Reader beware. (Editor's Letter).A superintendent I know once heard somebody at a party discussing the latest study on reaching at-risk at-risk adj. Being endangered, as from exposure to disease or from a lack of parental or familial guidance and proper health care: efforts to make the vaccine available to at-risk groups of children. children. Although the findings didn't did·n't Contraction of did not. didn't did not didn't do exactly jibe with his first-hand first-hand Adjective obtained directly from the original source Adverb 1. directly from the original source 2. knowledge, he was so eager to improve this part of his district that he immediately began revamping some policies. Unfortunately, the storyteller was missing a few vital pieces of information and the superintendent's changes exacerbated an already problematic area. OK, so this might seem like a stretch to many of you, and it is. But I made up this example to prove a point. It's rare that people in the media ever cast doubt on any of the stories that they report, but the reality is that those of us who put together this magazine each month are somewhat at the mercy of our sources. If someone or some agency reports new findings, the best we can do is be sure those statistics are accurate, question how a certain study was done, and ask other people in the field for comments. I bring all of this up because of the recent story in The New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times about Harvard Professor Paul Peterson For the actor and novelist William Paul Petersen, see Paul Petersen. Paul Peterson, also known as St. Paul, is a musician best known for his memberships in the bands The Family and The Time. . In the middle of the 2000 presidential race, Peterson made a splash by coming out with a study that, he said, showed that vouchers significantly improved the test scores of black children. Three weeks later, Peterson's partner in the study, New Jersey-based Mathematica Policy Research, came out with its own interpretation of the research. The group did find some gains by a specific group of blacks, but stopped well short of a sweeping generalization gen·er·al·i·za·tion n. 1. The act or an instance of generalizing. 2. A principle, a statement, or an idea having general application. about the effectiveness of vouchers. After the discrepancy DISCREPANCY. A difference between one thing and another, between one writing and another; a variance. (q.v.) 2. Discrepancies are material and immaterial. , Mathematica opened the study's entire database for outside review. A new analysis of the stats showed that the tremendous gains made by African-American students in the sixth grade were attributed, in part, to an error in the way race was calculated in the original report. When that mistake was corrected, the gains disappeared. The lesson here is clear. Even on such a grand scale, with such respected people involved, mistakes can happen. DISTRICT ADMINISTRATION has been increasing the number of reports cited and we've even created two new pages, Research Comer and By the Numbers. To help administrators delve deeper into the topics covered on these pages, the Web versions will include more detailed information on our sources. |
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