Category Archives: education

Dot plan for autumn

Posted on August 12, 2010 | Comments Off

I have really great memories of my first job after finishing my master’s degree. I worked as a Unix/C++ programmer on an intelligence agency software development contract. The people I worked with were really smart and the work was engaging.

Many of us at that workplace kept “.plan” (say it “dot plan”) files in our home directories that said what we were working on. You could see what someone else was doing by “fingering” them (kind of a precursor to Facebook poke, but with a reaction–a listing of the person’s .plan). Keeping public plans was a good way for us to share what we were working on, without being annoying about it. People use Twitter for that now, and I do intend to get back to Twitter, someday soon. But for now, it feels comfortable to write and think alone in my hermit-cave here.

Back to school

I completed my two big summer projects: submitted two studies to the AERA 2011 conference then prepared for and passed the SAS base programming certification exam. Now I’m thinking about back-to-school activities and fall quarter. It feels like the right time to update my plan.

These are my fall projects:

Submit a manuscript to a journal. I haven’t decided which study to rework into a journal article. Both studies are based on the TIMSS 2007 data set and fortunately I’m attending training in D.C. at the end of this month to learn more about that and other international education databases, so I think I’ll be in good shape to do this.

Prepare for my doctoral comprehensive exam, scheduled for late October. I’ll be blogging about the topics I expect to see on the exam, so if you see some tutorial-like posts, that’s why.

Study for and pass the SAS advanced programming certification. I plan to do this after taking comps, but ideally before January, when I’ll start looking for a job. Some of the most interesting statistician positions I’ve seen require SAS. Plus my advisor and I have a plan to do a missing data simulation study in the winter and she suggested we use SAS. I might have selected R if it were up to me, but I plan to use R for my dissertation research, so I’ll have both adequately covered.

Find a good middle school for my middle child. It kills me that Denver no longer supports neighborhood schools; it’s all choice choice choice. This is great when you find a school that suits your child and your family circumstances. The problem is there’s no default choice in many neighborhoods now. I don’t know anyone who sends their kids to our neighborhood middle school or high school, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable sending my daughter to either of those schools since her peers will go elsewhere. We’ll be looking at private and magnet schools. We may also consider trying to “choice in” to a traditional public school that’s near us but has a better reputation than the one that we are assigned to.

Complete 14 units of coursework. I am taking Cost-Benefit Analysis, Economic Fundamentals: Global Applications, Item Response Theory, and a required seminar in which I learn to administer IQ tests. After this quarter, I’ll have just two classes left, Qualitative Research and Analysis of Variance, and I can focus on my dissertation research and job search.

Meanwhile, keep the family happy and healthy. I’d like to get in the habit of starting my kids off each day with healthy breakfasts: scrambled eggs, berry smoothies, pancakes and waffles made with good stuff. We eat dinner together almost every night and I’d like to continue that too, including continuing to try new recipes on a regular basis so I can feed my need for novelty.

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Posted in diary of a doctoral student, education, personal

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Sharing government data, Colorado school districts edition

Posted on March 1, 2010 | Comments Off

Sharing government data with the public really does create a culture of accountability. The Denver Post analyzed spending data for Colorado’s three largest school districts and this forced Denver Public Schools to take action:

After queries from The Post, DPS officials Friday sent an e-mail to principals and staff announcing cost controls.

“Effective immediately, we will be restricting food purchases and travel expenses,” the message said.

Food may still be purchased for community meetings but no longer for internal staff meetings. Administrators are asking staffers to participate in “virtual conferences” rather than paying for out-of-state travel.

Among the expenses were $4,113 for doughnuts and burritos (Montbello High School) and $1,174 for a Dave & Buster’s year-end party (Lincoln High School). Lincoln seems to be one of the worst offenders, charging $161,000 to district-issued credit cards. North High School charged less than $14,000. (But North has bigger problems).

Many commenters on the article seem to think this isn’t a big deal, that the amounts of money involved are relatively small, and why shouldn’t teachers get some coffee?  But public school systems shouldn’t be paying for coffee and food and entertainment for their staff or for parents or for students, especially in a time of serious budgetary problems. Most families have to cut back right now; so should the government workers they support.

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Operational publicy for charter schools

Posted on February 28, 2010 | Comments Off

I’ve been blogging a lot, and I’ve had good reason. I’m practicing structured procrastination. It’s the ninth week of a ten week quarter, so I have a few major projects to finish, including a policy paper on charter school accountability and quality.

Once I finish that, I’m on to the fun stuff: analyzing some survey data on religiosity then modeling cross-country math achievement test scores using liking-for-math and country-level cultural values as predictors.

I’m just having trouble making this charter school paper come together. I already thought about charter school accountability and didn’t come to any conclusions, at least not anything interesting enough to write about. What interesting conclusions could there be? I can only think of relatively uninteresting ones:

  • Charter schools don’t operate in a free market for education, so market forces aren’t going to ensure they do a good job and aren’t going to force the worst ones out of business.
  • Charter schools sometimes do better than traditional public schools but often do worse. That’s what you’d expect. If you deregulate (or partially deregulate) a sector, you’re going to allow both higher quality and lower quality entrants in.
  • Colorado already has pretty good charter laws, according to these rankings.
  • Charter schools probably don’t get closed readily enough because it’s too politically difficult to do so. Far more charters are opened than closed — and they can’t all be that good.
  • Charter schools aren’t engines of innovation for the public school system, at least as far as classroom practice goes. They do, however, show what might be accomplished if you push control down to the school level vs. keeping it at the district level.

While procrastinating, I’ve been reading blogs and writing blog posts and trying to find some inspiration for this paper so I can get it written and move on to the fun stuff — I promised myself I can’t do the data analysis projects until I write the paper. Yesterday afternoon I finally found some inspiration, the idea of “operational publicy.” Yes, that word “publicy” is awful, but the concept is right on.

Charter schools should open up their operations and their data to public scrutiny, not just their test scores and demographics which are already released in school report cards, but everything they do. After all, they are getting public dollars for their work.

On the same topic, from the Economist special report on managing information:

Providing access to data “creates a culture of accountability”, says Vivek Kundra, the federal government’s CIO. One of the first things he did after taking office was to create an online “dashboard” detailing the government’s own $70 billion technology spending. Now that the information is freely available, Congress and the public can ask questions or offer suggestions. The model will be applied to other areas, perhaps including health-care data, says Mr Kundra—provided that looming privacy issues can be resolved.

Love the idea of a “culture of accountability,” but of course there are “looming privacy issues” in releasing school data too. Should you release teacher attendance data? You’re probably not going to point out individual teachers who miss a lot of school but what about aggregated data? What about administrator salaries compared to teacher salaries by school? Lesson plans? Results of parent satisfaction surveys? These are things the public should have access to.

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How does Colorado rank? Charter schools edition

Posted on January 16, 2010 | Comments Off

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools has just published rankings of state charter laws. Colorado did well, coming in at number 5 out of 40 states ranked, earning 128 points out of 208.

The states’ laws are ranked against a model charter school law published by NAPCS in June 2009 that addresses things like caps, authorizers, accountability, and exemption from state and district laws and regulations.

Why did Colorado do well? From the report:

In general, Colorado law provides an environment that’s cap-free, open to new start-ups, public schoolconversions, and virtual schools, and supportive of autonomy. Most notably, it is a leader in providing facilities support to public charter schools (although challenges remain). One potential area for improvement is providing clarity in the law to govern the expansion and replication of high-quality charter schools through multi-school charter contracts and/or multi charter contract boards. Another potential area is a general fine-tuning of the law in relation to the model law’s four “quality control” components.

The four quality control components that NAPCS mentions are these:

  • Authorizer and overall program accountability system required
  • Performance-based charter contracts required
  • Comprehensive charter school monitoring and data collection processes
  • Clear processes for renewal, nonrenewal, and revocation decisions

Number 6 state Massachusetts ranks highest on these elements, so perhaps offers a model for Colorado to look at.

The most recent research on charter schools has found that charter schools can drive better achievement growth but don’t always. So there seems to be some need for quality control. But is legislation the right approach?

The idea with charter schools — as I understand it — is to put in place some competition for traditional public schools. In an actual competitive marketplace the customers would put pressure on the suppliers to provide services of adequate quality; you might need some government quality regulations but these would supplement the workings of the marketplace, not replace them. Public schools, even with a few charter schools thrown in, aren’t anything like a competitive marketplace, though.

I wonder: how should the quality control components of charter school legislation be structured so that they encourage higher quality among charter schools and in the traditional public schools as well?

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Posted in education