Clinical trials for textbooks and curriculum
When I first happened upon the Institute of Education Sciences‘s “What Works Clearinghouse,” I wrote a little piece back in early June 2013 about the Saxon Math curriculum. But I didn’t realize how ground breaking this research was. In fact, I worried that my post was a bit PR-ish for the Saxon Math program. But Gina […]
Data Quality Campaign’s Aimee Rogstad Guidera discusses anti-data backlash and more
Aimee Rogstad Guidera founded the Data Quality Campaign in 2005 as a temporary advocacy group to get every state to set up its own longitudinal data system by 2009. Today, every state has a data system that tracks students from kindergarten onward. (edited for length and clarity) Q: Why didn’t you go out of business […]
Federal watchdog slams charter school data
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report in July, complaining that charter school data is so incomplete that it could not determine whether charter schools are avoiding non-English speaking students. “Specifically, for over one-third of charter schools, the field for reporting the counts of ELLs (English Language Learners) enrolled in ELL programs was left […]
The education search engines are coming
Searching the internet for recipes, academic papers or ex boyfriends is easy. But if you’re a teacher looking for a lesson plan, a textbook excerpt, or a fun brain teaser to share with your class, good luck. For example, I just googled “multiplying exponents”. A bunch of results pop up. If you’re a parent, it […]
District administrators balk at calculating how much each school spends per student
Since President Johnson’s War on Poverty Program in 1965, policy makers have been trying to equalize education spending across the United States. The lofty goal is for schools with lots of poor students to have access to the same resources that schools with rich kids have. But researchers and advocates for the poor have pointed […]
Big data systems still not answering which education programs work
Information Week‘s Michael Fitzgerald wrote about Colorado public school’s use of big data on July 29,2013. The state’s educational data program is now four years old and stores all kinds of facts and figures about 860,000 students in 2,000 schools, but it’s still unable to answers the questions that education policy makers want to know, […]
Misuse of NAEP scores
EdWeek’s Stephen Sawchuk wrote a piece on the misuse of NAEP score data by politicians and advocacy groups. The parsing claims sidebar has a few examples of prominent people an organizations who’ve made some elementary mistakes. Use of Data: “Public education is supposed to be the great equalizer in America. Yet today the average 12th grade black […]
Can an algorithm ID high-school dropouts in first grade?
Early warning systems to detect high-school dropouts are all the rage in education data circles. See this post on a new early warning system in Wisconsin. Like the Wisconsin example, most data systems focus on identifying middle-school students. But what if researchers could use grades, attendance and behavior data to identify at-risk students as soon […]
Report urges that federal funds for class-size reduction should instead go to train teachers in data analysis.
The New America Foundation, a non-partisan think tank in Washington headed by Anne-Marie Slaughter, is calling for more federal funds and school time for teachers to use student data to change how they teach. The report, “Promoting Data in the Classroom,” written by Clare McCann and Jennifer Cohen Kabaker, was published on June 4, 2013. […]
Not much educational data is yet improving classroom instruction
A May 28, 2013 blog post from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation by Micah Sagebiel notes that after a decade of collecting and analyzing education data, since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, that classroom instruction is no better for it. So far, all this education data has mostly been used for “accountability” purposes, […]
