Class Canceled Again
Class is canceled tonight, Monday, January 8. I'll update the class syllabus and think of something.
Below is a plot showing the relationship between the density of students receiving free and reduced lunch and the percent making progress in mathematics in Iowa school districts. Families with limited income are eligible for free and reduced lunch, so it’s a proxy for poverty. The regression line shows the negative relationship between free and reduced lunch and proficiency on Math AYP. That’s expected, we know students coming from low-income households struggle academically for a variety of reasons…
I’ve done quantitative research on graduate-student unionization before. In my research I found unionization has a modest effect on increasing wages and little to no impact on reducing wage inequality for graduate assistants.
However, I wasn’t able to investigate non-pecuniary effects of unionization. For instance, a union may want to specify manger-employ protocol. University of Oregon’s graduate-student union blog posted their examples of non-economic provisions in their labor agreement. They refer to their graduate assistance as graduate teaching fellow (GTF). So here they are:
Article 9 – We proposed that departments have “Specific, objective, and quantifiable” requirements for maintaining satisfactory academic progress, instead of the “general” requirements that the contract now requires.
Article 10: We had proposed language that would make the UO assign GTF help to GTFs who work as instructors of record the same way that GTF help is assigned to other faculty.
Article 17: We proposed that grad students who apply for GTF positions, but don’t get them, would be able to request as statement as to the reasons why they were not hired and their rank in the applicant pool (departments are required to rank all applicants based on their written criteria and give out GTF appointments based on these rankings).
These provisions aren’t a new concept all together–especially Article 9. The main question for someone like me is if the provisions are able to increase productivity. Unfortunately, such data is scarce so no one has been able to explore it, yet.
I wrote about this four years ago elsewhere. I just remembered it and posting it here for posterity (and for my own memory).
Original Date: March 20, 2006
Awhile back Lifehacker ran a post on how to highlight emails sent directly to you in Microsoft Outlook. Later, they showed how to “gray out” email not sent directly to you in Thunderbird. The latter option seems much more interesting to me. By using Outlook’s automatic formatting, the latter option can be replicated in Outlook.
Open up Outlook and go to Tools -> Organize. A pane similar to the one shown below will open. Choose “Using Colors” and turn on “Show messages sent only to me in [color].”
Iowa finally received some good news regarding unemployment.
Iowa Unemployment Rate (Seasonally Adjusted) 1976-2009
The Annual Condition of Iowa’s Community Colleges 2009 was released last week which highlights a bunch of data collected by the Iowa Department of Education on Iowa’s 15 community colleges.
Some basic stats show enrollment increased to 133,387 students last year, which was a substantial pick up since the prior year. However, the emphasis on this year’s report was workforce outcomes. We already know education can increase earnings. But in order to further education students have to face a trade-off. Student must forgo income, pay tuition, and push higher earnings until later in life. Is that investment worth it?
Our analysis showed the rate of return was 6 percent, within the 6 to 14 percent range we see nationally. The returns varied substantially depending on the type of award. The Associate of Applied Science, which is geared toward workforce outcomes, had a 55 percent rate of return. That means an additional 55 cents for every dollar invested. Meanwhile, the Associate of Arts, targeted toward transfer, lost about 10 cents on every dollar invested. The lesson here is to take your AA and try to transfer and work toward the Bachelor’s degree–it’ll pay off.
Many people are interested in which fields returned the most. Law, public safety, security & corrections had the highest rate of return. Health, manufacturing, and science, technology, engineering, & mathematics also had substantial returns. However, business management & administration did not. We suspect many of those skills are not linked directly to a degree. Many students are able to learn important skill sets (e.g., keyboarding, Microsoft Word, MCSE, etc.) without obtaining a degree.
We also included some infographics shown here before, such as in-state transition rate and workforce transitions. You can find more in section 17 of the report.
Radio Interview
I’ll be on The Exchange with Ben Kieffer January 21st discussing the results. I’m scheduled between noon to 12:30 and you can hear it on 640AM or online.
Homework #2 due 1/20/10; homework #3 due the following Monday.
Chad Adleman and the folks at Education Sector have recently released a report highlighting the deficiencies of Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) to measure student achievement. AYP is the (in)famous metric employed through No Child Left Behind to see if schools are improving on standardized tests. He concludes AYP is a seldom indicator of other long-term successes, like college continuation and college GPA.
This is at the same time when the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top programs are drawing heat in Iowa (and elsewhere) for tying student test scores with teacher evaluations. Now, I think standardized tests are maligned more than they should. It’s not perfect, but they do work. But it’s certainly not a perfect indicator–psychometricians would probably agree–for every formative measure of success.
So why the obsession with standardized tests? For one, it’s very quantitative and almost magical to most. But mostly I suspect because it’s quick. It’s certainly the most immediate feedback for student success when compared to others. Consider the waiting time to see if high schools have meaningful impacts and the time it would take:
Immediate
- 11th grade standardized tests (2 years)
- Graduation [rate] (4 years)
Intermediate
- College continuation (6-7 years)
- Early college GPA (7-8 years)
- One-year college retention (7-8 years)
Long-term
- College graduation (12-13 years)
- Rate of return to schooling (18-27 years)
The time from freshman year to the first measure of success, student testing, takes 2 years. While seeing if students continue to college would force us to wait six to seven years. And to measure the economic impact education (rate of return) has on students lasts 18 to 27 years!
All of those measures signify something significant, but I agree with Chad and others who are wanting to emphasis intermediate outcomes for a more thorough analysis of student achievement.
