Miracle Schools!: Proceed with Caution
During her tenure as Secretary of Education (2005-2009), Margaret Spellings announced No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was proving to be a success based on a 7 point gain in NAEP reading scores from 1999-2005. The data evidence referenced by Spellings was factual as framed, but when Gerald Bracey and Stephen Krashen dug beneath that broad claim, Spellings’ claim fell apart since the gain occurred entirely between 1999-2002, before any implementation of NCLB had occurred.
Lessons embedded in the false claims based on factual data by Spellings include the need to be skeptical about media and political analyses of data, the danger of assigning causation to any data without careful analysis, and the essentially distorting effect of large data points that blur the nuance of more detailed data.
While many educators and scholars have spent a great deal of time and effort to confront the enormous amount of misleading negative claims about education, little attention has been paid to the dangers of praising school success.
Miracle Schools!: Proceed with Caution
Historically, reaching well back into the nineteenth century, public schools have been maligned more often than praised, and in the past decade, most school success stories have either been claims of “miracle” schools or advocacy for high-flying charter