"Good" arrows and "Bad" arrows

Yesterday we learned from the JG that State Superintendent Tony Bennett wants FWCS to give him a presentation on their balanced scorecard. You can look at the scorecard after the first year on the FWCS web site. What you'll see is that the district finally has targets for academic improvement. That's the good news. The bad news is that they didn't meet their targets. The only area where they show "improvement" is in reducing some of the achievement gaps between white and minority students. But there are two ways to reduce the gaps. Minority scores can go up or white scores can come down. You can't tell which happened so these indicators don't mean anything.

The chart has green arrows pointing up for exceeding the target, yellow arrows pointing sideways for meeting the target and red arrows pointing sideways for failing to meet the target. Why would the red arrows point sideways instead of down? To make the failures less apparent. Is this scorecard about improvement or about appearances?

Wonder if Tony Bennett will pick up on all this? Someone should give him a heads-up.