Ideology Trumps Reality - Again

This is old news but it turned up in an Edutopia newsletter I received today. I skimmed the story last week about a U.S. Dept. of Education (read Bush Administration) study that showed no significant difference in educational performance between comparable private schools and public schools. No surprise there, really. But somehow I missed (darned skimming) the story behind the story. Wow. It's just hard not to fall into a pit of despair at the sorry state of affairs in this country under Bush & Co. Just follow these two headlines:

July 15, 2006

NY Times

Public Schools Perform Near Private Schools In Study

July 18, 2006

NY Times

Republicans Propose Nation-Wide Voucher Program

The first headline actually understates the issue - in all measures except 8th grade reading public schools performed better than comparable private schools. How the Times translated that into "public schools perform near private schools" is beyond me. So much for the liberal NY Times.

The Edutopia Newsletter links to an editorial in the Palm Beach Post:

Bush-Supressed Study Dispels Voucher Myth

The focus of this editorial is the story behind the story, but I will go back and quote from the original Times article to make the point:

Its release, on a summer Friday, was made without a news conference or comment from Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.

...

A spokesman for the Education Department, Chad Colby, offered no praise for public schools and said he did not expect the findings to influence policy.

And then juxtapose that absence of comment or fanfare from Ms. Spellings with the announcement of the voucher proposal:

With Education Secretary Margaret Spellings joining them in a show of support, Congressional Republicans proposed Tuesday to spend $100 million on vouchers for low-income students in chronically failing public schools around the country to attend private and religious schools.

Another salient point is that the Bush administration sat on this report for almost a year and added commentary to the report in an effort to soften its impact.

As an isolated event, this sequence might not be so earth-shattering in the grand scheme of things. But this administration shows time and again an utter disregard for reality in formulating and carrying out public policy and we've got 2+ more years to put up with it, if we all live that long. (OK. That's a bit over the top. All this talk about Armageddon, I'm starting to develop a complex.)