Sorry, Cav

I didn't get any good photos of bikes today, so it's back to crunching numbers from MySchool again. Yes, I must be weird - I find doing a spot of number crunching to be quite soothing and engaging.

Tonight's exercise was to pick another area of Sydney and to bring in another 15 school's worth of data. I chose the Auburn-Granville area, which is probably best known as being the home of a bloody big mosque. Most of the suburbs in the area are on the poor side, so pulling them in just added another slab of green dots to the graph above.

However, one dot appeared up the top - I had a look into it, and found that I had included the state school at Newington. This is one of those new suburbs that popped up after the Olympics on the old Naval armoury near Homebush. It's a very nice, middle class area. Brand new, very shiny. It's no surprise then that it sticks out like a sore thumb compared to Auburn, and has results on par with rich areas like the lower north shore and the inner west.

I've stuck in three purple markers though - these are middle income suburbs, but their results are crap. I went back and had a look at the data - these places are probably well known to most Sydneysiders as the home of drive-by shootings and Muslim gangsters. So the residents there are doing OK economically, but living in a crime infested neighbourhood in the midst of lots of gangsters is not that great for the school results. As 1735099 commented, values and community has a lot to do with it.

So next time someone starts raving that public education needs wads more money, ask them if more money will buy a better set of values. If not, tell them to keep their filthy hands out of your pockets.