The point of grades is to have the stakeholders in a child's education informed of the child's progress so corrections to the child's behavior the the instruction can be made. Pre-federal funding of state education, the primary stakeholders were parents and local school teachers/administrators (Children are NOT the primary stakeholders. They are not independent of their parents and the parent's wishes re: education are primary unless and until the children come of age or are legally emancipated). Now that the Federal government provides a good chunk of money to the States that is used for education, the Federal government has become a stakeholder. Grades are a relatively standard way for parents and other stakeholders to assess a child's performance. As a parent, I would not give up my right as the primary stakeholder in my child's education to teachers or some level of government. Schools that don't use grades in their assessment AND share them with parents are short changing the involvement of the primary stakeholder (even over the child) in the child's education.

Actually, in the 1800s, large poor families could supplement their income (support the children they have) by having their children contribute to the wealth of the family. Today, our government now pays for poor families to have children. How is that better from a cultural standpoint? In the past: people decided to have children and had the children work to help pay for the family....we removed/limited the ability of children to work....if things had stopped there then things would have been a bit better but we replaced children working with government payouts and handouts. We've created a subculture of poor people in this country. The government has become the slave master and poor people the slaves to the State. (Not to mention the poor working saps whose wealth gets taken to pay for poor people to have children that they cannot take care of financially and, in many case, should never have had in the first place. If you cannot take care of a child, then having a child by choice should be considered child abuse.)

I'm with you on making failure and repeating grades a real possibility. Whether or not students treat something as important should be the focus and responsibility of the parents not the school system. The school should provide the opportunity to learn and learned teachers who can explain things but that's it. I also think that the lack of discipline in schools, allowing recidivist trouble makers and students who do not want to lean to remain in school, is an unnecessary burden on those who want to learn. We'd be better off sending such students to reform school or letting their parents take care of them.

Actually, parents let their children work; so blame the forcing on the parents. I actually think we have it worse now. We have parents who do not support the education of their children AND they will continue to have children. Since these children cannot work (before 15 in most places), society now has to take care of such children and we can't do it. We have created a sub-culture in the United States where the people in that culture do not support education and live off of government largess AND that subculture continues to grow. I would rather parents be able to let their children work to learn about the value of a dollar than to continue (because of supposed high-minded mores) funding the growth of a subculture that produces many of the problem adults in society.

I don't think it's particularly tragic. I don't think you can explain to those under 18 why certain things are "good". I think the best you can do is ask students up through high school to learn certain topics. Wisdom comes with time and that's ok. I think expectations for a public-school system are often way too high. I don't expect teachers to put on a good show or tap dance or make students motivated to learn; that should be the responsibility and goal of the parents of those students. When teachers are responsible for teaching students whose abilities and interest cover the gamut of possibilities, it's too much to ask to tailor approaches to specific individuals. I also don't think it can be implemented universally because: a) Since we don't live in a fascist society, we don't take children away from their parents when their parents don't give the students the support that they need (and I don't support taking children away because I am comfortable with liberty) b) Cultural norms put enormous pressure on children to NOT learn (we can't stop this in a free society) c) We do not have the will to require teachers to have substantial knowledge; we allow people to teach or manage people who teach who are obviously incompetent (see the guy in the article; he shouldn't be involved with teaching anyone but his own children)

Hrm, if everyone passes the test then it's not a good test of ability is it? Should school be about teaching practical skills? Don't the set of practical skills depend upon what you do in life? Are you advocating forcing people to pick a career in high school (or earlier) and have them focus on the particular skills needed for the career they select? Wouldn't it be better if the purpose of high school and below would be to teach kids how to think logically in general and then fill in their empty heads with specific knowledge about various things so that it helps them A) not be taken advantage of later in life (e.g. don't take out a variable interest mortgage) and B) make them a well-rounded individual? I don't want primary and secondary education to be focused on producing a better assembly line worker. I think it better to make well-rounded students and let them decide if they want to be an assembly line worker.

See the relatively recent teacher cheating scandal in Atlanta: http://www.ajc.com/news/investigation-into-aps-cheating-1001375.html I don't see an issue with sharing copies of tests AFTER tests have been completed but sharing copies of tests with people like the guy in the article (who appears to be incompetent) is just asking for more cheating (people who don't support the notion of standardized tests or the content of the tests or who have a vested interest in their school looking good on the test may be inclined to cheat).

Well, people just need to be taught to think logically; and since math and statistics are, fundamentally, exercises in logic, learning them should help students think logically. Unfortunately, I'm not convinced that students are being taught how to think logically and THAT affects their ability to learn math(s). I think requiring people to take formal classes in logic would do more for an educated populous than focusing specifically on math scores. A good read is the book Innumeracy: http://www.amazon.com/Innumeracy-Mathematical-Illiteracy-Consequences-Vintage/dp/0679726012

The FCAT problems in the sampler seemed reasonable to me. Perhaps the hardest part about the test is reading comprehension. It seems reasonable to expect 10th grade students to be taught to parse a statement or series of statements to find out what is being asked of them. Also, since the purpose of these standardized tests are to estimate where an individual falls "among the student population" on math ability, there must be questions on the test that can only be answered by a small percentage of individuals; otherwise the test wouldn't differentiate between students of different levels of ability/knowledge.

In general, I'm not a big fan of exploratory modeling without a follow-up process of validation. And I'm not a fan of using the data use to build a model to then validate the model (hello climate change) One can find predictors of outcomes (e.g. oh look, the probability of a terrorist attack is higher if it's a Tuesday afternoon) that are statistically significant just because of the large amount of data available. Model-building without validation is just "correlation does not imply causation". Unfortunately, model-building is less a science and more a consensus building among professionals in a given field (appeal to authority). That's why I distrust the models used to predict temperature changes by the pro-man-made climate change scientists. In a closed-loop of like-minded individuals, who, for example, don't see any reason not to validate models with the same data used to build the models, you end up with process that produces non-challenged work.

That doesn't make much sense. Models don't just spit out one answer. Models will report estimates and estimates of the uncertainty (typically standard errors) of the estimates. These uncertainty estimates define the probabilistic distribution from which the events being modeled derive. Of course, there can be quite complex underlying probabilistic distributions; not just the simple case of a one-dimensional distribution defined by one parameter. Computers are useful when the number of dimensions of the underlying probabilistic distribution is large and also when the form of the underlying distribution is not some convenient structure. However, while a supercomputer can handle models with complex underlying probabilistic distributions, this doesn't mean that you'll get anything useful out of the modeling exercise. You still need to have lots of data on events (and non-events) to try and predict the events with any degree of accuracy and precision.

Having a supercomputer won't help predict rare events unless you have a particular mathematical model for those events already (see physics). If you don't have a model for how rare events occur (terrorism events, natural disasters) then a computer (of any type) won't help you predict them. If you want to build a model then you needs lots and lots of events (and nonevents) and associated data to try and build a model. If you have a lot of data, perhaps you'd need a supercomputer to investigate the interim models you come up with before you arrive at a final model. You can't predict rare events. Modeling, and statistics in general, is designed to make statements about things given sufficient data. By definition, a one-off event or extremely rare event doesn't provide enough data to allow generalization (or inference).

It's easier for a citizen to change his own behavior and not give his money to the nefarious corporation. Because of the desire for people to want "free stuff" or money from "Obama's stash", it is much harder to elect a Federal government that has fiscally sane policies. p.s. It wasn't a company who passed a law saying all U.S. citizens must give money to a private company in order to have health insurance; it was a bunch of elected democrats and an authoritarian President who passed a law to force individuals to give money to private companies. The way out of this scenario is for people to realize that centralized power over everything in life is going to be horrible and uncontrollable. The masses want more and more free stuff and the billions we spend on education have done nothing to create a mass of educated and independent people in the U.S.

He has a valid complaint. The key issue here is one of partitioning of government responsibilities. According to the Constitution, there are supposed to be two types of Governments in the U.S.; State and Federal with the State having most of the responsibilities and the Federal Gov't having a few specific responsibilities. If the country hadn't gone off the deep end starting with FDR, then the Federal government would have limited power (and thus limited ability to pry into people's private lives) and we could treat States like companies. If someone didn't like the government in a State, move to another; much like if I don't like Comcast, I don't have to use it. Unfortunately, it seems as if many people do not care to differentiate between the two levels of government and they appear to think that the Federal government should have ultimate authority over everything. Because of this attitude, and because it's readily apparent that people will vote for people who promise them free stuff, we are in the fiscal shape we are in and we cannot just "move to another State" to find a government that is in better shape fiscally; though I hear Canada has elected a conservative government and , wouldn't that be ironic, immigrating to Canada to find some sanity.

Not sure I see the point of this technology. Since the data provider has access to the raw unencrypted data (else how could the data provider see the unecrypted analysis results), wouldn't it be cheaper to develop a standalone analysis program for the data provider? Why encrypt, transmit, apply complex analysis process, retransmit, and decrypt results when one could just analyze the results onsite?