NAEP, NCLB, and hype
Today’s release of the latest 4th and 8th grade NAEP scores has brought a predictable flurry of attention focused on the tepid changes since NCLB. Quoted in the Washington Post article is Tom Loveless, pointing out that the trends look pretty similar whether you’re breaking it into the pre-2002 or post-2002 data. The immediate forecast […]
A contrarian definition of big social-science history
[Social Science History Association] Networks are encouraged to imagine the research program they would conduct with a multi-million dollar grant. (Full CFP.) … Big social-science history is interdisciplinary collaboration in history that can create, develop, or support a research agenda that would not be possible by researchers acting alone. Big social-science history should focus on collaboration and infrastructure that makes research possible. Big social-science history makes the tools and end results widely available to researchers and other readers worldwide…. None of these look like the “big social-science history” projects that were legends when I was in grad school.
Who understands peer reviewing?
In the last few months, I’ve sent out a sprinkling of manuscripts for Education Policy Analysis Archives to folks outside the normal spheres of academe—not only those in think tanks who generally understand reviewing processes because they often submit to refereed journals, but also those in the surrounding “wonkosphere” (for want of a better word), […]
Midterm Commandments
Following Miriam Burstein, I’ll see how many commandments I need to etch in stone for my students at midterm time:
Age-specific graduation rates
After too many months, I’ve finally carved out a few hours to play with the data Florida’s DOE sent me, a collection of individual-level data on enrollment, age, grade level, sex, race/ethnicity, lunch status, and withdrawal code (including different types of diplomas). The data isn’t clean (especially when looking at the birth years), but it’s […]