“The 74’s” Fact-Checking of the Democratic Platform
As we all likely know well by now, speakers for both parties during last and this weeks’ Republican and Democratic Conventions, respectively, spoke and in many cases spewed a number of exaggerated, misleading, and outright false claims about multiple areas of American public policy…educational policy included. Hence, many fact-checking journalists, websites, social mediaists, and the like, have since been trying to hold both parties accountable for their facts and make “the actual facts” more evident. For a funny video about all of this, actually, see HBO’s John Oliver’s most recent bit on “last week’s unsurprisingly surprising Republican convention” here (11 minutes) and some of their expressions of “feelings” as “facts.”
Fittingly, The 74 — a non-profit, and (allegedly) non-partisan, honest, and fact-based news site (ironically) covering America’s education system “in crisis” that publishes articles “backed by investigation, expertise, and experience” — took on such a fact-checking challenge (however not void of feelings) in an article senior staff writer Matt Burnum wrote: “Researchers: No Consensus Against Using Test Scores in Teacher Evaluations, Contra Democratic Platform.”
Apparently, what author Barnum actually did to justify the title and contents of his article, however, was (1) take the claim written into the 55-page “2016 Democratic Party Platform” document that: “We [the Democratic Party] oppose…the use of student test scores in teacher and principal evaluations, a practice which has been repeatedly rejected by researchers” (p. 33); then (2) generalize what being “repeatedly rejected by researchers” means, to inferring that a “consensus,” “wholesale,” and “categorical rejection” among researchers “that such scores should not be used whatsoever in evaluation” exists; then “The 74’s” Fact-Checking of the Democratic Platform | VAMboozled!:
