Arizona: G.i.

by David Safier

I don't know if Matthew Ladner is working from his end to discover whether or not the public school/private school survey he commissioned from Strategic Vision LLC was legit or fraudulent. But I have to say, he's been very forthcoming with documentation. I asked him if he would give me the raw data connected with the survey, and he sent it to me.

I forwarded it on to Alex Molnar, an assistant prof at Bellarmine University in Kentucky who teaches statistics and is looking into this as well. Molnar found no smoking gun. The raw data agreed with the data in the study.

by David Safier

This is just me being curious. I rarely write about the Goldwater Institute, and especially about Matthew Ladner's work, without getting a fairly prompt response in the Comments. Recently I've been tag-teaming with others all over the country to question the accuracy of Ladner's Civics study, as well as 2 others he put together comparing public and private schools. They were all based on the same survey by the same company, Strategic Vision LLC, and evidence points to the conclusion that the results were faked.

G.I. may have been the victim here, but the results went out as emails and press releases sent all over the country, so if they're a sham, the rest of us are victims of bad information as well.

by David Safier

In case you missed it yesterday (between Blue Meanie's posts and mine, things move down the page pretty quickly), I wrote about the possibility that the survey Matthew Ladner based three public/private school comparisons on was totally fabricated by Strategic Vision LLC, the company paid to do the survey.

Suspicions about the integrity of Strategic Vision can be found on lots of sites -- the end of the earlier post has a long list of links. Among other problems, the addresses listed as the firm's offices around the country are UPS stores. They have since been removed from the company's website.

by David Safier

If you haven't voted yet, VOTE! And if friends haven't voted, drag them to the polls.

Meanwhile, on a topic more suitable to the 2010 election a year from now:

Cap'n Al Melvin attended a town hall in Oro Valley October 30, sponsored by Americans for Prosperity and the Goldwater Institute. He praised the sponsors' efforts to rein in state budget spending, then spoke about why things are in the legislative mess they are today. It's because in the state senate, two Republicans are far left, and two others are "loser-tarians." Apparently he got a big laugh from some members of the audience for his little word play.