Why Federal Dollars and Federal Regulations Fail to Help Educate Our Kids

And here we thought we had totally bombed.  Sweet!

It is human behavior that one always ends up dealing with. When dollars are involved, scoring the dollars outranks making our kids well educated. Case in point:

A USA Today investigation put a microscope on Noyes, where in just two years, the number of students passing math on the standardized tests increased from 10 percent to 58 percent.

The school’s dramatic improvement earned it a National Blue Ribbon award from the U.S. Department of Education. It’s an honor that was given to only 264 public schools nationwide.

But in the 2010 testing round, 80 percent of Noyes classrooms were flagged for having a suspicious number of incorrect answers erased and corrected.

Somehow, school test results end up looking better after a little reflection and careful reconsideration of the questions. Are we to believe the kids are just damn good and at changing wrong answers to right? Apparently the change ratio was 12.7, as in it was 12.7 times more likely that an answer changed was changed from wrong to right. You're more likely to correctly guess the powerball numbers than to have tests changed so consistently to the correct response. Now how do you think that happened?

Brilliant.