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I apologize if this is the wrong forum to ask the question, but has
anyone noticed a very strange social attack taking place over in the
formal education world? I ask because the next steps taken may affect
our environment more directly.

There is a growing push, recently championed by the Secretary of
Education, to create a national registry of all college students, a
"unit database". The purported goal of this registry is to "allow the
agency to measure a college's performance more accurately by generating
better information about retention and graduation rates and by enabling
the agency, for the first time, to track the academic progress of
transfer students".

This, as far as I can tell, is a lie. The reality of statistics is that
for reasonably large samples, the average value estimated by the sample
really and truly represents the performance of the entire population.
And a reasonably large sample may be as small as 10 individuals,
although the true number needed is a function of the population size and
distribution. The upshot, however, is that the only reason for creating
this database is to allow tracking of individuals. As individuals. Who
in the educational system really needs or wants to do that?

The disingenuous misuse and ignoring of science and statistics to
justify the database is not uncommon. I do not understand the need for
such an insane collection of data, and the basic dishonesty and
magnitude of opportunity for abuse frightens me... 

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