Just so you understand

Tucked nicely in a NYT piece discussing how public schools fared vis-à-vis private on Bush's edjumikashun accountability standards (it makes fundamentalist education look pretty bad!), we find this quote:

Joseph McTighe, executive director of the Council for American Private Education, an umbrella organization that represents 80 percent of private elementary and secondary schools, said the statistical analysis had little to do with parents’ choices on educating their children.

"In the real world, private school kids outperform public school kids," Mr. McTighe said. "That’s the real world, and the way things actually are."

Does anyone else want to give this guy a swift kick to the groin?

It's true, in the real world, people who go to private schools do do better in "life." Interesting sociological tidbit: one of the stronger statistical predictors of an individual's income and other socioeconomic attributes is the occupation of his or her father. Indeed, you don't actually have to do well at private school to succeed - if daddy's connected, any coked-up, cheerleading, asshole fratboy can skate through prep school and Yale, dick around in the Air National Guard while his public school peers perish in the jungles, ruin businesses with verging on criminal incompetence and be rewarded with an even bigger job to fuck up, and then become a mad, mad president of the United States.

What a bunch of assholes.