Erika Sanzi calls out Providence Journal education writer Linda Borg both for her bias and for blocking Sanzi on Twitter.  On behalf of my fellow Rhode Island subversives, I welcome Erika to the club.

It’s nice to have somebody else spotting and calling attention to the obvious errors in the pro-establishment spin.  Borg tweeted that Rhode Island had moved “up to 12th in a national ranking by Ed Week on academic achievement.”  Anybody who’s paid any attention to our state’s scores and trends should have done a quadruple-take on that claim, and that’s what Sanzi did:

People can certainly celebrate or quibble with EdWeek’s finding of Rhode Island landing in the 12th spot for its school systems overall. If 22nd for chance for success, 30th for academic achievement, and 5th in school finance puts us in 12th place, perhaps we should be asking ourselves the following questions:

• Why is every state in New England, except for Maine, ranked higher than we are
• Why, with such a strong score for school finance, do our achievement scores remain so low?

Dwell on that second bullet point.  In any fair assessment, excess spending ought to be calculated as a negative, not a positive. (This is a common point not considered in comparisons of government activity across states.)  Making a quick index of EdWeek’s “achievement” score against its “spending” score — sort of an efficiency index — puts Rhode Island at 46th in the country.

That illustrates a point that I’ve made many times in the past and that Sanzi suggests above:  Being middle-of-the-pack is not very impressive when you’re spending top-of-the-line dollars.  That’s especially true when you consider that Rhode Island is above average in “chance of success,” which largely depends on socio-economic conditions.  In other words, our students’ achievement should be higher than average based on this factor alone.

The conclusion to which this analysis leads may be a painful one for Rhode Islanders to hear, but if we actually want to help our children succeed and to improve our state, we have to address it:  Rhode Island’s education system isn’t just failing to add value for its students — holding them back; it’s actively harming them — dragging them down.