Daily News Shills Play Fast And Loose With Facts On Charter Schools

The neo-liberals at the Daily News have an editorial today supporting Eva Moskowitz's walk across the bridge protest for charter schools.

As usual with the DN, they play fast and loose with the facts:

The innovative approaches, longer school days and longer school years they offer — almost always carried out by teachers working outside the union contract — are undeniable. Just one example: On the tough new state tests, about 26% of public school students citywide were proficient in English, and 30% in math.

At the Success Academy Charter in the Bronx, 97% got over the bar in math; 77% did so in English. Across the entire Success network, 82% of kids were proficient in math, and 58% in English.

See the sleight of hand here?

The DN shills are using stat wide stats and comparing them to just one charter school chain to declare the charter school sector a rousing "success" over the traditional public schools.

But if you compare city traditional public schools to city charter schools, here is what you get:

Across the city, about 25% of charter school students rated proficient in English, compared with 26% of traditional public school students. In math, 35% of charter school students rated proficient, compared with 30% of traditional public school students.

That's a report from the Daily News on August 8, btw.

Notice how strikingly different the numbers are from the DN charter shillery today.

Why not be honest and say "Hey, charters outperformed traditional public schools on the math tests, traditional public schools outperformed charters on the ELA exams?"

Because the Daily News editors have an agenda - to promote charters and choice over the traditional public schools, to promote school privatization and to destroy the teachers union.

They never let facts or truth get in the way of their agenda - whether it's Ben "Where Are The Perverts?" Chapman doing a smear job on rubber room teachers or the Daily News editors using misleading stats to sell charter schools.

The public backs charter schools - as the DN shills point out, the latest NY Times/Siena poll shows this.

But the reality is, the public has been fed a bunch of lies and deceptions over the supposed superiority of charters and nowhere is that more evident than in today's DN editorial that plays fast and loose with the facts and stats.

If there was accurate reporting over the charter sector, over how the test scores are not better than those in traditional public schools, over how charters don't accept every student and often counsel out the "problem" children that will bring their scores down - I bet the charter school polling would look a little different.