You don't understand why a story about a bad thing that happened, misrepresenting the information as positive, is a negative story? Reality doesn't have a take. You don't need to feel positive or negative about a fact. It just is - the states in the article defunded public schools and worsened education.

Or do you think it's a coincidence that when they give examples of improved scores, they only give them for newly opened private schools. Wouldn't the average or median reading level for the state, compared to the old level for the state, be the metric that shows.. reading level for the state? When they do give a number for the state, that number is not a score - it's a rank. Do you know how rank works? It's not a measure of how good you're doing compared to how you were doing before. It's a measure of how good you're doing now compared to someone else now.

Yes, looking at a very basic fact and recognizing someone completely misrepresented that fact, makes them feel comparatively smarter than the person who does not recognize that even after it was explained to them. Now your comment - it did not make me smarter. It did increased my rank on that chart though.