Long way of saying... the math is beyond me.
Exactly - the actual Math is beyond anyone - there is no place where one can go and look up a school district's average IQ. But - sad to say - Economic groups do have enough of an slant to them to help one estimate mean IQ for a school district. SAT scores can help as well. If your district's scores on NCLB tests come out well above the state average, you can bet it's the mean IQ talking more than the wonderful teachers and systems. Just the fact that your district has a self-contained program very often means that you have a forward-thinking, well funded school system, with a noticible number of kids who need it in the first place. I've often daydreamed of pitching a self-contained program to the local school board as a way of raising our local property values....
Note - I am certianly not saying that one can estimate an individual's IQ from their economic circumstances.
((Digression Alert: I also suspect that once one gets to the far right hand tail of the curve, past 'Optonally Gifted,' that the association falls apart rather dramatically, or at least the error bars grow to ridiculous proportions. I am just speculating, and have no data. Since we have no reliable way to calculate LOG, we therefore can't really measure what happens after the 3rd SD.))
Anyway - what I do when I get to unknowable Math is to just 'wave to it' and try to remember that I'm simplifing, which is a fair way to see how far the numbers will take us.
Back to the numbers. If only 5.5 students were chosen out of the whole 550 students, then your program is taking the top 1% of their population. Looks like they are taking almost their top 3%.
Let's take a moment and imagine a town where 140 isn't in the top 3%. I don't have enough math to 'back calculate' what the mean IQ would be expected to be, or enough general information to know what the numbers are like in Silicon Valley or the suburbs of Washington DC, certian suburbs near Chicago and in Connecticut, but I'd love to know if anyone else has this information.
I still have no answer for you- but the odds are on yourside. I hate waiting, so I hope that this at least distracts you a bit.
Smiles,
Grinity
