Sherman Dorn

Two interviews to read today

A few shout-outs while I'm still juggling a few hundred tasks the first week of classes:

• Charles Barone's interview of Robin Taylor (Delaware's state person in charge of accountability)
• The Eduwonkette Q&A for Bruce Fuller (coeditor of a new book on accountability)

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Posted in Accountability Frankenstein at 10:32 AM (Permalink) | |

First day of the semester

One piece of writing today made me want to scream. Another made me want to cry. Others just left me indifferent. While things could go downhill from here, the semester is far more likely to improve.

As soon as my spouse gets home, I'm going in search of better writing.

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Posted in The academic life at 08:22 PM (Permalink) | |

Eduwonkette is a graduate student

Who says that students are powerless? Eduwonkette is Jennifer Jennings, a doctoral sociology student at Columbia University. In retrospect, it makes an enormous amount of sense, and "grad student at Columbia" was one of the categories Leo Casey and I tossed around this spring as a possibility for Eduwonkette's identity. Jennings has worked with demographer Andy Beveridge of Queens College, and on the blog she's used maps to illustrate the relationships between social class and various measures of educational opportunity in New York. Her first article (several years ago) was about focusing on the "bubble kids" in Texas, and she's written consistently with the same concerns on the blog. (It's a very good article, and I cited it in Accountability Frankenstein.) I suppose I could say, "Yes, of course I knew it was her! I was just being polite by not mentioning it!" But that would be stupid.

For a variety of reasons, her becoming public/non-anonymous now is good timing. She's poked at the soft underbelly of the Klein et al. publicity/power machine, and I don't think there's anything the machine can do to her. And if it tries, it'll look very silly. Welcome to public blogging, Ms. Jennings. I think you'll find you enjoy it as much as being the caped crusader.

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Posted in Writing and editing at 06:32 AM (Permalink) | |

On sampling error and troubling year-to-year jumps in the data

Phi Delta Kappan's Bill Bushaw responded to my entry Thursday on the sample distribution of the Kappan poll:

For clarification, the Gallup Organization ensures that the poll sample is identified through a truly random process. This means it's possible to oversample one portion of the population. In order to correct for this, the responses are matched and balanced against the U.S. Census population parameters. That balancing process ensures that the sample reflects the U.S. population. Of course, in all polling, there remains a sampling error, in our case, +/-3%, standard for a national sample.

Bushaw is partly correct: The last page of the report describes in general the reweighting of the final interviews. But there's still a lot missing and some troubling data in the results. The specifics of weighting matter, and they are not described on the last page. In addition, the oversampling of parents of school-age children is not described (how many of the 1002 interviews were with parents of public-school students? how many of those public-school-parents sample were men?), and depending on the size of individual cells, the underrepresentation in the sample may skew the results.

What worried me when skimming the questions was a set of large jumps between 2006 and 2007 and then back again in 2008, moves greater than the margin of error for either the national or parent sample. For example, in Table 10, PDK reports that in 2006, 21% of public-school parents thought that funding was the worst problem for local publi schools. In 2007, PDK reported a jump up to 26% reporting that funding was the worst problem (a change barely within the margin of error), and this year it's down to 19%. In Table 13, PDK reported that in 2006, 21% of parents thought that they'd give the nation's schools an A or B and 51% would give the nation's schools a C. In 2007, PDK reported what looks like a big shift: 16% for A or B and 57% for C (changes at the edge of the MoE). Comes 2008 and here's another shift, reversed: 22% for A and 44% for C.

That up-and-down quality for other questions (32, 41-44) made me wonder about the sample, and as followers of national political polls are aware, the population models used for weighting can skew results one way or another. With political polls, we KNOW that pollsters make certain assumptions about the proportion of the population that belongs to different parties. With the PDK poll, the weights/models are not explicit, and there's something about the jumps in the results that raise red flags for me. Maybe public and public-school parent opinion changed between the summers of 2006 and 2007 and back again in 2008. But color me skeptical, and I think PDK isn't being entirely fair with it readership in focusing on the point estimates from the poll.

Then again, I have the same complaint when there is an obsession with the point estimates from test score data. So does Eduwonkette (on test scores).

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Posted in Education policy at 08:12 AM (Permalink) | |

The 2008 Kappan poll of older, white, wealthy college-educated women east of the Rockies

The most important news to come out of today's Kappan poll release is not the responses to any of the questions but the sample composition: 65% women, 84% white, 50% aged 50 and older, 44% college graduates (and 71% with some college experience), 43% with incomes $50K and above, and 19% from the Census West region of the country. I skimmed through the questions with some interest, and then my jaw dropped on the last page.

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Posted in Education policy at 11:35 AM (Permalink) | |

The Project Method zombie

The NCTAF blog calls it "a 21st century education system." Steve Lohr admires it as "the drive for technology-enabled reform of education." The New Technology Foundation calls it "a fully proven model." While I have some hopes for how technology might be used to change instruction, calling project-based learning new is something that raises alarms in my internal History Warning System(tm). I suppose I could point back a few years to Ted Hasselbring et al.'s Jasper Project, but let's nail this puppy to the wall. If you just read a bit of William Heard Kilpatrick's The Project Method (published in Teachers College Record in 1918), I think you'll discover that project-based learning isn't new.

Kilpatrick's version of project-based learning was torn apart in the Progressive Era by John Dewey and Boyd Bode, among others, as vapid, content-free pablum. That's not necessarily the case with well-designed anchored instruction, but the devil's in the details. From my own experience, there is an enormous amount of work that goes into designing anchored instruction that works. Neither technology nor the existence of an interesting case guarantees valuable instruction, and I hope we stop believing in education panaceas, whether you call them project-based learning, vouchers, or anything else.

Again: the existence of anchored instruction isn't bad. It's the idea of any panacea that we need to watch for, else the zombies of long-dead promised panaceas will rise and eat your brains. Or they'll eat our children's brains.

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Posted in Education policy at 06:31 PM (Permalink) | |

We now return to our regularly-scheduled panic

Last week I was in California helping to surprise my mother for her 75th birthday, and despite fears of her finding out in advance (mothers tend to suss out these things), she swears up and down she had no clue. It's been about 14 years since we all got together in the redwoods and pines of the Sierras. It was wonderful to see almost all of my nephews and nieces, my maternal uncles and aunts, all my siblings, and a bunch of cousins, including one I hadn't seen for several decades (as well as her husband and daughter). Great place, especially as the early-morning temperatures in the 50s beat out Tampa's 76 F. lows. And I was the only relative who thought to buy my mom a brand new car. Sheesh. Unfortunately, the main customers of Matchbox and Hot Wheels are still into gas guzzlers these days, but I did find a Volvo C30 in the midst of 1960s muscle cars, and you know how mothers value safety along with frugality. My children gave her Octavia Butler's Kindred and a Louis Armstrong album.

Along the way, my teens and I took a few side trips. They had their first trip to Yosemite Valley, miraculously getting to Bridleveil Falls early enough so that only a handful of other people were with us. The amount of water mirrored the crowds, but this is late summer in a low-snowfall year. We also trekked into and around San Francisco our last evening, eating dinner at a hole-in-the-wall pizza parlor, browsing at City Lights, and eating desserts at Caffi Puccini. They're at school today (but not tomorrow: thanks, Fay!), and I'm on campus.

For the trip, I took along a bunch of things to read and got some of that done. (I've decided that the Sony Reader is an excellent investment for journal editors). We returned at the end of the week, and I spent a few days polishing syllabi and other course material. I had plans to spend today on the journal, but Tropical Storm (soon Hurricane) Fay is short-circuiting that plan; I am finishing as much of course prep as I could before I leave campus. That way, I can focus on other things if the power is out tomorrow or for several days. I have a few things this week, and they'll get shifted around. The local public schools are closed tomorrow, my university almost inevitably will as well, and we'll see if the same is true Wednesday. Did I mention that the Sony Reader was a good investment? The battery will last through several days of power-free living, if that's necessary.

I have a bunch of work I owe people, from manuscript authors to editors who want me to write to a coauthor and... oh, yeah, other stuff. To paraphrase Berke Breathed, my summer has been an idyllic set of good intentions savaged by a brutal pack of life. On the good side, I'm not going to be bored for the foreseeable future (or the rest of my life). But there are some consequences. I'm back from my blog vacation, but probably not back to regular blogging for another week or two. I have several half-formed ideas for longer entries, and they'll sit on the shelf for a while.

If you're a fellow Floridian, stay safe and dry. If you're not in Florida, go ahead and be smug. We'll have our revenge in the winter.

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Posted in The academic life at 02:43 PM (Permalink) | |