The College Board offers some speculative reasons about why some students are college-ready and others are not...Another is that college-ready students took more AP tests
If someone wants to misinterpret something there is no way to stop them, but I don't see how this is genuinely misleading to a fair reader.
It's genuinely misleading because it never happened. The claim that "college-ready students took more AP tests" is a Richwine fabrication. The SAT report says no such thing. It does say that more college-ready students took rigorous classwork, with AP and honors classes lumped together. Taking an AP class does not necessarily mean taking the AP test.
He's correct about the PSAT, though. And he's WAYYYYYY off base with the "core curriculum" comment, as ultramarina has already described.
I'm not holding the NR piece up for any special praise, but I'd like to know where you get your opinion journalism if this is an egregious example.
Opinion journalism? Sweet. I love oxymorons, and that's a new one to me.
To answer your question, though (although it wasn't addressed to me), I prefer actual journalism, and form my own opinions. I'm not really interested in pre-processed ideology... it loses a lot of its nutrients and flavor.
