Friday, April 10, 2009

Bower Botches Blog: Petrilli Promptly Pardoned

Yesterday I said that Mike Petrilli seemed to have flippantly fumbled the facts over at Fordham's blog. When I read his post it seemed to say that zero schools have been closed as a result of NCLB -- which is so egregiously false that it startled me. I couldn't figure out how he could have gotten it so wrong and wondered aloud as to whether it was a typo or if, perhaps, I had misread it.

Well, we have an answer. I misread it. He said that in "the vast majority of states" zero schools in restructuring have been closed down, consolidated, or shown improvement. I'm not sure if that statement is correct or not -- I know NYC, Chicago, and Pittsburgh have shut down schools, but have no idea how many other places have, yet alone how many schools have shown serious improvement or how many would constitute a vast majority -- but that's somewhat beside the point.

In other words, Petrilli may, in fact, have flippantly fumbled the facts -- but not in the way I thought he had. So he may or may not have been wrong, but I definitely was.

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