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Friday, May 11, 2012 | 2 a.m.
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How does a Nevada high school get ranked 13th best in the country?
By mistake.
A year and a half ago, a state worker inside a sprawling government building a block from the state Capitol clicked his mouse, unwittingly sending bad data to a federal government education database used by researchers and others.
In this case, the bad data, which had the effect of misconstruing the academic achievements at Green Valley High School, ended up in the formula used by U.S. News and World Report to rank the nation’s best high schools.
When Green Valley’s principal saw his school’s No. 13 ranking and looked at the supporting data, he knew it didn’t add up. For instance, the ranking information pointed out that Green Valley had 477 students when in fact it has 2,850.
The mess-up originated inside the single-story Nevada Department of Education building — a world steeped in statistics, reflecting the national push to evaluate students, teachers, principals, schools and entire states on the weight of cold data. Presumably accurate data.
One day in September 2010, with a click of a button, Julian Montoya, the deputy director of accountability, sent the data to the federal Department of Education database. It’s called the Common Core of Data and is used extensively by academics, think tanks and educators. The data were filled with errors that, Nevada officials believe, were created by a computer program that collects data from school districts and forwards it to the federal government.
Beyond that, Montoya said, there were no easy answers. The federal grant that had paid for a programmer to work on the system ended in March. That worker has since moved to Texas.
The state doesn’t have the resources to check all the data it submits. Instead, it relies on the federal government to flag any discrepancies, said Carol Crothers, the Education Department’s director of assessment, program accountability and curriculum.
“It’s not like we have a bunch of people sitting around a table, adding up the numbers, making sure things are right,” she said. “It’s an automated process.”
At the federal level, two safeguards, meant to catch errors, failed.
One failure — during an “edit check” — appeared to be a programming issue that the federal government is still investigating, said Marilyn Seastrom, the chief statistician and acting deputy director with the National Center for Education Statistics, the statistical unit for the U.S. Department of Education.
A second check, done by the department with help from the U.S. Census Bureau, failed because of confusion among the staff over earlier errors that had been caught and ensuing confusion over which of those errors had been corrected. Suffice to say, it’s a long, complicated story.
“We are truly sorry it occurred,” Seastrom said. “We apologize for any embarrassments that occurred. We will redesign edit checks and procedures to make sure something like this doesn’t happen in the future.”
The wrong school data were posted online in April 2011. There they sat unnoticed and uncorrected for more than a year, crunched by an unknown number of analysts.
When the error was discovered by Green Valley Principal Jeff Horn, U.S. News and World Report pointed to the federal Common Core of Data website.
Crothers said it is preparing a contract for more computer programming to build a system that would catch discrepancies year-to-year for the data it submits.
She said she did not believe this data cost Nevada schools any money from federal grants.
Instead, the state and schools use a different set of numbers that, she said, are accurate.
The inaccurate Green Valley data on the federal website were still uncorrected late Thursday.
Just shows how much of a number game and illusion this country is. What is important is the students and whether they can critically think.
Unfortunately, this is not measured by a bunch of meaningless numbers.
Of course, critical thinkers is not what corporations want coming out of our schools, because these people are not lemmings or voracious consumers.
What a waste of our money!
If the State and the Districts us a different set of numbers that are accurate then it seems to me that it would not be a big problem to pass those same numbers on to the Fed's.
Sometimes there are way to many excuses when the public catches the errors.
To many people involved in doing things and it gets messed up.
And these incorrect statistics are used to determine federal, state, and local funding?
And these statistics are used to evaluate teacher and school performances?
No wonder this school district is so maligned. Time to break up the school district into manageable pieces. its is obviously too big control efficiently and effectivley!
Souns like this was a dishonest mistake, how can someone make this kind of mistake on accident ?? hmmm
Thanks for the follow-up. I learned that the culprit was- "Julian Montoya, the deputy director of accountability." Funny.
"A year and a half ago, a state worker inside a sprawling government building a block from the state Capitol clicked his mouse, unwittingly sending bad data to a federal government education database used by researchers and others."
Where's the liability? Harmless error here, but have a look at what the same kind of wrong mouse click did to one family -- an 18-month girl on the federal no-fly list. See that @ http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/b...
"Is this 1984, or what?" -- the Honorable Alex Kozinski, now chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in the Unabomber case
So the gist of this story is that the data from not just Green Valley, but every other Nevada school may be incorrect? Starting off with flawed assumptions about your baseline sorta plays havoc with planning, no?
Why write a "sprawling government building" unless you're trying to portray the usual over-build, free-spending, wasteful big government picture to the reading public.
While I don't doubt the validity of the rest of the story, the fact is the state's Dept. of Education in in and old elementary school and while it's all on one floor "sprawling" is NOT a term anyone would use to describe it.
Green Valley is a great school but not that great to ranked 13th in the nation.
Washington Post got it right. Clark High School is #1 Ranked High School follow by A-Tech #2 than Green Valley #3 in CCSD high school ranking.
Nationally, Clark High Ranked #250, A-Tech ranked #766 and Green Valley High Ranked #952 of total 16,000 high schools...Not too shabby!