’)As one of the people who pushed this story, I owe it to you to note just how shoddy the data was.
There is no reason to think, in other words, that the students in House District 15 should have gotten such profoundly superior results to the “students” in Strategic Vision’s survey. Nor could Strategic Vision’s results have been the result of any sort of mathematical or methodological oddity. Consider their claim that literally none of the 1,000 students they surveyed were able to answer more than 7 of the 10 questions correctly — lower than the average score achieved in Cannaday’s test.
There are, rather, only two possibilities. Either the Strategic Vision survey was entirely fabricated — or Cannaday’s was.
I’ve been following the Strategic Vision follies over at fivethirtyeight.com. Silver really pwnd the fsck out of them, so bad that they aren’t even mounting a defense, but are basically hoping they can get away with simply disappearing.
This particular SV poll was simply too good to be true, for both sides: “liberals” got to laugh at those dumbass Okies, and conservatives managed to persuade themselves that schools in freaking Oklahoma are so straining under the weight of political correctness that rudimentary but important information is being left out of the history and civics classes (that and the other conservative shibbloleth, which is simply that public schools are evil).
Probably a better idea of what the schools are like in that region can be found in the book Friday Night Lights (Odessa, TX, totally same diff as Oklahoma). The schools aren’t bad, just really mediocre, football rules, no one really cares about anything else, mainly because everyone can read, write, and cipher well enough to work in the oil fields and hardly anyone aspires to much beyond that.