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December 7, 2013 09:30 pm GMT
Public school children have become lab rats of policymakers who are eager to see change faster than we can study what works. Experimental reforms are often founded on the lackluster research of ideological think tanks, who have filled the expertise vacuum left by academics unwilling to conduct policy-related research. “I’ve reviewed some just God awful stuff,” cringes Rutgers Professor Bruce Baker, whose influential data-driven education, blog,schoolfinance101has helped him become a go-to reviewer for policy reports. For example, he notes, the libertarian-happy think tank The Reason Foundation concluded that a controversial program to peg funding to student improvement had worked, but forgot to highlight the policy was adopted after the changes had begun. “I started realizing that there’s this never-ending flow of misinformation and disinformation out there,” he said. Like Nate Silver’s influential and statistically nuanced election forecast blog posts, Baker has gained notoriety for reexaminingdata to trounce his adversary’s conclusions. And, with Silver’s new independent 538 channel, Baker’s brand of statistics-heavy argument could be the future of education journalism. Stop Cheerleading Education Miracles, i.e. Education Effects Are Small “We really have failed in the teaching of mathematics and probability,” decries Baker, who regularly debunks myths about unicorn policy changes that radically improve student outcomes. At scale, experiments rarely move the needle more than a few percentage points. Statisticians measure outcomes in “standard deviations”, or how students move relative to their peers. A full standard deviation is, on average, going from the back of the pack (33rd percentile) to average (50th percentile). If “Anyone starts saying they’re getting you a half or full standard deviation additional growth–that’s when the bullshit detector starts going off.” When a new Stanford University study found that Washington D.C.’s controversial pay-for-performance teacher policy had a half-standard deviation impact on quality, newspaper headlines lit up, “Study Finds Gains From Teacher Evaluations” read the New York Times Economix blog. Despite data buried within the reports that show how reform had slightly improved the number of good teachers who didn’t quit, there was virtually no impact on student outcomes. Even worse, it ignored the fact that many other school districts have attempted similar results, with widely varying results. Baker put together a blog post soon after, re-organizing all the reform-minded states in relation to their students’ initial starting points on reading and math In the admittedly ugly graph above, states should be showing great gains (above the red line)–but
Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/kv_f7JA0Hmw/
Meet The Nate Silver Of Education. Bruce Baker Will Bring Sanity To Reform Hype
Public school children have become lab rats of policymakers who are eager to see change faster than we can study what works. Experimental reforms are often founded on the lackluster research of ideological think tanks, who have filled the expertise vacuum left by academics unwilling to conduct policy-related research. “I’ve reviewed some just God awful stuff,” cringes Rutgers Professor Bruce Baker, whose influential data-driven education, blog,schoolfinance101has helped him become a go-to reviewer for policy reports. For example, he notes, the libertarian-happy think tank The Reason Foundation concluded that a controversial program to peg funding to student improvement had worked, but forgot to highlight the policy was adopted after the changes had begun. “I started realizing that there’s this never-ending flow of misinformation and disinformation out there,” he said. Like Nate Silver’s influential and statistically nuanced election forecast blog posts, Baker has gained notoriety for reexaminingdata to trounce his adversary’s conclusions. And, with Silver’s new independent 538 channel, Baker’s brand of statistics-heavy argument could be the future of education journalism. Stop Cheerleading Education Miracles, i.e. Education Effects Are Small “We really have failed in the teaching of mathematics and probability,” decries Baker, who regularly debunks myths about unicorn policy changes that radically improve student outcomes. At scale, experiments rarely move the needle more than a few percentage points. Statisticians measure outcomes in “standard deviations”, or how students move relative to their peers. A full standard deviation is, on average, going from the back of the pack (33rd percentile) to average (50th percentile). If “Anyone starts saying they’re getting you a half or full standard deviation additional growth–that’s when the bullshit detector starts going off.” When a new Stanford University study found that Washington D.C.’s controversial pay-for-performance teacher policy had a half-standard deviation impact on quality, newspaper headlines lit up, “Study Finds Gains From Teacher Evaluations” read the New York Times Economix blog. Despite data buried within the reports that show how reform had slightly improved the number of good teachers who didn’t quit, there was virtually no impact on student outcomes. Even worse, it ignored the fact that many other school districts have attempted similar results, with widely varying results. Baker put together a blog post soon after, re-organizing all the reform-minded states in relation to their students’ initial starting points on reading and math In the admittedly ugly graph above, states should be showing great gains (above the red line)–butOriginal Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/kv_f7JA0Hmw/
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