Any private school teachers or adminstrators reading this?

by David Safier

More on the survey results used for the G.I. civics study (No, I'm not obsessed, just very interested). Here's a way to get closer to finding out whether Strategic Vision LLC actually completed the survey for G.I. and didn't just make up the results.

It can be worth a $25 gift card for 3 lucky students.

Adam Molnar, who is also looking into this (see the post below), came up with an interesting figure. He said the survey would have polled about 1 in every 10 private high school students in the state. That would mean, finding some students who recall taking the telephone survey, if the survey was actually conducted, should be fairly easy.

Molnar pointed me to a page on educationbug which gives numbers for Arizona's private school enrollment. It says there are about 11,000 students in high school, from grades 9-12. (That's a reasonable approximation, given that the total number of private school students is about 50,000 to 54,000.) Since the survey claims to have polled 1350 private high school students, that's a little more than 10% of the total.

Ladner says the survey was conducted between November 21-23, 2008. The 2008-9 seniors will have graduated, so we have the current crop in grades 10-12 to pick from. A school with 50 students in each grade should have an average of 15 students who took the phone survey. So even a fairly small school would have a good chance of finding a student who remember the phone call — if the phone calls were made.

Molnar made this generous offer.

I'll contribute 2 $25 gift cards (Borders or Barnes & Noble). All students who can show proof of contact will be entered into a drawing for one of the cards.

And I'll throw in a $25 card as well to sweeten the pot.

Proof would mean some kind of a phone record from the Nov. 21-23 time period documenting the call, unless the student can offer some other kind of valid proof. So three lucky private school students can win if SV is legit. All they have to do is come forward.

Any private school teachers or administrators out there interested in asking your students? If so, I would be very interested in your results, whether or not any students remember being polled. You can email me at safier@schooltales.net.