Note to Drudge and Malkin: Do The Math on Education

[kerrygoddess]

Note to Drudge and Malkin: Do The Math on Education
February 1st, 2006 @ 3:26 pm

Both Drudge and Michelle Malkin are making an issue out of what was obviously a mis-speak this morning by John Kerry on the Today Show and the wingnuts have joined in the chorus. It was evident that Kerry gave Couric a bit of thrashing... an now the wingnuts are protesting.

Malkin quotes Kerry saying this morning, “53 percent of our children don’t graduate from high school.” He then goes on to say “Kids don’t have after-school programs.”

Could it be that Kerry was referring to lower income kids and their parents, that rely on after-school programs? You know the ones who’s parents can’t afford college, the ones that rely on Pell Grants — “Only 9 percent of the people eligible in America will be able to get Pell Grants this year, and for the fifth year in a row they’re not going to raise the amount of money to help kids who have a 57 percent increase in their costs of education be able to pay for it.”

Drudge and Malkin dredged up up the 2003 Census Report that shows “that 84 percent of Americans over the age of 25 are high school grads.” Malkin failed to correctly quote the Census Report — Percent of People 25 Years and Over Who Have Completed High School (Including Equivalency), Population 25 years and over (State level).

I did the math on this — and I am no statistics major, but it seems to me that if the data reported was from 2003, and most of the people surveyed in 2003 were 25 or older, that would mean that they graduated from High School on or before 1996 - given average age of 18 for high school graduates.

Just yesterday the L.A. Times published a story on high school drop out rates.

Statistics Versus Reality

The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, in conjunction with UCLA, produced a controversial report last spring saying that official dropout statistics in California’s largest school districts were shockingly out of sync with reality. The researchers found that only 48% of the L.A. Unified students who started ninth grade in 1999 graduated four years later.

MORE & LINKS - http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/?p=1827