Ah, another day of Study 1....

Well, this time, the lecture was given by Tony Vinson, who is a rather prominent statician researcher into a lot of things for the Australian and NSW Government. His latest study was actually into the effectiveness of NSW Public Education, and well, quite sadly it was very lacking.

He has also been involved in other studies around the place.
However, his lecture was actually quite interesting in some aspects, because he was talking about the effects of certain factors in living locality that directly impacted on education.
Things like a low birth rate, high mortality rate, and other interesting figures that might not normally be associated with education were actually studied and compared to education factors such as drop out of students, and scores from the schools.

The correlation that was theorised, and in fact demonstrated, thus proving the hypothesis at least more than partially correct, was that places even of high socioecconomical status, that had communities who did not band together in certain aspects, would not generate a living condition that valued education. And communities that did, with better community support and services (thus related to mortality and birth rates in some ways) also cared about education thus their schools did markedly better.

Very interesting stuff.