Families for Deceptive Statistics

March 22, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

If you live in New York City and have a working television set, you’ve seen those heart-wrenching ads accusing Mayor DeBlasio of “taking away the hopes and dreams” of 194 middle school children.  The meanie mayor did this by allowing 14 of 17 charter schools to get free space in public schools.  Unfortunately, at least one of the three that didn’t meet the criteria* is run by Eva Moskowitz, who is closely connected with some heavy hitters.** Hence the multi-million dollar saturation ad campaign.

The ads come from an organization called Families for Excellent Schools. It was bad enough that they took over my television. Now they’ve turned up, unbidden and unfollowed, in my Twitter feed. 

Wow – 79% want to “protect or expand.”  Looks like four out of five New Yorkers are strongly pro-charter.  But just to be sure, I followed the link and arrived at a Quinnipiac poll (here).  It’s Quinnipiac, so I assume that the sampling and questions are OK.  Here’s the relevant item:

30. As you may know, charter schools are operated by private or non-profit organizations. The schools are paid for with public funds and do not charge tuition. Do you think the mayor should increase the number of charter schools, decrease the number of charter schools, or keep the number of charter schools the same?

And here are the results (I’ve left out the demographic breakdowns which you can find by following the link above).

	Total	Kid in PS
Increase	40	45
Decrease	14	14
Keep the same	39	35
DK/NA	7	6

Notice that the word in the tweet, “protect,” was not one of the choices. The trick is obvious: lump the 39% who said “Keep the same” with the 40% who said the 39% who said “Increase,” and voila – 79%.  But the trick works both ways.  Using the same logic, charter opponents could add the “Keep the same” group to the 14% “Decrease” group and say

Poll finds majority of New Yorkers wants to halt growth of charter schools, 53 - 40.   Among those with kids in public school, they outnumber proponents of charter expansion 49 - 45.

Would that be deceptive? Maybe, but certainly no more so than “protect or expand.”

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* Diane Ravitch (here) has more on the criteria for “co-location” of charters in public schools.

** “Jeremiah Kittredge, the executive director of Families for Excellent Schools, said the strength of the movement comes from the bottom.” (From a story on WNYC radio.) Hmm. Do you pay for a multi-million dollar TV ad campaign with money from the bottom?  It turns out that Families for Excellent schools gets its money from ordinary bottom folks like the Walton family and probably a bunch of billionaire hedge-funders and CEOs, though we can’t be sure: “Kittredge declined to discuss his organization’s funding.”