School funding: more complicated than deciles
Most of the coverage of the school decile changes has worked on the basis that decile tells you everything important about government funding levels. I had thought this was true (not being a parent or school teacher, I hadn’t studied the matter carefully). Harkanwal Singh’s new interactive in the Herald shows that this is a major oversimplification. There are ‘steps’ within the deciles, and the range across decile 1 is larger than the difference between the top of decile 1 and the bottom of decile 2.
The piece combines maps and tables: the table are much better if you want to look for particular schools, but the maps are interesting for looking at geographical trends. For example, I wasn’t expecting funding increases for schools in the Onehunga/Royal Oak/Mt Roskill area.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
School can also lose help from charities when they change deciles too.
“And the rejigged decile ratings have another critical impact, which is that schools can lose the ability to access help from charities such as KidsCan, Duffy Books, food in schools programmes and access to social workers. Suddenly, with little or no change to the students’ circumstances, that extra support is gone.”
http://saveourschoolsnz.com/2014/11/27/decile-review-causing-blunt-force-trauma/
9 years ago