What. The. Hell?

by David Safier

I just read an article the Star posted on its website about "Precious Knowledge," a film two documentary filmmakers created showing TUSD's Mexican American Studies program in action and containing lots of material about students and their families. Most of the article is about the pro-Ethnic Studies content of the film and the years the filmmakers spent on the project.

But somewhere in the writing and editing of the article, someone at the Star must have decided it all sounded too positive, because they put in a paragraph near the end saying MAS doesn't improve students' achievement.

The district last week released a study, it commissioned, that claims students in ethnic studies do not perform any better than students who do not take ethnic study classes. The study punches a hole in the argument of ethnic studies' teachers and supporters that the program propels students to college at higher rates.

This information comes from the ridiculously misleading and erroneous first half of an article in last Sunday's Star. David Scott, the TUSD statistician who created the study mentioned in the paragraph, had this to say about the improved achievement of students in the Mexican American Studies Program:

• “I find that there are positive measurable differences between MAS students and the corresponding comparative group of students.”
•  “Juniors taking a MAS course are more likely than their peers to pass the reading and writing AIMS subject test if they had previously failed those tests in their sophomore year.”
• “Seniors taking a MAS course are more likely to persist to graduation that their peers.”
• “I find that over the last six years, students who complete a Mexican American Studies class during their senior year are more likely to graduate than comparison group seniors,” Scott writes. “The difference in completion rates ranges from 5-11 percent higher.”

The Scott quotes above come from a Save Ethnic Studies media release. They apparently are taken from an analyis Scott sent to Superintendent John Pedicone, and they are in total agreement with Scott's data, which I have looked over.

To whomever at the Star inserted that paragraph in the article: The paragraph is in a gray area between extremely misleading and flat out wrong. Just because you got it wrong the first time is no reason to repeat the error.