Education

On Why We Don’t Need a National Student Unit Record System

The 2008 College Affordability Act prohibited the U.S. Department of Education from establishing a student unit record (SUR) database. The database would contain individual student information of any student who attended a higher education institution eligible to receive federal funds (i.e., almost all). The bill killed those hopes of a national SUR for awhile but […]

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 […]

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 […]

K-12 Expenditures and Enrollment Size

From a working paper by Dan Otto on the economies of scale in Iowa’s K-12 schools: First, expenditures per student generally rise as district sizes fall below about 750 students. Given no additional knowledge about educational processes, it is possible there are economies of scale relative to school district size for these districts. It also […]

Preview: Community College Finances – Tufte Scatterplot

I’ve actually shown this graph before at a State Board of Education meeting last year. I don’t think it was received as well as I had hoped. Many people were worried about the “complexity” of the diagram and I did hear some murmuring when I flipped to the slide. Below is the image of the […]

Preview: Five-year In-state Retention Rate

Ever get a letter from your alma mater asking what you’ve been up to since you graduated? That data is used to see how well the college has been doing. It’s especially important for public colleges to see if most graduates stick around. Ever send one back? No? Well, most don’t. But that’s a pain […]

Fall Enrollment 2009 Presentation

The Iowa Department of Education released the Community College Enrollment Report for Fall 2009. Enrollment exceeded 100,000 students for the first time in the fall semester due to a dramatic year-to-year increase. Below is the presentation given to the state board and the full report can be found here. I’ll write later on the fall […]