Why the GAO Should Play Powerball
by Frederick M. Hess • Dec 20, 2010 at 12:33 pm
Cross-posted from Education Week
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ShareOn Friday, Andrew Kelly and I penned an Inside Higher Ed column that called out the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for the fact that its influential and scathing report on for-profit colleges turns out to be riddled with errors. Even worse, the GAO did its damndest to keep it under the radar--quietly posting an errata online on November 30, without so much as a press release to document the changes. Senator Mike Enzi expressed concerns in a December 7 letter to the GAO, and then it took enterprising journalists like theWashington Post's Nick Anderson to bring the issue to the public's notice. And then, when questioned, the GAO denied that the errors mattered and refused to alter any of its conclusions.
In our piece, Andrew and I observed: "The authors of the Government Accountability Office's for-profit secret shopper investigation pulled off a statistically impressive feat in August. Let's set aside for the moment that on Nov. 30, the government watchdog quietly revealed that its influential testimony on for-profit colleges was riddled with errors, with 16 of the 28 findings requiring revisions. More interesting is the fact that all 16 of the errors run in the same direction -- casting for-profits in the worst possible light. The odds of all 16 pointing in the same direction by chance? A cool 1 in 65,536." This is all especially troubling given that the report was seized upon
