It’s no secret that the Washington Post is known for its liberal bias. If you didn’t already know that, you might also be interested in learning that the earth is indeed round.

But I came across a recent Post article that piqued my interest, given my recent coverage of the apparent media bias against the SAT. The Post allowed the infamous FairTest, which I’ve written extensively about on Big Journalism, to write a guest post claiming that the ACT has “caught up” to the SAT.

So, did this mean that the Post shared in the anti-SAT bias I’ve been noticing in the media? Possibly. I left a comment on that article letting readers know exactly who FairTest is and what they’re all about.

A follow-up post on Wednesday, however, left no doubt in my mind that the Post, as well as their education blogger Valerie Strauss, are definitely in the tank against the SAT. (more…)

The Boston-based organization FairTest,  which is dedicated to destroying standardized testing, has more than a few questionable things in its background, as I’ve noted in the past. As purveyors of junk science regarding education, they have deliberately distorted the degree to which colleges and universities have made standardized testing part of the admissions process. Their oft-quoted staff has no expertise or understanding of higher education and their roots are not in education but in the abortion movement.

But things get even stranger after reading over FairTest’s current financial statement. It turns out the group paid more money in salaries than it raised during the last tax reporting period, is tottering on the edge of being flat-out broke, and has as its highest paid employee a public relations guy who lives in Florida and whose background includes no experience with standardized testing.

FairTest’s most recent 990-EZ –  the tax form filed by small charities and non-profit groups – shows that for the tax year ending September 30, 2009, the organization reported $177,043 in total revenue for the year. Not a large sum, but many small charities would be happy to raise so much money in a year.

The more one reads, the odder the situation appears. FairTest paid its staff $226,388, or 127% of its total revenue based on contributions from their donors that year. Add to that another $31,311 for professional fees and payments to contractors, $35,827 in rent and utilities, $3,681 for printing, publications, postage and shipping, another $77,135 for a variety of “other expenses” ranging from payroll taxes and office supplies to travel and bank charges, and it totals $374,342: (more…)

When it comes to junk science and the interpretation of it, I have news for you: the wheels have officially and totally come off the wagon.

A new study published in Journal of Applied Psychology is calling for a revival of research into possible test bias in standardized testing. A topline read of this new report offers some truly startling and impressive looking information:

Results based on 15 billion 925 million individual samples of scores and more than 8 trillion 662 million individual scores raise questions about the established conclusion that test bias in preemployment testing is nonexistent and, if it exists, it only occurs regarding intercept-based differences that favor minority group members.

Wow, more than eight trillion scores examined. This must be one heckofa study to have looked at all that information. The researchers used what they called “a powerful and sensitive methodology,” in search of test bias where heretofore no one has been able to find it. A provocative premise indeed.

In order to support this premise, the researchers engaged in some very sophisticated mathematics, like this item – one of my favorite passages – from page 653: (more…)

On the heels of an L.A. Times story that 31% of Americans are “still not angry yet at the nation’s media,” one wonders how much lower that percentage would drop if the public knew exactly how much they are not being told by the media.

Last week, Washington Post blogger Jay Mathews moved a provocative post about a research paper published in the Harvard Educational Review, purporting to provide ‘new evidence’ that the SAT is biased against African-American students and in favor of white students.  On Monday, June 21, writer Scott Jaschik with the website Inside Higher Ed also moved a story on the report with similar structure and flow.

I wrote about this latest example of junk science last Sunday and have been thinking about what is behind all of this SAT bashing ever since.  Standardized tests in general and the SAT in particular are two gigantic cultural piñatas.  Because they are yardsticks by which achievement can be measured, they are despised by people who subscribe to the theory of equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity.

If you take a look at what Mathews and Jaschik have done in their treatment of this report from the Harvard Educational Review – which, BTW, is not a peer reviewed journal – a scary trend begins to emerge.  The style of reporting in both cases takes on an eerie and frightening tone that should give everyone reason to pause. (more…)

When most people think of junk science, they picture test tubes and laboratories. But not all junk science emanates from the stuff that comes out of Petri dishes or Erlenmeyer flasks. In this case, I’m talking about a research report that claims the SAT is biased against minorities, particularly African-Americans.

This report, authored by Maria Veronica Santelices with Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Mark Wilson from the University of California at Berkeley, ostensibly looked at the results of SAT tests, examined which kids got which questions right and which questions wrong, and concluded that African American students didn’t do as well on the test as white students because the SAT people used certain words that minorities have a hard time understanding.

The Santelices/Wilson report was published by the Harvard Educational Review in April and idled around the Internet for a couple of months until Washington Post blogger Jay Mathews  decided to write it up for his blog. His post revealed shocking details and ramifications involving the SAT:

“The confirmation of unfair test results throws into question the validity of the test and, consequently, all decisions based on its results,” said Maria Veronica Santelices, now at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago, and Mark Wilson of UC Berkeley. “All admissions decisions based exclusively or predominantly on SAT performance–and therefore access to higher education institutions and subsequent job placement and professional success–appear to be biased against the African American minority group and could be exposed to legal challenge.”

Legal challenges to college admissions decisions! Could anything be more dire? As a matter of fact, things could be much more dire because this report is nothing more than junk science masquerading as scholarship. (more…)

It’s not unusual for me to have the TV turned on when I’m working around the house and when the news comes on, it’s like liberal bias dressed up as white noise.  But there was one story last Friday that really caught my ear because the editorializing was even worse than the white noise I usually hear on the news. The story was from Brian Ross of ABC News reporting on a jet engine for a new fighter jet called the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Normally a subject like this would be far from my usual portfolio of junk science but I have been hearing a ton of ads about this on Washington, D.C., radio lately. And since I have family members that work in defense, my curiosity was piqued and I started poking around.

Let me set this up very quickly.  The Ross piece focused on what amounts to a fight between a couple of different corporations that each want to produce the engines for this new fighter jet.  The Pentagon seems happy with one particular engine – made by Pratt & Whitney – while there’s pretty strong sentiment in Congress to have two vendors for this engine, the second being a joint effort between General Electric and Rolls Royce.

I visited the ABC News website to check out the Ross piece in full and was immediately struck by the headline for the video package:

Pentagon Chokes on Pork

Aside from the gross imagery evoked by the headline, the sheer audacity of this naked editorializing really caught my attention.  Since when does ABC News get to decide what is and isn’t pork, not to mention the whole choking thing?  Within seconds of beginning to watch the story, the editorializing increased: (more…)

On Thursday, the Associated Press breathlessly reported that babies in America are getting diaper rash. I swear I am not making this up.

Thursday’s story centered around what is described as “a handful of reports” to the Consumer Product Safety Commission from mothers whose babies have come down with a bad case of diaper rash. But instead of getting the Desitin out of the medicine chest and keeping baby’s bottom nice and dry, these parents have decided to blame the disposable diapers. In this case, it’s the Pampers Dry Max diaper. So far, the CPSC has received what it calls “a handful” of reports.

Let’s put this into context for just a moment. We have this “handful” of reports of diaper rash with moms blaming the diaper rather than the fact that babies just get diaper rash sometimes. Now, compare that fact with this statistic (taken from an alarmist website I’d rather not link to) from Pampers spokeswoman Jodi Allen: (more…)