Dirty!

In the big scheme of things this mix-up in Portland’s database is trivial. But it is illustrative of a bigger issue, the coding on a lot of state databases is far from perfect and input is often sloppy or based on questionable standards (for instance what counts as a transfer and not a dropout).  It’s getting better but this stuff increasingly matters (think about an issue like teacher of record for assigning value-add scores) and these systems are not all confidence inspiring…

Update: Alert reader AB trolls the database and says the health care package would amount to 28 percent of GDP if extrapolated nationwide.