it extremely advanced journalism to whine about academic standards while disregarding the academic critique of their statistical basis by elitist "priests". um, maths is a science, nowadays, granny Herald.

By the way, we have read to her from birth and if someone is reading a book out loud in her vicinity she…

That's just insecure whinging.

What is the Herald actually trying to justify?

the peasants are revolting, sir

(I think the actual argument there is that the application of the standards probably averages out. But whether *that* result reflects the students' progress or the quality…

Or, more succinctly: LALALALALALA-NOT-LISTENING-LALALA

It's a qualitatively different way of storytelling than, er, "regular" novels; much or most of the information conveyed is through pictures, not words.

ah, so what the point of your post?

I guess the discussion about literacy and reading to kids and engaging…

A vocal lobby argues none of this information should be made available by the state. It is too early in the life of national standards, results are inconsistently judged at a school level, insufficiently moderated at a national level and devoid of…

Indeedy.

Check out Pan paniscus as opposed to Pan troglydtes- one has the capacity to learn in new environments new things (provided they’re brought up by…

even more interesting if they do will the Herald report how dumb they were...

I think they have the kind of gall to do just that

Dear Chris…

This is far from being a sufficient factor for love of reading as a hobby (as opposed to simple literacy), though. I can think offhand…

Ae, same for me, and I'm doing my best to recreate that for my wee one, I read to her at least one book in English each day and make sure my…

That's not true. Not even remotely.

__''Children don't learn at the same rate, they don't walk at the same rate, they certainly don't speak at the same rate, so why would we have National Standards where if a child doesn't meet,…

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA1209/S00361/prime-minister-requests-inquiry-into-dotcom-case.htm

I guess they're for those people who don't pay any attention whatsoever to their kids, but want them measured carefully and presented as KPI statistics. Workaholic upper management dads, maybe?

Lucy: what's the Arrrrr! value for that scatter plot?

I guess so. It goes from "How is my child doing?" to "Is my primary-school-age child beating other kids?"

If we take out the special schools, that goes down to 0.0738. This is what we would call a "poor" fit.

"Poor fit". L O bloody L....Bonk.…

how little Jemima compares with Sally, Rangi or Usuf

John Minto speaking for QPEC (on Radio NZ in the last quarter hour) said that lower decile schools tend to use the extra funding they get to pay for more teachers per student. Danyl graphed the relationship…

I think the point of contention here is that, instead of "truth to power", this is just "some bullshit interpretation of meaningless numbers to power".

This fundamentally misunderstands the role of the media in a democracy.

Truth to power. Public accountability with public money. Etc.

It's not their job to improve the education system. Or to help police catch criminals. Or…

Che, have you got a leopard-skin paint job on your car?

why i don't work in policy i really have no idea.

This is in fact a classic example of the thick plotting.

maybe. the literature is pretty clear. the education of the parents is far more significant than the quality of the school environment or teaching.

reference pending...

i think i remember that another significant factor…

you seem to have written down what i was thinking

I hadn't realised there was a default for that in Excel.

A scatological scatter plot, if you will.

More spatter than scatter.

Our media should be working to improve our education system, instead we get this.

Now it gets really difficult to plot.

It appears so.

So not only is the y axis full of shit…

But in statistics a relationship is defined by the probability of the occurance of that relationship by pure chance. A relationship has no meaning unless there is a probability. While we are probably wrong to do so…

No – and they don’t measure performance against the primary school curriculum either. But the level of resourcing available at tiny rural schools is extremely likely to have an impact on national standards scores. A single-teacher country school will not, for example, have…

Wouldn't that be an arrow to through the eye?

Still, it states:

In fact, buried within the national standards dross is valuable information about how boys are struggling, the decline…

They're really not. Very roughly speaking, r gives you an indication of whether the two variables have a relationship, r^2 provides an indication of how much variance in the data can be explained. r^2 =1 means…

Yes. See http://dimpost.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/well-below-standard-in-analysis/

Agreed.

National Standards don't address a comprehensive education.

But the value on the y axis is probably a lot of shit.

Not really much point in plotting shit vs real.

Yep. I have no idea why they're in the data set.

Most of the other low scoring, high ratio schools are remote rural low decile schools with, like one teacher and eleven students. Amazingly they aren't delivering a comprehensive…

They probably are but it's worth looking, outliers are often very informative.

I'm pretty sure "r value" is slang for R^2. They are the same thing.

The real problem here is confounding variables.

Why does the "Goodness of Fit" explanation talk about "R^2" but the table above it talks about the "r value" – or are these unrelated?