Daily Archives: May 22, 2013

Charter schools in Boston score higher on key tests

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The Boston Globe has the article Charter schools in Boston score higher on key tests.  If you are not a Globe subscriber, the only text you get to see is:

Boston charter schools outperform other public schools on three popular barometers of achievement — the MCAS, the SAT, and the Advanced Placement exams — but tend to have lower four-year graduation rates, according to a study being released Wednesday.

If you read the newspaper or have full access to the site, you will see the following about half way through the article:

In Boston, there are 25 charter schools.

The study examined 3,400 students who sought admission to one of the six charter high schools in Boston between fall 2002 and 2008. (The study excluded two charter high schools that closed during that period because of low performance.)

I commented on the article which reported on a study done at MIT.

If there had been more room, the headline might have said “Charter schools score higher on key tests except for the ones that don’t”  It is convenient how two schools that would have lowered the averages for the Charter schools were taken out of the study.  Perhaps the people conducting the study and doing the statistical analysis could have excluded a similar proportion of low performing public schools from the study.

With MIT accepting huge amounts of funds to build buildings named after the infamous Koch brothers and then this story, perhaps it is  true that MIT is selling its soul to the devil in order to raise funds.  Now when MIT calls me for an alumnus donation, I just tell them to put it on the Koch brothers’ tab.

The scandals are falling apart

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The Washington Post blog has the post The scandals are falling apart.  This one covers all three “scandals”.

I want to emphasize: It’s always possible that evidence could emerge that vaults one of these issues into true scandal territory. But the trend line so far is clear: The more information we get, the less these actually look like scandals.

My sentiments exactly.

Lois Lerner: ‘I have not done anything wrong’

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The Washington Post has the article Lois Lerner: ‘I have not done anything wrong’

At a hearing of the House Oversight Committee Wednesday, IRS Director of exempt organizations Lois Lerner invoked her fifth amendment rights, saying she was innocent of any wrong doing. 



Some comments on this article suggested firing people from the top on down.


If we are going to fire people from the top down, how about going after the Congress people who have cut $1billion from the IRS budget, then complain that the IRS is responding too slowly, then get all huffy when some people in the agency try to take shortcuts to catch up on the backlog. 


The Republican fairness as far as the IRS is concerned also means that the IRS should spend equal amounts of time going over the tax returns of people earning $20,000 a year and the people and corporations earning $1,000,000,000 a year. This is the Republic method of running the IRS like a private corporation. Do all Republican private corporations spend their resources equally on places where they are likely to reap profits and places where they are unlikely to reap profits?  


If you want to catch the most tax fraud for your auditing dollars, you go after the places with the highest possible tax responsibility. Especially places that earn big bucks, but pay no taxes. You might also look at organizations that are obviously political, but are claiming social welfare exemptions.


The auditors used search terms including “Tea Party” to find likely applications to concentrate on.  If these and other conservative political organization related terms were the only ones they used, then this might be a scandal.  Since they also investigated and denied exemption to liberal groups too, it seems unlikely that there was a political motivation here.  Since Congress passed laws that said Social Welfare groups claiming tax exempt status could also do some politics, but not too much, did they expect the IRS to process these applications without asking if there were too much political activity?


So the Republican investigators of the IRS have some suspicions.  When they have proof of something, then I will start to listen.  Until then, it just looks like a witch hunt to me.