Nearly Half Of Detroiters illiterate.

[Hauldren Collider]

Clearly smoking is okay.

[Guynemer]

Those of you with Ben on your side need to question your position.

Words to live by.

[Thoth]

Those of you with Ben on your side need to question your position.

Words to live by.

What you meant to say is "DaShi wins the thread"



(as much as it pains me to admit it...DaShi pwns this thread so far....)

[Kuciwalker]

It could be, but enough people have seen this for it to be generally held as true for you to be in the position needing to provide evidence against.

JM

That's not how science works, JM. The aggregate of systemically biased observations doesn't get special status.

[Jon Miller]

We base our null hypothesis off of what is expected to be true.

I will point out that you still haven't provided any evidence for your dismissal of my (and most others) personal evidence. Your claim that my observations and others are biased and so shouldn't be considered is groundless. You haven't provided any support of your claim.

Please do so.

Until you do so, you have no basis in claiming that the commonly held position is so biased as to be lacking.

JM

[Jon Miller]

To help you Kuci:

All scientists are fundamentally biased. All measurements are fundamentally biased.

Science tries to account for this in two ways.

1. Scientists try to remain blind where possible. This removes some (not all) of the effects of the bias of the scientists.
2. Scientists only compare hypothesis, that fit the experiment. The measurement is the comparison of the hypothesis. Note that this is definitely biased!

Scientists then use these systematically biased measurements to form a conclusion with an understanding that it is biased and that the conclusion might change if the bias is changed.

For example, for a long time scientists were biased towards the position that neutrinos didn't have mass. A lot of measurements were made, and various conclusions were made with this bias. Finally, somewhat due to these past measurements, neutrino oscillation was measured. Then many of the previous conclusions of the results of measurements were changed to agree with the new interpretation of the neutrino having mass.

JM

[Jon Miller]

Here is a simple experiment.

Take schools, look at their measure of 'goodness'. The measure could include things like test scores on standardized tests, number of students who go to college, number of students who graduate college, number of students who are in trouble with the law, etc.

Here are the hypothesis to compare:
1. Being a good school in 2000 is correlated with being a good school in 2008.
2. Being a good school in 2000 is not correlated with being a good school in 2008.

This measurement is definitely biased. Like all measurements.

I don't have scholarly papers handy showing it, but I think you would agree that 1 will turn out to have more truth over 2?

This would most likely be interpreted, of course with a bias based on expectations, as supporting the conclusion that going to a good school improves student performance.

The fact that science is biased, does not mean that the scientific method is invalid or that it's observations should not get special status.

JM

[MikeH]

The UK posts annual "school league tables" which basically only measure exam results, so no indication of how smart the kids going into the school were etc.

Still, the number of schools dramatically changing their performance in the league tables over a period of ~ 8 years is observed to be very small compared to the total number of schools.

[Kuciwalker]

We base our null hypothesis off of what is expected to be true.

I will point out that you still haven't provided any evidence for your dismissal of my (and most others) personal evidence. Your claim that my observations and others are biased and so shouldn't be considered is groundless. You haven't provided any support of your claim.

The observation is biased because you only look at people who chose to go to good schools!

Do you seriously not see how the observation "all the people I know who went to good schools ended up successful" demonstrates precisely nothing about causation?

[rah]

You create a good school by limiting the number of potentially bad students. It's that simple.
In the suburbs around large cities, the wealth required to live in the district eliminates a good percentage of poor kids, those from broken homes, minorities, etc.
Hence the schools are considered (and score wise) rank higher.
Spending more dollars per student in inner city schools and a few less on these suburban white boys isn't going to make any real difference.

Charter schools or other specialty schools in the inner city only take in better students and those that are motivated to learn. So they are considered (and score wise) and rank higher.

Money helps some but how often have we seen money tossed at a pool of bad students not have the desired impact?

[MikeH]

The observation is biased because you only look at people who chose to go to good schools!

Do you seriously not see how the observation "all the people I know who went to good schools ended up successful" demonstrates precisely nothing about causation?

That's a bit of a straw man. That statement is mostly irrelevant to this?

Isn't Jon's point that if you are contesting that going to a good school doesn't increase your chances of being a success, you need to provide some evidence against that, as it's such an unusual claim and so far against what is commonly assumed.

He's also suggesting you define what is a "good school" based on the success of the pupils that go to it.

[MikeH]

You create a good school by limiting the number of potentially bad students. It's that simple.
In the suburbs around large cities, the wealth required to live in the district eliminates a good percentage of poor kids, those from broken homes, minorities, etc.
Hence the schools are considered (and score wise) rank higher.
Spending more dollars per student in inner city schools and a few less on these suburban white boys isn't going to make any real difference.

Charter schools or other specialty schools in the inner city only take in better students and those that are motivated to learn. So they are considered (and score wise) and rank higher.

Money helps some but how often have we seen money tossed at a pool of bad students not have the desired impact?

Not true. Well it depends how you define good school. One that cherry picks students isn't good, it's just fixing the stats.

Tossing money and spending it in ineffective ways doesn't work. Same with anything, anyone can waste tons of money doing things that don't work.

In the UK it's very hard to get good teachers to work at crap schools because they earn the same money at nicer schools and the working environment and job satisfaction is much higher.

Where they have targeted schools, allowed the heads to pay teachers more and get better teachers in, and reduced class sizes and provided more specialist teaching it's made a dramatic difference.

The reality is that kids with issues are much more expensive to teach than kids from nice solid middle class homes, and require different teaching, and it is much more expensive to teach troubled kids and they still won't achieve the same results as moderately funded middle class kids, but they will achieve much more than they would have.

[rah]

Better students, better schools no matter how you rate them. Test score wise, graduation rates, % that go on to college. It's rigged that way. If the kids don't care, it's hard for even the best teachers to motivate them. So the more you limit your exposure to possible bad students the better the school will appear in no matter what you look at.

If you look at the top 20 High Schools in Illinois they're all from suburbs or Specialty schools in Chicago. (those with the fewest uninterested poor people) Thinking it's all about how much is spent is naive.

But I will concede that the Chicago Public School system could spent the LARGE amount of money they spend more efficiently.

[Jon Miller]

I have been focusing on the impact of good schools, and not on how to change a bad school into a good school. I actually agree that getting rid of those who don't want to learn/be there would be a bigger factor than anything else (although I don't have experimental evidence to prove this).

I do, however, think it likely that money does play some role... as it plays a role almost everywhere. Teachers who don't care have to be a negative influence.

JM

[Asher]

Maybe they work nearby and they don't want to commute from the ghetto.

You do realize that there are other factors in buying a home besides nearby schools, right? Asher is getting a house, and I seriously doubt he gives a **** what the schools in his area are like.

Actually, schools did play a role because they affect resale value. The neighbourhood I built in will feed into the same high school I went to, which is one of the top ones in Canada and the top one in Alberta. It's not unheard of for rich asian parents to buy or rent houses in the area just so they can register their kid to attend the school.

It's why I also picked a lot with a street address of 56 instead of 44. Resale value.