Even education data geeks agree that education data is completely inscrutable and inaccessible to parents
One of the many provisions of the 2001 federal education act, known as No Child Left Behind, was a requirement that states had to issue a “report card” for every public school. The report cards include things you might expect like student test scores and test score changes, but also a laundry list of data from […]
Three things that will make a school bad: child abuse, homelessness and mothers who dropped out of high school
Conventional wisdom has it that schools with high concentrations of poverty are bad. But when a team of researchers led by Dr. John Fantuzzo from University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) studied every third grader in the Philadelphia public schools, they found strong student achievement in some schools with high concentrations of […]
More college educated parents, but their kids are not getting smarter
Here’s another data puzzle I’ve been thinking about. Why is it that more and more kids have college educated parents, but high school test scores are not improving? In 1978, only 32 percent of the parents of 17-year-old students had obtained a college degree. In 2012, 51 percent of the parents of 17 year olds […]
Data on the children of Tiger Mothers
On May 8 in Poor Little Tiger Cub, Slate wrote about a March 2013 study of the children of Tiger Mothers by Su Yeong Kim at the University of Texas. Kim studied 444 Chinese American families (what an unlucky number!) and concluded that the children of Amy Chua-like tiger parents had lower GPAs and educational attainment. These […]
