After a change-of-pace thanks to the arrival of actual news late last week, we will return today to our usual Friday habit of web site housekeeping and casual chit-chat.

One error to correct. In what must have been a typographical error of the fingers (the mind, or what’s left of it, knew the right word), the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” become the “American recovering and Reinvestment Act”

Repeat after me. Recovery is (or so it is to be hoped) for economies. Recovering is for substance abusers.

Typographical errors of the more common variety have been all but eliminated thanks to the engagement – at extraordinarily competitive wages – of a top-notch copy editor whose identity may not be revealed (and who could not have been expected to know the name of the legislation).

I thank the reader who caught the mistake. All are invited to follow his example. The standards here are: (1) Nothing gets printed unless it is both newsworthy and accurate; (2) Nothing is concluded unless the conclusion is based on empirically verifiable fact, as opposed to surmise or the weaving of some (UGH!) scenario. Any violation of these standards should be exposed. If the writer fails to expose them, a reader should,

Even if there have been few mistakes, there has been a lapse. Vermont News Guy has not yet been to the Legislature. Intentions were good. Execution was non-existent. Events ranging from car trouble to snow intervened.

They will not be allowed to intervene any longer. One cannot cover the news of a state without hanging around its Legislature when it is in session. Starting next week, some hanging around will commence.

More than 50 readers have now “registered” on this site, meaning they can make comments. A few have. More are invited to do so. Do not be bashful. Feel free to object to the posts by the editor/writer/poobah and to objections or endorsements by other readers. One goal of Vermont News Guy is to get some conversations going. Even some disputations. Just keep it relatively polite.

Who knows whether 50 is a lot of registrants or a disappointment after eight weeks? There are indications, though, that Vermont News Guy is getting some attention. A member of the Legislature reported that one earlier post had been “the talk of Montpelier” for a day or two. And a recent post so enraged one state government flack that he screamed at your humble agent, who had been screamed at only once before in 46 years as a reporter.

In the earlier case, the screamer was, at the time of the screaming, president of the United States. So this was a comedown.

The ambition here is to continue to enrage state flacks, their bosses, as many members of the Legislature as possible, and tub-thumpers on the right and left sides of the political debate.

OK, that’s not really true. The ambition here is to cover the news and tell the truth, no matter who gets enraged. But if the news and truth get some folks enraged, so be it.

The suspicion grows that the ambition of most established news organizations in Vermont is to make sure never to enrage anyone, especially those in power. There are exceptions because – as has been noted here before – there are some very good reporters in the state, and sometimes they write very good stories.

In general, though, the newspapers get both skimpier and blander. Not much news, and no personality.

We’ll try to provide both here, to justify the donations received this past week, for which the donors are dearly thanked.

A somewhat discombobulated post this morning, following a day spent poking into state and federal fiscal matters, only to have the poking get overtaken by events.

The big event in Washington, as everyone knows, was passage by the House of Representatives of President Barack Obama’s “American Recovering and Reinvestment Act of 2009,” more generally known as the “stimulus plan.”

In Montpelier, with considerably less fanfare, the big event was the transmission of the final (for now) projection of  what that stimulus plan would mean for the state and its budget.

It meant that for the coming Fiscal Year (2010, starting July 1), things don’t look as bleak as they did. The projected shortfall, according to a draft analysis by the Joint Fiscal Office, is $33.4 million.

That’s a lot lower than the $252.8 million gap between revenue and expenses the state would face without the federal money. The information inspired WCAX-TV (Channel 3) to lead its 6 o’clock news with a story saying the federal money might “stave off budget cuts,” with Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin saying, “This stimulus package is going to be a huge help to us.”

Well, yeah, but not for long. The Joint Fiscal Office analysis projects the budget crunch will bump right back up to $220.9 million in Fiscal Year 2011. The state is by no means free of having to choose between drastic cuts in services or higher taxes on at least some people.

But perhaps not right away. The Legislature does have a little breathing room, giving it some ammunition to use against Gov. Jim Douglas’s insistence on deep budget cuts, including the elimination of some 600 jobs.

In fact, when Shumlin said the federal money was going to be “a big help to us,” the “us” he had in mind might have been his fellow-Democrats vis a vis the Republican governor. With these new numbers, it might be a little tougher for Douglas to convince voters that all those cuts are needed right now, a little easier for Democrats to argue that at the very least the cuts can be phased in.

The schools, too, may have been given some political breathing room . The bill passed by the U.S. House (and the Senate, if anything, is likely to vote for more spending) includes almost $80 billion to be funneled directly to local school districts nationwide.

That includes $13 billion for Special Education. For years, Vermont schools have spent more on Special Education per pupil than most other states, partly because the state follows the “mainstreaming” approach the federal government has advocated since 1974, but never adequately funded. The new money could ease the burden on property taxes in many districts, in turn easing the pressure on school districts to cut other programs.

As though they had orchestrated the events, educators got another political gift Wednesday when the latest standardized test scores of the New England Common Assessment Program were released. The only conclusion that can be drawn from them is that the schools are doing a pretty good job.

More students were reading at or above the “standard.” And proficiency scores were up among all elementary school pupils tested. As has always been true in Vermont, and in the other 49 states, children from poor families did not do as well on the tests. Even here, though, the gap narrowed between those who qualify for the federal free or reduced-price meals and their classmates from higher-income families.

Coming just a little more than a month before Town Meeting and the votes on most school budgets, the news is likely to convince at least some voters, especially parents, that the schools are worth their cost.

The test scores, to be sure, do not demonstrate that all the children are mastering reading, writing, and arithmetic. But they’re not doing that in the other states, either, or, come to think of it, in other countries.

In fact, here’s a little secret that is so outrageous in some circles that we’re going to utter it very softly, hoping only a few of you will hear. But we’re going to go into some depth and demonstrate the truth of our secret sometime in the near future.

Ready?

Actually, American public schools in general are pretty good.

And it is possible-just possible, mind you-that the widespread sentiment to the contrary reflects the success of a well-financed, politically-inspired campaign to undermine their reputation and their effectiveness.

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Did you know that Vermonters are less satisfied with their jobs than workers in any other state and are the most likely to be planning to move away?

It’s right there in the encyclopedia. It’s in Wikipedia, in the article about Vermont, where it says, “A 2007 survey claimed that Vermonters were the least satisfied with their job in the nation and were the most likely to be making plans to leave.”

Nor is this a mere assertion. Not on your tintype. This sentence ends with a footnote. Footnote number 70, just in case you’re interested, which provides the source of the information.

The source of the information is something called Salary.com . Salary.com, a company in the Boston area, “builds on-demand software around a deep domain knowledge in the area of compensation to help customers win the war for talent by simplifying the connections between people, pay and performance,” whatever that means.

The company’s press contact is a friendly fellow named Rob Halpin, of a Boston firm called Version 2.0 Communications, who readily acknowledged something about the Salary.com poll.

It isn’t a poll.

OK, Halpin didn’t say that in so many words. What he did say is that it was not a random sample survey. It was one of those on-line displays that asked a question to be answered by any computer-user who stumbled onto it. It had, Halpin said, “no methodology” to speak of, and was not “terribly scientific.”

It isn’t a poll.

A poll-if it’s a real poll-must be a survey of a “random sample,” defined as a “set of items that have been drawn from a population in such a way that each time an item was selected, every item in the population had an equal opportunity to appear in the sample.”  (from the Internet Glossary of Statistical terms).

If respondents choose to be respondents, then every item (in this case, employed Vermonter) in the population (in this case, all employed Vermonters) does not have an equal opportunity to appear in the sample.

Not to mention that there are employed Vermonters who don’t use computers to begin with, meaning they would have no opportunity at all to appear in the sample.

It isn’t a poll.

What is it then? It is nothing. Nada. Rien de tout. Bupkiss. Gornish. A nullity.

At least as far as its conclusion meaning anything. It might serve as a promotional device for the company. It might be fun for the folks who click their answers to the questions.

It isn’t a poll.

There are two problems illustrated here, one cosmic and one local. The cosmic relates to but transcends Wikipedia, which, to its credit, has been trying to police the (mis-)information its readers/contributors often insert. Just the other day one of them inserted an obituary of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, saying that he “died shortly after” his Inauguration Day collapse.

Kennedy is, of course, alive, and Wikipedia is re-examining its free-wheeling ways as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” The whole “anyone can edit” outlook is essential to the  on-line-world philosophy which disdains “gate-keepers” and other elites as relics of another day.

Perhaps. But sometimes a “gatekeeper” is someone who knows what he is talking about. Or who has standards of intellectual honesty which will prevent her from approving a sentence saying Vermonters are more dissatisfied with their jobs than workers elsewhere, an assertion for which there is not a scintilla of evidence.

The local problem is that several Vermont news organizations, including the three major newspapers-Burlington Free Press, Rutland Herald, Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus—put these pseudo-polls into their on-line versions. Currently, the Herald and the T/A are asking whether students should be allowed to carry backpacks or bags during the school day. The Free Press question asks whether the state should cut spending more, raise taxes, or do some of both.

At about 8PM last night, “cut more” had a big lead, 64 percent, to 28 percent for some of both and eight percent for raise taxes.

Sounds like a blow-out, but only 272 votes had been cast, not enough of a sample had it been a random sample, which it was not.

It’s not a poll.

Which did not stop the editorial writer at St. Johnsbury’s Caledonian Record from proclaiming the other day that most Vermonters must agree with Gov. Jim Douglas about cutting school spending, because such was the result of what the writer called a “poll” in the on-line version of the Herald and Times-Argus.

It was not a poll, which might have embarrassed the editorial writer, who, however, seems unembarassable.

Just because these on-line devices are not polls, does not mean they are nothing.  They are something. From the perspective of the bean-counters at the newspapers, they are no doubt part of their marketing and promotion campaigns. And at least somebody at the newspaper understands that they are not real polls. “This is not intended to be a scientific sample of local and national opinion,” the Free Press acknowledges under its “poll question.” The other papers use similar disclaimers.

In short, the newspapers are admitting that these are not polls. They are lies. Really, news organizations shouldn’t do that.