Submitted by Betsy Muse on Sun, 09/07/2008 - 10:44pm.
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A Quick Virginia Foxx Fact Check
Submitted by fake consultant on Mon, 09/17/2007 - 11:57pm.
In the course of debating education issues today in the House, Virginia Foxx reports that there is no correlation between education spending and educational outcomes.
She tells us that the States "know what's best", suggesting that there's no reason for Federal involvement.
So the question is: is there a correlation?
To address this, I ran a quick analysis: gathering the data on per capita educational spending by State.
I compared it to the listing of "Smartest States" located here.
Guess what?
Of the 15 "lowest funding" States, only three (Idaho, Montana, and South Dakota) are in the Top 20 of Smartest States.
We assume the inherently small class sizes in these States explains the outcome in these States, but in all other cases, the "lowest spending" States did the worst in educational outcome.
To conclude: if you're going to debate education, Representative Foxx, do your homework.
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file that one under "Duh".
It's no great stretch of the imagination that they more you spend on education, in general, the better the outcomes are going to be.
Be the change you wish to see in the world. --Gandhi
for someone who hails from the #4 smartest state...
...this is clearly a duh.
for members of congress from other states (and some of that state's more gulllible voters), maybe not so much.
And for a sold out Bushbot
facts don't matter. Foxx knows exactly nothing more nor less than what the Party of Greed wants her to know.
perhaps the lack of mental effort...
...exhibited in these sorts of comments is counterbalanced by the enormous mental effort that must be required to compartmentalize all the contradictions from each other.
Watched her on C-SPAN
last night for a few minutes with my son, and our conversation went like this:
Ryan: Is she cross-eyed?
me: Maybe, but that's not important.
Ryan: Look! Tell me she's not cross-eyed.
me: Are you even listening to what she's saying?
Ryan: I think we both know the answer to that question.
me: *sigh* Go ahead and change the channel.
Maybe Ryan is right
If she were saying something important, the crossed eyes wouldn't matter.
Be the change you wish to see in the world. --Gandhi
as i intimated above...
...perhaps the crossed eyes are a sign of great mental effort moderately well hidden.
that was exactly what i saw...
...and the speech and accompanying chart seemed impressive until you actually listened to the words and
looked up confirming data.
thomas p. m. barnett tells us that the best way to achieve success at the defense dapartment is to have a fantastic powerpoint presentation; and we get the impression that congress also feels the whole "charts and graphs" thing is considered just as important, right or wrong, as actual ideas and cogent thought.
It's a perceived value phenomena
Like the way a child (or an adult, in my case :) ) gets all excited over a big, heavy, fancy-wrapped Christmas package.
Someone put a lot of work into this.
It's a subjective analysis based on visual triggers, and it's more about projecting the aura of competence than imparting information.
I need to do a graph showing the steady rise in re-election stats for graph-flippers. :)
i'd love to do research...
...on the difficulties of doing research when the math describing the available universe of facts applied to the research more or less looks like n = 0.
Hey fakey!
It's interesting you should post this, because I have wanted to do it at a state level. Total taxes per school district (county or in our case city) that go to education, then scores on whatever test is best suited for measuring total outcome. Not NCLB meeting or not meeting requirements, because there are schools in Chapel Hill/Carrboro that didn't "meet" requirements that are superstar schools compared to the types of rural schools we have in this state.
Any ideas?
One of the pitfalls of childhood is that one doesn't have to understand something to feel it. - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
here's what i did...
...i located the two datasets and hand transferred them to an excel, then sorted the two pairs of columns high to low.
after that it was a simple matter of eye-to-eye comparison.
my original intent was to compare just the bottom 10, but examining the bottom 15 gave even more striking results.
i chose the top 20 because i wanted to give the lower states every chance to show any sunstantial improvements, and also because i figure if you're not in the top 20 you're not doing well.
the data on educational achievement can probably be found at the census bureau, by state and by county. the spending data will probably have to hustled from the various spenders. my experience with local school districts suggests you'll be making many phone calls to obtain that data.
of course, if you get lucky the us department of education or the state have that same data available all in one place.
good hunting!
Robert.....then compare the unemployment figures for the same
counties. Wonder what we'd see.
Robin Hayes lied. Nobody died, but thousands of folks lost their jobs.
expanding on that theme...
...the census bureau has average income data by county and city as well as average education levels achieved in the reporting area, and that would be an even more direct way to compare economic outcomes and educational levels.
of course, it is fair to point out that the linkage could be coincidental-for example, economic planning by a community's leaders couild create conditions that obviate any educational achievement. (if there's no $40, 000/year jobs in your town, all the education in the world won't get you a $40,000/year job...at least not in that town.)