Case 2

Teacher SalariesThe following data from several years ago represent salaries (in dollars) from a school district in Greenwood, South Carolina.

21,900 10,600 11,500 12,800 14,700 19,500

19,500 16,600 19,500 22,560 16,200 101,000

Required Tasks:

1. First, assume you work for the school board in Greenwood and do not wish to raise taxes to increase salaries. Compute the mean, median, and mode, and decide which one would best support your position to not raise salaries. Second, assume you work for the teachers' union and want a raise for the teachers. Use the best measure of central tendency to support your position.

2. Explain how outliers can be used to support one or the other position. Which measure of central tendency can be misleading when a data set contains outliers?

3. If the salaries represented every teacher in the school district, would the averages be parameters or statistics?