Where the polls stand - Post convention

With the RNC and DNC conventions over, the clear winner, based on current polling, appears to be President Obama.

”Mr. Obama had another strong day in the polls on Saturday, making further gains in each of four national tracking polls. The question now is not whether Mr. Obama will get a bounce in the polls, but how substantial it will be.Some of the data, in fact, suggests that the conventions may have changed the composition of the race, making Mr. Obama a reasonably clear favorite as we enter the stretch run of the campaign.” Nate Silver in The New York Times.

Let's take a look at the state of play. First, Real Clear Politics has the race essentially unchanged from last week, with President Obama having 221 electoral college votes to Mitt Romney's 191, 126 are listed as toss-ups

In Ohio, RCP has Obama's lead increasing from an average of 1.4% to 2.2%

538, whom we quoted up top, has the President's advantage increasing by 10 electoral college votes, and now stands at landslide levels of 318.8

In Ohio his chances of victory have also increased and now stand at 74.6%, up from 71.5 last week.

Crazy polling result of the day perhaps comes from a PPP poll of Ohio, where 15% of Ohio Republicans said Mitt Romney deserved more credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden.

The Ethics Of Testing Children Solely To Evaluate Adults

The recent New York Times article, “Tests for Pupils, but the Grades Go to Teachers,” alerts us of an emerging paradox in education – the development and use of standardized student testing solely as a means to evaluate teachers, not students. “We are not focusing on teaching and learning anymore; we are focusing on collecting data,” says one mother quoted in the article. Now, let’s see: collecting data on minors that is not explicitly for their benefit – does this ring a bell?

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