Klein Lied to the National Press Club

Trevor Cobbold of Save Our Schools has been in touch. They have followed up on Klein's recent visit. Leonie Haimson sent out this excerpt of their report. (See below for links to full document.)

Click to enlarge (page 1 only)

Check out the latest report from the Australian organization Save Our Schools. Here is an excerpt from "Klein Lied to the National Press Club":

New York City Schools Chancellor, Joel Klein, was exposed as a dissembler at his National Press Club address in Canberra last week. Under forensic questioning from The Canberra Times’ education reporter, Emma Macdonald, Klein resorted to lies and deceptions to justify his claims of increases in student achievement in New York City schools.

Macdonald challenged Klein on his claims by citing national reading and mathematics assessments which show that there has been no improvement in student achievement in NYC since 2003, except for 4th grade mathematics. She questioned him on whether the grades given to schools in this year’s school progress reports had been manipulated by reducing the cut-off scores to achieve an A or B.

Klein denied both charges. He said that Macdonald was wrong on both facts. His response was to falsely assert that the cut-off scores for school grades had not been reduced, falsely claim that New York State tests were a better measure of student achievement than the independent national assessments, and to selectively cite evidence about the success of African-American students.

Check out the entire document, complete with bibliography.

By the way, it was our own Steve Koss who first figured out the cut-off scores had been manipulated in this way: Don’t Like the Results? Change the Scale!

Full SOS document posted at Save Our Schools web site and Norms Notes.

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