Nate Silver Takes On Strategic Vision

I'm always suspicious of any group decrying the declining standards of today's et cetera.  When that group is on the Right, well!

Here is Strategic Vision, a Right-Wing Think Tank (say no more! say no more!) which claimed to have done a study (Awoohah! Awoogah! Raise all Shields!) on Oklahoma school kids, and alors!  Those kids today!  Taught by those Union-coddled over-paid lie-bral teachers!  Look!  Just look!

Couldn't any of'm tell you who the first President was!  When asked what the Supreme Law of the Land was?  No Idear!  When asked what the name of the two parties were in America's two party system?  They answered Republican and Communist!

So claimed Strategic Vision, anyway.

Nate Silver had his doubts about this survey.

For me, some of these results don't pass the smell test. I agree that public schooling in the United States needs to be improved, particularly in the areas of government and citizenship. But only 23 percent of high school students in Oklahoma knew that George Washington was the first President? Really? I have difficulty accepting that claim at face value. In 2008, 68 percent of Oklahoma fifth graders passed the Oklahoma Core Curriculum Social Studies Test.

Ed Cannaday, a State Representative in Oklahoma, had doubts as well.  

He took the survey Strategic Vision claims to have given to Oklahoma School children and gave it to students in 10 Oklahoma school districts in the area he represents.  And his results do not show what Strategic Visions says their results do, but quite the contrary.

Which -- for anyone who knows any actual school children, or who has been in any actual schools lately, as opposed to anyone who simply hangs out at teabag rallies -- d'oh.