Income inequality and achievement: The rich test better
There’s a provocative online opinion piece, No Rich Child Left Behind, posted April 27th on the New York Times website by Stanford education professor Sean Reardon. His analysis of test-score and...
View ArticleAn explanation of when $20,000 is not enough to teach a student.
New York City may spend more per student than most districts in the United States ($19,597 during the 2009-2010 school year according to the U.S. Census), but one education scholar’s number crunching...
View ArticleData on resilience
Can resilience be taught? On May 3, 2013 Bruce Rogers of Forbes posted The Power of Resilience: Study Shows How Horatio Alger Association Scholarships Make A Difference about a 2012 study by NORC’s...
View ArticleData on teacher absenses, sick days and substitutes
On May 16, 2013, Choice Media, an online education news service that is critical of teachers unions, posted a provocative story, What’s Making Asbury Park Teachers Sick?. They collected data from a...
View ArticleThe number of high-poverty schools increases by about 60 percent
Poverty is getting so concentrated in America that one out of five public schools was classified as as a “high-poverty” school in 2011 by the U.S. Department of Education. To win this unwelcome...
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Rich kid, poor kid, fewer middle class
David Johnson, chief of the Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division at the U.S. Census Bureau, points out that the latest data on U.S. children, America’s Children: Key National Indicators of...
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Washington DC and Tennessee post huge gains in math and reading in 2013 while...
Fourth and eighth grade public school students in Washington DC and Tennessee showed huge gains on national math and reading tests in 2013 from two years ago, the last time the National Assessment of...
View ArticlePaying good teachers $20K to move to bad elementary schools works and is...
A November 2013 Mathematica study conducted for the Institute of Education Sciences within the U.S. Department of Education shows that paying good teachers $20,000 to transfer to a low performing...
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Is gentrification in Washington DC driving the surge in test scores?
As I wrote on Nov. 7, 2103, Washington DC posted the one of the strongest test score gains in the nation on the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress and I wanted to look at how demographic...
View ArticleAre Hispanic students the driving force behind the rise in urban test scores?
When the National Center for Education Statistics reported on Dec. 18th that fourth and eighth graders in the country’s largest cities had shown marked improvement in test scores over the past decade,...
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Three things that will make a school bad: child abuse, homelessness and...
This article also appeared here. Conventional wisdom has it that schools with high concentrations of poverty are bad. But when a team of researchers led by Dr. John Fantuzzo from University of...
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Poverty among school-age children increases by 40 percent since 2000
National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of Education 2014 One in five school-age children lived in poverty in 2012, compared to about one in seven children back in 2000. That’s a 40...
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US educators lead the world in overestimating student poverty, which may...
AndreSource: Andreas Schleicher OECD Do educators’ perceptions of how disadvantaged their students are matter? Put another way, when teachers think their students are underprivileged, do they have...
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Reflections on the underemployment of college graduates
Most people — and especially parents of 20-something college graduates — know that the job market is particularly tough right now for recent college grads. But so tough that about half of them are...
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Lessons from Hawaii: tracking the right data to fix absenteeism
Good school attendance is associated with all sorts of good educational outcomes, especially higher grades and higher test scores. It’s obvious: if you’re not showing up for school, you’re not going to...
View ArticleHomeless students increase by 58 percent in past six years
Despite signs of a national economic recovery, homelessness in U.S. public schools steadily increased 8 percent, to 1.26 million students, in the 2012-13 school year from the previous year. That may...
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Twenty five percent of low-income urban high schools beat the odds
It won’t surprise anyone to learn that wealthier high schools send more students to college than low-income high schools. But a October 2014 report from the research arm of the National Student...
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Absenteeism: another way to measure school poverty
Map of New York City, showing neighborhoods with the highest rate of chronic absenteeism in the elementary schools. South Bronx and Central Brooklyn are shaded dark red. Center for New York City...
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Summer school seems to work better for math than for reading
RAND Corporation photo Back in 2007 a team of Johns Hopkins researchers found that low-income children tended to improve in reading just as much as their wealthier peers did during the school year. The...
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Homework matters depending upon which country you live in.
Chart created by Jill Barshay, data from OECD For years, researchers have been trying to figure out just how important homework is to student achievement. Back in 2009, the Organization for Economic...
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