Des Moines Register Gets Grade “F” on Iowa School Report
by Linda Thieman
On September 8, 2004, the Des Moines Register reported
that a new study showed that “Iowa schools are about on par,” ranking
“25th in the nation for performance.” The study by a New York
City think tank called The Manhattan Institute, claims to evaluate “16 social, economic and demographic factors to
measure the overall difficulty of educating students in each state.”
It
appears that the Register failed to do even the most cursory digging to evaluate just who conducted the study and how it was
conducted. If they had, they would have quickly come to the
conclusion that The Manhattan Institute is a right-wing organization with a socially conservative agenda, and that their study, which tries to pass as objective, is anything but.
In fact,
a quick look at the criteria in the study shows that racial bias plays
a prominent role in the “16 social, economic and demographic factors”
that were the basis of the study’s “teachability index.”
Students, if they are not “non-Hispanic white,” are considered less teachable in this
complex formula.
In
addition, when every state in the union is keenly feeling the lack of
funding for education due to Bush’s enormous and irresponsible tax
breaks for the wealthy, and citizens are faced with skyrocketing
property taxes to try to make up for it, this ridiculous study claims
that “huge increases in resources are producing no improvements in
student achievement” and “student teachability cannot be a valid excuse
for the failure of vastly increased spending to produce better
results.”
Vastly increased spending. They take figures over a period of 30
years, leave out the George W. Bush years and his devastating effect on
education, and then call it “vastly increased spending.” It is
clear that The Manhattan Institute and their flawed study have an
agenda – one that is designed to convince the average American that the
underfunding of education by the Bush Administration really isn’t the
problem we all know it to be. And, having once bragged about advising Giuliani, you can bet that these are the
very people who are now advising Bush to make the damaging cuts.
Shame on the Des Moines Register for reporting this pap and calling it news.
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