Impression Management, or: How I Learned to Stop Hating Press Releases on Test Scores

Eduwonkette posts on the divergent takes on the TUDA results by different cities.

Once upon a time in a land far, far away, district leaders did not live and die by their students' test scores. When I peered back into the educational debates of the 1980s and even the early 1990s, I found that the release of state and federal test scores was not an occasion for carefully orchestrated media stunts.

Sure, there was spin then, too - but district leaders were just as likely to decry poor test results to build political momentum to infuse additional resources or make needed changes.

Not so last week, where almost every district publicly releasing scores from the Trial Urban District Assessment spun a fabulous yarn around the NAEP results. Indeed, some of the results were promising. But many of the results that district leaders swaggered about were not. Instead, district leaders cherry-picked the results, up-playing positive news while ignoring or discounting negative news.