SUCKING LESS THAN REST GARNERS PRAISE FOR WORST SCHOOL DISTRICT IN THE COUNTY

The Godfrey-Lee public school district, the tiniest of the four small districts that divide the City of Wyoming that has long out-lived its rationale as a separate government body, has been heralded in a study as a top performer in this year's MEAP testing.  Truly an extraordinary achievement for a school district that in one category scored six -- count 'em, SIX! -- points on a scale of one to a hundred.

The MEAP is, of course, the annual standardized testing of public schools used to determine their compliance with the Bush administration's "No Child Left Behind" program.  The study that singled out Godfrey-Lee for honor was an evaluation of MEAP scores by Standard & Poor's.  Keep in mind that the fellas over at S&P, who are usually busy doing things like rating bonds, didn't do this out of the goodness of their hearts.  This evaluation is a service they sell to the state governments.

Because the education bureaucrats in the Michigan state government are perfectly capable of reading the results of MEAP testing for themselves, what S&P does is sell them a report that tells how good a job they are doing.  That isn't always easy when you have miserable school districts like Godfrey-Lee scoring 29 on math, 33 in English, and 6 on social studies -- even worse than the bottom-dwelling Grand Rapids public schools -- indeed, Godfrey-Lee is not just the lowest-scoring district in Kent County, but in the entire region.

But the fellas at S&P are pretty bright, and they have to be if they're going to sell their boondoggle wares.  So they figured out how to put lipstick on the pig.  They used a demographic factor that tends to associate similar-scoring schools together (in this case, the percentage of students below poverty level) and then ranked the school districts within these groups.  Voila!  Godfrey-Lee may have the lowest MEAP scores in the area, but by golly it's the best of the worst throughout the state.

So now the state's educrats can wave a report showing how swell of a job they are doing:  No child is left behind, because everyone has come in first!