The New York City Department of Education's third annual progress report is reminiscent of Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average.
Of the 1058 schools graded in the new report (Excel), a jaw-dropping 889 -- 84 percent -- received an A and another 142 schools got a B. Only 20 schools earned a C and just five a D. Miraculously, only two schools, Washington Heights Academy and the Harlem Link Charter School, are failing.
City Comptroller Bill Thompson, Mayor Bloomberg's opponent in this fall's election, was not surprisingly stunned by the numbers.
"Once again today's schools success story is based on the world according to Bloomberg, not the reality that our students are graduating unprepared," said Thompson. "Bloomberg would rather inflate these numbers and falsely claim success at the expense of kids being educated."
Bloomberg's school's czar Joel Klein wisely attempted to put the numbers in their proper context.
"We want to make clear that that reflects that [schools] met their progress targets," he said. "It doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination that those are schools that don't have a lot of improvement ahead of them."
Nonetheless, even some of the people whose hard work was lauded in the report were frustrated by the apparent grade inflation.
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"You work so hard and then you look and see that 85 percent of schools are A's," one Brooklyn principal told the New York Post. "It's not like 'Wow!' for me anymore because this year everyone got A's, more or less."
Maybe Klein can give President Obama some pointers on how to best serve America's "schoochildren."
