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On standards, the curriculum, and acorns
One of my frustrations with some types of education policy writing is its irritatingly acontextual nature, as if nothing but that era (usually This Era) and the conceptualization in use at the time (i.e., a particular buzzword) is relevant for the question at hand. The writing-that-frustrates-Dorn can often be very detailed, accurate, and descriptive, but […]
Statistical magic and record linkage
Highly recommended link on a way-cool statistical technique in record linkage: The Bristol Observatory, where Steven Banks and John Pandiani have developed probabilistic population estimation, using two data sets with just birthdates. It’s not really magic but relies on a classic puzzle in probability (and an elementary one to solve, apparently). Banks and Pandiani developed this technique […]
NCLB reading for the week
As suggested by Eric in one of Jenny D.’s Hechinger Institute confab entry, here’s a recommendation for Hayes Mizell’s speech in 2003. Mizell’s explanation of NCLB’s origins (“For decades, local policymakers and school officials turned a blind eye to a set of vexing problems in public education”) assumes there was no such thing as accountability […]
Backpedaling on the achievement gap
I’ve been puzzled by Kevin Carey’s blog entries Thursday and Friday, in response to a Richard Rothstein essay and AFT’s NCLBlog, respectively. Here’s the critical claim of Carey (from Thursday): NCLB is not based on the premise that good schools can erase the achievement gap. It’s based on the premise that good schools can raise […]
What do you think of this accountability mixed metaphor?
I’m now done with the preface and chapters 1-2 of Accountability Frankenstein, and I just noticed the following mixed metaphor: For a school official to say blithely that elementary teachers should deemphasize -ing word endings in language arts because -s and -es endings are on the test but -ing endings are not is letting the […]