Collins Ad Attacks Jackson on Education Using Questionable U.S. News Ranking for Maine

Filed 2h ago · Via FactCheck.org · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: HatschiKa · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

A Susan Collins campaign ad claims Maine's high schools fell to dead last nationally under Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson's ‘failed leadership,’ citing U.S. News & World Report's state rankings. The ad omits that Maine's Department of Education stopped sharing Advanced Placement exam data with U.S. News starting with the 2020-2021 rankings, and AP performance is a major input in the ranking formula.

Every other state that has similarly withheld its AP data — Vermont, Colorado, New York — has also seen its ranking sink in the years it withheld data, and risen when it shared again; New York jumped from 50th to 9th simply by resuming disclosure. Maine placed 11th in 2019, the last year it allowed AP data through, and has been last or near-last ever since it stopped.

The Maine Department of Education has not explained its decision to withhold the data, and U.S. News referred inquiries back to the state. The Collins campaign, when confronted with this, called Maine's lack of transparency itself evidence of Jackson's failures — a rhetorical maneuver that turns the missing explanation into the smoking gun.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

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Blaming a candidate for a methodology quirk his opponent's campaign was happy not to look up is a time-honored genre, but this one is almost admirable in its cheek: when the explanation for the ranking doesn't fit the attack, just declare the absence of an explanation to be the real scandal. It's a neat trick, provided nobody checks what three other states experienced under the identical policy.

Source: Read the original at FactCheck.org → Scored: Fig Leaf Rag · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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