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Surveys that are less impressive the more you look into them
While I am on the theme of data overinterpretation this week, two recent surveys that have been overinterpreted: 1. The recent Quinnipiac University Polling Institute survey of New York City residents, which included a number of questions on school politics in the city. The New York Times’ blog entry by Winnie Hu started, “A majority of New York City voters approve […]
How to manipulate data and figures
On occasion, students and reporters ask me what makes me trust or distrust folks who claim to be education researchers, and it’s a harder question to answer than one might think. As an historian with some quantitative training, I am eclectic on methods–I have no purity test other than “the evidence and reasoning have to […]
Odds and ends
It’s been a wild week to be an involuntary observer this week — the week before spring break for me turned out to be very busy for both anticipated and unanticipated reasons, so I was unable to comment on the debate over SB 1718 in Florida (the “parent trigger” bill), the higher ed budget and […]
Quasicohort and period measures are weak proxies for the new federal graduation rate
If you were wondering where I was going last week with the release of Florida graduation rates using the new federal definition, it’s this: an analysis of proxy high school graduation measures. It’s short, but I wanted to make it available quickly both here and on the Social Science Research Network because the point is sobering: all […]
The Pascal’s Wager wager
Welcome to my world, ed policy folks: small impacts can be very meaningful, but primarily in the long term. One of the sadder bits of the post-Lowrey story Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (s)extrapolation is the attempt to magnify the scale of outcomes beyond what the research shows. The economists concluded that the impact of shifting a […]