One of the more irritating aspects to the Bush administration’s style of governing is the way in which it handles bad news. As a rule, they’re surprisingly effective at hiding it.
About two weeks ago, for example, data from the Department of Education appeared to show that students in charter schools are underperforming, especially when compared with students in traditional public schools.
The first national comparison of test scores among children in charter schools and regular public schools shows charter school students often doing worse than comparable students in regular public schools.
The findings, buried in mountains of data the Education Department released without public announcement, dealt a blow to supporters of the charter school movement, including the Bush administration.
Rod Paige, Bush’s education secretary, refused to answer questions about the data, but, in true Bush fashion, has come up with an even better way to deal with the problem.
The Department of Education is sharply cutting back on the information it collects about charter schools for a periodic report that provides a detailed national profile of public, private and charter schools.
Confirmation of the change, originally relayed in an e-mail message to a university professor, came on Wednesday from a spokeswoman for the Education Department.
I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
The answer from the Bush administration is never to fix the problem, but rather, do away with the source that points to the problem in the first place. In other words, Bush’s gang takes “if we ignore it, maybe it’ll go away” to a whole new level.
The federal report, known as the Schools and Staffing Survey, provides a wealth of information about charter schools, including the location and number of such schools, their share of low-income students, the qualifications of principals and teachers and the ratio of teachers to students.
In the future, however, the National Center for Education Statistics, which conducts the survey, will cover only a random sample of about 300 charter schools.
In an e-mail message, Susan Aspey, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said the decision to switch to a random sample had been made in the first year of the Bush administration “for technical reasons.”
What a clever euphemism.
By curtailing the data, the Bush administration is simply making it harder to hold schools accountable and measure whether students are succeeding.
Helen Ladd, a professor of public policy studies at Duke University, used the federal survey for a study that found that parents of children in charters were generally more involved in school activities than were parents of students in other public schools. “Having the full sample of charter schools was essential for that type of work,” Dr. Ladd said.
Dr. Ladd said that the Education Department might have sound practical reasons for no longer surveying all schools, but that given its support for charter schools, “we need to learn as much as we can about them, and for that we need good data.”
Ladd is assuming the Education Department is actually more concerned with objective, accurate data than politics. When the White House weighs the two, it’s not even a close call.
Of course, this is hardly the first time the Bush administration has preferred eliminating research data to solving a policy problem.
* In June 2003, an EPA report highlighted the problem of global warming and included evidence of increasing temperatures, analysis on what has caused this change, and recommendations on what can be done about the problem. The White House “edited” the report and eliminated the information about global warming altogether. (In its place, administration officials added a reference to a new study, partly financed by the American Petroleum Institute, questioning the existence of global warming.)
* In March 2003, a federal report called “Budget Information for States” showed that states were facing their most serious fiscal crises since WWII. The administration had a simple solution to the problem; they stopped publishing “Budget Information for States,” despite the fact that it was the primary source for comprehensive data on state funding from the federal government.
* On Christmas Eve 2002, when they assumed no one would be looking, the White House announced that the Bureau of Labor Statistics will no longer publish information about factory closings in the U.S. Apparently, the administration was embarrassed by the data showing higher unemployment and increased factory closings, so instead of implementing economic policies that produced more jobs, it stopped printing the unpleasant data.
Information that gets in the way of Bush’s political agenda is information that must be hidden, or better yet, eliminated. It’s so much easier than actually governing effectively.