Undeserved PR black eye for SFUSD
Every year school districts have to give a state-mandated series of fitness tests to students. Results are reported for kids in 5th, 7th and 9th and usually wind up in some summary form in the press. The school district reports the results to the California Department of Education, which compiles them all and reports them to the world.
This year's SFUSD results looked kind of weird. A cursory glance at the statistics shows that there's an error. Look at the category for "flexibility" and you will note that 0 kids at every level are reported as passing that category.
Well, duh, someone at SFUSD or the CDE screwed up. Obviously it's not possible that zero kids passed the flexibility test. I asked a handy 7th-grader — an accomplished dancer — who said of course she passed it; it was easy. Any idiot can glance at the CDE chart and see that it's a bureaucratic screwup.
I learned about this silly and apparently inconsequential error a couple of days ago. But today I walk by a batch of newsracks at 19th and Irving, and see a headline on the mysterious San Francisco Daily screaming: "SF kids out of shape: Every 9th-grader failed test — educators are in disbelief." The story quotes dietitians and experts about how kids spend too much sedentary time and too much time on Playstations and yada yada.
Turns out the reporter who failed to notice that this was an obvious bureaucratic error works for Bay City News Service, which has presumably sent this story out far and wide. I called them (as a parent volunteer member of the SFUSD Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee). I am so sure they're knocking themselves out to send out a correction. But the headline is still sitting there on the newsstand.
Minor bureaucratic snafu multiplied by clueless reporting equals PR black eye.
And what a waste of a bunch of people's time doing all this testing, compiling, reporting etc. — plus the time of the reporter who failed to (duh) notice that it was an obvious bureaucratic error and called to interview sources, plus the sources', plus mine — sheesh.
— Caroline
This year's SFUSD results looked kind of weird. A cursory glance at the statistics shows that there's an error. Look at the category for "flexibility" and you will note that 0 kids at every level are reported as passing that category.
Well, duh, someone at SFUSD or the CDE screwed up. Obviously it's not possible that zero kids passed the flexibility test. I asked a handy 7th-grader — an accomplished dancer — who said of course she passed it; it was easy. Any idiot can glance at the CDE chart and see that it's a bureaucratic screwup.
I learned about this silly and apparently inconsequential error a couple of days ago. But today I walk by a batch of newsracks at 19th and Irving, and see a headline on the mysterious San Francisco Daily screaming: "SF kids out of shape: Every 9th-grader failed test — educators are in disbelief." The story quotes dietitians and experts about how kids spend too much sedentary time and too much time on Playstations and yada yada.
Turns out the reporter who failed to notice that this was an obvious bureaucratic error works for Bay City News Service, which has presumably sent this story out far and wide. I called them (as a parent volunteer member of the SFUSD Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee). I am so sure they're knocking themselves out to send out a correction. But the headline is still sitting there on the newsstand.
Minor bureaucratic snafu multiplied by clueless reporting equals PR black eye.
And what a waste of a bunch of people's time doing all this testing, compiling, reporting etc. — plus the time of the reporter who failed to (duh) notice that it was an obvious bureaucratic error and called to interview sources, plus the sources', plus mine — sheesh.
— Caroline
Labels: Nutrition
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