teacherken's musings on everything

quoted by Jay Mathews in his piece "S & P Opens a Rating Service on Schools" . The entire article will be available HERE for the next two weeks.

I have enclosed below the relevant portion, which is relatively brief. I guess I am quotable??

The site calls this the Instructional Spending Allocation Index, which measures the proportion of increased spending over time allocated for instruction and provides a way to track money raised with the intent of improving student performance. The portion of new dollars for instruction in Washington area school districts in 2002 ranged from 104.8 percent in the District, which Web site officials said spent all of its new money and then some extra from other sources on school performance, to 52.6 percent in Prince William County.

That index and other data developed by Standard & Poor's should be handled with care, the Web site says. It includes a warning from former North Carolina governor James B. Hunt, one of the leaders of the national school improvement movement and a member of a Standard & Poor's advisory board, that "these ratios should not be used alone to draw conclusions about education performance."

Kenneth Bernstein, a teacher at Prince George's County's Eleanor Roosevelt High School, said he thought that statement odd. "For all the warnings by Hunt and others not to use the data for comparisons, what do they expect, when the only really new thing they offer is precisely that data?" he asked.

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