Mayor Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, have reaffirmed that old Mark Twain saying about the three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.
Using a PowerPoint presentation filled with glitzy graphs and color charts, Klein reached a new low yesterday by attempting to blame a sharp drop in this year's third-, fourth- and fifth-grade reading scores on thousands of immigrant pupils.
According to the chancellor, the drop in the lower grade scores was solely because of the federal government's new requirement that all children classified as English-language learners, or ELLs, must take the regular state tests after being in the country just one year.
Because of that requirement, some 30,000 more ELLs took the state test this year than in 2006, Klein said, and their lower scores dragged down overall city results.
Fred Smith was outraged when he heard Klein's explanation. Smith, you see, spent three decades analyzing tests for our city's school system, so he knows a thing or two about how chancellors paint the prettiest picture for the public.
"They never told you that back in 2005, during the mayoral race, the school district quietly increased the number of exemptions for ELL kids and then claimed a record boost in scores," Smith said.
That year, Bloomberg and Klein announced "the highest one-year gains ever achieved" by city fourth-graders, a more than 10% increase in those scoring at or above grade level.
But, as Smith noted, Bloomberg and Klein never mentioned in any press release that the city had dramatically increased the number of immigrant students exempted from the test that year. Some children had been in the school system as long as five years and were still being exempted from regular state tests.
According to records Smith obtained in a Freedom of Information request, there was a 40% increase in 2005 in the number of fourth-grade ELL exemptions, from 5,274 to 7,444. Add to that an additional 3,000 pupils who were held back in third grade in '05 because of Bloomberg's tougher promotion policy that year.
And Smith figures that if all those new exempted students had to take the test in 2005, the actual increase in fourth-grade scores would have been half what the mayor reported.
"They all try to make things look better than they are to further their own ambitions," said Smith, who is now writing a book on how public schools doctor test results. Bloomberg and Klein just "have better public relations" than previous administrations, he said.
"Gaming of the scores goes on all the time," a current school official conceded yesterday. "There's been a great tradition of overclassifying ELL kids," that official said.
Klein is certainly right to criticize as too harsh the federal requirement under President Bush's No Child Left Behind law that immigrant children be tested in English after just one year in the country. It is the rare child who can become sufficiently proficient in English in one year to compete with native-born students.
Testing immigrant children after a minimum of two years is certainly a fairer approach.
But Klein and Bloomberg can't have their cake and eat it too.
IF THEY'RE right that this year's test results are not as bad as the numbers show, then back in 2005 and 2006 - when the city was exempting far too many immigrant students - the scores were certainly not as terrific as Klein and Bloomberg claimed.
The only way to get at the truth, Smith says, is to set up "a separate auditing function for test scores, one that's separate from the school system and from the test publishers."
Until then, you can trust the facts in "Huckleberry Finn" more than a City Hall test score.
