Criteria

There seems to be a never-ending debate as to where education is better. Who’s more literate? Who’s more talented? And where: urban, suburban, or rural areas? It seems that yesterday, the Georgia department of education furthered the debate by releasing a report in which it stated that, of the 79 highest performing schools in the state, 46 are located within the metro Atlanta area.

That statistic may sound very convincing. And it may just be, but it depends on what parameters – or criteria – were used for the research. That’s what caught my eye.

Let me explain myself. By parameters, I mean the meanings of the words “highest performing” or “metro Atlanta”. Even though we all get a good sense of what they mean, or what they refer to, there’s no clear-cut definition for them. For example, I might consider a “high performing” school an establishment where students get 2400s on their SATs, while someone else may say that school of that kind would have students with 1700s on their SATs. Neither one is right, but both definitions are still viable.

Likewise, I might consider metro Atlanta to be composed of Buckhead and Midtown, while someone else may believe that metro Atlanta extends all the way to Johns Creek. What is metro Atlanta? It varies from person to person.

So what am I trying to get to? Well, there’s no real way to determine whether students perform better in an urban, suburban, or rural environment. There are simply too many variables and criteria to be kept in mind. If we can’t agree on what metro Atlanta is, how can we possibly compare large groups of students all at once?

My belief is that we, as humans, are all separate and too complicated to compare. We all specialize on certain things we like and we excel at. Otherwise, we’d become numbers on an infinite spreadsheet. But hold it. I think I’ll leave that for my next blog post.

Conrado Brenna

Source: http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/45-metro-schools-among-states-top-title-1-performi/nSs6T/