Art Kendall wrote: > > part 1 > > > - There is little reason to expect the voucher schools to do better, > > and early returns show that they have not. > > see GAO report GAO-01-914 > http://www.gao.gov > > In sum voucher programs did increase parent satisfaction ratings. > Math and reading scores were lower in the voucher schools. > > Many advocates of vouchers say that competition is the key to getting > teachers off their duffs. There is an urban legend view that all public > employees especially teachers do hardly any work. By my observation in > many schools at different levels, few occupations as a group work as > hard as teachers do. A quality management (esp. Deming) perspective > also points out the corrosive effects of competition in most job > situations.
I definitely agree with this. Of course, I suppose we can not expect the statistical illiterates who get get elected to positions of responsibility to understand such things, but some of the provisions of No Child Left Behind come straight out of Deming's bead experiment on how not to motivate people who are dealing with a system with random variation. Cheers, Russell -- All too often the study of data requires care. . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
