Local Ed Reform Pushing Hard (But Looking Desperate)

The Times continues its ed reform push and, as we have previously reported, they continue to do it both editorially and in their reporting. 

The latest example is in an article about a "poll" for the A-F grading for schools bill currently in the Legislature.  (It passed in the Senate but hasn't gotten a committee vote yet in the House.)

(Sorry, I can't link the story because of the Times' paywall.)

The story does not say who commissioned the poll or who took the poll until the fifth paragraph.  That is very odd and would seem to indicate that the Times was more interested in pushing the results than what the poll was about and who created it.

The article only states how many people took the poll (402) but not how many questions were on it nor what the questions were.  We all know what a push poll looks like and I suspect this was one of them. 

It appears there was a question on the A-F bill which came out 66% for and 29% against (but what the other 5% thought isn't reported) and a question on "whether to increase taxes to give more money to education."  The latter is a very broad question and how it was phrased would have been important to know.  That question's polling came out 49% against and 46% for.

What's also telling is the quote from the Stand spokesperson then proudly says that "it's clear" that voters want funding and improvements.  Really?  A small poll with one measure at 49-46% is a clear message? 

The Times doesn't explain who Stand for Children is in the article.  Most readers would not know who they are.  And the Times again goes to the teachers' union well for a comment instead of say, asking the Washington State PTA for their comment.   The Times consistently makes this about the union versus everyone else and you have to wonder why.

I know both Brian Rosenthal and Linda Shaw who do most of the Times' ed reporting.  They are both bright and capable reporters.  They both tell me that editorial has no sway over what they write.  That might be true but that sway is apparent in the editing.

I'll give reader, Mary Griffin, the last word (she wrote this in the Tuesday Open Thread comments):

The article about the Stand for Children poll is curious. With 3,910,000 voters in the state of Washington and a sample size of only 402 survey respondents, that gives a margin of error of +/- 4.89% with a confidence interval of 95%, which would is a relatively wide margin of error. Why would this group plan a poll with such a small sample size knowing that it would have such a wide margin of error. They must have expected a wide variance between the two response groups. This leads me to believe that there was a certain amount of question bias by Strategies 360 in the first place in which they expected this kind of result...which leads to why this was reported before the actual methods/results can be examined. Very strange. Or not. As others have noted, the ed reformers have used the same company before to provide biased polls.