Agreed that the school system is not working as well as it could or
should. The modern american school system is a product of the
industrial age. It was find for turning out farmers and factory
workers/management 100 years ago, and up to 20 years ago, it may not
be an appropriate model now.
Could you show any studies from peer reviewed journals, or data from
national or govermental databases that support your conclusions
regarding competition in schools over the long term have produced
better results. This is a blanket statement that should be backed up
by data. I personally think that competition does not work as defined
by the NCLB act. More on that later.
The question you ask is too large. Perhaps you ought to review some
materials even before starting to discuss it. Here's a good starter on
an outline of what's needed to know as a background for the
discussion. http://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/345/345%20Review%202.htm
Now that said, one of the most general findings in psychology going
back to the mid 60's is that measures of attitude change do not
predict behavior with any degree of accuracy. Correlations between the
attitude change measure and a behavioral report are typically less
that .25. In other words about 6% of variation in the behavior can be
explained by changes in attitudes. I'll have to go into my texts to
get the exact numbers and stats. But the idea is that if you want to
see a change in behavior (in this case increased performance on a set
of standardized measures - which is the definition of progress
according to the NCLB act), measuring attitude change is a poor
predictor.
larry
On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 10:37:33 -0500, Andy Ousterhout
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> This all goes beyond my knowledge at this point, except for the everyone
> should be measured the same, which I agree with.
>
> My main objective was to show that this is not a simple issue, that smart,
> well intentioned and informed people do differ on this issue. And perhaps the
> issue is more complicated in that the dialogue may also have a subtext about
> national testing as a gage for judging the performance of schools. Bottom
> line is that:
>
> 1. The current education system is not working as well as we would like
> 2. Competition has proven to produce better results over time in many
> formats(anyone have an example were competition hasn't produced better results
> outside of this area?)
> 3. Charter schools do not prevent the other ideas that work within the
> existing system from being tried, except for potential impact on cash flow
> from less students(has this been tracked at all and connected with change in
> quality of education?)
>
> Question: While changing attitude does not directly correlate with changing
> behavior, what percentage of behavior change starts with attitude change? Or
> is this question a clear indicator that I don't understand stat's?
>
> Andy
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