This is astroturf at its finest. A low-paid intern or first year employee cutting and pasting a talking point into comment sections as they register, too lazy to change it up, and too rushed to bother creating real profiles to post from.
The tipoff for me was the use of educators. The use of the word "educators" instead of teachers is a code word meant to make you think of the word educate, which is so much sexier than teaching.
The problem is the "statistic," no matter where it came from, is bunk. Focusing on the students who took the ACT/SAT doesn't cover the whole educational picture. It covers those most likely to graduate across a state (knowing full well that school districts within a state, and even a city, vary wildly). It doesn't touch on dropout rates at all.
Let's look at those dropout rates by county, instead of by state, and see what we get. Here is a list from 2006 in USA TODAY.
The tipoff for me was the use of educators. The use of the word "educators" instead of teachers is a code word meant to make you think of the word educate, which is so much sexier than teaching.
The problem is the "statistic," no matter where it came from, is bunk. Focusing on the students who took the ACT/SAT doesn't cover the whole educational picture. It covers those most likely to graduate across a state (knowing full well that school districts within a state, and even a city, vary wildly). It doesn't touch on dropout rates at all.
Let's look at those dropout rates by county, instead of by state, and see what we get. Here is a list from 2006 in USA TODAY.
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