Describing the Capital Region With BusRev Data

Describing the Region

To: Those Interested in Regional Meanings of k-12 Education
From: David Wiles
Re:   Making Sense of the Capital Region Using Business Review Ratings

Since the first of the semester we have wrestled with the premise that the Business Review ratings of seventy nine k-12 districts in ten counties of upstate New York comprise a geographic entity called the "Capital Region"

As a follow up to class discussion, the "1993 Model" measures were used to determine what varied systematically with the l995 Business Review ratings of school productivity. As with the class demonstration, the following descriptors were submitted to stepwise regression:

l993-l994 Regents diploma percents;
l993-1994 college bound intentions;
secondary dropout rate;
l993-l994 teacher turnover;
pupils per square mile;
l993-l994 k-12 enrollment;
combined wealth ratio;
census poverty index;
free and reduced lunch eligibility;
tax rate per $1000;
full value of property per enrolled pupil;
percent spending for direct teaching;
percent spending for administration of instruction and media;
percent spending for general school government;
percent spending for transportation;

The results of the stepwise regression set the stage for your Business Review exercise. On the following pages you will find both multiple regression and analysis of variance statistics applied to the descriptors found to be statistically significant by stepwise regression.

EXERCISES

Would you guess that the l993-l994 Regents diploma percents are a better "fit" with the Business Review rating or with the University Press Regent Points count? How would you set up an exercise to assess this using the l993 Model?
What is it about the Business Review composite measure that seems to "favor" free lunch eligibility more than combined wealth ratio as a wealth capacity measure of the Capital Region?
What would you guess the "beta scores" calculated from the standard error of the beta coefficient would say about the amount of "systematic variation" we were discussing in terms of individual measures "within" the correlation squared value generated by the multiple regression equation? Remember our class discussion about "standard error" in the Greg Camilli article?
If you were going to describe the Capital Region as an area to pilot test the state wide implementation of the Regents driven secondary reform effort what would you say about the individual descriptors that exhibit the most (and least) systematic variation for networking strategies among the seventy nine disticts?

FOR WEB CHECKING OVER THE SUMMER

Federal Budget Process http://www.ed.gov/news.html#budget;
State Budget Process http://www.state.ny.us/access.html;
New York State Education Budget http://www.nysed.gov/;
School Performance Data on Each NYS District http://www.nysed.gov/chap655/distlist.html;
Census Data Profile of Each NYS District http://www.nysed.gov/chap655/cenlist.html;
NYS Education Commissioner Comments on Standards http://www.summit96.ibm.com/brief/papers/high.html

If you plan to come to Florida this summer http://www.surfinfo.com/html/surf.html.

If you wish to send me a message or comment about the Business Review exercise e-mail.