CURMUDGUCATION: Chiefs' New Hilarious Practical Joke

CURMUDGUCATION: Chiefs' New Hilarious Practical Joke:

Chiefs' New Hilarious Practical Joke

I am about 72% certain that this is a practical joke, right down to this stock photo:

"Seriously, dude?"

That photo is on the top of a Chiefs for Change news item for the new Student Growth Simulator. 

A new web-based tool will offer far greater ease and clarity for state and district leaders seeking to set learning goals and measure progress under the sweeping Every Student Succeeds Act.

The Chiefs for Change, you may recall, was part of the Jeb Bush Edu-reform Complex, and was going to be a group of the very reformiest education chiefs in the country, helping to sweep Jeb to power. Things haven't quite worked out (though Chief Hanna Skandera does seem poised to sweep into DC as part of an ed department that doesn't look too much different from the one that President Bush III would have installed), and it turns out that Hot Ed Reformster Celebrities don't have a very long shelf life (how's Chris Barbic doing these days, anyway?) and the whole Chiefs thing has been losing steam, even going so far as to let people into the club who aren't even actual chiefs!

So, anyway-- since the Simulatoir is web-based, I thought I'd see if i could use it-- and it turns out that anyone can. Which is cool, because this thing was developed by Chiefs for Change, researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, and Tembo, an education technology firm.

I'll put some screen shots further down the page so you know i'm not making this up, but let me describe how it works. First, you enter the name of your indicator (I went with "BS Test") and your target year. then you tell it what percentage of students fall into which ethnic groups, and how CURMUDGUCATION: Chiefs' New Hilarious Practical Joke: