A Higher Quality, More Sophisticated Fart

This morning, I ended the show on a low note.  I know, I'm a jerk.  I was talking willy nilly about farters and non-farters, but I swear, the talk was on point for the discussion AND about the best analogy I could ever make.

Let me explain...

On Thursday's Morning Grind, I criticized Alejandra Matos, the blogger for Class Act on the Star Tribune's website, for publishing a very unflattering story about the Minneapolis Public School system having a graduation rate below 50%.  The story relied heavily on a study done by a Washington state group called the Center for Reinventing Public Education, or CRPE.  The study goes onto say that only 4% of all Minneapolis high school students take either the SAT and ACT.  Two things missing from the story were 1) what was the recommendation the CRPE concluded from the study, and 2) what was their methodology for achieving their numbers, basically the 'Why' and 'How' of the study.  There was also a few peculiar statements in Matos' original piece, so I went to the CRPE website for more information.

It was clear within five seconds, the CRPE is a pro-charter school organization.  This itself was not bad, but it should've been part of the story.  These pro-charter school organizations are common, but they're notorious in their attempts to make public schools look bad, in an effort to make charter schools look better, usually with iffy numbers.  The fact that the whole original story by Alejandra had no purpose, outside of bashing on public schools, should've been a real big red flag.  On air, I made the point the pro-charter school attitude of CRPE, and the lack of purpose to the study, should've been addressed, and how it looked like Matos had just published talking points from the CRPE.

This morning's Star Tribune had a follow up story from Alejandra, indeed addressing these points directly.  She now correctly identifies the CRPE as a pro-charter school, anti-teacher tenure organization with an agenda, takes to task the non-sensical formulas the CRPE used to come up with there "conclusions," and basically establishes that no one should ever take a CRBE study as a neutral, independent study ever again.

The funny part is how the follow up story exposed the tricks the CRPE used to make public schools look bad, including folding the numbers for charter school graduation rates and placement testing into the total numbers for public schools, in turn, making them look worse.  You see, charter schools perform worse overall in these areas, so to make public schools look worse, they had to add the bad charter school numbers.  A reminder, the CRPE is a PRO-charter school group who knows charter schools preform poorly overall, but still wants them to replace public schools.  In one case, they knowingly took one charter school's dismal graduation numbers, the Minnesota Transitional Charter School, and counted them as public school graduation numbers FIVE TIMES in the same study.

Let me repeat:  The CRPE knows charter schools perform worse than public schools, but yet they still advocate for them, even being extremely dishonest by representing charter school numbers as public school numbers, to make public schools look worse, with the end goal of replacing the better performing schools, public schools, with a poorer quality of school, charter schools.  WOW!

The whole agenda pushing aside, this has got to be one of the most self abusing groups I have ever seen.  They're self deprecation is on the same level as the albino monk dude from the Davinci Code.  This is a level of self serving sycophant you rarely ever encounter.

Because I'm a child, a great analogy to the CRPE came to me in the form of a pro-farting group.  Stay with me; you'll see where I'm going...

Say you have an organization which is committed to farting.  They know they make the room smell far worse than the non-farters, but they need to promote their ideology.  They release a study which says all non-farters are far stinkier than anyone ever dreamed, with no purpose to the study outside of making non-farters look bad.  A quick look at their website shows they're a pro-farter group, and so their study should've included their point of view.  You then delve deeper into their anti-non-farter study to discover they actually used a faulty methodology, adding the farters to the non-farters to make the non-farters smelliness increase, even going as far as counting one farter's stench five times in the same study.  This completely misrepresented the non-farters, falsely implying their aroma is far worse than it really is.  And the funny part is they're doing this to get rid of the less smelly people, the non-farters, so they can promote the group they represent, the far smellier farters, as the freshest smelling people out there.

That's funny.  I'm glad we cleared the air. (HA!)