A while back I fell into a debate on twitter about whether OFSTED/Raise Online stats were wrong. It was about something that’s at the heart of interpreting what’s really going on underneath data. It was about how we can have any confidence that results didn’t just happen by luck.
I can’t say how many times I have watched school managers pick over vast grids of figures and attribute every tiny up or down to a decision they’ve made or not made, each time my statistics heart has broken a little (yes even data monkeys have hearts).
It seems to be one of our idiosyncrasies that when we see something presented as a number it takes on the status of unquestionable fact. The number for these children is higher than the number for those children because of something I did, fact.
But there is a hell of a lot that…
View original post 1,875 more words
The Echo Chamber 