Hey look…there’s a part 2!

John Tierney has an interesting piece up at the Atlantic about how national high school rankings are not only meaningless, but actually harmful.

He doesn’t quibble much with local rankings, and agrees that if done correctly they can provide good information for residents.  As for national level rankings though, he says this:

let’s call national rankings of high schools what they are: nonsense. There is no way to say, with any degree of accuracy at all, where any given high school ranks in relation to others in terms of how good it is or how challenging it is. 

Now this seems pretty sensible to me.  Ranking all the schools in a given state against each other can be meaningful, though more so within ranges than with strict numbers (is there really a meaningful difference between #34 in the state and #35?).  But to pluck a few from around the country?  That’s not even useful.  When my husband and I went to buy a house, we knew the general area we were looking at, and school rankings were one of many factors we looked at when picking a town to buy in.  I’m pretty sure most people  do something similar.  This works of course because we already had the region picked out and knew the trade offs that came with the individual regions.  You’re not going to use national rankings like this.

Additionally, he notes that at least one of the national lists (the “Challenge Index” from the Washington Post) literally uses only one metric to determine a challenging high school: the number of AP (or similar) tests taken by the seniors at the high school, divided by the number of seniors:

Note that the numerator is not even the number of such exams passed, but merely the number taken. So, a given school can rise on the list by increasing the number of its students who take “advanced” classes. Conversely, schools that are more discerning and thoughtful about which students ought to be taking AP classes end up suffering in the rankings. So, the list produces nonsensical anomalies such as high schools with very low graduation rates ranking much higher on the “Challenge Index” than excellent schools that don’t game the ranking system…

This idea of ranking interested me.  Ultimately, we actually picked the school district we did in part because of the options it holds for the not-so-academically inclined.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s in the top 20% of high schools in the state, but not by much.  More importantly, the regional technical high school is here, and there’s opportunities to learn how to make a good living even if college isn’t your thing.  I live in a state with a great educational system, and my town is no exception.  I’m less worried about AP tests, and more worried about school districts that might push kids in to inappropriate classes to keep their numbers up, to the detriment of the child.  While a certain baseline level of knowledge should be mandatory, I want my son to be challenged, but not tortured.  I’m suspicious of schools who try to hard on these lists, because school ranking and the best interest of the child don’t always collide.

Looking further down the line, it’s interesting to note that even more advanced methodologies almost always use the percent of kids headed to college as a judge of the high school’s rigor.  As college costs continue to spiral and become and worse and worse investment, I’m curious if we’re going to see a bigger and bigger divide between rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods in terms of rankings.  This could drive people out of the poorer neighborhoods, not because the schools were actually worse, but because the metric used to assess them is so contingent on parents have the cash to send their kids to college.  Things to ponder.

I saw a weird headline last week about how teens interest in Facebook has been waning.

I was curious what constituted “waning”, and it appears that most of the proof is that other social media platforms are growing quickly.  What was interesting is that buried in the report is the Facebook ubiquity level among teams: 94%.

I’m sort of curious how any software that has that level of ubiquity could be doing anything other than “waning”.  It certainly can’t be going up.

Also entertaining: Facebook execs called Facebooks loss of young people an “urban legend”.  I’m pretty sure a company that’s less than 10 years old shouldn’t describe anything as an urban legend.

Just for giggles, here’s the growth chart:

Well, I missed towel day.

Here’s a infographic:

Interesting stuff from Juice Analytics…30 days to better data storytelling.

Also, just in time for summer, a whole bunch of science reading.  I just finished Space Chronicles and am starting My Beloved Brontosaurus.

Speaking of dinosaurs, here’s the list of best to worst.

On a fun note, here’s 20 biopic actors and the famous people they played.  I always thought Charlize Theron deserved every bit of that Oscar she got for Monster.

In other news, here’s the top 10 species discovered in 2012.  The Semachrysa jadeis my favorite story.  It was found on Flickr.

Ann Althouse linked to an article about the struggle of working class male undergrads vs middle-class undergrads:

I didn’t mention it in my post yesterday, but part of the impetus to my father sending me the link about the water fluoridation was an ongoing discussion we have about the reputation of Republicans as “anti-science”.  I actually get asked about this a lot, and my standard answer tends to be something along the lines of “I think almost everyone is anti-science”.

You may noticed I’ve added my Twitter feed to the side bar.  I’ve just started messing with it a bit, but I’m putting up some interesting links that I don’t get a chance to write about here, and it felt weird to keep things separate.  

My Dad sent me an article today about Portland’s ongoing debate about putting fluoride in their water.

There’s a lot of interesting science around water fluoridation, but that’s not what caught my eye.  What I noticed was this paragraph:

 Almost every credible national, state, and local health and science organization—private and public—gives its blessing to optimal levels of water fluoridation: The American Medical Association, the American Dental Association, the Environmental Protection Agency, the World Health Organization, American Academy of Family Physicians, and  the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which named the measure one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20^th century. They all agree that fluoridated water is perfectly safe and extremely effective at preventing tooth decay.

I was intrigued by that paragraph because the link they provide for the organizations that support water fluoridation has 11 pages of organization names and their statements supporting it.

While there’s many well known names on there, I was thinking about how hard it really is to know about lesser known organizations, and how easy it is to confuse various organization names.

Example: the American Medical Association is one of the biggest medical groups in the country.  The Association of American Physicians is a group dedicated to furthering biomedical research.  The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons is a group dedicated to “fighting socialized medicine and the government takeover of medicine”.

Now you might recognize the difference between the first one and the other two, but my guess is most people will not remember which one is which 20 minutes after you finish reading this blog post.

Now I’m certainly not saying that these 11 pages are crap…there’s some big names on that list.  What I am saying is that random names of groups is something people must take some due diligence to investigate.  I’m sure that the anti-fluoridation people could also come up with a long list of organizations that support them, even if it represented far fewer people.  In this age of propaganda, we must remember that organization names alone may not be enough to convince people.   Too much data causes overload, and we can’t blame people for this.  Now go brush your teeth.