{"id":849,"date":"2007-01-26T19:28:59","date_gmt":"2007-01-26T23:28:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=849"},"modified":"2007-01-26T19:28:59","modified_gmt":"2007-01-26T23:28:59","slug":"reasoning-free-journalismblogging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=849","title":{"rendered":"Reasoning-free journalism\/blogging"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Wednesday&#8217;s story by Pauline Vu,&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.stateline.org\/live\/details\/story?contentId=172668\">Lake Wobegone, U.S.A.<\/a>, and this afternoon&#8217;s blog from Alexander Russo, <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.edweek.org\/edweek\/thisweekineducation\/2007\/01\/states_not_all_lowering_ayp_st.html\">States Not All Lowering AYP Standards<\/a>, make a common enough blunder that one might expect from newbie state legislators, arguing that North Carolina&#8217;s proficiency thresholds must be easy because you don&#8217;t need to answer a high proportion of questions right to be proficient.&nbsp; According to Vu:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>By the state&#8217;s yardstick, students had to answer correctly fewer than half the questions to pass. In some grades, they can flub two-thirds of the questions and still be marked &#8220;proficient.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>While Vu&#8217;s story is about the larger public-relations discrepancy between state judgments and AYP judgements (which are also state judgments passed through the AYP filter), the reasoning here is specious. Doesn&#8217;t the judgment of the test&#8217;s difficulty depend greatly on the difficulty of the items? Consider the <a href=\"http:\/\/math.scu.edu\/putnam\/\">Putnam Competition<\/a>, the challenging college math exam where getting one or two problems right is wonderful. I&#8217;m not saying that NC&#8217;s exams are that hard, but this writing is sloppy journalism.<\/p>\n<p>Bad Vu and Russo. No cookie. (Update: Russo begs for cookie in comments and as an addendum to his blog entry.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wednesday&#8217;s story by Pauline Vu,&nbsp;Lake Wobegone, U.S.A., and this afternoon&#8217;s blog from Alexander Russo, States Not All Lowering AYP Standards, make a common enough blunder that one might expect from newbie state legislators, arguing that North Carolina&#8217;s proficiency thresholds must be easy because you don&#8217;t need to answer a high proportion of questions right to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-dH","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}