When Real Life Exceeds Satire: Comments on ShankerBlog’s April Fools Post
Yesterday, Matt Di Carlo over at Shankerblog put out his April fools post. The genius of the post is in its subtlety. Matt put together a few graphs of longitudinal NAEP data showing that Maryland had made greater than average national gains on NAEP and then asserted that these gains must therefore be a function of some policy conditions that exist in Maryland. In the Post-RTTT era, Maryland has been the scorn of “reformers” because it just won’t get on board with large scale vouchers and charter expansion and has resisted follow through on test-score based teacher evaluation. Taking a poke a reformy logic, Matt asserted that perhaps the low charter share and lack of emphasis on test score based teacher evaluation… along with a dose of decent funding might be the cause of Maryland’s miracle!
Of course, these assertions are no more a stretch than commonly touted miracles in Texas in the 1990s, Floridaor Washington DC, most of which are derived from making loose connections between NAEP trend data and selective discussion of preferred policies that may have concurrently existed. The difference is that Matt was poking fun at the idea of making bold, decisive, causal inferences from such data. Such data raise interesting questions.
What I found so fun and at the same time deeply disturbing about Matt’s post is that the assertions he made in
Of course, these assertions are no more a stretch than commonly touted miracles in Texas in the 1990s, Floridaor Washington DC, most of which are derived from making loose connections between NAEP trend data and selective discussion of preferred policies that may have concurrently existed. The difference is that Matt was poking fun at the idea of making bold, decisive, causal inferences from such data. Such data raise interesting questions.
What I found so fun and at the same time deeply disturbing about Matt’s post is that the assertions he made in