Closing the Roethlisberger Gap

Steve Koss sent along a link to this article (click headline below for full article.)

Pittsburgh School District Leads Nation In Ability To Spell 'Roethlisberger'

from the onion with some commentary:

I absolutely ADORE "The Onion" weekly newspaper, and this story from last week is one of the funniest and spot-on stories about education I have ever seen. I was practically rolling on the floor reading this, except that it's also tragically so sad in the reality of what it satirizes. The text is below.

Replace "Roethlisberger" in this story with NYS Math and ELA exams and you have a perfect and hilarious description of NYC schools under Joel Klein. The supportive comments from educational administrators sound just like the typical DOE P.R. stuff.

Gary Babad, do these Onion guys work for you? If not, maybe you should work for them!

Steve Koss

Here's a short excerpt:

"If you look at the data, our students were correctly spelling Roethlisberger only 43 percent of the time during the quarterback's rookie season," said Pittsburgh mayor Luke Ravenstahl, who called the 2004 statistic an embarrassment. "In just five years, we have increased that number to 92 percent. That's 54 percent better than students in California, 35 percent better than those in Oklahoma, and 96 percent better than those in the Cleveland area, who tend to spell Roethlisberger by adding the letters 'u,' 'c,' and 'k' after the letter 's.'"

"The bottom line is the Pittsburgh school system is giving its students a leg up on the competition, not only in America, but throughout the world," Ravenstahl added. "Our kids correctly spelled Roethlisberger 12 times more often than all the students in Europe and Asia combined."