Labor union supporters say Wisconsin test scores vastly outpace those in five states without collective bargaining for teachers

Politifact.com:

With that question out of the way, we'll take a look at the thornier question of how those five states' test scores stack up nationally, and against Wisconsin in particular.

On Feb. 20, 2011, Angus Johnston, an adjunct assistant professor at the City University of New York, published a comprehensive analysis of this question on his blog. He published links to a chart that appears to have been the inspiration for the tweets and Facebook postings. It offers a state-by-state analysis of scores on the SAT and the ACT, the two leading college-admissions tests, assembled by University of Missouri law professor Douglas O. Linder.

Johnston is critical of Linder's methodology for a variety of reasons, which he explains in more detail here. But without even taking those concerns into account, we find the statistics unreliable. They were published in 1999, meaning that the statistics themselves are likely more than a dozen years old -- far too old to be presumed valid in 2011.

Fortunately, it's possible to obtain state-by-state rankings for the SAT and ACT of a more recent vintage. Here's a table of the relevant states:

Posted by Jim Zellmer at March 2, 2011 10:00 AM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas