I hate the sensationalism that pervades our journalism. More to the point, I hate the way statistics are misused to generate funds for various programs, or to push for reforms, especially in education.

Take the headline of this article. While it has never appeared in print (to my knowledge), similarly sensationalist headlines have (such as a state's average spending on education compared to the other 49), and, in fact, No Child Left Behind was passed with the absurdly unreachable goal of bringing every child up to average.

In one state even, the standards for homeschooling parents demand that all of their children score at or above the 40th percentile on standardized testing. This is patently ridiculous, and it ignores the fact that, statistically, 4 out of 10 children will fail to reach this goal. In fact, if my family fell across the statistical mean, 2 of my children would fail to meet the standard. Fortunately, it seems genetics will prevent this likelihood from occurring, but there are many parents who will have children that just don't have what it takes to meet the bar for the educational standards, and, in fact, that just may be OK. Relax, parents. It is entirely possible you may have a child who is not very bright, but is just as deserving of the right to achieve in the areas where they can achieve.

Even if we vastly inprove the education for the bottom 40%, statistically, of course, there will always be a bottom 40%. This is the same problem as we have in our American definition of poverty. If we define the poor as the bottom X% of wage earners, guess what? There will always be poor (despite the fact that, in America, at least, the "poor" have it VASTLY better than the world's poor). If the minimum wage were set tomorrow at $15 an hour, we'd still most likely define "poor" as anyone making less than $25 an hour. And, thanks to the inflation resulting from the extra money put into circulation to pay the wages of the inflated salaries, they WOULD be poor...as would a lot of wage earners in the $30-35 range.

We've got to get past the mentality of allowing numbers to manipulate our thinking so easily. In education, as in economics, there will be "failures" from a statistical standpoint. What we need to concentrate on instead is the quality of life available to those "failures", and how we can best use the gifts they do have to make our communities stronger.