Search

This paper presents a rudimentary model of the public school system as an input-output process. The inputs are students' own abilities and attitudes, parental support, peer support, quality of the school system, community support, and society's posture with respect to education. Outputs are various categories of academic achievement as well as social competence, responsibility, self confidence, creativeness, ethics, and ambition. All these factors must be measured by index numbers or simple indicators. The model is a set of regression equations relating outputs to inputs. Some implementation of the model has been made possible by means of data gathered in the U.S. Office of Education's Equality-of-Educational-Opportunity Survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author attempt to show that there are important areas in which there is little or no contribution and in which operations analysis has the potential to make quite salient contributions. The first group of problems is associated with the general area of education. In the United States, national budget for education is well over half the size of the defense budget so that it is quite a respectable chunk of the gross national product and certainly it is a crucial element of continuing national posture. There may be something of a revolution coming to education because of the so-called teaching machine developments. The machine aspect may not be so important but surely the programmed learning idea is, because it will allow a student to move at his own pace. Another class of problems revolves around health. First of all there is the matter of what is a sensible budget allocation for health in the national account. Here, as in the case of education, one can find ridiculously large figures put together by proponents of this or that health program.

The article discusses resource allocation in higher education in the U.S. According to authors of the article, higher education may be regarded as a system. It consumes resources, such as money and manpower and it produces a number of outputs, such as educated people, occupational specialists, professional meetings and research. There is a production function involved and presumably it is possible to combine inputs in different ways to achieve desired combinations of outputs, although that has not yet been demonstrated. What makes the system difficult to deal with, among other things, is that its output is not easily specifiable and where one can agree on what the output is it is extremely difficult to quantify it. Those inputs are easier to handle, although there are some tricky costing problems and there is the further complication that it is not always clear whether some parts of the system are inputs or outputs. There is also the problem of which parts represent investment and parts represent consumption.

The article presents information about Samuel S. Wilks, a great contributor to statistics. Wilks' behavior toward applications was peculiarly split, he encouraged his students to work on applications, not always an easy thing to do in a strongly theoretical mathematics department; he often told students about applications that he regarded as "neat" or "cute" or "clever"; the statistical colloquium he guided often had speakers on practical applications of mathematical statistics; he himself wrote some practical papers in statistics, but in the classroom he rarely discussed applications. Repeatedly, however, practical problems explicitly influenced both his own publications and those of his students and Wilks often used applications as motivation for the discussion of distribution theory, usually going well beyond the needs of the original problem. The papers to be discussed exhibit incompletely and fragmentarily a major influence on the work of the man and his students. Wilks watched the development of the statistical theory of order statistics closely. Indeed he wrote a masterful summary of the literature. The general area involves the study of the statistical properties of ordered measurements.