Superintendent of Education Mick Zais can’t help himself. He is so enamored with his misinformation-as-talking-points that he is willing to visit and shame a high-poverty elementary school. This is the other side of the coin for Zais who has previously visited a so-called high-flying school in order to shame all the other schools.

In both cases, however, it is bully politics pure and simple, and there is no excuse for the misinformation:

Students are increasingly poorer at Lambs Elementary, but state Superintendent of Education Mick Zais said that’s not a justification for the school being among the state’s lowest-performing, high-poverty schools.

The school has seen a more than 10 percentage point increase in its students’ poverty during the past four years, but Zais pointed to a document highlighting schools and districts with similar poverty levels that were outperforming Lambs. The difference isn’t parents’ income or education, he said.

“It’s what kind of leadership is in the school and how effective are the individual teachers,” he told Principal Jarmalar Logan, who’s in her first full year of leading the school. “I know you’re working on getting this (‘F’) grade up.”

Why are political leaders allowed to state demonstrably untrue claims, and why does the media report that misinformation, and why do neither the politicians nor the media suffer any consequences?

Why do we need to continue to present the evidence?:

But in the big picture, roughly 60 percent of achievement outcomes is explained by student and family background characteristics (most are unobserved, but likely pertain to income/poverty). Observable and unobservable schooling factors explain roughly 20 percent, most of this (10-15 percent) being teacher effects. The rest of the variation (about 20 percent) is unexplained (error). In other words, though precise estimates vary, the preponderance of evidence shows that achievement differences between students are overwhelmingly attributable to factors outside of schools and classrooms (see Hanushek et al. 1998; Rockoff 2003; Goldhaber et al. 1999; Rowan et al. 2002; Nye et al. 2004).

To The Post and Courier and to Superintendent Zais: Out-of-school factors dwarf teacher and school quality. Yes, teacher and school quality matter, but stating that OOS factors are irrelevant is simply a lie. It serves no one except politicians and the media seeking to perpetuate those lies for their own benefit.

Stop demonizing schools. Stop demonizing teachers.

Start facing the evidence and do something to help the teachers teach and help the students learn.