Bushy Logic: Clear Thinking in Kansas

Bemoaning the lack of tough standards in schools ("all they have to do is be there and they will pass"), a Kansas great-grandmother has posted the following in a letter to the editor in the June 7, 2007, The Kansan: "...No Child Left Behind is just another way of passing your child even if they are below average." Presumably the outrageously strict testing requirements of NCLB aren't strict enough.

Let's look at this for a moment: by definition, at any given moment, by any criterion, half of any group is "below average." That's what "average" means: half are above, half are below. So the only interpretation of this statement that's possible is that in all cases, half of every student body should not pass. A guaranteed failure rate of 50%! Bush and Spellings would be in heaven if they heard this (assuming that you believe, as I do, along with Stan Karp that "the AYP [Adequate Yearly Progress] formulas and the 'Leave No Child Behind' rhetoric are transparent attempts to set up schools to fail.")

However, it would be really easy to pummel this writer for her thinking, or lack of skills in making a point clearly, or any number of other flaws. But I don't really want to do that. This woman is a great-grandmother, on a fixed Social Security income, and I have no wish whatsoever to embarrass her. I sympathize with her situation, and figure if I were in her shoes, betrayed and overwhelmed, I'd want to blame somebody, too. Why not the schools? On a very personal level, it's not her fault.

It's just that this kind of bizarre thinking is what's behind the NCLB: the way it's worded, the way it operates (if your school is in trouble and you need to fix things, your federal money will be withdrawn), the way it's promoted by the Bush marketeers. We need to get tougher on chldren.

W in Wonderland. Bushy logic makes truthiness and wikiality look downright factual.