Jay Mathews Condemns Miron KIPP Study for Its Fairness, Part II
Mathematica, which is under contract to KIPP, Inc. for some ongoing research, issued a working paper in time for AERA this year and in time to try to neutralize the findings of the Miron study. It is this "better data" to which Jay refers in the quote below. "Better data for Jay is, of course, data that supports the KIPP party line. It matters not that the Mathematica paper bases its numbers on self-reported info from KIPP schools and does not include some schools that did not bother to report or that had incomplete data, whereas the Miron study pulls from the Fed's Common Core of Data, which some might view as "better data" in the sense that is is less likely to be cooked by KIPP.
Miron and his team raise good questions about KIPP. They come up with some interesting answers that both support and criticize the KIPP model, although their conclusions lean toward the negative and they make some mistakes. In one section they say KIPP is losing 40 percent of black males, but better data from Mathematica show the loss is considerably less than that, and below the average attrition of black males in neighboring regular public schools. The Miron report
Jay Mathews Condemns Miron KIPP Study for Its Fairness, Part I
As the spokesman for the testing industry in general and for Kaplan in partiular (thank you, Kaplan, for paying Jay's salary), Jay Mathews lost credibility as a reporter a long time ago.
When Jay signed on as KIPP's man in the print media, a previous lack of credibility earned from disfiguring the facts turned to public dismissal as dissembling degenerated to all-out bullshit, as defined by Frankfurt in his book, On Bullshit:He [the bullshitter] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to
