Margaret Spellings gets it way wrong

Today's San Francisco Chronicle ran a piece under Margaret Spellings' byline praising the No Child Left Behind act. It uses a bogus comparison to praise Oakland's controversial American Indian Public Charter School and use it as an example of NCLB success.

Here's what Spellings, or her staff, wrote:

...[T}he law put American resolve behind the revolutionary idea that "every child can learn," setting a goal of 2014 for all students to be able to read and do math at grade level. This has proven especially beneficial to disadvantaged and minority students.

The results can be seen in schools such as the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland. More than half of the student body demonstrates limited proficiency in English, while 83 percent qualify for free lunch. In 2004-05, 70 percent of sixth-graders scored proficient or better in the English-Language Arts portion of the California Standards Test, up from 36 percent two years earlier. For math, the numbers rose from 48 percent to 78 percent.

But of course, those are two different groups of kids, and the demographics of those two sixth-grade classes are significantly different. The primary difference is that the "before" class was zero percent Asian, and the "after" class was 45% Asian. Most Asian groups are an anomaly in tending to post high achievement even despite low income.

Here are the demographics for the two sixth grades that Spellings misleadingly compares.

In 02-03:

28%	African-American
28%	American Indian
4%	Filipino
36%	Latino
0%	Asian
92%	economically disadvantaged

In 04-05:

25.5%	AA (down from 28%)
9.8%	AI (down from 28%)
45%	Asian (41% Chinese, 4% Vietnamese - and up from 0%)
0%	Filipino (down from 4%)
19.6%	Latino (down from 36%)
88%	economically disadvantaged (down from 92%)

The school still serves low-income students, but that 45% Asian figure, which didn't exist in 02-03, is a huge confounding factor.

— Caroline