The New Math

Here are the numbers provided by the consultant in its preliminary report to the school board on redrawing the boundaries for middle school now that they're CLOSING my daughter's school. This is Option A, and the school board members and the superintendent were practically high-fiving themselves when it was presented. [Presented, by the way, with no advance notice to the public that it would be a topic of discussion and without posting the report online before the meeting.]


School A
Enrollment = 821
ELL = 33%
FRL = 42%


School B

Enrollment = 793

ELL = 20%

FRL = 23%

Difference

Enrollment = -23

ELL = -13%

FRL = -19%

Are you a math person? Or does it make your head hurt? I'm a math person. Specifically, I'm a statistics person, having spent many years in my social research and market research life comparing sets of numbers. Do you see the glaring errors here? It's in the "Difference." The English Language Learners difference isn't 13% -- the cause of the celebration among the board members -- it's 13 percentage points. The actual difference is 42%. For the Free/Reduced Lunch students, the difference is 47%.

But you want to know the more egregious error made by the consultants and the school district? They never included School C -- a K-8 school -- in the calculations. They counted all those School C students, 180 of them, as attending School A.

And do you know how they found out about these errors? Apparently, it was discovered when some bitch sent an email to all the board members, copying the not-to-be-trusted superintendent, pointing them out. She did manage, in her email, to not point out the very correct assertion that 100% of the school district leaders are complete morons.