Regardless of how many times people are told by the Educational Testing Service not to use the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) as a gross measure of school productivity, the test continues to be used for that purpose. This article shows how misleading SAT scores and per-student-expenditure correlations are used to justify spending less money on…

Debunks eight misconceptions concerning U.S.'s alleged "lavish" spending on education in comparison to other countries. The share-of-national-income approach and measures of per pupil spending are frequently misinterpreted and often exclude education need and education resource cost. Nations with an expensive, highly productive labor…

Using principal-components analysis, this paper highlights the nature of the alleged gap between new and older universities in the United Kingdom, as portrayed in recently published league tables. Although the tables may capture some recognized differences, they rank performance by limited criteria that favor the old university sector and fail to…

Mixed results for U.S. adults on the First International Adult Literacy Survey reveal the worthlessness of posting international test scores without considering cultural, social, and economic contexts. In the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, U.S. eighth-graders' performance was average, but fourth-graders' results were…