A question of significance to state legislators working with tight budgets is the spending for secondary education. The data in Table 8.6 are from the Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics and were considered by Merline (1991) in assessing the relationship between the amount of money spent on secondary education and various performance criteria for high-school seniors. Table 8.6 gives the spending ($) per high-school senior and the percentage of those seniors who graduated for each of the 50 states in the 1987-1988 school year.
Use the large-sample approximation to test the hypothesis of independence versus the alternative that spending per high-school senior and the percentage of seniors graduating are positively correlated. (Discuss any other social or economic factors that might impact on these data and, thereby, on the conclusion from this statistical analysis.)
