Dear Editor:
To Mr. Michael Haney, Gilroy High graduate: Kiddo, you might
consider continuing to think about your positions rather than
setting them in concrete because you are wrong up one side and down
the other.
Dear Editor:
To Mr. Michael Haney, Gilroy High graduate: Kiddo, you might consider continuing to think about your positions rather than setting them in concrete because you are wrong up one side and down the other.
It is neither fair nor just on your part to charge Mrs. Walker with using education as a weapon; she presented her credentials when you insulted her by claiming that she lacked knowledge of statistics. As it turns out, she has rather more training in the subject than you will for many years yet.
For your information, you have not succeeded in “debunking” Mrs. Walker’s position. She presented her argument, you presented yours. She is right. You are wrong. Here are two reasons why.
First, Mrs. Walker did not use statistics in her discussion of Gilroy Unified School District performance. Statistics is a technique for making predictions about a population based on random samples. Mrs. Walker used the results of tests that are given to all students. Since the results include the entire population, they constitute facts, not probalistic inference. Statistics just ain’t in it.
You, Mr. Scott, and GUSD in general are using statistical inference to compare performance to “similar” schools. You are, in my opinion, making specious use of racial quotas to eliminate competitors who are kicking your pasty diversified rumps. Apparently the only way you all can find to get near that dizzying height of mediocrity: average.
Second, I’d like to share a little secret that neither you, nor Mr. Scott, nor, as far as I have seen in The Dispatch, anyone at GUSD seems to know.
Imagine, if you will, a local supermarket food distribution center. That facility has extensive refrigeration systems to prevent the food from rotting before distribution. Like all machines, refrigeration systems break down now and again. When they do, management calls a technician to come fix the problem. Refrigeration maintenance requires some knowledge of electronics, software, power distribution codes, brazing metallurgy, heat transfer, mechanical power transmission, gas and liquid flow, vapor pressure curves, dynamic phase equilibriums, phase transitions, pressure compensated regulators, and a lot of other stuff.
When one is sitting next to a broken machine surrounded by 30 tons of warming, perishable food, socioeconomic status, racial background, gender, and sexual preference do not matter a darn. All that matters is whether one knows how to fix the machine. If the machine gets fixed in time, life goes on. If it don’t, the people who were going to eat that food starve.
We have 300 million people in this country whose prosperity, comfort, and survival depend on the smooth functioning of a complex, scientifically sophisticated economy. If we, as a nation, fail to provide our young with the knowledge that they must have to be the mechanics, technicians, engineers, scientists, and leaders that are essential to that economy, then our future and that of our children will be poverty, hardship, and death.
Stuart Allen, Gilroy
Submitted Friday, July 23 to ed****@ga****.com.
