

Department of Awful Statistics: Small Schools Edition - cwan
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/09/department-of-awful-statistics-small-schools-edition/62406/

======
zeteo
And that's not even the worst of statistical illusions. After reading about,
for example, Simpson's paradox

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_paradox>

I concluded I'll always be very wary of using statistics for anything. It's a
powerful tool, but also very easy to shoot yourself in the foot with. (Or to
get deceived by. And they don't even need to know statistics better than you
in order to fool you with some reasonable-looking analysis!)

------
pg
At the least the Gates Foundation has enough mathematical sophistication to
understand what they got wrong.

------
llimllib
Why link to the link? This is what you should have pointed to:
[http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09...](http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/the-
small-schools-myth.html)

------
blahedo
Oh! I thought the claim was that there was an error in the blue-grey box
somewhere, and I was feeling dumb for not seeing it. Then I finally read the
sentence at the end about the Gates Foundation, and I understood. :)

Aside: based on the percentages, it looks like there were 85 schools per
decile, or 850 schools total (give or take a few); in which case the total
percentages indicate that a total of 58 or 59 distinct schools made it onto
the Top 25 over a four-year period (23 of them from the smallest-decile
schools). So there really is a lot of variability in the winners. I'd be
interested to see a similar decile breakdown of schools that managed to get in
the top 25 for _at least two_ of the four years studied. That would seriously
damp the noise.

------
raleec
Hopefully the funding will be diverted into support for smaller class sizes.

------
narkee
The WTF here is how anybody drew a conclusion without performing a simple
statistical test for significance.

