April 2013

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 […]

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Data on open enrollment school choice in New York City

Yet another study seems to indicate that white and Asian middle-class families benefit more than minority and lower-class families from open enrollment programs where students can choose to go to public schools outside of their neighborhoods. The latest finding comes from a data analysis of New York City’s school choice program conducted by The Research […]

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Education data events

I’d like to keep an ongoing list of education data events. Please email me or post a comment if you know of others. APRIL/MAY 2013 The American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) annual meeting is taking place Saturday, April 27 to Wednesday, May 1,2013 in San Francisco, California. This year’s theme is “education and poverty” and […]

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Clean, clean, clean before you crunch those big data sets

Anyone interested in how data science might transform education should read The Dirty Little Secret of Big Data Projects.  David Dietrich, an impressive data geek consultant at EMC’s education unit who’s been involved with a big data lab at MIT, wrote that 80% of your time on a data project will be spent on the […]

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The politics of education data in Florida

The national debate over making student and teacher records more accessible is playing out in the state of Florida. Last week (week of April 8th, 2013) the Florida Senate voted to consolidate education records in a single, online database. It’s still far from becoming law, but the debate is quite similar to the one over […]

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Per pupil spending by school district in the United States

At the end of March, the Hoboken school board voted to increase taxes by 4 percent to pay for the school budget, which spends $23,716 per student, the second highest in the state of New Jersey. It struck me how much school spending has changed since I went to school, when wealthier districts consistently spent […]

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