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     It all began with good news. On August 17, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) touted gains on the PARCC exam-short for Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers-for economically disadvantaged students in grades 3 through 8. OSSE reported that those students improved by 9.2 percentage points in language arts and 6.4 percentage points in math from 2016 to 2017, in terms of their readiness to perform at the next grade level.

    The mayor chimed in with upbeat press releases. But in mid-September the local newspaper found a clerical error. That is, at one school, OSSE counted all students as economically disadvantaged, when in fact many at that school are not disadvantaged at all. The mistake raised the aggregated scores that applied to lower income students. The error was significant enough that it inflated scores of disadvantaged students throughout the area. True, the test scores of disadvantaged students had improved, but by much less: 5.2 percentage points in language arts and 3.2 percentage points in math. Scores of economically disadvantaged students haven’t improved as much as was initially reported.

    The newspaper did not report the error at the time. Instead, it informed OSSE, which claims to have discovered the error themselves just 48 hours earlier. After confirming the results, OSSE posted corrected figures on its web page and informed education agency heads, according to a spokesperson. OSSE did not take steps, however, to alert the general public to the error-or the correction. That was left to the newspaper, which reported last week that “economically disadvantaged students still made gains over the previous year but not as much as first reported because of the coding mistake.”

    “Whom are we fooling?” asks Mary Levy, a respected budget expert who has been watching school officials fiddle with the way they report the data for years. “The misleading use of data and the positive spin on limited achievement gains continues to undermine efforts to give education reform the urgency that it needs.”