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Saturday, January 7, 2012

“let some of the players with lower batting averages go” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

“let some of the players with lower batting averages go” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…:

“let some of the players with lower batting averages go”

Yesterday, I wrote a post (see “The message is to fire people sooner rather than later”) commenting on the big (non peer reviewed) study featured in The New York Times about the long-term impact on students of having “high value added” teachers.

One of the researchers was interviewed on the PBS News Hour last night, and a comment seems to me to point out a huge blind spot in the study. He said:

I think — you know, let me make an analogy here. Suppose you are managing a baseball team, say, the Boston Red Sox, and you’re trying to do as well as you can. You have players with different batting averages. One approach you might take is to bring the hitting coach out and try to raise the batting averages of the players you