Posted on 08/29/2003 11:37:43 AM PDT by hsmomx3
The Arizona Republic recently made a baloney sandwich out of the news that Arizona's SAT scores are higher than the national average.
There is nothing unusual about the Republic and other establishment media publishing baloney about public education. What was unusual was the way the Republic did it in a front-page story on August 27.
The Republic sandwiched the SAT news between two slices of baloney about inadequate school spending, instead of placing the spending baloney in the middle of the story, as it usually does in its education coverage. In other words, it was an inside-out baloney sandwich.
No doubt, if the Republic ever did a story on student acne, it would insert baloney about schools being underfunded.
The first slice of baloney in the SAT story was a self-serving quote in the second and third paragraphs from the president of the state's largest teacher union. The union bigwig said that Arizona ranks 49th in education funding, which is baloney that the paper has repeated many times over the years, in spite of experts telling editors and reporters that it is baloney -- moldy baloney at that.
True to form, no counter opinion on spending was included in the story -- not one! In other words, there was no attempt whatsoever at balance, although the newspaper has a creed that calls for balanced reporting. Apparently, the creed is nothing but baloney when it comes to education reporting.
The last slice of baloney was in the final paragraph, where a local resident was quoted as saying that school funding keeps being cut each year. The resident is either delusional or brainwashed.
It is interesting that in a state of five million people, the Republic cannot find one Arizona citizen who disagrees with the paper's party line about education spending. Is it because all five million Arizonans have swallowed the Republic's baloney, or is it because the Republic does not quote sources that do not agree that the state ranks low in spending?
Let's turn now to the inside of the sandwich -- to the superficial coverage of SAT scores. It was not much better than the baloney about spending.
Not surprisingly, the coverage was entirely from the perspective of public education insiders and from a left-leaning advocacy group that yaps about SAT being unfair to minorities.
Curiously, the article did not publish the scores for the various minority groups. For that information, one had to read the same day's Wall Street Journal.
No wonder the Republic did not publish the scores. The scores show that the Republic's least-favored minority group of Asian-Americans continues to rank first in SAT scores nationally. The most-favored group of Mexican-Americans continues to rank second-last, only surpassing African-Americans. In fact, the gap between Asian-Americans and Mexican-Americans has grown from 132 points in 1993 to 178 points in 2003.
Hmm, it does not appear that the SAT is unfair to Asian-Americans. Oh, I forgot that they don't count as a minority group under newsroom diversity rules and by yappers who yap about the SAT being unfair to minorities. For some inexplicable reason, Mexican-Americans are considered a minority group, although they are the largest ethnic group in the state, far surpassing Asians, Italians, Arabs, Jews, Greeks and many other ethnic groups.
Under the perversity of diversity, the larger a group, the more it is considered a minority.
The article admitted that the state's gains in SAT scores may be misleading, due to only 38 percent of the state's students taking the test last year. But it made no attempt to estimate where the state might have ranked if the same percentage of Arizona students had taken the test as the national average of 48 percent.
In five minutes of Internet research, I found a source that had done such an estimate, showing that the state would have ranked near the bottom if a higher number of Mexican-American students had taken the test. Of course, many Mexican-Americans do not even make it to the junior year to take the test, because Mexican-Americans have a high dropout rate, as do Mexicans in Mexico.
That, folks, is not baloney. If you want baloney, go to the supermarket or read the Republic's coverage of public education.
__________
Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and consultant. He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.