Many conservative commentators blame the dismal state of the Republican Party on the talk-show crowd: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and the other blowhards who play on people's fears for a living. I wouldn't argue that point, but the moment I viewed the GOP (and the conservative cause) as entering a tailspin was when the Wall Street Journal decided to give Karl Rove his own column. To be sure, Rove is a very good, if not necessarily "good," political mastermind. But a public intellectual? Not only are his op-eds predictable (and thus boring), they are full of spin.
Consider today's, "Bush Was Right When it Mattered Most," which makes the following bold (and false) statements about education:
Mr. Bush was right to pass No Child Left Behind (NCLB), requiring states to set up tough accountability systems that measure every child's progress at school. As a result, reading and math scores have risen more in the last five years since NCLB than in the prior 28 years.
I spot four errors (you might say lies) in those two sentences alone:
1. The law surely doesn't require states to set up "tough" accountability systems. Famously, it allows states to set meager standards and allows districts to make little more than cosmetic changes in failing schools.
2. NCLB definitely doesn't "measure every child's progress at school." Which is too bad; that would be a great improvement over the actual system, which doesn't look at student growth over time.??Certainly the next version will.
3. Reading and math scores have risen more in the past five years than in the previous 28? I'm curious what numbers he's thinking about here, because any look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress will indicate that the greatest gains in recent history were made just before the implementation of No Child Left Behind (from 1998-2002 or 2000-2003, depending on the test). Nobody really knows why, which brings us to the last point...
4. "As a result..." Nobody can claim that NCLB "resulted" in bigger test score gains (or smaller, or whatever) because there's no way to draw causal conclusions from the data we have available. I happen to think that the evidence points to gains under NCLB for low-achieving students, but I don't know whether those gains "resulted" from No Child Left Behind or something else.
It's time for the right to rebuild;??it doesn't help to have??Karl Rove hanging around on the pages of the Journal. Mr. Murdoch, are you listening?
