Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Another Year, Another Report

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community
Suppose you are a political lobby group and you really want to emphasize the implementation of some policy in schools, like math testing for example. Here's what you do: you create a mechanism that ranks schools and then include that policy as fundamental to the rankings. Newspapers then report your rankings uncritically, fawning all over them as though they represented Scientific Data. The public gets the (false and misleading) impression that schools not implementing your policy are failing, and administrators rush to implement your favourite policy even though there is not a shred of evidence to support it. And if you are the Fraser Institute, you do this utterly without shame.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Apr 16, 2024 3:32 p.m.

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