Question: You think that the best sampling strategy is stratified sampling. You’d like to list the characteristics of schools in this district, and then randomly select 80 schools who roughly match the demographic characteristics of the entire population of schools in this district. Forty, (40) of these would come from schools that had the experimental curriculum and 40 would come from schools that kept the old curriculum.

However, people from the school board have made the following statements regarding sampling. One well meaning school board member has argued that "because we are interested in how successful the curriculum is, we should sample the 80 schools with the best results from the experimental curriculum." The school board member who represents one of the poorest neighborhoods has said that "everybody knows that schools in poor neighborhoods are the most in need of reform. Therefore, our sample should be the 80 schools with the lowest household income among students." The school board member who authored the new curriculum has told you "look, to be honest, the old curriculum was horrible compared to the new one, but many teachers and parents are simply reluctant to change. The Secretary of Education testified in the US Congress that 'this curriculum is quite honestly the best curriculum in the country. It would be foolish not to roll it out to all schools immediately.' The best thing for our kids is to have the best performing schools with the new curriculum and the worst performing schools with the old curriculum in the sample...the bigger we can make the impact look, the greater the support will be to adopt the new curriculum district wide."

Describe what is wrong methodologically with each of the three suggestions you received from the various school board members. You will want to focus on issues such as sampling error, the sorts of biases that will be introduced from such sampling methods, how you might expect to see those biases manifested in the data/data analysis, and how these issues will affect your ability to comment on the district's original question as to whether or not it would be a good idea to roll out the new curriculum to all schools in the district.

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