Numbers Are Way More Than Seeds And Stems

For almost 20 years, I have been trying to make sense of how the public school system functions. I would have never been drawn to this except for the countless numbers of isolated incidents that I experienced. It became clear to me that there was more to the problem than just the particular issue of the day, week, month, year, individual or site. In other words, I recognized that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, as seen here in this context:

Schools of Psychology "Unlike the behaviourists, the Gestaltists believed that behaviour should be studied as an organized pattern rather than as separate incidents of stimulus and response. The familiar saying "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts" expresses an important principle of the Gestalt movement."

In today's news, we see this:

I-Team: State Admits "Anomalies" in Violence Numbers - cbs4.com: "In Miami-Dade County schools three years ago, police found 152 weapons and filed reports in each case.

But if you go on Florida's Department of Education's violence tracking website you would think that in Miami-Dade County there were ZERO weapons were found on schools campuses in 2006-2007.

'This certainly does look like an anomaly when you see zero reported weapons,' said Florida's Department of Education's Press Secretary Thomas Butler. 'So we did talk to the district about it. And they mentioned there was an administration change quite possibly clerical error that occurred.'"

Just look at how many times I have written about "numbers":PRO on HCPS: numbers

How long can we trust?