Malleable statistics

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment. -- Jean Baudrillard

In Illinois, some school officials are having a field day with statistics showing how well their students did on federal math and reading tests.

One way to improve a school's test scores, these officials have learned, is to throw out tests of low-performing students.

How can they do this?

Illinois has a policy whose purpose is to avoid penalizing schools with high populations of homeless, migrant or poor children who tend to fall behind in their studies. The Illinois solution: Throw out the tests taken by these students.

The policy also says tests can be discarded if students didn't answer enough questions.

In all, Illinois schools got rid of 80,000 tests taken by poor achievers, thereby helping more than 20 schools avoid failing results in the reading and math tests. A total of 1,380 schools showed improved results after the bad tests were weeded out.

For a lot of Illinois schools, it seems statistics are a dream come true.