I read a lot of blogs regularly. One of them is Freakonomics which is an interesting blog about economics and related geekery about statistics, economics, data and such. It’s written in an easy to understand style rather than a boring text book style.
I came across this post on Vanishing Mailboxes, Underperforming Schools, and Global Warming. It is actually written by a guest but it has some excellent points.
The discussion on mailboxes is almost funny. I found the points on Global Warming interesting. The real meat to me though was the section on Underperforming Schools.
Here is an excerpt:
But, by closing the school and moving them to a much larger school, these low performing kids continue to be low performers, they just do not pull down the average as much. Worse, these low performing kids often do worse (at least according to a recent study at Stanford) and/or drop out. Dropping out helps the averages, so you could argue it is a good policy (Texas allegedly uses that to improve their scores), but the consequences are likely dire for society (more crime or welfare or both). The problem is that the poor performing school may in fact have those particular kids doing much better than they would in another school (due to extra attention, etc), but decision makers are taught that ???statistics do not lie???.
The discussion around schools centered on the statistics fallacies used when deciding what schools to closed. It is interesting. While this guest blogger, Paul Kimmelman, isn’t a statistician, he’s got some great points.