None of it bodes well for an informed public

Another example of cognitive pollution based on innumeracy and absence of contextual knowledge in Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty by Lyndsey Layton.

The headline has to be wrong from simple mathematical necessity. Very roughly 90% of all school age children attend public school with about 10% attending private or religious schools.

22% of all children (16 million) fall into the Federal definition of living in poverty ("22% of all children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level – $23,550 a year for a family of four" from the National Center for Children in Poverty.

Now one might argue with the Federal government's definition of what constitutes poverty, whether this measurement is before or after transfers, whether low income/high wealth people should be considered in poverty, etc. All fair points. However, that is the definition as it currently stands whether or not it is a good definition.

Since the percentage of children attending private school is small and since a relatively high portion of those are in religious schools where income distributions tend towards the norm, the income distribution of those in public school is not going to be materially different than that for the population at large.

Given all that then, what the headline is saying is that 22% of the nation's children (i.e. those in poverty) now making up 50+% of the public school population. For that to be mathematically possible, some large percentage of the top four quintiles must not be attending school at all. We know that is not the case.

The upshot is that the headline is simply wrong based on simple, readily available information that is in reasonable circulation.

The writer and editors must either not be aware of the common knowledge (which seems very doubtful) or must not understand about gaussian distributions or statistics or simple math (which is also doubtful but is perhaps the more likely of the two possibilities). There is of course a third possibility that the article is an example of advocacy journalism where factual accuracy is not important in the balance of advancing a particular narrative for particular reasons. There is a fourth possibility that the economic model for mainstream journalism has now evolved to the point where they simply have to take press releases from advocacy groups, rewrite them and then use them as filler. I would hope that none of these are the case but they are all logical explanations.

When I accessed the article, there were already 3,402 comments, the first thirty of which are consistent with my observation that the commenters at the Washington Post and the New York Times are getting more and more conservative. And it doesn't seem, from the tone of the comments, that it is a matter of conservatives coming to comment. Instead, a lot of these comments seem to be from paid members of the clerisy pointing out the factual errors and reportorial one-sidedness.

Are poor old Layton and her editors rabid ideologues or simply contextually unaware or ill-informed or are they mathematically challenged or does their new economic model mean that they simply rewrite advocacy press releases as filler. Hard to know what the answer is but none of it bodes well for an informed public.