And thus the use of a tolerance, as a threshold. - Jimminy, CoG of FF

If there's a financial incentive for getting everyone's BP to 120/80 exactly, how many more blood pressures do you think are going to be recorded as exactly perfect? - Victor Ganata

It'll be another Texas Miracle! - Andrew C (✓)

Victor, that's the beauty of it, it can also show cheating, by inflation, as long as a large majority aren't doing it. It results in anomalous data, that is higher than it should be, also I never pointed out any financial incentive, hiring, firing, or any other recommendation, besides using it as a comparison. - Jimminy, CoG of FF

How would you know that the effect isn't the result of more aggressive blood pressure management, rather than people just making numbers up? Specifically, what differences in the data would there be? - Victor Ganata

And then throw in the people who are unhealthy because of too LOW of blood pressure numbers. - Rochelle

This isn't just idle speculation either since CMS is hell-bent on enacting pay-for-performance for Medicare reimbursements as well, with private insurance sure to follow. I guess we all get to be guinea pigs. - Victor Ganata

Healthcare is much more subjective, than education, you absolutely can't reduce health to a number; I'd say you can't for education either, but they do it anyways. Why not make use of it? How do you determine if it's actual or virtual, you can see if they changed rapidly, assuming 2 different points, for the person, that would be a tip off, and a recommended audit. If you have enough data points to compare it with, it can give you a suggestion, that it might be poor quality, inflation. - Jimminy, CoG of FF

I actually think health care is a lot less subjective than education, since there are a lot of reliable, reproducible measurements. I'm not convinced standardized testing is all that useful a marker for success in education. As far as I can tell, all it really predicts is how well you do on subsequent standardized tests. (Which is precisely what they seem to be measuring in the LAUSD data.) And while there's a correlation between the SAT and how well you do in college, most of this effect seems to be related to SES more than anything else. - Victor Ganata

It usually takes anywhere between 6 months to 3 years to get someone's blood pressure under control, so usually there are a lot of data points to compare. While I realize there are methods to detect fabricated data, how easy would it be to see if there were anomalies if everyone ends up doing it? - Victor Ganata

Victor, I'm not actually talking about Standardized testing at all, everything I've discussed has been class averaged GPA, and thus it's less subjective, because there are fewer variables to deal with. Victor, that's one flaw I've pointed out, small data sets, and having the majority greater than 70% begin cheating, it would reduce the ability to find the anomalies. - Jimminy, CoG of FF

Keep it local. Let principles fire teachers. Let parents choose schools. Limit the reach of a school board to a single school, or at most a highschool and feeders. - Alex Scrivener from iPhone

I don't see how splitting up the LAUSD into several hundreds of different school boards could possibly actually save money. - Victor Ganata

Jimminy, I think GPA is even worse in terms of reliability. I know in the UC system, they're far more interested in your SAT scores than they are in your GPA, since inflation is so rampant. And the reason why I mention standardized testing is because that was what the LAUSD data was derived from. - Victor Ganata

People are less likely to waste what they see as their own money than if it is State money. - Alex Scrivener from iPhone

Victor, LAUSD, had a delta value, my suggestion doesn't, and it's more on deducing, variation, in teachers grades. The idea is based off part of this lecture, http://ff.im/q4CTg, and recommendation logic. GPA, is much more objective than SAT, it allows you to look into normalize the data, much more accurately, though easier for a teacher to modify. - Jimminy, CoG of FF

How can GPA possibly be more objective than the SAT? Each school and each class in a particular school will have different standards as to what constitutes an A. And GPAs are a lot easier to cap than the SAT. At least one-third of an incoming UC freshman class probably have straight-up 5.0s. - Victor Ganata

Well for one, I'm talking about teachers, not students. SAT, is probably more objective for a student, but when you're trying to compare a teacher's value, not all students will have taken a SAT, and you can adjust the average GPA for the class, removing the variable bias in students using the average overall GPA for the students in the class, you can't do this accurately with SAT's, they're too infrequently updated. - Jimminy, CoG of FF

I was just using the SAT as an example of a standardized test that supposedly has good reproducibility and which does correlate with how well someone does in college. But California does administer standardized testing from grade 2-11, which is what the LAUSD data was looking at. The thing with GPA, at least with regards to admissions, is that the difference between a 5.0 from one school vs a 5.0 from another school might actually be more significant than the difference between a 3.5 and a 3.54. The fact that students GPAs are more likely to cap out seems like a huge limitation in statistical analysis. - Victor Ganata

I actually don't doubt that some schools will benefit if LAUSD is split up, but there will also be schools that will suffer greatly. I'm not sure how much it would change the funding mechanism, though, since that was written into the state's Master Plan for Education, and all California residents know just how effective the legislature is at effecting change, which is not at all. - Victor Ganata