Petrilli and Wright’s Porous Article on Mediocre Test Scores
In November 2015, Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli and Brandon Wright published an article entitled, “America’s Mediocre Test Scores,” which is slated to appear in the Winter 2016 issue of Education Next.
The article has a number of limitations worthy of note.
For starters, the article lacks links to references supporting the authors’ assertions. They open by referring to Pasi Sahlberg, Michael Rebell and Jessica Wolff, and Randi Weingarten, and without linking to sources, Petrilli and Wright connect statements these individuals have made regarding the connection between poverty and student performance on standardized tests to a “relative measure of poverty”:
For those educators quoted at the beginning of this essay, the answer is yes. They assert that the U.S. has a sky-high child-poverty rate compared to other developed countries.To support their claim, they use a measure that assumes all families with less than half the median income in the country are by definition “poor.”
Petrilli and Wright need to provide the links for the source(s) to support their statement above.
Another limitation of Petrilli and Wright’s article is the “two out of three” assumption Petrilli and Wright’s Porous Article on Mediocre Test Scores | deutsch29:
Also In November 2015, Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli
