Paul Peterson to head education-policy transition group for Crist
Via Naked Politics comes word that Paul Peterson will be heading up a “citizen review panel” on education policy during the transition to the Charlie Crist administration in Florida. Most of the other figures named by Crist as transition heads are known to him personally and come from the state. To be honest, I’m surprised […]
One more study of accountability using aggregate NAEP scores
Yesterday, EPAA published Relationships between High-Stakes Testing Policies and Student Achievement after Controlling for Demographic Factors in Aggregated Data, by Gregory J. Marchant, Sharon E. Paulson, and Adam Shunk of Ball State University. Its conclusions: The few relationships between high-stakes testing and achievement or improvement in reading, writing, or science tended to appear only when […]
Department of Ed folks know their gramher
Some months after requesting age disaggregation of college-grad literacy stats from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, I haven’t had a response, so I sent an e-mail followup. A staff member replied promptly, saying it was probably a problem with the website request form. But there was no longer any analytical staff available to the […]
The last chapter problem
In Improving Poor People (1997), Michael Katz wrote: Historians and other social scientists who offer interpretive accounts of social issues always face a “last chapter” problem. Readers expect them to extract clear lessons from history, offer unambiguous recommendations, and foresee the future. My standard response—my role is to analyze and explain the problem; I have […]