G.I. Guarantee Watch: Day 3

by David Safier

As the sun sinks slowly in the west, we bid good-bye to Day 3 of the G.I. Guarantee Watch.

To recap: Goldwater Institute has a Guaranteed Research policy which promises any errors brought to G.I.'s attention will be noted on its website. I brought an error to the attention of Matthew Ladner and Darcy Olsen (President and CEO) almost 2 weeks ago. I got a weak answer from Ladner, saying it wasn't quite an error, which I didn't accept, and I wrote an email telling them so. I haven't heard from either of them since.

Let's take another look at the offending paragraph from a Daily Email authored by Matthew Ladner.

Here's what Ladner does in the paragraph. He begins by using the word "adminstrators," and later uses the word "bureaucrat" as if the 2 are synonymous. Obviously, there are many more bureaucrats than administrators, but Ladner folds them together because he wants us to envision swarms of unnecessary superintendents and principals eating up state budget funds.

Still, that's not an error. It's the kind of smoke-and-mirrors I complain about regularly, but an insinuation or an implication doesn't qualify as an error.

The error comes when Ladner states (1) half of school district employees aren't teachers (I haven't checked, but I'll assume that's correct), and therefore, (2) schools have "an almost 1-to-1 teacher to bureaucrat ratio." That's grossly incorrect, since many of those non-teachers are bus drivers, maintenance workers, food services workers, etc., and they can't possibly be included under the heading of bureaucrats.

Here's the offending paragraph:

Consider administrators in the K-12 public educational system. The
National Center for Education Statistics reveals that of the 104,630
employees at Arizona school districts in 2007-08, only 54,032 of them
were teachers. What is more worthy of funding: maintaining an almost
1-to-1 teacher to bureaucrat ratio or maintaining services for the
mentally ill? [bold face added]

Ladner would love to use that "1-to-1 teacher to bureaucrat ratio" ad nauseum to "prove" how top heavy school districts are. Now he won't be able to, because I called him on it. But he and Olsen, have not yet admitted their error, as their Guarantee requires them to do.

And until the moment G.I. publicly admits to the error, the G.I. Guarantee Watch continues.