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 This blog is no longer being updated.
Education
Opinion
Friday Link Love
1) Goldrick-Rab and Roksa Rock: Sociologists Sara Goldrick-Rab and Josipa Roksa issue a new Center for American Progress report on expanding the federal higher education policy agenda.
Education
Opinion
eduwonkette flies over to GothamSchools: NYC Graduation Rates
NYC Readers - Wondering what's going on with the graduation rates that were released this week? Head on over to GothamSchools, where I will be posting occasionally on NYC education issues, and check out a map of 4-year cohort graduation rates across the city.
School & District Management
Opinion
Fact Checking "Whatever It Takes" (Or: The Trouble with Heroes)
Over at eduwonk, guest blogger Michael Goldstein points us to an inspirational trailer for a documentary, Whatever It Takes, about a new small school in the South Bronx. This is American education's favorite past-time - find inspirational principal/teacher and tell an uplifting/touching story about how kids from tough backgrounds beat the odds. Preferably, someone easy on the eyes like Hilary Swank or Morgan Freeman plays the lead.
Education
Opinion
Cool People You Should Know: David Rindskopf
You don't come across statistics ninjas like David Rindskopf, a psychologist who teaches at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, every day. Whether he's making advances in latent class analysis, multilevel modeling, or Bayesian statistics, Rindskopf has paved the way for education researchers to better understand the factors that affect students' performance in school. And his work hasn't gone unnoticed. A few years ago, Rindskopf was elected a fellow of the American Statistical Association, a designation rarely bestowed on scholars outside of a statistics department.
Education
Opinion
skoolboy Goes to the Olympics, III: Socioeconomic Status
skoolboy doesn’t know who was the first to say that the true measure of a society is how it treats its weakest members, but it’s an appealing proposition. All societies have children and adults who vary in their economic, social and cultural status within the society. In virtually every modern society, the more advantaged, as a group, do better than those with lower status, although individuals can rise or fall in relation to their peers. Today’s visit to the Olympics looks at the relationship between a child’s socioeconomic status and proficiency in math and science across countries.
Equity & Diversity
Opinion
skoolboy Goes to the Olympics, II: Gender
On Friday, eduwonkette wondered about how gender figured into my Olympics-inspired international comparison of high student literacy in math and science. Ask and you shall receive, e. Today I’m reporting data on the percentage of males and females in different countries and economies that are high achievers, and within-country differences in these percentages. On Friday, I was looking at the top 5% of students in each country. Today, I’m using the percentage of students in each country scoring at the highest level on the 2006 PISA science and math literacy scales. (Yeah, proficiency scores, but what can you do.) In science, there are six levels of proficiency, with 1.3% of students across the OECD countries scoring at Level 6. This is more selective than the top 5% in each country. But I should point out that PISA assesses the real-world application of math and science skills, and is not a narrowly-tailored test of particular math and science disciplines. Such tests might well yield different country rankings and gender differences.
Education
Opinion
eduwonkette's First COWAbunga Award!
A few weeks ago, Kent Fischer started a great feature on his Dallas schools blog called "Comment Of the Week Award," also known as "the Golden COW." Starting today and every week thereafter I'll follow his example and give the COWAbunga Award to an insightful, interesting, or funny comment on this site.
Education
Opinion
A New Slogan for New York City: "Reach Out and Test Someone"
A week ago, you submitted 47 slogans for the New York City Department of Education, and I picked one to illustrate. The winning slogan comes from Gary Babad, Chief Satirical Officer at the NYC Public School Parents blog. Congrats Gary, and thank you to everyone who contributed a slogan!
Education
Opinion
skoolboy Goes to the Olympics
skoolboy has always found Olympic medal counts by country to be silly. Sure, it's fine to take pride in the accomplisments of one's countrymen and countrywomen. But the Olympics for me are about appreciating excellence, regardless of the flag (or swoosh) on the uniform.
Education
Opinion
Olympic Edu-Fencing! The Bob Wise vs. Fordham Edition
It's still a day until the opening ceremony, and the edubloggers have already lined up on the starting line (though without their oxygen masks, it seems). Over at the Alliance for Excellent Education, former West Virginia governor Bob Wise announces his planned reporting on our academic standing in the world. And it seems that all of that smog has gone to his head. Here's an excerpt:Decidedly cooler and more entertaining is the Fordham video, which previews their Olympics coverage. Here's what their website says:But comparing the international standing of the average US student with the international standing of our most elite athletes (as does Bob Wise) - and then decrying our relative lack of focus on academics - doesn't make a lot of sense. Take a field trip to Harvard, Yale, MIT, or Princeton and you'll see that our top students are taking names. Put them in an academic Olympics with students from Oxford, Tokyo University, and Peking University, and we'll do as well as we do in the Olympics. So I hope that my fellow bloggers will use this opportunity to drill down with these international data and look at how our high performers compare to other countries' high performers, how our poor students compare to other countries' poor students, etc.
Education
Opinion
Cool People You Should Know: Suet-Ling Pong
Regular readers know that eduwonkette was an early endorser of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education policy statement crafted by Sunny Ladd, Pedro Noguera, and Tom Payzant, and co-signed by some of skoolboy’s favorite scholars, policymakers and activists. The fundamental premise of the policy agenda is that efforts to advance student’s learning and development need to combine policies intended to improve schools with policies designed to transform the social and economic contexts in which children and youth develop. The approach is described as broader and bolder because it postulates that school improvement—which includes holding schools accountable for students’ learning and development—can’t do it alone. Rather, investments in communities, families and other social institutions that shape children’s lives outside of formal schooling are critical to moderating the powerful linkage between socioeconomic advantage and children’s learning and development.
Education
Opinion
New York City Achievement Gap Round Robin
Check out these links on the NYC achievement gap dust-up:
Education
Opinion
Last Chance to Submit a Slogan!
Last call! Submit your slogan by the end of the day. I'll put a few together as logos and we'll vote next week. My new submission is "The NYC DOE: Truthiness in Education." Some of yesterday's submissions included: