California student-teacher ratio highest in the country
The number of public school students for every full-time teacher in California was 23.4 during the 2011-12 academic year, almost 50 percent above the national average of 16 students per teacher. The lowest student-teacher ratio was in Vermont with 10.7 students per teacher. The National Center for Education Statistics released in October 2013 a preliminary […]
Bonus pay for teachers thoroughly discredited
Debate closed: paying teachers extra for student performance does not work. The research community’s conviction that giving teachers bonus pay for high student test scores does not work was solidified in the fall of 2013 when the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences added a RAND report to its What Works Clearinghouse and […]
Shelf space for books at home predicts educational outcomes
A fascinating blog post, “Does Poverty Cause Low Achievement?“, by Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute cautions researchers against using poverty or family income when crunching numbers to come up with education policies. He argues that poverty in and of itself doesn’t cause low achievement. And flawed educational research conclusions have been made by […]
NYC high school graduates read by third grade
A new data study shows that third graders who can’t read proficiently are unlikely to graduate from high school in New York City. Only 2.7% of students who failed to meet a basic third grade English Language Arts (ELA) standard went on to meet or exceed the benchmark in eighth grade. Only one in three […]
Data analysis discredits widely used TERC math curriculum
One of the most widely used math curricula in elementary schools, Investigations in Number, Data, and Space, also known as simply “Investigations” or by its developer’s name, “TERC,” was found to underperform three other elementary school curricula. The three that performed better were Math Expressions, Saxon Math and Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley Mathematics (SFAW), also known as “enVision” Math. The study, […]
Still widespread use of restraint and seclusion at schools
I was surprised to see this article by Christopher Cousins in the online version of the Bangor Daily News, “Data from schools show widespread use of restraint and seclusion, but validity of numbers debated.” Cousins reports that 800 of Maine’s 185,738 students were restrained at schools during the 2012-13 academic year in order to deal with their […]
Pre-K spending down but not everywhere
The New America Foundation on Sept. 24, 2013 released 2012 state and school district pre-kindergarten data, which the think tank says has never been published before. Their Funding Per Child widget allows users to see which districts in a specified state spend most and least per child on pre-K. “The National Institute for Early Education Research, from which FEBP […]
New dataset says almost a quarter of African Americans are suspended in high school
The Center for Civil Rights Remedies, part of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA, aggregated publicly-reported school disciplinary data into one spreadsheet and released it on September 12, 2013. They also created a new handy, dandy web tool to see suspension rates by district. The problem is that fewer than half of the states in the U.S. […]
Q & A with Laura Hamilton: States should wait to evaluate teachers under Common Core
New Common Core aligned tests are sure to have an effect on how teachers are rated now that teacher evaluations in many states are tied to their students’ test scores. The Common Core standards in math and English emphasize greater critical thinking skills and non-fiction reading, and some districts in places like New York and […]
Education industry ranks #1 in customer satisfaction
Sam Boonin is the vice president of products at Zendesk, a software company that collects online inquiries from customers and turns them into support tickets. Zendesk’s software is used by more than 30,000 companies and institutions, from Sony and Adobe to Twitter and Groupon. And so Boonin decided to sift through the customer satisfaction surveys […]
