Are Hispanic students the driving force behind the rise in urban test scores?
When the National Center for Education Statistics reported on Dec. 18th that fourth and eighth graders in the country’s largest cities had shown marked improvement in test scores over the past decade, a question kept popping into my head. To what extent is white gentrification of cities driving this test score increase? Is it possible […]
Is gentrification in Washington DC driving the surge in test scores?
As I wrote on Nov. 7, 2103, Washington DC posted the one of the strongest test score gains in the nation on the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress and I wanted to look at how demographic shifts in the nation’s capital might be influencing these test results. I began by constructing this table. […]
Paying good teachers $20K to move to bad elementary schools works and is cheaper than reducing class sizes
A November 2013 Mathematica study conducted for the Institute of Education Sciences within the U.S. Department of Education shows that paying good teachers $20,000 to transfer to a low performing elementary school raised the test scores of students by 4 to 10 percentile points. No positive effect was found at the middle school level. Mathematica […]
Washington DC and Tennessee post huge gains in math and reading in 2013 while nation shows small improvement
Fourth and eighth grade public school students in Washington DC and Tennessee showed huge gains on national math and reading tests in 2013 from two years ago, the last time the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) exams were administered. Unusual seven point gains were seen on some tests, whose results were released on Nov. […]
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 […]
The number of high-poverty schools increases by about 60 percent
Poverty is getting so concentrated in America that one out of five public schools was classified as as a “high-poverty” school in 2011 by the U.S. Department of Education. To win this unwelcome designation, 75 percent or more of an elementary, middle or high school’s students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch. About a decade […]
Data on teacher absenses, sick days and substitutes
On May 16, 2013, Choice Media, an online education news service that is critical of teachers unions, posted a provocative story, What’s Making Asbury Park Teachers Sick?. They collected data from a few New Jersey towns, through a Freedom of Information Act request, and found that Asbury Park’s teachers averaged more than 18 absences a […]
Data on resilience
Can resilience be taught? On May 3, 2013 Bruce Rogers of Forbes posted The Power of Resilience: Study Shows How Horatio Alger Association Scholarships Make A Difference about a 2012 study by NORC’s Gregory C. Wolniak and Zachary Gebhardt at the University of Chicago. The authors found that low-income students, many of whose parents were drug addicts or […]
An explanation of when $20,000 is not enough to teach a student.
New York City may spend more per student than most districts in the United States ($19,597 during the 2009-2010 school year according to the U.S. Census), but one education scholar’s number crunching shows that the city’s schools are underfunded. Bruce D. Baker, a Rutgers education professor, posted Class Size & Funding Inequity in NY State […]
Income inequality and achievement: The rich test better
There’s a provocative online opinion piece, No Rich Child Left Behind, posted April 27th on the New York Times website by Stanford education professor Sean Reardon. His analysis of test-score and income data leads him to conclude that the achievement gap between the richest and the poorest has grown 40 percent worse over the past […]
