When something sounds too good to be true it probably is. The same holds true for when something sounds too bad.

Take the Albertson Foundation's "Don't Fail Idaho" campaign, for example. Radio and TV ads shock us daily with the claim that only "one in 10" Idaho high school graduates finishes college. Sounds absolutely awful. But in fact it's absolutely preposterous.

It sounded wrong the first time I heard it, and we've all heard it enough now that perhaps Albertson is hoping we will just accept it as fact. As a teacher of high school seniors I ask my students how many plan to get a college degree, and almost all raise their hands. Now, I know things don't always go as planned, but if I'm to believe the "Don't Fail Idaho" claim then only two or three kids out of a class of 30 will end up with a college degree. That, indeed, sounds too bad to be true.

So a closer look at the claim seems necessary, and scrutiny shows that the Albertson Foundation has chosen as the cornerstone of its campaign very questionable figures. In fact, an examination of the 2012 study done by the Idaho Legislature's Office of Performance Evaluation titled "Reducing Barriers to Post-Secondary Education" shows how incomplete the statistics really are. A perusal of this website shows (starting on page 30) that the contributors basically apologize because "existing data ... prevent the board from accurately assessing current levels of educational attainment ..." Data used by the State Board of Education (SBE) does not take into account, among other factors, out-of-state institutions. But about half of my seniors who raise their hands keep their hands up when I ask them if they plan to attend college outside of Idaho. And according to the study itself the SBE only keeps track of in-state public institutions.

Think about that for a moment. That means that the SBE is primarily limiting itself to public institutions within Idaho. A follow-up study done last June shows that it is still struggling to develop a longitudinal data system to provide accurate information. The study claims its best source is the American Community Survey (ACS) but admits it cannot rely on the ACS data because "if students finish college in Idaho and then move to another state ..." the other state gets to count them. And a visit to the "Don't Fail Idaho" website shows that most of their information comes from the same ACS that the SBE found unreliable. So when "Don't Fail Idaho" uses incomplete and confusing data to claim that nine out of ten of our high school graduates fail to finish they are not counting students who go to rinky-dink places like the Ivy League.

How crazy is that? I've had students go on to Harvard, Stanford, Princeton ... you name it, but if you don't name a public institution inside Idaho, those graduates are counted as failures. And by extension so is the system that sent them there.

The "Don't Fail Idaho" website does use some figures from the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS) ranking Idaho last in seniors who attend college anywhere in the U.S., but these and other NCHEMS figures are apparently based on stats from the ACS and from the 2010 census that lack out-of-state information. In fact, the SBE is waiting for the 2020 census, hoping for more accurate data by that date. The fact is that the reporting systems present such a head-spinning circuitous conundrum that the SBE admits it can't even count graduates from the College of Idaho or from BYU-Idaho. And yet "Don't Fail Idaho," using these same sources, confidently criticizes our state for failing to move kids on.

So what is the Albertson Foundation's purpose in bombarding us with these "facts"? On the surface it seems we are to assume it is an attempt to get more kids to go to college. But it might actually have the opposite effect on Idaho students who already have a lack of confidence in their education thanks to constant reminders from "Don't Fail Idaho." If students hear the long odds of finishing college they might decide the debt and trouble are not worth gambling that they will be the one in 10 to finish.

I suspect there are motives besides philanthropy at work here. After all, these "statistics" come to us from the same folks who spent a lot of money trying to convince voters that our state's system ranks at or near the bottom nationally but who conveniently failed to mention that how much a state spends on education is a deciding factor. That bit of slanted propaganda was used in the last election, but somehow we gullible Idaho hicks saw through the ruse and voted down all three of the so-called "Luna Laws" that we were told would fix our broken system. Somehow we seemed to know that, yes, we can do better - but our system isn't broken.

Idahoans are sagacious enough to know that the real truth is almost never as good or as bad as it is portrayed politically, and our graduates need not hang their heads as they leave for college if they have taken seriously the education Idaho has offered - that is if Albertson's hasn't already scared them away from moving on.

Mike Ruskovich is a teacher and a resident of Blanchard.