eduwonkette
Through the lens of social science, eduwonkette took a serious, if sometimes irreverent, look at some of the most contentious education policy debates in this opinion blog. Find eduwonkette’s complete archives prior to Jan. 6, 2008 here. This blog is no longer being updated.
Teaching Profession
Opinion
Following Up on the Art Siebens Discussion
Thanks to everyone who's participated in the spirited discussion below on the Art Siebens case. Commenters have raised a number of important questions, among them:
Education
Opinion
In the Name of Reform? A Lesson About Michelle Rhee's Big Plans from Art Siebens
All along the Eastern corridor, folks are buzzing about firing teachers. In New York City two weeks ago, the New Teacher Project once again called for the district to put excessed teachers who have not been hired after a year on unpaid leave. Last week in his Washington Post column, Jay Mathews also sang a paean about the virtues of principals firing teachers at will. And in Michelle Rhee’s proposed contract, teachers would give up tenure in exchange for performance pay. Now, she’s moved to “Plan B,” which involves giving “bad teachers” 90 days to improve, or else face dismissal.
Education
Opinion
A Course in Statistics at Columbia: $3186. The NYC DOE's Comment on Confidence Intervals: Priceless!
You have to hand it to the New York City Department of Education's Department of Assessment and Accountability. You really do.
Education
Opinion
Cool People You Should Know: Jonathan Zimmerman
It is a rare talent that can filter the mass of information around us, process it, and spit it back out to shed new light on things we thought we already understood. Among educational researchers, few share Jonathan Zimmerman's knack for cutting to the core of the issues of the day.
Standards & Accountability
Opinion
Why skoolboy Is Uncertain about the NYC School Progress Reports
It’s election season, which means that we’re being inundated with polls. The reporting of poll results drives statisticians nuts, because the press often reports the percentage of those surveyed who favor one candidate or another, without taking into account the poll’s margin of error. The margin of error is a way of quantifying the uncertainty in the poll numbers, because even a well-designed poll that surveys a random and representative sample of the population is going to generate an estimate of the true proportion of those in the population who favor a particular candidate. The general rule of thumb is, the more information available in a sample, the less uncertainty in the estimate. A smaller batch of information will yield a more uncertain, or imprecise, estimate than a larger batch of information. This is as true for estimates of the relative performance of schools and teachers—whether in the form of a complex value-added assessment model or a simple percentage—as it is for political polls.
Education
Opinion
Vanity Fair
Rest assured that this blog will not run out of troubling things to write about anytime soon.
Standards & Accountability
Opinion
No Child Left Behind: Looking Back, Looking Forward
I'm knee deep in old NCLB documents, and ran across the Department of Education's NCLB song. NCLB represented not only a major shift in federal education policy, but an embrace of policy/PR boosterism that's enough to make all of us giggle (Remember Armstrong Williams?). Back from 2002, here are the NCLB lyrics:
Education
Opinion
Guest blogger Betsy Gotbaum on: The Future of Mayoral Control
Betsy Gotbaum is the Public Advocate for the City of New York. The Public Advocate is an independently elected citywide official who serves as a public ombudswoman.
Education
Opinion
This Week's COWAbunga Award
This week's COWAbunga Award, aka the "comment of the week award," goes to Citizen X, who let loose on Roland Fryer's experiments that pay kids for their test scores:COWAbunga, indeed.
Equity & Diversity
Opinion
Cool People You Should Know: Sean Reardon
We know that the average African-American student lags behind the average white student. But until recently, we did not have a clear portrait of the differences between black and white high-achievers in elementary school - a critical pipeline issue in shaping inequality in access to the most coveted colleges, graduate schools, and jobs. Thanks to Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist of education who studies school segregation and the sources of racial/ethnic achievement gaps, we've come a long way.
Education
Opinion
Thursday Link Love
1) My Kingdom for a Parking Space: On top of everything else, NYC teachers like Mimi are without parking. As always, she has some funny and insightful things to say about it:2) Quiz Show: Celia Oyler puts together her second New York City Progress Report Quiz.
Standards & Accountability
Opinion
Could a Monkey Do a Better Job of Predicting Which Schools Show Student Progress in English Skills than the New York City Department of Education?
eduwonkette and I have been blogging about the School Progress Reports released last week by the New York City Department of Education. We’ve shown that, although the performance and environment scores of schools were pretty consistent from last year to this year, the student progress scores were virtually unrelated—knowing a school’s progress score from last year didn’t predict which schools would demonstrate a lot of progress this year. This, we argued, demonstrated that the progress part of the School Progress Report—representing 60% of the letter grade each school received—wasn’t really telling us which schools consistently are promoting student progress, but rather was mostly random error.
Education
Opinion
Happy Anniversary!
Today marks the one-year anniversary of eduwonkette's bold entry into blogging about education. A lot has happened here over the past year, across 487 different posts, and thousands and thousands of comments. (Heck, back then, eduwonk and eduwonkette were BFF.)
Standards & Accountability
Opinion
What Does Educational Testing Really Tell Us? An Interview with Daniel Koretz
Daniel Koretz, a professor who teaches educational measurement at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, generously agreed to field a few questions about educational testing. He is the author of Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us.