Survey: Student poverty is rising and so is teacher pay
Last week, the National Center for Education Statistics released the first results of its newest School and Staffing Survey, which is administered to teachers and administrators across the United States every four years. The survey, which is meant to examine the characteristics of public school districts, including average teacher salary, sizes and types of districts, […]
Only 6 percent of college students do work study
The National Center for education statistics reports that only 6 percent of undergraduates earn money through work study programs. Yet 71 percent receive some sort of financial aid, such as grants or loans. http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2013165
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 […]
A call for more data, and less anonymous data, to contain college costs
In Higher Education, Data Transparency, and the Limits of Data Anonymization, Reihan Salam in the online version of the National Review writes, “I am increasingly convinced that unless governments do a better job of measuring student learning and labor market outcomes, any reform efforts will be of limited use.” In the piece Salam cites an idea from Andrew P. […]
States and districts pull back from InBloom Data warehouse
InformationWeek Education has a good piece, with a punny wilting headline, on the growing backlash against InBloom’s plan to warehouse data for states and school districts. InformationWeek’s David F. Carr writes, “Louisiana withdrew from the project in April and other states who initially expressed an interest have backed off. Most recently, Politico reported that Guilford County, N.C., […]
Move over U.S. News, a new ranking for universities and scientific institutions
Mapping Scientific Excellence, a new website out of Germany, has come up with a novel way to rank the world’s best universities and scientific institutions. It ranks an institution’s excellence by the rate at which it produces scientific papers that are most frequently cited. An MIT Technology review of the site, which Lutz Bornmann at […]
Community college graduation rate perhaps double what previously thought, new data show.
My colleague Jon Marcus wrote an interesting piece today explaining why community college graduation rates are actually double what the data usually show. That’s because many students transfer and eventually earn a degree somewhere else. Instead of a dismal 18 percent graduation rate, new data from the National Student Clearinghouse suggests that the community college graduation […]
College towns are smarter
Venture Beat reports that the towns with the smartest people are small college towns, based on how more than 3 million people around the U.S. performed in brain training games created by Lumosity. VB explains, “These games measured performance across five cognitive areas: memory, processing speed, flexibility, attention, and problem solving. Then the scores were […]
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 […]
Rich kid, poor kid, fewer middle class
David Johnson, chief of the Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division at the U.S. Census Bureau, points out that the latest data on U.S. children, America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-being released on July 8, 2013, shows growing concentrations of rich and poor. “We see an increase in the children living at the high […]
