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: From Major to Targeted Clusters

The state of Iowa has established three targeted industry clusters: advanced manufacturing; bioscience; and information solutions. How have Iowa’s community colleges been supplying the industry? Above is an ideogram showing the path from program major (left) to targeted cluster (right). Obviously bioscience is being well-stocked, mostly from health science majors. I’m a bit surprised though […]

Iowa Unemployment: Exploring the Denominator

Iowa’s unemployment edged up to 6.7 percent in November from October’s 6.6 percent. The increase wasn’t statistically significant, so for practicality we can say it remained flat.  However, the unemployment level isn’t too disconcerting, especially since Iowa is relatively low compared to other states. Iowa’s civilian labor force declined for the third straight month.  In […]

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 […]