Katie Turns Off BS Detector as Kerry Trumpets Bogus Stats

Katie Turns Off BS Detector as Kerry Trumpets Bogus Stats Posted by Rich Noyes on February 1, 2006 - 11:20. Massachusetts Senator John Kerry must be thinking how fortunate he was that there were no real journalists in the room -- just perky Katie Couric -- when he appeared on NBC’s Today to complain about President Bush’s State of the Union address. As NewsBusters’ Mark Finkelstein noted earlier, Couric did ask a couple of pointed questions, at one point asking Kerry if there “was there anything you appreciated or liked hearing” in Bush’s speech.

But when Kerry started inventing statistics in his rant against the President’s education policies, preposterously claiming at one point that “53 percent of our children are not graduating from high school,” (in fact, 73.9 percent of incoming freshmen graduate from high school, according to the most recent Department of Education tally) Couric never even blinked -- not even when Kerry haughtily accused Bush of not presenting “the real state of the Union.”

Here’s the full exchange as it unfolded live on NBC at about 7:08am EST this morning. Kerry himself brought up education as he finished complaining about the President’s foreign policy: “I think that if you look at, look at education and competitiveness. What he did last night was timid compared to what we need to do. Of course we need to improve-”

Couric interjected: “He said he wanted to train 70,000 additional teachers in math and science.”

Kerry sarcastically shot back: “And that’s terrific, Katie, but 53 percent of our children are not graduating from high school. Kids don’t have after-school programs. Only nine percent of the people eligible in America will be able to get Pell grants this year and for the fifth year in a row they’re not gonna raise the amount of money to help kids who have a 57 percent increase in, in their cost of education to be able to pay for it.”

Since Couric didn’t interrupt, Kerry continued: “The fact is, what he’s doing is fiddling at the margins. He didn’t ask America to sacrifice anything to achieve great goals last night, and the biggest example of that is making the tax cut permanent for the wealthiest people in America. The average American is struggling to find time to take care of families. Time to be able to work two or three jobs. Their wages haven’t gone up and the President wants to give an estate tax cut and a capital gains tax cut and make it permanent to people earning more than a million dollars a year, while people earning less than $50,000 get $20 back. It’s a disgrace.”

Couric remained silent, so Kerry plowed on, condemning Bush for failing to present reality: “He didn’t tell the real state of the union, he didn’t challenge America to rise to the occasion, and I think there’s a better way to go where we can be stronger at home and stronger in the world and, and last night he didn’t describe it.”

When Kerry finally paused for air, Couric asked her final question, but she didn’t challenge anything from Kerry’s preceding screed. Instead, she wanted to know why most Americans told NBC’s pollsters that Democrats were “doing a poor job at presenting a clear agenda.”

It's not as if the Democrats aren't getting a lot of assistance from their friends in the liberal media.

“The fact is, what he’s doing is fiddling at the margins. He didn’t ask America to sacrifice anything to achieve great goals last night, and the biggest example of that is making the tax cut permanent for the wealthiest people in America. The average American is struggling to find time to take care of families. Time to be able to work two or three jobs. Their wages haven’t gone up and the President wants to give an estate tax cut and a capital gains tax cut and make it permanent to people earning more than a million dollars a year, while people earning less than $50,000 get $20 back. It’s a disgrace.”

So, he is pi$$ed because Americans aren't being asked to sacrifice anything, and he is pi$$ed because so many are having a tough time of it. I hear rubber beach sandals flipping and flopping along. YeeeeAggghhhhhhh!

Various groups play the numbers and manipulate statistics to further their own ends (no shock there). I wonder how many of these groups would be willing to admit that the breakdown of the family and discipline at home and in school is a major factor?
Here's your scare headline:
"Silent Crisis: Large Numbers of Youth Are Not Completing High School"
http://www.connectforkids.org/node/2776

some excerpts:

When the results are broken down by race and ethnicity, more than 75 percent of white and Asian students completed high school with a diploma. Graduation rates for black, American Indian and Hispanic students are closer to fifty-fifty -- 50, 51, and 53 percent respectively. Graduation rates were also substantially lower for students educated in highly segregated, socio-economically disadvantaged, and urban school systems.
(Losing Our Future: How Minority Youth Are Being Left Behind by the Graduation Rate Crisis, Urban Institute and Harvard Civil Rights Project, 2004)
http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=410936

The national graduation rate for the class of 1998 was 71%. For white students the rate was 78%, while it was 56% for African-American students and 54% for Latino students. (Jay P. Greene, High School Graduate Rates in the United States, Manhattan Institute, Black Alliance for Educational Opportunities, April, 2002)
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_baeo.htm#14

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) finds a national high school completion rate of 86% for the class of 1998. The discrepancy between the NCES’ finding and this report’s finding of a 71% rate is largely caused by NCES’ counting of General Educational Development (GED) graduates and others with alternative credentials as high school graduates, and by its reliance on a methodology that is likely to undercount dropouts. ( Jay P. Greene, High School Graduate Rates in the United States, Manhattan Institute)
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_baeo.htm#14

It would seem to be a simple question of either having a diploma or not, but educators, researchers and policymakers throughout the country have long debated the exact definition of a dropout and exactly how dropouts should be counted. Some use enrollment figures to reach their conclusions, while others rely on population surveys from the U.S. Census. Some include GED recipients in their high school completion rates; others do not. Some account for the large influx of immigrants into public schools, and some do not. Some keep close tabs on transfer students; many do not. (Lucy Hood, High School Students at Risk: the Challenge of Dropouts and Pushouts, Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2004)
http://www.carnegie.org/pdf/challenge_dropouts.pdf

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