Robert J. MacG. Dawson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Therefore, I would not expect regression to the mean to be sufficient
> to explain the observed outcome (in which "practically no" top schools
> met expectations); and I conclude that the goals may well have been
> otherwise unreasonable. Indeed, requiring every school to improve its
> average by at least two points every year is not maintainable in the
> long run, and only justifiable in the short term if there is reason to
> believe that *all* schools are underperforming.
This is the second time in the last two months that I've said to myself "I
wish W. Edwards Deming were still alive." He always railed against
arbitrary numerical performance goals that were set with no understanding
of the system that produced the results and no specific plan for changing
the system to produce better results. He'd probably be quoting Lloyd
Nelson's quip about such goals, to the effect that if you say that you
want to increase, say, revenues by 5% this year and you don't plan to
change the system, then you're admitting that you've been slacking because
if the current system allowed for it, you should already have done it.
(The other context in which I thought of Deming was the election
results. Deming insisted that it was meaningless to talk about the "true
value" of some quantity in the absence of an operational definition of how
to measure it. In this context, I'm sure he would have insisted that it
was nonsense to assert that this method or that method of counting
disputed votes gave a closer answer to the "true vote count" because the
latter doesn't even exist until you specify a particular method of
evaluating ambiguous ballots.)
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