Spin, Baby, Spin

Those fine journalists at Gotham Schools, ever mindful of their funding and perhaps angling for some of that Bloomberg philanthropy money, spin the state tests scores for the mayor:

The state’s first round of Common Core test scores are out and they are just as low as officials warned.

But there is some good news for New York City: Its scores are close to the state average, and far ahead of those of other large cities.

...

As expected, New York City’s scores are lower than they have been, too. But the good news for city students and educators — and, perhaps especially, for Mayor Bloomberg — is that the city’s proficiency rates are not so far off the state’s.

...

The picture gets even better when looking at the scores of other large cities with student populations similar in many ways to New York City’s. While the new scores have New York City students hitting the proficiency standard only about half as often as they did last year, other cities saw performance fall more sharply. In Buffalo, only a third as many students — 9.6 percent — are considered proficient in math as they were last year. In Rochester, only a fifth as many students — just 5 percent — hit the math proficiency bar.

A commenter on the post notes the following:

There definitely is a positive spin in the charts shown since nyc is close to the average of ny state, but since the next four largest cities are below the state average, the stat inference can be drawn that the missing data from the chart (all other schools in ny state) are a mirror image of the downside figures but on the upside instead (to make the full average). But this data appears purposefully not shown on the displayed charts giving the impression that nyc didn't do quite so badly. Further, since nyc comprises almost 50% of the state as a whole, we are really interested in results of ny state w/o nyc in which case nyc would again show an even a worse comparison to the rest of the state. This is also purposefully not shown in the displayed tables above either.

I found most interesting how the deformists can so quickly mobilize their front in the billionaire propaganda papers, get Duncan to show up personally and even get Klein to put in 2 cents. Very slick orchestrated PR on short notice although no doubt they probably had a leak of the reports before the public to prepare in advance.

Indeed, the spin doctors are out in force today.

One of the problems with that, however, is that some of that spinning is getting done at "news" sites.