Championing Fact-Challenged Facts
Posted on January 9, 2014
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The New Teacher Project and Students First have recently posted/cross-posted one of the more impressively fact-challenged manifestos I’ve encountered.
The core argument in this recent post is that the facts on education reform speak for themselves and that the facts, as they describe them, simply need a champion – someone to make the public aware of these undeniable facts. However, the dreaded and evil teachers’ union, and its stranglehold over the media and public opinion is dead set on obfuscating the undeniable facts about the effectiveness of recent education reforms. As they put it:
The reality is that while unions and their allies have the motivation, discipline and resources to get their messages out and repeat them endlessly, the facts have no champion.
So then, what are these supposed facts that the teachers’ union has so successfully obfuscated?
The Facts According to TNTP/SF: U.S. Failure on PISA
According to TNTP and SF…
There’s no disputing that the results are pretty dismal—15-year-olds in the United States ranked 30th in math, 23rd in science and 20th in reading among participating industrialized countries. But the conversation about the PISA results