Girl Power: Mining The Georgia NAEP Scores For Achievement Gaps

Georgia Department of Education Superintendent Cathy Cox had this to say about Georgia students performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress:

"This is the first evidence we have that the GPS is helping our students be more competitive at the national level. I am confident this is just the beginning of the gains our students will show on national tests as our new curriculum takes hold."

Governor Perdue was mighty pleased too:

"These latest Math NAEP scores continue to show that we are making significant progress in the most important subject areas. Our scores are improving at a faster rate than the national average, which is a result of the hard work of our students, parents and teachers. "

I looked at the executive summary which is usually a cherry-picked list of test scores that students improved on, then I went to the NAEP Data Explorer which provides an opportunity to input variables in as many weird combinations as you can think of (state, grade level, subject, subgroup, year, and statistical group) and I found some very encouraging tidbits and a few surprises about student achievement in Georgia.

--In the last 10 years, 4th grade & 8th grade students have improved an average of 15 pts. in math. This improvement roughly parallels the implementation (some would say imposition) of NCLB.

--4th grade reading has improved 10 pts in about 10 years. Curiously, 8th grade reading has declined 2 points during the same time.

--The black/white achievement gap in math and reading has stayed relatively constant (around 25 pts.) even as both groups have increased their achievement scores.

--Coming as no surprise to me, 4th grade females pound 4th grade males in reading by 6 pts. That's a touchdown better.

--By 8th grade, girls have increased their dominance over boys by 10 pts in reading.

--In the last 10 years, girls have narrowed the gap in 4th grade math to just 1 point behind boys.

--And in the last 10 years, girls have overtaken the boys in 8th grade math by 1 point.

So real quick-like:

Girls do better than boys at reading in 4th & 8th grade and they do better than boys at 8th grade math--by 1 point. They are gaining at 4th grade math. The black/white achievement gap has remained fairly constant over 10 years.

I bet if I spent even more time with the NAEP tool with other states data sets, I would find girls surging there too.

What's happened to boys in school?

Social Mobility Rankings For Georgia Colleges

Looked at Washington Monthly's 2009 College Guide to see how Georgia colleges and universities were scored. The WM uses three indicators to rank schools:

Social Mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students)
Research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs)
Service (encouraging students to give something back to their country)

Here is how Georgia colleges and universities ranked when all 3 categories are taken into account (this does not include the separate ranking for Liberal Arts Colleges):

#38 Georgia Tech
#69 Clark University
#113 Emory University
#135 UGA
#205 Georgia State
#231 Georgia Southern

Here's how these 6 schools rank in Social Mobility:

#8 Clark University
#83 UGA
#152 Emory University
#202 Georgia Tech
#212 Georgia State
#220 Georgia Southern

Here's how the Social Mobility ranking works--only 14% of Georgia Tech, Emory, and UGA students received Pell Grants. Georgia Southern--30%. Georgia State--35%. A whopping 60% of Clark University students received Pell Grants. Here are the respective graduation rates:

88%--Emory
78%--Georgia Tech
77%--UGA
47%--Georgia State
45%--Georgia Southern
44%--Clark University

It seems the more Pell Grant students a college has the higher the social mobility score. However, it also seems that the higher the social mobility score the lower the graduation rate will be.

So, is it downward or upward social mobility that the Washington Monthly celebrates? Well, certainly the WM mission clearly spells out the audience for such rankings:

"Isn't it time to join people such as Warren Buffett, Paul Krugman, Garry Trudeau, Rachel Maddow, Bill Clinton, and the producers of "60 Minutes" and "Frontline" who turn to the Washington Monthly for journalism that isn't afraid to shake some sense into the system?"

The WM College Guide is doing a whole lot of shaking, but not making a whole lot of sense.

Teacher Incentive Pay Works--What Will Furloughs Do?

Always on the minds of educators is how to improve educational outcomes--which is jargon for how to get the kids to learn something--or more specifically, how to get them to learn something so they will pass the state tests that show Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Along with those thoughts, however, is the reality that teachers who excel at improving educational outcomes for students are also not going to get paid a dime more than the educator who doesn't exemplify all the skills and behaviors that work best for student achievement--that is unless they have more seniority.

Most teachers ignore the reality (most of the time) that their less well-prepared colleague who shows up late, muddles around in the classroom during the day, then leaves early, will get the same pay for doing, way, way less--they have to or they will quit a job they probably have a real affinity for and go wait tables or work at the perfume counter at Belk. It's past time for state legislatures to institute merit pay or teacher incentives for producing positive educational outcomes. Teacher incentives work:

"The program provided bonus payments to teachers based on the average improvement of their students' test scores in independently administered learning assessments (with a mean bonus of 3% of annual pay). At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in control schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations in math and language tests respectively. They scored significantly higher on "conceptual" as well as "mechanical" components of the tests, suggesting that the gains in test scores represented an actual increase in learning outcomes. Incentive schools also performed better on subjects for which there were no incentives, suggesting positive spillovers."

Georgia has nationally board certified teachers that receive 10% pay increases based on completing an arduous program where great teachers document their greatness. But those pay increases were slashed this year. This year, all over Georgia, teachers are being furloughed at least 3 days, with more days coming after the first of the year. Furloughing teacher pay, unfortunately, is not concommitant with the state furloughing its expectations of teachers to foster even greater student educational outcomes.

So if incentivizing teachers increases student outcomes, what will happen when teachers are furloughed and lose thousands of dollars of their pay?

Just asking.

Spending Time With Your Kids: A Wise Human Capital Investment

If you’ve got kids, it will do them well, and prospectively, the parents well, to spend time with them. Not to satisfy feminist ideology (why shouldn’t men spend more time with their kids—so we mothers can go out and do shots with the girls?) and not because of the smooshy cultural prompts (all of the unshaven, man-boys being schooled by their kids in the grocery store), but because, in these times particularly, it makes good economic sense. Spending more time with your kids increases their chances of getting into college:

“Since the early 1990s, college-educated mothers have reallocated more than nine hours per week from leisure time to childcare time. This reallocation occurred at the same time that competition to get into college intensified, as a combination of demographic forces and the increase in the college premium led to a surge in the demand for college slots.”

Dads are re-allocating almost 6 hours per week from leisure (there goes the Saturday morning golf time) to childcare. Competition for college slots is intensifying.

“The children of the baby boomers are flooding colleges with applications, making the process more competitive than ever.”

This I know. In the last two years, we have run the college admission gauntlet twice and were successful twice—but what it puts your kids through is harrowing. First, when high school starts and I mean freshman year, your kid is on the college application clock. Every single thing they do beyond going to school and getting good grades (that goes without saying—because in today’s hyper-inflated grades world—everyone gets A’s) counts toward gaining entry into college. Did your kid man a bake sale after school to raise money for a band or sports team trip? Document it and your kid’s role in it. Get your kid in as many after-school clubs and sports as you can (our boy child did varsity tennis, honor society, etc, the girl child was an officer of about a half-dozen clubs and committees)—not just as members, but in leadership positions. ALL of this stuff counts on college applications. (On one of the applications, there is a space to describe ORIGINAL research and/or experiments conducted.)

But your kid just doesn’t start being one of those “doing stuff all the time” high school kids unless parents have taken the time before that to be with them, take them places, and give them opportunities to experience things beyond what’s on cable, the internet, and Wii—get them outdoors, take them to big cities and little craphole towns on a two-lane road out in a county with a name you can’t pronounce, and make sure they see you being involved in stuff beyond the four walls of where you live. And it does mean chauffering them around a lot (mothers spend 2+ hours per week for kids under 5 and almost 3 hours per week chauffeuring kids older than 5—for dads its about an hour and a half per week).

Unless UGA, Georgia Tech, GSU and all the rest dramatically increase capacity, increased competition for college slots will be the trend—as will increased time spent by parents with their kids to prepare them for those slots.

Global Warming Pushback?

There's this Mastercard commercial where the school-aged kid helps his dad become a better man by helping become more eco-conscious. (I sort of expected the kid to stand beside his dad while he was taking a dump and offer him 2 Sheryl Crow squares of toilet paper):



Presumably, the kid is more environmentally aware than his doofus dad and presumably the little green kid learned his global warming chops at school. Kids do learn about global warming at school--there are plenty of guides, lesson plans, and free materials out there to teach global warming to PreK-12th grade. Nickelodeon even has global warming specials on so that every child ca be inculcated in this man-made disaster as early as possible.



But there may be a pushback brewing. For the first time EVER, among all the usual pile of educational catalogues and materials that go straight to the recycling bin, was a teaching material that refutes global warming--The Skeptics Handbook. Here is the opening plaint from the author, Joane Nova:

"Rise above the mud-slinging in the Global Warming debate. Here are the strategies and tools you need to cut through the red herrings and avoid the traps."

I'm guessing Joanne means the traps of getting cornered in the gym or the cloak room by one of those little eco-scolds from the Mastercard commercial. Ms. Nova's slim volume goes over topics with headings like The Global Warming Gravy Train Ran Out Of Evidence, Believers Are Becoming Skeptics, and Cutting Through The Fog. Ms. Nova finishes her treatise with this bottom line:

"Carbon doesn't seem to have driven temperatures before; probably isn't doing it now; things are not getting warmer; and computer models can't predict the weather. An emissions trading scheme is a bad solution to a problem that's gone, fighting a cause that never was..."

This handbook seems about as alarmist as the global warmers talking about floods all the way to the Alabama line in the coming decades--so I don't know what the educational value might be. But I will say its the first educational pushback on global warming that I've seen come through my mailbox.

Big Headed Kids & Autism

Seems as if the larger the head of an autistic child, the more trouble they have generalizing, but do well with detail-focused processing:

"Macrocephaly in the context of autism may therefore be a biological marker of abnormal neural connectivity, and of a local processing bias."

Macrocephaly is an abnormally large head. Big headed kids also tend to be taller and to be male. They also have less adaptive behaviors. I was curious though as to what "big-headed" might mean in context of babies at different ages. From the CDC:

--At birth, the 95th percentile for head circumference is a tad more than 15 inches.
--At 6 months, the 95th percentile is right at 18 inches.
--A one year old child that has a head bigger than 95% of other kids will have a 19 inch head.
--A two year old will have a head slightly under 20 inches and a three year old will have a head about 20 and half inches.

I know if I had a baby child I might be getting out the tape measure right about now.

No Weird Fridays

We in the office are serious about our No Weird Fridays. No time suck psychodramas allowed. So of course, about 12 seconds after we were hooting about the time one of our substitutes was convinced she was receiving radio signals from her earrings and our fire alarm sensors were actually video cameras tracking her every movement (yeah, I sent her home, like, for good), into the office walks two guys--both wearing jeans, one in an Atlanta Falcons t shirt the other in an untucked golf shirt.

They announce to the three of us in the office that they are from the Department of Homeland Security. We howled. We couldn't help it. Right in the middle of our No Weird Friday declarations and our reminisces about prior paranoid schizophrenic weirdness, weird squared walks in.

No really, they insisted we are Homeland Security They both whipped out badge holders. Sure 'nuff. Golf Shirt guy says we have tracked an illegal alien to within 100 meters of this location.

"You mean, right now?" I ask.

Yes. He says they believe a woman, who we recognize as a parent, is harboring an illegal and we believe he is here.

"In school?" I ask, I think quite reasonably. And really, it is serious--the guy they are after is wanted for rape and assault in Florida. I'm thinking about locking down the school now. Or maybe evacuating it. This would certainly count as Friday weirdness.

"So how do you know he's here? Are you tracking him somehow?"

Golf Shirt guy says, "Homeland doesn't track cell phones, but we have traced his cell phone to within a 100 meters of this location." Aaaaaah. I see. How did I end up in Enemy of the State, II? But razor sharp school brains prevailed--we figured out who the kids were of the parent that was illegally harboring a fugitive and then figured out that one of the kids had the CELL PHONE.

The Homeland Security guys seemed almost peeved that their dangerous fugitive wasn't cowering in the Media Center behind the Captain Underpants display or hiding behind the tether ball pole out back.

I took Golf Shirt guy's card and promised I would call him if a guy we didn't know showed up to pick the kids up. They left and we in the office just looked at each other. It wasn't even 9:30 yet on our No Weird Friday.