Track Wheel question

David L. Johnson said:

Mark Hickey said:

Quoted message said:

Well, Mark, actually Jobst was talking about the
administration's own misuse of the language -- by the
head of that administration.

The "illiterati" term was what I keyed in on. If he
considers a Bachelor's degree in history from Yale and an
MBA from Harvard "a lack of edjumacation", Mr. Jobst must
have some truly outstanding educational credentials!

Still, Mr. Bush does not show much of that Ivy-league
education in his speeches. Every time he says the word
"nucular", it's like fingernails on the blackboard to me.

Most of what he says- delivered in that mug smarmy style of
his- is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. Although
I'm hard to please, I suppose- I didn't like Clinton's,
Gore's or any of the most recent crop of Democrats'
speaking skills.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

It is also highly questionable whether it will improve
education at all. Taking more tests, which is the
usual effect of the program, is not more education,
but less. Teaching to the test, which is the local
school districts' usual response, is not better
education, but worse.

I wish I knew a better way to hold the schools
accountable for results - I'd support it in a heartbeat.

So would I. But that does not, in my mind, justify the
current program.

"Holding schools accountable" the way it's being done now is
simply the wrong approach. Hold students and parents
accountable, first and foremost. But that's not going to be
done in this century, since the American Way seems to have
become "hold someone else accountable for my screwups."

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

But the testing that goes on isn't something that SHOULD
take "special classes" to pass. If the schools produce
kids with even remotely adequate reading, writing, math
and logic skills they'll do fine. If they're turning out
students that require special classes to pass the test,
the problem isn't the test, IMHO.

Agreed, but neither is the test the solution. Problem is,
that is essentially all that is offered under the "no
child" program.

The problem with "no child left behind" is that it neglects
a simple reality: half of the children in any school are
below average. America is not Lake Wobegon where "all the
children are above average." The only way not to leave some
children behind is to dumb the standards down drastically.
Bill Clinton started this "no child left behind" malarkey in
one of his State of the Union addresses and Bush & Co. just
sucked it up 'cause it sounds great to the public (half of
whom are below average themselves).

Quoted message said:

Maybe my old-fashioned New-Deal liberalism is showing
through here, but somehow, if a school shows poor student
performance, cutting the funding to that school would not
seem to be the way to improve that performance.

It's not. This sort of thinking just shows the bankruptcy of
creative analytical thought in the Legislature and the administration-
not that this is a new thing or confined to the Republican
side of the aisle.

Quoted message said:

I have seen the difference in performance of schools in
Philadelphia, compared to the outlying suburbs. There are
buckets of money going into the Philadelphia school
system, so it would seem, but I never have been able to
find out the difference in $/student between the systems.
I do see that the Philly schools look like [censored], and they
use hand-me-down books and ancient computers. Suburban
schools have all the latest.

They have the latest, and these kids started out with social
advantages as well: they've grown up steeped in the myth
that you can make your own future in any way you want. Kids
from poor families, which are disproportionately
concentrated in urban districts, do not grow up with the
myth that they can make their own future. They grow up with
the myth that the games is rigged against them.

Quoted message said:

Either Philly schools don't get the funding the
suburban schools do, or it is siphoned off before it
gets to the kids.

Sure, some of it is discipline and all the other problems
in big-city schools. But I suspect a lot is also plain old
graft. To think that cutting funding will help is naive.
The "privatization" that has happened here has also been
merely a way to re-channel the flow of money, but not to
the students.

Yup, charter schools were all the rage here but several of
them have been found to be run fraudulently and this has
given the privatization of schools a black eye. IMHO that's
not unexpected, as the whole premise of saving money by
privatizing schools is specious.

Quoted message said:

To test the teachers and fire those who can't pass seems
like a good solution, but only if there are other, better-
qualified teachers ready to step in. There is no long line
of prospective teachers trying to get into the
Philadelphia school system.

No, I do not know the solution to the problems. But that
does not suggest to me that I should support a clearly
shortsighted program aimed more at garnering votes than
improving schools.

Exactly.

Mark Hickey said:

The Washington DC schools have one of the highest (maybe
it is the highest) $ per student ratio in the country -
and among the worst results.

Ray Suarez, who lives in DC and sends his kids to DC
schools, was recently in Minnesota talking about this very
issue. I found it quite enlightening. Unfortunately there
doesn't seem to be a viewable copy of this on the Twin
Cities Public Television Web site (www.tpt.org). Anyway,
Suarez pointed out that the very figure you cite is
misleading in that some schools in the DC area are
drastically better funded than others, and not surprisingly
the students in those schools perform better.

Tim McNamara said:

... The problem with "no child left behind" is that it
neglects a simple reality: half of the children in any
school are below average. America is not Lake Wobegon
where "all the children are above average." The only way
not to leave some children behind is to dumb the standards
down drastically. Bill Clinton started this "no child left
behind" malarkey in one of his State of the Union
addresses and Bush & Co. just sucked it up 'cause it
sounds great to the public (half of whom are below average
themselves)....

I though that half the children were below median. If you
take 9 squirrel monkeys and one gorilla, 90% of the primates
are below average weight.

--
Tom Sherman – Quad Cities

Tom Sherman said:

Tim McNamara said:

... The problem with "no child left behind" is that it
neglects a simple reality: half of the children in any
school are below average. America is not Lake Wobegon
where "all the children are above average." The only way
not to leave some children behind is to dumb the
standards down drastically. Bill Clinton started this "no
child left behind" malarkey in one of his State of the
Union addresses and Bush & Co. just sucked it up 'cause
it sounds great to the public (half of whom are below
average themselves)....

I though that half the children were below median.

No, half the children are below the mean, not the median
nor the mode. Confusing these terms renders the
discussion useless.

David L. Johnson said:

Tim McNamara said:

The problem with "no child left behind" is that it
neglects a simple reality: half of the children in any
school are below average. America is not Lake Wobegon
where "all the children are above average." The only way
not to leave some children behind is to dumb the
standards down drastically. Bill Clinton started this "no
child left behind" malarkey in one of his State of the
Union addresses and Bush & Co. just sucked it up 'cause
it sounds great to the public (half of whom are below
average themselves).

It's not Bush, nor is it Clinton, who started that.

Well, he started the popular use of "no child left behind"
as national public policy objective. It's a great sound bite
even though it is barely meaningful and is in practice
impossible.

Quoted message said:

Several years ago I was amazed to hear the debates about
school curriculum; how it could not be more rigorous since
"not every child would be able to succeed". So, they
dumbed it down so that every child could "succeed". Sorry,
but that is not my idea of success, nor of education.

I agree with you on that. Education should be about mastery
of the material in absolute terms, not relative terms. We
should also as a culture face up to the fact that not every
student is college material or executive material, and that
there are other ways of making a valuable contribution and
(there should be) other ways of earning a good living to
support yourself and your family. Unfortunately in our
culture, prestige, power and privilege are intimately
linked to income and not to the value that the person
provides society.

Quoted message said:

I have occasionally been involved with pedagogical
projects. One in particular got me. It was an experimental
program, and what they wanted was "indicators of success"
of the program, _not_ the results of the experiment, which
were somewhat negative. Lake Woebegone is alive and well
in colleges of education throughout the nation.

Indeed it is.

David L. Johnson said:

Tim McNamara said:

The problem with "no child left behind" is that it
neglects a simple reality: half of the children in any
school are below average. America is not Lake Wobegon
where "all the children are above average." The only way
not to leave some children behind is to dumb the
standards down drastically. Bill Clinton started this "no
child left behind" malarkey in one of his State of the
Union addresses and Bush & Co. just sucked it up 'cause
it sounds great to the public (half of whom are below
average themselves).

It's not Bush, nor is it Clinton, who started that. Several
years ago I was amazed to hear the debates about school
curriculum; how it could not be more rigorous since "not
every child would be able to succeed". So, they dumbed it
down so that every child could "succeed". Sorry, but that
is not my idea of success, nor of education.

I have occasionally been involved with pedagogical
projects. One in particular got me. It was an experimental
program, and what they wanted was "indicators of success"
of the program, _not_ the results of the experiment, which
were somewhat negative. Lake Woebegone is alive and well in
colleges of education throughout the nation.

Sadly true. The NCLB isn't concerned with "averages", but
simply making sure kids graduate with some semblance of an
education in basic reading, writing, math and logic skills.
I doubt very much that a kid who is in the lower quartile
of any reasonably effective school would have trouble
passing it.

Mark Hickey Habanero Cycles habcycles.comhabcycles.comOpen ↗ Home of
the $695 ti frame

David L. Johnson said:

On Mon, 12 Apr 2004 23:29:01 -0500, Tim McNamara wrote:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

> to the public (half of whom are below average
> themselves)....

I though that half the children were below median.

No, half the children are below the mean, not the median
nor the mode. Confusing these terms renders the
discussion useless.

Quoted message said:

Sorry, but he's right, Tim. Median is the score for which
as many data points are below as above. So, if one kid
has an IQ of 200, but 3 others have IQs of 103, 100, 99,
and 98, then the median IQ is 100, whereas the mean is
120. 4 are below the mean, but only 2 below the median,
and 2 above.

True, but IQ scores, and most standardized tests, are
designed so that raw scores (which you never see) are
transformed onto a point scale defined so that the testees
are more or less normally distributed, so the median and the
mean are equal.

Of course test scores and other more legitimate educational
metrics have outliers, but they aren't generally like income
or house prices where the distribution is skewed and the
median and the mean can be significantly different.

Nitpickily, Ben

Median house price in my county just went over
$600,000. I rent.

David L. Johnson said:

,,,but 3 >others have IQs of 103, 100, 99, and 98,

Sorry, but I find the irony (in regards to a discussion on
averages) too funny not to point that out.

Mark Hickey Habanero Cycles habcycles.comhabcycles.comOpen ↗ Home of
the $695 ti frame

David L. Johnson said:

Tim McNamara said:

Quoted message said:

> to the public (half of whom are below average
> themselves)....

I though that half the children were below median.

No, half the children are below the mean, not the median
nor the mode. Confusing these terms renders the
discussion useless.

Sorry, but he's right, Tim. Median is the score for which
as many data points are below as above.

He's still using the wrong measurement for this discussion.
When talking about variance and central tendency in
performance on a standardized test, it is preferable to use
the mean rather than mode or median. Standardization tends
to limit skew, which would affect the mean to a greater
extent than the median or the mode, and hence there is not
much to be gained and quite a bit to be lost by using the
median or mode as the measurement. Median and mode can be
used for purely ordinal data, of course, which is not the
case with the mean. If we were talking about ordinal
ranking, then the use of the median would make sense.

However, my reference to "half of all children are below
average" refers exactly to the distribution of scores on
standardized IQ tests. That is of course slightly
oversimplified, since as I pointed out earlier some 68% of
children score within one standard deviation of the mean;
this is a significant difference, however, as a child who
scores 115 will likely perform much better academically than
a child who scores 85.

Quoted message said:

So, if one kid has an IQ of 200, but 3 others have IQs of
103, 100, 99, and 98, then the median IQ is 100, whereas
the mean is 120. 4 are below the mean, but only 2 below
the median, and 2 above.

Yes, the mean is sensitive to being skewed by extreme scores
which is why, for example, it is not used preferentially in
describing the distribution of incomes or residential
property values across the population of the United States.
The median income is a more useful figure in these
instances, although the media more often than not confuses
the median with the mathematical "average.".

For standardized tests of performance, however, the mean is
used, rather than median or mode, because it is more
mathematically useful in analyzing the results. In the
specific case of IQ testing, the mean is used rather than
median or mode in describing performance on IQ tests. IQ
tests (e.g., the Wechsler series, the Stanford-Binet, etc)
are standardized so that the mean is 100 and the standard
deviation is (or was) 15 for the Wechsler tests and 16 for
the S-B. This allows easy comparison of individual
performance against the standardization sample.

In the case of the Wechsler tests, ISTR that the curve is
slightly leptokurtic. There is (or was) also a tendency for
the S-B to produce a slightly lower z-score than the
Wechsler tests so it is (or was) more likely, for example to
rate a child as mildly mentally retarded than as having
borderline intellectual functioning. I haven't done IQ
testing in years and the tests have since been revised, so I
don't know what the relationships between scores on the
Wechsler vs. S-B might be now.

Tim McNamara said:

... a child who scores 115 will likely perform much better
academically than a child who scores 85.

Is it still PC to say that? ;-)

Mark Hickey Habanero Cycles habcycles.comhabcycles.comOpen ↗ Home of
the $695 ti frame

Mark Hickey said:

Tim McNamara <[email hidden]> wrote:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

... a child who scores 115 will likely perform much
better academically than a child who scores 85.

Quoted message said:

Is it still PC to say that? ;-)

Well, increasingly, academic performance is defined as
scoring well on standardized tests, which often bear some
resemblance to IQ tests (OK, not all of them do). So it's
not just PC, it's tautological.

Silly remarks aside, test-taking is a skill in itself, which
has various weird correlations with social/cultural
background, etc., and is increasingly important, damagingly
so I think. I'm not ready to discuss this at length, but
Nicolas Lemann's book "The Big Test" is interesting and
scary reading. Burn the SAT!

Mark Hickey said:

Tim McNamara said:

... a child who scores 115 will likely perform much better
academically than a child who scores 85.

Is it still PC to say that? ;-)

Hah! Absolutely not. But then I've never quite managed to be
PC very often. I'm too much of a loudmouth.

What is PC is to pretend that everyone can do anything they
want with their lives. That's been the myth of America for a
long, long time. Your odds of self-direction and doing what
you want might be better in the US than in many places in
the world, and perhaps no better or not even quite as good
as in some other places- depending on what you want to do.

Benjamin Weiner said:

Mark Hickey said:

Tim McNamara <[email hidden]> wrote:

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

... a child who scores 115 will likely perform much
better academically than a child who scores 85.

Quoted message said:

Is it still PC to say that? ;-)

Well, increasingly, academic performance is defined as
scoring well on standardized tests, which often bear some
resemblance to IQ tests (OK, not all of them do). So it's
not just PC, it's tautological.

I haven't looked at any of the stadardized tests used in the
"Profiles of Learning" model used currently in Minnesota
(and soon to be abandoned). The ACT and SAT do have some
relation to IQ tests, but those are college entrance tests
and that's appropriate. Grad school tests such as the MCAT,
LSAT, Miller's Analogies, ete. are even more like IQ tests.
Their purpose is to predict future academic achievement
rather than to measure current achievement.

Quoted message said:

Silly remarks aside, test-taking is a skill in itself,
which has various weird correlations with social/cultural
background, etc., and is increasingly important,
damagingly so I think.

Well, there are test taking skills that can be learned and
can have a measureable affect on test scores. However, tests
of ability (such as IQ tests) are different than tests of
achievement (which is what standardized tests for academic
achievement ought to be).

Quoted message said:

I'm not ready to discuss this at length, but Nicolas
Lemann's book "The Big Test" is interesting and scary
reading. Burn the SAT!

The SAT has been rendered relatively useless with the advent
of training courses for the children of overly competitive
parents. It is less and less a valid predictor of
performance and more and more a measure of preparation. Back
in my day (1977), my 670 math/740 verbal wasn't too bad. It
doesn't look as good by comparison today. The average math
score in 2002 was 516 (534 for males, 500 for females), a 35
year high; the average verbal score was only 504, however-
507 for males and 502 for females. The latter is actually
surprising, as typically girls show better language skills
development early but boys must close that gap by the end of
high school.

Tim McNamara said:

The SAT has been rendered relatively useless with the
advent of training courses for the children of overly
competitive parents. It is less and less a valid predictor
of performance and more and more a measure of preparation.
Back in my day (1977), my 670 math/740 verbal wasn't too
bad. It doesn't look as good by comparison today. The
average math score in 2002 was 516 (534 for males, 500 for
females), a 35 year high; the average verbal score was only
504, however- 507 for males and 502 for females. The latter
is actually surprising, as typically girls show better
language skills development early but boys must close that
gap by the end of high school.

Do I remember that they "adjusted" the SAT tests some
years ago (resulting in an artificial "increase" in the
test numbers)?

Mark Hickey Habanero Cycles habcycles.comhabcycles.comOpen ↗ Home of
the $695 ti frame

Mark Hickey said:

Do I remember that they "adjusted" the SAT tests some
years ago (resulting in an artificial "increase" in the
test numbers)?

You do remember correctly. From various sources I've seen
the jump was about 100 points.

From: myscschools.comsat00Open ↗

"The scoring scale was recentered in spring 1995. The data
in this summary report reflect the new, recentered scale.
Data for the prior years for all students also are reported
using the recentered scale."

--
Dane Jackson - z u v e m b i @ u n i x b i g o t s . o r g
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a
strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. --
Abraham Lincoln

Dane Jackson said:

Mark Hickey said:

Do I remember that they "adjusted" the SAT tests some
years ago (resulting in an artificial "increase" in the
test numbers)?

You do remember correctly. From various sources I've seen
the jump was about 100 points.

From: myscschools.comsat00Open ↗

"The scoring scale was recentered in spring 1995. The data
in this summary report reflect the new, recentered scale.
Data for the prior years for all students also are reported
using the recentered scale."

Exactly - so Tim needn't lament over the fact that the
current average scores seem to be creeping up near his
(unless updating the data for prior years included someone
crawling through his bedroom window and slipping a
recalibrated set of test results into his dresser drawer).

Mark Hickey Habanero Cycles habcycles.comhabcycles.comOpen ↗ Home of
the $695 ti frame

Tim McNamara said:

Quoted message said:

Do I remember that they "adjusted" the SAT tests some
years ago (resulting in an artificial "increase" in the
test numbers)?

Hmm. I don't know. I did read that the ACT's scoring
method has been slightly adjusted compared to when I took
it in 1977, but I didn't see anything like that about the
SAT (and I may just have missed it). However, I'd bet
there's educators in this newsgroup who would know.

Mark is right in the particulars here. They did bump up
the scores by a fair notch recently. But the scores have
been creeping up since the 1980s, and since they control
the determination of the score ranges, that can only be
by design.

--

David L. Johnson

__o | If all economists were laid end to end, they would
not reach a _`\(,_ | conclusion. -- George Bernard Shaw
(_)/ (_) |