Achievement gap between minorities and whites is closing; gender gaps narrow too
Black and Hispanic students posted much larger gains than white students over the past 40 years on the long-term National Assessment of Education Progress test, which I first wrote about on June 27, 2013. “The improvement and gap closing is not just a theoretical possibility, but it is happening,” said Kati Haycock, president of the […]
High school test scores haven’t improved for 40 years; top students stagnating
Is U.S. high school a wasteland? Or are teenagers getting a better education today than they were 40 years ago? That’s a puzzle offered in a release of national test scores on June 27, 2013 by the National Center of Education Statistics. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), test scores for 17 […]
Education might be the next weight loss fad; obesity rate much lower among college grads
The obesity rate among college graduates is significantly lower than for high school drop outs or those with only a high school degree. This obesity gap exists not only in the United States, but also in 23 other countries around the world, according to a new data report, Education at a Glance 2013, by the […]
More college degrees and higher pay among daycare workers, nannies and early childhood educators, says study.
The people who take care of our littlest children are better educated than they used to be and are seeing their paychecks rise. They’re also staying in the profession longer than childcare workers had in the past. That’s according to a paper, “The early childhood care and education workforce from 1990 through 2010: Changing dynamics […]
Low and incomplete marks for most prestigious teacher training programs
I was just starting to poke through the National Council on Teacher Quality’s first Teacher Prep Review, published June 2013, which makes a data-rich argument that the nation’s teacher training programs are admitting some of the weakest students in the nation and spewing out unprepared teachers at the end. I was struck by how few […]
New data on Australians who go into teaching
The Australian teaching system has long been revered in the United States. Even today Aussie is the biggest professional development consultancy in New York City. Back in Australia, the government is trying to use data to track the teaching profession more closely. A first annual data report on the teaching profession was recently released in […]
India data show test scores rise when students are automatically promoted to the next grade
A controversial 2009 law in India outlawed the practice of holding failing students back and making them repeat the entire year of school in classes 1 through 8. In India, it’s called “detention” and at least one student union staged a protest this Spring to bring detention back, arguing that automatic promotion undermines academic quality […]
Teachers better at rating schools than parents and students
Schools are kind of like Congress. Most people claim they hate Capitol Hill, but they like their own representative. Similarly, people say the U.S. education system is broken, but they like the school that their kids go to. I’ve been doing alumni interviews for Brown for more than 15 years and my first question is […]
Number of young American adults with college degrees jumps 36 percent
A New York Times front page story and a Lumina report released Thursday, June 13, 2013 examine the sharp increase in college graduates. In 2012, more than a third of young American adults (25 to 29 years old) had at least a bachelors degree compared with less than 25 percent in 1995. That’s a 36 […]
Less math is more: data supports Saxon Math curriculum
A math curriculum that reduces how much new content elementary students are exposed to each day was found to be effective, according to an analysis by Mathematica Policy Research. Mathematica looked at two studies that focused on Saxon Math, a curriculum designed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The studies covered more than 8000 students in 11 […]
