Month: January 2010

K-12 Expenditures per Student and Performance

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 […]

Non-economic Benefits to Graduate-student Unionization

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 […]

Organizing Email Sent Directly to You

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 […]

Condition of Iowa’s Community Colleges & Radio Interview

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 […]

Alternatives to Student Testing

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 […]