Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: P.S. 234 -- It's no Lake Wobegon

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: P.S. 234 -- It's no Lake Wobegon:

P.S. 234 -- It's no Lake Wobegon

by Mike Klonsky

Garrison Keillor

I rarely take statistics seriously when it comes to teacher evaluation. Especially when they're based on student test scores and published in the New York Times. But this one is too good to pass up.

At Public School 234 in TriBeCa, where children routinely alight for school from luxury cars, roughly one-third of the teachers’ ratings were above average, one-third average and one-third below average.

I mean, except in Lake Wobegon, isn't this what average means (no pun intended)? It's the perfect distribution. If you fired the bottom third, wouldn't one-third still be below average?

The Times story continues:

At Public School 87 on the Upper West Side, where waiting lists for kindergarten