Well, sort of, but not quite

Two days ago, the New York Times dropped a bomb on NCLB -- apparently, charter schools don't work. Or so we're told:

The findings, buried in mountains of data the Education Department released without public announcement, dealt a blow to supporters of the charter school movement, including the Bush administration.

The data shows fourth graders attending charter schools performing about half a year behind students in other public schools in both reading and math.

And, of course, this purported revelation just happens to have an anti-Bush implication:

Charters are expected to grow exponentially under the new federal education law, No Child Left Behind, which holds out conversion to charter schools as one solution for chronically failing traditional schools.

But Mickey Kaus (via Instapundit) and others pointed to some major holes in the study: (a) this was from the American Federation of Teachers' union (AFT), a critic of charter schools, (b) only fourth-graders were mentioned, (c) contrary to the Times' breathless assertions, the differences between central city schools and charter schools were found to be "insignificant", and (d) the report failed to highlight, says Kaus, that...

the AFT's own analysis declares that in the racial categories the math results presented in the Times' chart were "small and statistically insignificant. In reading, the gaps were even narrower."

... which meant that the performance differences were adequately explained by demographic differences, not necessarily a lower-quality education.

Someone at the Chicago Tribune seemed to have caught on to this, the next day, issuing a pithy retort which included:

Problem is, the study findings are about as new as a lava lamp, as revelatory as an old sock and as significant as a belch. Too bad federal education officials didn't realize as much when they decided to quietly bury the data instead of releasing it in context.

So it seemed it was time for The Times to fess up. Print a retraction or correction? Admit error?

How about we invite a former Democratic politician to write a blithe op-ed "response"?

It starts well, pointing out there are different criteria being applied here, a different set of students being measure. Then, inexplicably, the author seems to drop the thread halfway through the column, and instead seems to concede, yes, this does show charter schools aren't working:

And in the end, are these statistics really so damning? After 100 years, and with all of the conveniences and advantages they enjoy, the teachers' unions and traditional schools have only 30 percent of 4th graders reading and doing math at grade level. After just a few years, charter school students are slightly worse, at 25 percent.

Doesn't sound very convincing, does it?

And then, he ends on this note:

The next time critics want to examine data, they should ask the 600,000 families that have conducted their own studies - ones in which their children's futures are on the line. When they chose charter schools they might not have had access to scholarly research, but they chose what they believed was best for their children. That ought to count for more than the expertise of some dispassionate researchers and union bosses trying desperately to preserve their monopoly.

Though he sounds like he's making an anti-union slam, his central point is: We shouldn't use standardized tests to see determine if students are, in fact, learning. Instead, we should look to the subjective criteria of their parent's beliefs and feelings. Strangely, this is exactly the stance of unions like the AFT and NEA, which oppose the use of tests to gauge student (and thus teacher!) performance.

And there's yet another "trojan horse" union critique buried in this paragraph:

Unfortunately, the professional advocates for public education are trying to block that choice. They send lobbyists to Washington and their state capitals to ask for levels of funding for charter schools that they would find intolerable in other areas of public education.

Sounds like another anti-union slam, right? You'd be wrong again. It is, in fact, unions like the AFT who do not want to see increased funding for charter schools. The author is again parroting the union line, even while sounding like he's opposed to the unions. The "lobbyists" he's referring to certainly aren't union lobbyists, even though it sounds that way in this context.

Interesting! Sneaky!

The op-ed is kind of a backhanded way of allowing the Times to admit error without admitting it. As an op-ed column, it won't be placed as prominently as the original "news" article (I'd suspect -- I don't have the paper copy to prove it), and won't be picked up and echoed by the many news outlets which follow The Times' lead.

And it's crafted in such a way that a reader who missed the original would be forgiven for getting the impression, from this op-ed, that the AFT report somehow magically jumped into the public spotlight with no help from the Times.

And while it touches on the main problems, it fails to address the "cherry-picked" data -- culled exclusively from the fourth grade level. It's been my experience that when alternate education methods are employed, there's sometimes a temporary dip around the fourth grade, which shortly disappears. (By high school, such students are blowing away their public school peers.)

So what have we got? A half-retraction which appears to argue against unions while making yet more pro-union points? An argument against the report in question which ends with a flight from all empirical methods of gauging student success? If it's a retraction at all, despite a few expliticly anti-union slams, it's fundamentally a very leftist-friendly and Times-friendly one.

Contrary to what the op-ed implies, the problem isn't that union fatcats -- or any other special interest group, for that matter -- can release a biased, half-baked report which doesn't tell the whole story. The problem is that the Times is all too ready to run with such stories, uncritically, when the conclusion seems to fit their own biases and prejudices.

And I'd love to see a bit of browbeating at the Times regarding that.