On Tue, 09 Nov 2004 11:27:41 -0500, alexy wrote:

With small schools and small classes, students with learning
disabilities have a disproportionately large affect on the test
results.
I don't understand this one. Why is that? Fresh air leads to learning
disabilities, or is it too much maple sugar?

I'm not saying that Vermont has a disproportionetly higher incidence
of learning disabled students than other states. But they do have
lots of very small schools. If the school has just a few learning
disabled kids, they tend to drag down the scores because there are so
few other students in the class. NOTE: I'm not saying that all the
small schools have LD kids in each class. Things get much worse if one
of these small schools is unlucky enough to have several LD kids.
Larger schools get to bury their LD student's scores in a much much
larger student population.

As always at this point in a straying discussion, I regret my adding
to the drift. I will post no more on this subject.

My apologies.

Corky Scott