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The Limits of Data: Weighted Edition
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /byOne tip for aspiring data hounds — always ask for weighted data. What do I mean? What’s the on-time performance for commuter rail? In NY, it’s 96%! Huzzah, right? Wrong, that’s on the basis of trains, not weighted by passenger. Anecdotal evidence suggests rush-hour trains (which are packed with people) have a much higher rate of delay. By not weighting on-time data by passenger, NY’s on-time performance fails to tell the whole story and fails the credibility test with the most important user group of all — the customers.
Day 11: Put virtue in virtual school regulations
/0 Comments/in Blog, News, Related Education Blogs /byFor Aristotle, virtues required wisdom, the ability to find balance between extremes. So, famously, he noted that courage was neither cowardice nor charging ahead with a devil-may-care attitude. Regulations require that kind of balance even in a virtual age. Virtual learning is a huge untapped opportunity in Massachusetts. Some people consider its potential to individualize instruction and address some portion of the ever-present classroom problem of kids learning at different paces as game-changing. The conversation sometimes feels like the conversation on stem cell research–perhaps overblown, perhaps not. The fact is we are early in finding out. The issue of the pace at which kids learn is an important one. Many kids are bored because teachers have to adjust lessons to […]
The Limits of Data
/0 Comments/in Blog, News /byHere at Pioneer, we are all for data-driven decision-making, and rely on publicly-available data all the time. But that can be a problem when the data being provided is garbage… or worse. In case you missed, the Globe is in the midst of a slow-motion evisceration of the state’s Probation Department and their article on Sunday was a stunner. It revealed, among other, things that the Probation Department was using a non-standard measure of caseload (measuring all cases open during a calendar year) and when the nationally-accepted standard was put in place, caseload dropped from 167 cases per officer to ‘about 40’. From reading the piece, and the series, its clear that Probation has operated off the grid of oversight […]
Day 10: Decentralize decisions in failing urban districts
/0 Comments/in Blog, News, Related Education Blogs /bySometimes failure is not just in a handful of schools, but in the majority of a district’s schools. In those cases, a broader application of key principles of the 1993 Reform Act (empowering principals and teachers, clear measurement of student performance and accountability for performance, and competition for students) is needed. One way to do that is to pilot a fully decentralized network of schools that are given charter flexibility at the school level. Angus McBeath, the former superintendent of the Edmonton Public School System, took a school system 30 percent larger than Boston’s and gave district schools the same freedoms and accountability that charters have. The so-called “Edmonton model” empowers principals, teachers and parents by decentralizing budgets to the […]
Day 9 – Tested innovation for failing urban schools
/2 Comments/in Blog, Blog: Education, Blog: School Choice, Jim Stergios, News, Related Education Blogs /byCountdown to World-Class Schools summarizes 12 actions the incoming governor can take to make our schools the best in the world. All achievable. All for under $50 million. For decades, urban parents have heard state leaders announce big improvements in their schools. The reality is most urban district schools still lag in student achievement and show, at best, progress that is tragically slow for parents and their children. Not only have urban districts resisted implementation of the state’s 1993 Education Reform Act (MERA) by not aligning local curricula with the state frameworks, but they have not taken advantage of important tools in MERA: Decentralized management to empower principals and teachers to make meaningful decisions about how to achieve results, and […]