Teachers, students and adult public more supportive of school testing than you might think
You might guess that standardized tests are the bane of both teachers’ and students’ existences, but two different opinion polls show a surprising level of support for bubbling in circles with number 2 pencils. In Teachers versus the Public, a book published on April 29, 2014, Harvard Professor Paul E. Peterson reports that 86 percent of the […]
Ranking colleges by salaries of graduates
In March 2014 Payscale came out with its annual rankings of colleges based on how much graduates earn after 20 years. As before, there was a lot of grousing about the data. How can we trust the self-reported salaries of people who happen to choose to participate in the Payscale surveys? The #1 college — […]
Whites and Asians have a disproportionate share of pre-k seats in NYC
These pie charts show that whites make up fewer than 15 percent of the student population in New York City’s public schools, but they took nearly 18 percent of the city’s limited and coveted pre-kindergarten slots in the 2011-12 school year, the most recent year that data was available. That’s according to an interactive […]
Schools struggle to count algebra classes
Politico posted a nice roundup of new data from the U.S. Department of Education on March 21, 2014 that highlights racial inequities in education. They led with the provocative statistic that more than 8,000 three- and four-year olds were suspended from preschool in 2011, but most of the story covers how minorities have less access to […]
Student loans still growing faster than any other debt and now most likely to be 90-days-plus delinquent
Back in 2010, student loan debt outstanding in the United States surpassed outstanding credit card debt. Student loan debt hit the $1 trillion mark in 2013. It’s still the fastest growing consumer debt and a lot of it isn’t getting paid back. That’s according to the most recent consumer debt report by the Federal Reserve […]
US rookie teachers relatively better paid than veteran teachers
I had some critical feedback over my March 7, 2014 post about US teachers being the 6th highest paid in the world, according to a UNESCO analysis. One reader questioned the absurdity of a chart that says US teachers make $105 a day when their average annual salary is $54,704. I could imagine many intelligent […]
White students predicted to be in the minority in U.S. public schools by fall 2014
The National Center for Education Statistics released its “Projections of Education Statistics to 2022” with data on enrollment, teachers, graduates, and expenditures. Page 33, Table 3 shows how white students are projected to switch from majority to minority status this fall 2014. Click on the table below to see a larger version. I also found […]
High tech collaborations between traditional schools and after-school or museum programs
In the first installment of the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access’s new online discussion series, “Digital Directions in Learning”, academic researchers highlighted the Young Writers Project, as an example of an innovative high-tech community that allows students to write, revise and share their writing with students at other schools. It began as an […]
Top 10 teachers in Florida illustrate how messy and absurd the new teacher data is
This week of February 24, 2014 the State of Florida was forced to dump a boat load of data on its teachers into the public domain (It lost a law suit to Times Union newspaper in Florida, which requested the data). Nearly every public and charter school teacher in the state is named. And next […]
More students don’t always mean lower test scores
When masses more students began taking the SAT in the 1980s and 1990s, average scores dropped so much that the SAT makers had to recalibrate the scoring system in 1995. To make sure the national average still approached 500 in each verbal and math section, each student got a bump of about 50 points (a […]
