sjdprods's blog

To the Superintendent and Members of the Board (sent 3/28):

At last Thursday's school board work session, Ms. Henning asked about the accuracy of the PSU demographic projections. The staff indicated that these projections were generally accurate; the only school identified as having had flawed projections was Forest Park.

A quick review of the information available on the PPS web site demonstrates that this is by no means the case, at least not when one is talking about long-term trends. While PSU's predictions may be reasonably accurate in the short term, that's likely because PSU re-normalizes predictions based on the prior year's enrollment. If one goes back to 2000, however, and compares the predictions for 2005 that were relied on then, to the actual enrollment for those schools in 2005 (taking into account, as best I can, changes due to boundary fluctuations and closures), there are a number of schools you see where the 5-year predictions for schools other than Forest Park proved to be off as much as 71%, with an average (absolute) error of 26% (well more than one full class of students), and a median (absolute) error of 19%. That's a long way from being "pretty good," as was suggested last Thursday. An Excel spreadsheet, excerpted below, summarizes my findings about the quality of 5-year projections.
 read more »

Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 09:23:50 -0800 (PST)
From: Jeff Dobbins
Subject: School Consolidation: A Modest Proposal
To: letters@news.oregonian.com

To the Editors:

PPS Superintendent Vicki Philips is considering the closure of even more schools – perhaps as many as 15 – in an effort to demonstrate a commitment to efficiency. While data indicates that closing schools saves very little money and will drive away families, that doesn't seem to faze her. Her theory? Bigger is better.

On that theory, though, why limit closures to just 15 schools?
 read more »