Ever more desperate to conceal the underperformance of our schools in science and math as evidenced by four straight years of flat and abysmal scores on the state’s own assessments (the Maine Educational Assessment, or MEAs), and to secure an exemption from the accountability provisions of the federal education act (No Child Left Behind), the spin doctors among our state officials and the press have been telling us: “Not to worry, for our students regularly lead the nation in math and reading on the national [National Assessment of Educational Progress] exams.”

This party line reached a climax in the front-page article (BDN, Nov. 14) on this year’s NAEP results. It began by misreporting the reading scores (see the corrections below) and concealing the fact that Maine’s reading scores for both grades, far from “remaining stable,” actually dropped a significant five points from their levels on the year 2000 NAEPs. While the figures it reports for the percentages of Maine students who were at or above proficient were accurate, it failed to mention that 26 states topped Maine’s 27 percent proficient on the eighth-grade math test, a strictly middle-of-the-pack performance, leaving readers with the impression that here, too, Maine is way above the national average. But the biggest deception lies in failing to factor in relevant demographic differences.

What would you think of a study which claimed to establish the superiority of the whole-language approach to reading over phonics based on scores on reading tests if it turned out that all the whole language schools included in the study were located in affluent white suburbs while the others were all inner-city schools with huge minority enrollments? Serious researchers would dismiss such a “study” as a joke. And yet, that is exactly the game our state officials have been playing with the NAEPs. Those scores are now “disaggregated” – broken down by race and gender, not only to ensure that minority kids no longer suffer what the president so tellingly labeled “the soft bigotry of lowered expectations,” but also to prevent small rural states with tiny minority enrollments from looking a whole lot better than they are.

How could it be fair to compare Maine, with our 2 percent minority enrollment, with states such as California with 60-plus percent minority enrollment and large troubled urban school districts with schools in which the kids speak 60 different languages and almost no English?

Among white students, Maine’s scores rise imperceptibly while those of other states jump substantially, so that our 30 percent of proficient students on this year’s eighth-grade NAEP math test, which was two points above the national average for all students, is six points below the national average for white students and is topped by 38 states including every northern tier and every East Coast state. It is the same story on the fourth-grade test, so that among white students Maine is in the bottom quartile on both tests. Likewise, those vaunted reading scores for fourth- grade drop from near the top to three points below the national average for white students, with 27 states beating Maine’s 36 percent proficient and seven others tying it.

Maine press coverage of the failing schools list was equally skewed in failing to mention that the benchmarks for “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) on the math portion were set at the ludicrously low levels of 11, 12 and 13 percent of the students meeting or exceeding the standard. It also failed to mention that those benchmarks will remain at those levels for several more years. Nevertheless, I counted 160 schools that failed to achieve these benchmarks on this year’s math MEAs. Had the cutoff for AYP been set at even a modest 20 percent of the students meeting the standard, 70 percent of our middle schools and 50 percent of our high schools would have failed the AYP test and been placed on the federal list of failing schools. These results spell educational disaster.

The fables we are being told about our students’ “consistently top 10” performance on the NAEPs are designed to mask this disaster in hopes that Maine’s taxpayers will write our public school monopoly yet another blank check with no accountability strings attached. In hopes that Maine parents will go on consenting to having their children imprisoned in failing schools when charter schools that would offer them meaningful choices now exist in 40 other states. In hopes, finally, of scuttling the No Child Left Behind legislation, which passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, thus removing the rights and protections American parents of schoolchildren now enjoy under that law.

Roger D. Rosenkrantz, Ph.D., of Wayne, is a member of the Maine Charter Schools Association.