- "What Freakonomics did in raising our collective economic literacy, this book does for the economics of schooling." -Kate Walsh, President, National Council on Teacher Quality
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Welcome to the Profit of Education website. Continuing the conversation begun in the book Profit of Education, we discuss the latest economic evidence on education reform.
Summing up what we know about class size
Class Size and Student Outcomes, by Matthew Chingos, sums up what we have learned about the importance of class size. Lesson 1: Parents, teachers, and the public at large are all convinced that small classes are wonderful and are prepared … Continue reading
Grumpy academic and assessing first-year teachers
The New Teacher Project has released findings, Leap Year, from their program for assessing first-year teachers. The TNTP report provides some great information that can certainly help school districts work with first-year teachers. I found one statement especially exciting. Multiple measures … Continue reading
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Jesse Rothstein says:
The MET data showed similarly low correlations (though I’m not sure they are exactly comparable — MET reported mostly “disattenuated” correlations that abstracted from year-to-year variability in value-added). And MET drew similar conclusions from those low correlations. See the review I wrote here:
http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/ttr-final-met-rothstein.pdf
I read the evidence the same way you do. But what to make of it? I’m not sure. I don’t see any way to decide which of the measures is/isn’t getting at something important except by validating them against each other. So is there a better way to learn about this than simply to try implementing policies based on various combinations of the measures, then evaluating those policies?
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Gates and AFT abandon their roots
The Gates Foundation and the American Federation of Teachers have come up with six principles for effective teacher evaluation and development. The principles are: Match high expectations with high levels of support. Include evidence of teaching and student learning from … Continue reading
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Peer effects
Are students helped by having other smart students as classmates? Answering this question is a surprisingly difficult statistical problem. Suppose schools tend to track students by ability. (Suppose???) When you look at a high-achieving student you’ll see that she tends to … Continue reading
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Are ed schools easy graders?
For a while now folks have been saying that ed schools are easy graders. Most of the evidence has come from looking at particular schools. But are ed schools as a whole easy graders?….Yeah, they are. I’ve put together a … Continue reading
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High school graduation rates
Dick Murnane has put together a new description of U.S. High School Graduation Rates. This turns out to be harder than you might think. Murnane explains three of the “gotchyas” that have to be dealt with. State records ought to let us track whether … Continue reading
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Heterogeneous grouping
I had lunch last week with one of my high school teachers. One of the topics that came up over guacamole was whether heterogeneous or homogeneous grouping is better, i.e. should classes be mixed ability or should “fast” and “slow” … Continue reading
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Teacher selectivity and college GPA
A couple of weeks back I looked at the statistical relationship between SAT scores and the probability that an education major ends up teaching the year after graduation (based on a logit I ran using the Baccalaureate and Beyond data). … Continue reading
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Teachers and SAT scores again
The discussion on “teacher quality” sometimes degenerates, coming off as if teachers are kinda dumb. Teachers are not dumb. In fact, their academic ability–as measured by SAT scores–looks pretty much like the ability of other college grads. Here’s a table … Continue reading
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What teachers teach and their SAT scores
Here’s a short graphic on the SAT scores of students who pass the Praxis licensing test. (The graphic is copied from the ETS publication “Teacher Quality in a Changing Policy Landscape: Improvements in the Teacher Pool.” I was led to … Continue reading
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