framed his criticism thusly: FERNHOLZ (12/12/08): Which is not to say Rendell's criticism [of Obama’s team] is incorrect; the Obama team's handling of the issue has been almost as bad as the media's reporting on it. (Those failures were best expressed here: "So, the US Attorney who is going after Blagojevich says there is absolutely no evidence Barack Obama has done anything wrong. This, naturally, is bad news for Barack Obama.") Quite correctly, Fernholz said the media’s reporting had been “bad.” But in the same breath, he said this: “the Obama team's handling of the issue has been almost as bad.” But what had Obama’s team done wrong? We had no idea—and Fernholz didn’t say. But then, we think you’ve seen these constructions before: On the one hand, the press corps was wrong. On the other hand, so was Obama! To us, this was an odd (but sadly typical) post, after four days in which many liberals had pushed back, with considerable skill, against the press corps’ clowning. But then, a question popped into our heads: How many of the other fiery liberals at Tapped had criticized the press corps at all? And sure enough, when we scrolled back, we got a sadly predictable answer: As best we could tell, Fernholz’s post represented the very first time anyone had criticized the press corps at all! Nor could we find such criticism in the American Prospect’s articles, or on Ezra Klein’s site. This week, the Group Disinterest continued, with one exception: On Tuesday, A. Serwer posted this dead-on complaint about a New York Post column by Kirsten Powers. But aside from that, the silence continued. That’s a tremendous amount of disinterest from a large group of fiery liberals. (On Wednesday, Serwer completely vindicated himself, offering this plainly intelligent post on a different topic.) Let’s be clear: There’s no reason why any particular individual just has to address this topic. And of course, the professors will tell us: There’s almost surely a very good reason for all this liberal silence. But we think we’ve seen this movie before, at other times when the mainstream press has committed startling fouls. Example: When Time put Ann Coulter on its cover and massively fawned, many liberals pushed back hard on the web. But at career liberal sites, it was silent night. All was calm—and the future looked bright (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 4/28/05). To our reckoning, career liberals seem to keep their traps shut when the press corps goes after your interests—and your leaders. We have a term for that silence: Dead weight. But almost surely, the professors will see right through that “take” on our nominal allies. There must be a high-minded reason, they’ll say, when fiery liberal dogs fail to bark.
  
  Special report: School daze!Part 4—Why her story matters: Sigh. Even after Obama’s election, what explains “the success that conservatives have enjoyed in framing arguments that leave Democrats and liberals at an automatic disadvantage?” That quotation comes from E. J. Dionne’s column in this morning’s Washington Post. And sure enough! If you want to explain “the success that conservatives have enjoyed in framing arguments,” we’d advise you to read that very same column, in which Dionne discusses Arne Duncan’s role in the current education debate. Dionne describes two warring camps (each of which have valid ideas for improving public schools, by the way). Duncan gets along with each camp, Dionne says. In this passage, Dionne describes the more “liberal” of the two warring camps: DIONNE (12/19/08): When the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal and pro-labor think tank, circulated an education manifesto that focused on expanding the services for poor children available at public schools, Duncan signed on.

  The statement, reflecting a view strongly held by teachers groups, rejected the idea that "schools alone can offset the full impact of low socioeconomic status on learning." It called for "high-quality early childhood and pre-school programs, after-school and summer programs, and programs that develop parents' capacity to support their children's education.”

  This “liberal” camp wants to expand early childhood programs; it wants to teach low-literacy parents how to raise more successful kids. Those are both perfectly valid ideas. And as he continues, Dionne describes the (perfectly valid) ideas of the other, non-“liberal” camp:

  DIONNE (continuing directly): But Duncan also signed a statement from the Education Equality Project associated with Joel Klein, the schools chancellor in New York City, and Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the Washington, D.C., schools, both of them heroes to the tough-on-the-unions camp.

  The statement called for "an effective teacher in every classroom, and an effective principal in every school, by paying educators as the professionals they are, by giving them the tools and training they need to succeed, and by making tough decisions about those who do not.”

  This second camp wants “an effective teacher in every classroom, and an effective principal in every school.” Those are valid objectives too. But back to our question: Why does it remain so easy for conservatives to frame our public debates? Here’s one reason: All through this column, Dionne refers to this second camp—and this camp alone—as “reformers” in search of “reform.” In this way, he adopts the language of the conservative world—language which heavily tilts this debate against the more “liberal” camp. In Dionne’s column, firing bad teachers counts as “reform;” expanding pre-school doesn’t. In this way, big pundits help conservatives “frame arguments that leave Democrats and liberals at an automatic disadvantage.”

  Read carefully, all the way to the end. In Dionne’s column, Michelle Rhee’s a reformer—but the EPI isn’t. With “liberals” like this on the Post’s bloated payroll, who needs anyone else?

  This brings us to our topic today: The way Amanda Ripley profiled Rhee on the cover of last week’s Time. Let’s be clear: Rhee may turn out to be an excellent superintendent of schools in DC. In our view, it’s OK that she’s inclined to bang heads (though she may be inclined to overdo it a tad); we think you should probably err on that side if you’re running a big urban system. But Rhee is a darling of press corps elites, who often know nothing about urban schools. That has led to some unfortunate journalism—as in this important passage from Ripley’s profile of Rhee:

  RIPLEY (12/8/08): After Rhee graduated from Cornell University in 1992, she joined Teach for America. She spent three years teaching at Harlem Park Elementary, one of the lowest-performing schools in Baltimore. Her parents visited and were stunned by the conditions of the neighborhood. "The area where the kids lived reminded me of a scene after the Korean War," says her father Shang Rhee.

  Rhee suffered during that first year, and so did her students. She could not control the class. Her father remembers her returning home to visit and telling him she didn't want to go back. She had hives on her face from the stress.

  The second year, Rhee got better. She and another teacher started out with second-graders who were scoring in the bottom percentile on standardized tests. They held on to those kids for two years, and by the end of third grade, the majority were at or above grade level, she says. (Baltimore does not have good test data going back that far, a problem that plagues many districts, so this assertion cannot be checked. But Rhee's principal at the time has confirmed the claim.) The experience gave Rhee faith in the power of good teaching. Yet what happened afterward broke her heart. "What was most disappointing was to watch these kids go off into the fourth grade and just lose everything," Rhee says, "because they were in classrooms with teachers who weren't engaging them.”

  Including its gratuitous slam at those bad fourth-grade teachers, that’s the classic foundational tale of the “Rhee is a Miracle Worker” myth. Except for one small fact: The miracle claims attributed to Rhee have been vastly downsized here. In Ripley’s telling, Rhee “started out with second-graders who were scoring in the bottom percentile on standardized tests”—but after two years of miraculous work, “the majority were at or above grade level.” But that is not what Rhee has said all through her flashy public career. Last year, the Washington Post’s Nikita Stewart actually quoted her long-standing, undocumented, boast:

  STEWART (6/30/07): Rhee’s résumé asserts that the students made a dramatic gain: "Over a two-year period, moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher.”

  On balance, that is a much more dramatic claim than the one Ripley described in Time. According to Rhee’s long-standing claim, she worked so major a miracle that ninety percent of her floundering students ended up “scoring at the 90th percentile or higher.” That is a truly astonishing claim—and, in Ripley’s profile of Rhee, that claim has been massively downsized.

  That’s right, readers! “A majority” of kids “at or above grade level” is a much more modest claim than the claim which helped Rhee get where she is. So how about it? Has Rhee actually changed her claim? Twice last week, we e-mailed Ripley through the “Contact” mechanism on her web site, hoping we could find out:

  E-MAIL: I'm wondering about the following passage from your Time profile of Michelle Rhee:

  "The second year, Rhee got better. She and another teacher started out with second-graders who were scoring in the bottom percentile on standardized tests. They held on to those kids for two years, and by the end of third grade, the majority were at or above grade level, she says."

  I'm wondering if that is an accurate account of something Rhee said in your interviews with her. I ask because Rhee has made much stronger claims about her students' achievement in the past. For example, on her resume, Rhee was still saying this in 2007: “Over a two-year period, moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher." That is a much stronger claim than the one you report.

  I realize that you don't quote Rhee in that part of your profile, but I'm wondering if that was an accurate account of something Rhee said about her students' test scores. This would be for further treatment at my web site, The Daily Howler.

  With thanks for any help you can give, [etc. and so forth and so on.]

  We don’t know if Ripley got our request. But we got no reply.

  Does this question actually matter? Yes, it does. Here’s why: Dionne’s “reformers” build their world around the idea of improving the stock of public school teachers. This is a perfectly valid objective—although, in some hands, it can quickly devolve into brainless, old-school union-bashing. To these heroic “reformers,” Rhee is a leading figure. And if you believe her self-glorying tales, you might start thinking that the only problem in low-income schools involves those lazy teachers. According to Rhee (and others like her), when teachers roll up and their sleeves and get to work, even the lowest-scoring kids end up in the top ten percent. If you really believe such inspiring tales, it’s hard to see why we should waste our time with all those other types of “reform.” We should just send high-minded Princeton kids into the schools and let the miracles happen.

  Rhee may turn out to be a good superintendent—but no, we don’t believe her tale. And we think Wendy Kopp should go to jail for that crap she told Charlie Rose last summer (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/16/08). But Charlie just sat there and let her blab, with nothing resembling a real question asked. And this morning, Dionne restricts the use of the loaded term “reform” to Kopp and her tellers of tales.

  It matters if Rhee’s hero tale is correct. Tales like that have created bogus ideas about low-income schools for the past forty years now. Unfortunately, Time sent an unschooled scribe to profile Rhee, and through some process or another, she vastly downsized Rhee’s long-standing claim—perhaps without even realizing. Last week, we asked her how this change had occurred. But in the world the Dionnes and Roses have built, you don’t really question “reformers.” Meanwhile, low-income kids can go hang in the yard; our journalistic world is built around pleasing tales, not the real search for “reform.” Press elites have always found it pretty to believe pleasing tales like Rhee’s. For ourselves, we don’t believe her inspiring tale—and we think the search for real success will surely be hard, and quite long.This just in from the ivory tower: Uh-oh! Both camps in Dionne’s column have valid objectives. But read back through the two sets of reforms. Neither group mentions instructional practice! Such fluff isn’t mentioned at all.

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• 18 Dec 2008 13:22

  THIS JUST IN FROM THE BACKWATER! Courrégé’s superlative work made us stop and ponder: THURSDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2008Campbell Brown, playing the fool: Astounding. Last night, it was Campbell Brown making a fool of herself over the deeply troubling way Obama has handled the Blagojevich matter. At the start of her program, Brown played tape of Tuesday’s Q-and-A between Obama and John McCormick—the troubling exchange in which Obama told McCormick (again) that he’d have to wait until next week to have his questions answered. Then, Brown made an utter fool of herself with an utterly silly commentary, in which she lectured Obama about “the very ideals you promoted during your campaign—directness, honesty, candor, transparency, openness.” Poor Brown! “You were the one who embraced openness,” she piously said. “You could stand to be a little more open to it.”

  Brown’s commentary was utterly foolish—but her panel segment on this matter seemed designed to make her look even worse. Roland Martin and Jeffrey Toobin tried—much too politely, in our view—to show her how silly her whole posture was. But Steven Hayes was clowning too, about this super-trumped question.

  We won’t even attempt to capture how foolish Brown was all through this discussion. But good God! When it came time to move along from this trumped-up topic, she laughingly responded to Martin, who was openly mocking her focus on this bogus matter:

  MARTIN (12/17/08): We in the media— This is the best that we have to latch on. So we're going to ride this until the wheels fall off.

  BROWN: No! no! We've got something better. We've got something better! Stay right there! Don't go anywhere, Roland, or the rest of the panel. We do have other things to talk about! A little bit later, we're going to talk about a potential political superstar, Caroline Kennedy!

  By now, Brown was clearly trafficking in high irony. To our ear, it was fairly clear that she understood—that she was acknowledging—how foolish this whole bag of bullsh*t is. Shorter Brown: We won’t just waste time on the one-week delay—we’ll waste your time with Caroline too! But so it now goes in the cable “news” world, a world which has never seemed phonier. Remarkable. You live at a time when institutions are crumbling all around you—but seven-figure cable “news” stars can’t think of real news topics they can discuss! It’s hard to believe, but it’s perfectly true: We’re not sure when we’ve ever seen them play the fool to quite this extent. Last night, we thought it was fairly clear that Brown knew this was all bogus too.

  Late Tuesday, Steve Benen captured this unfolding gong-show, as many liberals have done on the web; he described the pimping of this pseudo-issue as “a week of bizarre reporting, and a bizarre effort on the part of many outlets and media personalities to draw a connection that doesn't exist.” Indeed, the clowning has truly been something to see since December 9, when Patrick Fitzgerald announced that Obama hadn’t done anything wrong—and read the transcript of Blagojevich complaining about that very fact. We’ll admit it: We ourselves have been very surprised to see the press corps clown so hard—to see them working so wondrously hard to suggest that Obama has done something wrong. Yesterday, Digby authored her latest must-read post about this remarkable—and objectively evil—nonsense. We’ll only say this: You know you’ve hit the Village rock-bottom when the very correct and prim Ms. Stoddard adds her very fine cant to the mix. Do they make her remove her hat and white gloves before she deigns offer comment?

  Many liberals have pushed back skillfully against this truly remarkable nonsense. But readers: Which of your fiery “nominal allies” have somehow managed to hold themselves back? We’ve been asking that question all week. Tomorrow, despite the attendant heartache, we’ll finally give you an answer.The culture—and cult—of the palace: Here was Matthews, chirping and chittering last night about Dear Caroline:

  MATTHEWS (12/17/08): We’ll be back with John Harwood and Michael Duffy for more of the “Politics Fix.” We’re going to talk about Caroline. This has become the story in every newspaper I read at dawn—Caroline! Of course, I read those stories first. You’re watching Hardball, only on MSNBC.

  [commercial break]

  MATTHEWS: We’re back with John Harwood and Michael Duffy. We’re having the candy moment of the show, which is Caroline Kennedy. I don’t know what it is, but it is the cotton candy of political discussion, Harwood. It is amazing. It’s so easy to talk about. It requires no intellectual knowledge. Do you want Caroline Kennedy to be back in the Senate? That’s all.

  A recurrent thought: It’s very hard for regular people to come to terms with the nonsense involved here. People can fathom the broken-souled culture of palace elites—when we talk about life in the real Versailles. But here’s something that’s hard for most people to see: This is the same sort of addled culture, among the same addled elite.

  Matthews is paid $5 million per year to offer “cotton candy” like that. He was put in his post by GE’s Jack Welch, one of our wealthiest corporate players.
  
  Special report: School daze!Part 3—This just in from the backwater: Do Malcolm Gladwell and Amanda Ripley know squat from squadoodle about public schools? Here at THE HOWLER, we have no idea. Within the past week, each scribe penned a major education piece for a major American magazine (for The New Yorker and Time, respectively.) But there’s little sign that either writer has any background in educational issues, and in each case, their presentations sometimes seemed suspiciously murky. In particular, Ripley wrote about Michelle Rhee, the hard-hitting new head of DC’s public schools. Given the school system Rhee now heads, did Ripley understand how shaky this particular feel-good tale sounded?

  RIPLEY (12/8/08): The data back up Rhee's obsession with teaching. If two average 8-year-olds are assigned to different teachers, one who is strong and one who is weak, the children's lives can diverge in just a few years, according to research pioneered by Eric Hanushek at Stanford. The child with the effective teacher, the kind who ranks among the top 15 percent of all teachers, will be scoring well above grade level on standardized tests by the time she is 11. The other child will be a year and a half below grade level—and by then it will take a teacher who works with the child after school and on weekends to undo the compounded damage. In other words, the child will probably never catch up.

  We don’t know why Ripley’s so sure that an “average 8-year-old...will be scoring well above grade level” by the age of 11, if she gets “effective” teachers—“the kind who rank among the top 15 percent of all teachers.” But working in DC’s public schools, Rhee is dealing with lots of delightful kids who simply aren’t “average 8-year-olds”—if we’re talking about these children’s educational profiles. What sorts of approaches will work best for them? Ripley didn’t seem to realize that this question was raised by her formulation. But duh! For many kids in DC schools, being “a year and a half below grade level” would count as a major academic success! We saw no sign, at any point, that Ripley really knew squat from squadoodle when it came to so basic a fact. But then, mainstream writing about public schools is often less than expert. In part for that reason, mainstream scribes may be inclined to accept whatever conventional wisdom may be chic and current. Somewhat oddly, Ripley and Gladwell both cited the research of Eric Hanushek, senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institute. Hanushek’s research may be of great value; we know of no reason to think it isn’t. But Hanushek isn’t a world-famous fellow, and yet, for some unexplained reason, both these scribes were citing his research last week, though neither stated his claims in ways which struck us as fully clear. That said, a great deal of mainstream ed writing pimps CW—and a great deal of current mainstream CW involves the need to replace or augment the current stock of teachers. This strikes us as a perfectly reasonable approach, but it also tilts the discussion in the direction of union-bashing—the kind of old-school conservative impulse which can be found in current debates about both the public schools and the Big 3. No, the ongoing struggles in low-incomes schools aren’t simply a function of poor teacher quality. But you might have thought otherwise when you read Nicholas Kristof’s recent column, in which he advised Obama:

  KRISTOF (11/13/08): There's still a vigorous debate about how to improve education, but recent empirical research is giving us a much better sense of what works. A study by the Hamilton Project, a public policy group at the Brookings Institution, outlines several steps to boost weak schools: end rigid requirements for teacher certification that impede hiring, make tenure more difficult to get so that ineffective teachers can be weeded out after three years on the job and award hefty bonuses to good teachers willing to teach in low-income areas. If we want outstanding, inspiring teachers in difficult classrooms, we're going to have to pay much more—and it would be a bargain.

  Kristof offered three ideas, all of which are perfectly valid; but all three ideas involved teacher quality. For the record, this seems to be the study to which he referred; the same study was specifically cited in Gladwell’s piece, once again driving home the point about mysterious uniformity of outlook. The study’s authors make five formal suggestions; in our view, all five suggestions are well worth pursuing. But can teacher quality be the only correctable problem facing struggling, low-income schools? You might think so if you were to judge from recent mainstream journalism, where you constantly hear tales from the likes of Rhee and Wendy Kopp about the miracle cures that can result if the right sorts of people are sent into urban schools.

  Tomorrow, we’ll return to one such tale, as told (again) in Ripley’s profile. Today, though, let’s link to an excellent piece of ed writing, by Adam Nossiter, from the front page of the New York Times. The piece appeared on Halloween, and for good reason: It concerned the kinds of ghosts and goblins which often will get overlooked in mainstream educational journalism. Uh-oh! “Inspiring Story of Success at Charleston School Gives Way to Suspicion and Hurt,” the front-page headline said. Nossiter described a heralded elementary school in Charleston, South Carolina, whose miraclous test score gains now seem to have been a fraud. For ourselves, we’ll skip the name of the (former) principal, who has denied wrong-doing. But here is the heart of the tale:

  NOSSITER (10/31/08): [Principal M] has been a hero in the worn neighborhoods behind this city's venerable mansions, a school principal who fed her underprivileged students, clothed them, found presents for them at Christmas and sometimes roused neglectful parents out of bed in the nearby housing projects.

  As test scores rocketed at her school, Sanders-Clyde Elementary, the city held her up as a model. The United Way and the Rotary Club honored her, The Charleston Post and Courier called her a ''miracle worker,'' and the state singled out her school to compete for a national award. In Washington, the Department of Education gave the school $25,000 for its achievements.

  Somehow, [Principal M] had transformed one of Charleston's worst schools into one of its best, a rare breakthrough in a city where the state has deemed more than half the schools unsatisfactory. It seemed almost too good to be true.

  It may have been. The state has recently started a criminal investigation into test scores at Principal M's school, seeking to determine whether a high number of erasure marks on the tests indicates fraud.

  Nossiter goes on to describe the process by which the state of South Carolina decided that something was wrong at this school. In short, exam sheets at the high-scoring school sported an unusually high number of erasures—with the erasures all turning wrong answers to right. (That’s not the normal pattern.) If we were to fault Nossiter’s piece, we’d only say this—he failed to put this unfortunate story into a larger historical context. As we told you years ago, this particular type of (outright) cheating has been well-known for decades now (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 10/31/00)—though it’s rarely discussed in the mainstream press, which so loves tales of those miracle cures. Indeed, after reading Nossiter’s piece, the question we would ask is this: Why did it take the state so long to realize that something seemed wrong at this school? In Washington, why did the award-bestowing Department of Ed behave like a perfect mark?

  Nossiter’s front-page work was good—but someone else’s work has been truly superior. That person is Diette Courrégé (all links here), who began reporting this story in the (Charleston) Post and Courier on September 10 of this year. After reading the full account of this mess, one might perhaps fault the Post and Courier for not getting on the story sooner. But since September, Courrégé has produced a stream of superior stories, reporting this matter in a type of detail that is simple never, ever found in the mainstream American press. Try to believe that readers got to peruse a report which started out like this:

  COURREGE (9/28/08): In 2007, Sanders-Clyde Elementary students' scores on the state Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test were among the best in Charleston County.

  That same year, Sanders-Clyde students also took a lesser-known test and had some of the weakest scores in the county.

  The Post and Courier uncovered the gap after requesting test scores from the school district.

  There is less than a one percent likelihood that chance alone explains the wide gap, according to a statistical analysis requested by the newspaper.

  The discrepancy in Sanders-Clyde's test scores raises new questions about the school's record of achievement. Further analysis revealed testing irregularities at another school, E.B. Ellington Elementary in Ravenel.

  Say what? The Post and Courier uncovered this gap after requesting test scores from the school district? The gap didn’t likely occur by chance, according to a statistical analysis requested by the newspaper? It’s truly inspiring to see a newspaper engaging in such careful technical work. And to see Courrégé provide this type of detailed background about this long-standing problem:

  COURREGE (11/2/08): Every year, a small group of South Carolina Department of Education employees gathers behind closed doors to scour thousands of students' standardized test results and search for cheaters.

  In an attempt to identify educators who have illegally tried to improve their class or school scores, the group hunts for classes, schools and districts with unusually high numbers of test answers that have been erased and corrected.

  [...]

  State educators began looking for clues in eraser marks about two decades ago.

  Joe Saunders spurred the state's exploration into this aspect of testing. He's a number-crunching expert for the state who wrote a computer program that analyzes eraser marks.

  The state's testing company provides individual students' answers to every test question, including whether tests contained answer switches. A computer can tell when an answer has been erased.

  Saunders' program flags districts, schools and classes that have high numbers of answer changes, and it shows whether correct or incorrect answers ultimately were chosen.

  The Post and Courier obtained the state's analysis that showed more than 7,500 students' tests statewide last year had a higher-than-average number of wrong answers that were erased and corrected.

  In today’s post, we can’t begin to do justice to the detailed work Courrégé has done on this matter. Suffice to say that this is the kind of work you’d sensibly expect a journalist to do—and that it’s the kind of work you simply never see in your major newspapers.

  Nossiter’s piece was a step in the right direction; Courrégé’s serial effort has been truly superb. That said, let’s tie this back to a question that came to our heads when we reviewed that sensible, intelligent Hamilton Project study—the one which Kristof cited.

  Early on, Courrégé began giving her readers some background on the general shape of this problem. On September 14, she began one of her many informative reports with some awkward info:

  COURREGE (9/14/08): So much rides on public school students' test scores.

  They can make or break a principal's career. Awards, money and promotions often accompany high scores. Low scores can mean state takeover or intense public scrutiny. They can lessen neighborhoods' home values and desirability.

  The increasing pressure on educators to post strong results on high-stakes tests has created ripe conditions for cheating.

  Cases of educator-led cheating are cropping up across the country, from Virginia to Texas to Ohio. An analysis of seven years of test results for third- though seventh-grade Chicago public school students found evidence of teacher cheating in more than 200 classrooms per year, which was roughly 5 percent of the total, according to the book "Freakonomics" by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Those in the lowest-scoring classrooms were most likely to cheat.

  A number of scenarios, such as unusually large one-year gains or high numbers of eraser marks, can trigger suspicions.

  We’ll edit Courrégé on one point. In fact, “cases of educator-led cheating” have been “cropping up across the country” for decades, ever since scores derived from teacher-administered tests began to be used as accountability measures. And uh-oh! We have no idea if those data from Freakonomics are representative of national conduct. But we thought about this Charleston school when we read that intelligent Hamilton Project study, the one Kristof recommended. You see, that study turns on the use of test scores from the Los Angeles schools—pre-existing data derived from teacher-administered tests. If five percent of those data are bogus, the study’s utility may well be affected. But we rarely see any sign that major researchers—or educational writers—ever consider such matters. As a result, you recently had the Washington Post praising an elementary school at the top of page one—a school with the second-lowest reading score in the whole state of Virginia! And when we discovered that test scores for every school in Virginia had been bogus for several years—when the head of the state school board said we were right—your extremely high-minded Washington Post didn’t even bother reporting this small, minor, non-newsy fact.

  Kristof cited an intelligent study, one whose suggestions are well worth considering. But what about Courrégé’s superlative work, down in a little backwater paper? Do researchers allow for possible problems like the ones she’s been discussing? We don’t know the answer to that. But we’ve often wondered when we’ve read certain studies, like some of the studies which are now CW wherever press outlooks are sold.

  Tomorrow: Back to Rhee’s uplifting tale.
  
  

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• 17 Dec 2008 13:21

  As we watched, we thought of the way they posed in June 1999, just before Candidate Bush hit the national trail.

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• 17 Dec 2008 08:46

  BONESMAN’S COMPLAINT! The nonsense was general all over cable. This morning, a Bonesman concurred: WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2008BONESMAN’S COMPLAINT: The Chicago Tribune’s John McCormick may be ready to move to the Village. Yesterday, at Obama’s press event, he started asking this question: MCCORMICK (12/16/08): You told us at your first press conference after the election that you were going to take a very hands-off approach to filling that spot. Over the weekend, the Tribune reported that Rahm Emanuel, your incoming chief of staff, had presented a list of potential names that— His question wasn’t totally silly, though McCormick had been parsing a tad—and his account of Obama’s remark at that “first press conference” was perhaps a bit massaged (original transcript below). That said, McCormick didn’t get to ask his full question. Obama broke in, saying this: OBAMA (): John—John, let me, let me just cut you off because I don't want you to waste your question. As I indicated yesterday, we've done a full review of this. The facts are going to be released next week. It would be inappropriate for me to comment because, for example, the story that you just talked about in your own paper, I haven't confirmed that it was accurate and I don't want to get into the details at this point. So do you have another question? Duh. On Monday, Obama announced that his office’s “full review of this” would be withheld until next week, at Patrick Fitzgerald’s request. And Fitzgerald’s office confirmed the fact that they had made this request. But McCormack plowed ahead anyhoo, asking a question that plainly wouldn’t get answered. And then, on cable, the children started wailing, about Obama’s bad conduct. Which part of “the information will be withheld until next week, at Fitzgerald’s request” don’t these life-forms understand? The caterwauling was widespread on cable; for Digby’s account of one exchange, just click here. But as always, the silliest Villager was the Post’s Dana Milbank, who put his low IQ on display in this morning’s “Washington Sketch.” If the insider press is our dumbest elite, Milbank is its perfect town crier. Like Bush, he’s straight outta Skull and Bones. And as he neared the end of his “sketch,” he again seemed determined to prove it. Classic Milbank! This is how the Post’s “sketch” artist described one part of yesterday’s session—an event at which Obama introduced his nominee for Secretary of Education. As always, Milbank found himself bored by the day’s dismal dullness:

  MILBANK (12/17/08): Next up in Obama's insomnia treatment was an acceptance speech by the previously unknown nominee, followed by the president-elect's own blend of convoluted and passive answers to questions: "We're going to have to work through a lot of these difficulties, these structural difficulties that built up over many decades, some of it having to do with the financial industry and the huge amounts of leverage, the huge amounts of debt that were taken on, the speculation and the risk that was occurring, the lack of financial regulation, some of it having to do with our housing market, stabilizing that."

  The whole thing might have ended in snores if McCormick hadn't piped up about Blagojevich.

  Milbank began with a brainless jibe at the “previously unknown” Arne Duncan. In fact, Duncan has been head of Chicago’s public schools for the past seven years, though no one in Milbank’s circle has heard. Then, the crier took a familiar tack; he complained that Obama’s quoted answer was too “convoluted” —too long. In fairness, Obama’s answer did stretch to a punishing 71 words, and Village attention spans are quite short. At least Obama hadn’t used too many big words, the brainless complaint the Bonesman raised against dull, verbose and know-it-all Gore when the exceedingly tiresome fellow once tried to discuss his new best-selling book (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/30/07). Gore had used such terms as “the marketplace of ideas” and the ”exchange of goods and services”—and this had led to a long, loud complaint. Ponder the plight your nation faces when Boneheaded fellows of such low distinction control the shape of its discourse.

  “The whole thing might have ended in snores if McCormick hadn't piped up about Blagojevich,” the Bonesman explained, helping us see his cohort’s sad culture. Again, the truth about this dullest elite: They’re constantly drowning in their own dismal dullness. Only the thrill of scandal/sex/wardrobe/personality tales rescues them from their own cosmic dullness. Big Dem pols who don’t offer such treats will be accused of using big words—of giving “convoluted answers.” Almost everything puts them to sleep. Low-income kids can be damned. Yesterday, the nonsense was general all over cable, but no one is ever much dumber than Milbank. As he described McCormick’s Q-and-A, we got to peep inside the head of the Village’s emptiest Bonesman:

  MILBANK: [T]he Chicago Tribune's John McCormick didn't want to talk basketball. He wanted to know about contacts that Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, had with disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

  "John, John, let me just cut you off," Obama interrupted, "because I don't want you to waste your question." The president-elect said the "facts are going to be released next week”—when he, by random coincidence, will be enjoying Christmas vacation in Hawaii—and "it would be inappropriate for me to comment" before then. "So, do you have another question?"

  McCormick tried to rephrase the question, to no avail. "John, John," Obama repeated, reproachfully. "I said, the U.S. attorney's office specifically asked us not to release this until next week."

  Can you get dumber? We’re not sure. But try to grasp how bad it can get when these life-forms start offering snark. Again, Fitzgerald’s office confirmed the fact that they asked Obama to wait till next week before discussing Emanuel’s contacts. The Bonesman, though, interjected some “tude” into his account of this matter. He suggested that the release of the info next week was some sort of slick Obama trick, designed somehow to coincide with the gentleman’s Christmas vacation.

  No, that doesn’t really make sense. But this is the Village’s Bonesman. Let us repeat what we’ve told you before. There is no way to understand this group without understanding a basic fact: Your “press corps” is a D-plus elite—our slowest, dumbest professional cohort. For the record, we’ve been surprised by the way they’ve behaved in the ten days since the Blago tale hit. They’ve been dumber—and faker—than we would have dreamed. Nothing derails their sad culture.Or their posturing: And nothing can stop them from posing. Yesterday, pundits posed all over cable; they pretended they’ve been asking important, tough questions—and that Obama’s been ducking and dodging. Given the well-known facts of this case, this pose has been ludicrous right from the start. But on cable, the pundits were widely growling like bears, pretending that they were eager to serve by doing their duty as journalists.
  As we watched, we thought of the way they posed in June 1999, just before Candidate Bush hit the national trail.

  By then, they’d been tearing Candidate Gore to shreds for three months. Indeed, their attacks on Gore had been so startling that a few pundits even had mentioned the conduct! And so, as the date of the Bush Launch drew near, the scribes began growling like ravenous bears. Just wait till the you see how we go after Bush, a string of posers loudly proclaimed. “The governor’s problem, like Gov. Bill Clinton’s in 1992, is that the great hunt is on for negative material,” Howard Kurtz foolishly claimed, in the Post. “The inquisition has begun,” the scribe said.

  Many others said similar things. But what actually happened when Bush hit the trail? We’re surprised to see that we’ve never done a full post on that topic—though we did describe a bit of the nonsense in real time (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/18/99). Suffice to say that this is how David Von Drehle’s news report began on page one of Kurtz’s own Post. That inquisition? It hadn’t begun:

  VON DREHLE (6/14/00): Looking relaxed and sounding eager, Texas Gov. George W. Bush barnstormed across Iowa today with his heart on his sleeve, hoping to show that he can touch voters as effectively as he has tapped the checkbooks of the Republican elite.
  
  His pitch: a sunny mixture of economic and political conservatism with a neighborly dose of love. Bush drew his greatest cheers when he defended the idea that conservatives can be compassionate, and when he promised to lead from principle, not from the polls.

  A string of pundits had sworn to the world that Candidate Bush would get torn limb from limb. But uh-oh! By the time the campaign was done, the press corps had studiously avoided discussing his problematic record in the Texas Air National Guard; it had failed to uncover his past drunk driving record (you had to go to the chief of police in Maine and ask—and they hadn’t); and it had failed to inquire about his past business dealings (e.g., Harken). One big scribe had explained that they preferred trashing Gore, about trivial things, because it was “more fun,” “as sport.”

  No one fakes it like these life-forms do. In June 1999, they growled like bears—then rolled over and died in the sun. Yesterday, they were faking it too. They pretended that they have been asking tough questions—and that Obama’s been ducking and dodging. Yes, they’re your nation’s dumbest elite. Can your nation survive them?McCormick had been doing some parsing: So you can judge the way McCormick paraphrased, here is Obama’s statement from that first press conference, the one McCormick cited yesterday: OBAMA (11/7/08): Let's see. Where's John McCormick? Give—give a local, hometown guy a little bit of, a little bit of time. MCCORMICK: Thank you, sir. To what extent—to what extent are you planning to use your probably pretty great influence in determining the successor for your Senate seat? And what sort of criteria should the governor be looking at in filling that position?

  OBAMA: This is the governor's decision. It is not my decision. And I think that the criteria that I would have for my successor would be the same criteria that I'd have if I were a voter: somebody who is capable, somebody who is passionate about helping working families in Illinois meet their—meet their dreams. And I think there are going to be a lot of good choices out there. But it is the governor's decision to make, not mine.

  Lynn Sweet. What happened to your arm, Lynn?

  You have to hand it to McCormick. Yesterday, he could have asked a question about anything in the whole wide world. (Presumably, he had heard of Duncan.) But uh-oh—the gentleman had been doing some parsing, comparing that initial statement to the (reported) fact that Emanuel presented a list of names of possible senate successors. “You told us at your first press conference after the election that you were going to take a very hands-off approach to filling that spot,” he now said, paraphrasing Obama’s November statement—paraphrasing a bit creatively, in our own studied view.

  Did Obama’s original statement perfectly jibe with what later occurred? With that (reported) list of names? To McCormick—he may be ready to live in the Village—this was the most important topic in the whole farking world. Can your nation really survive in the grip of such frivolous life-forms?
  
  Special report: School daze!

  Part 3 tomorrow.
  
  

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