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David Grissmer and his colleagues noted that three of the data sets had early measures of fine motor skills. They found that, after they statistically accounted for all of the factors that Duncan et al had examined, fine motor skills was and additional, strong predictor of student achievement.

Value added measures sound fair, but they are not. In this video Prof. Daniel Willingham describes six problems (some conceptual, some statistical) with evaluating teachers by comparing student achievement in the fall and in the spring.

As New York City parents and teachers struggled Monday to make sense of recently published schoolteacher rankings, education officials considered making future releases illegal to protect a fragile truce on a new statewide system. Legal experts said a series of court rulings have made it increasingly clear that statistics-based portions of teacher evaluations are public information, unlike those of police officers, firefighters and other public workers specifically protected under state law. Only a change in law, experts said, would change that. Shielding teacher rankings from public view is likely to become a new pressure point in the debate over how to measure the effectiveness of teachers, lawmakers and officials said Monday. Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, which sets education policy, said that while she backs using tests scores to hold teachers accountable, she would support changing state law to hide their rankings from public view.

By the end of her second year at MacFarland Middle School, fifth-grade teacher Sarah Wysocki was coming into her own. "It is a pleasure to visit a classroom in which the elements of sound teaching, motivated students and a positive learning environment are so effectively combined," Assistant Principal Kennard Branch wrote in her May 2011 evaluation. He urged Wysocki to share her methods with colleagues at the D.C. public school. Other observations of her classroom that year yielded good ratings. Two months later, she was fired. Wysocki, 31, was let go because the reading and math scores of her students didn't grow as predicted. Her undoing was "value-added," a complex statistical tool used to measure a teacher's direct contribution to test results. The District and at least 25 states, under prodding from the Obama administration, have adopted or are developing value-added systems to assess teachers.

In today's knowledge‐based economy, education-especially education beyond high school-is central to achieving the American Dream. Yet, recent research points to devastating statistics related to educational outcomes in the nation's communities of color.  For example, only 54 percent of Native American students will graduate high school on‐time. Half of today's African American and Latino eighth‐graders will drop out of high school before graduation. And, only 10 percent of African‐American and Latino eighth grade students will complete any sort of college degree. While Asian American student outcomes are seemingly high compared to other students of color, this is not true for all Asian groups. Within the Southeast Asian community, 34 percent of Laotian, 39 percent of Cambodian, and 40 percent of Hmong adults do not have a high school diploma or equivalent.

For the second time, the Los Angeles Times published results of statistical testing examining the variation in teacher and school performance in the LA Unified School District. The resulting ranking system was found to be inaccurate due to the unreliable methodology.

In short, there are different ways to measure the gender gap, and their "accuracy" is not about the statistics as much as how they're interpreted. The gap is 75-80 cents on the male dollar if you're making no claims that the difference is attributable solely to discrimination. When you account for the underlying factors - and you must do so to interpret the data in this manner - you get a somewhat different picture of the extent of the problem (problem though it still is). Now, think about how easily this all applies to test data in education. We are inundated every day with average scores and rates - for schools, districts, states, subgroups of students, etc. These data are frequently compared between groups and institutions in much the same way as wages are compared between men and women.

"I've examined the various statistics about Success and will summarize and analyze them here with the hope of shedding light on what things this network might be doing that 'works' and also illuminating some of the problems with this network."

"A while back, in a report from the NJDOE, we learned that outliers are all that matters. They are where life's important lessons lie! Outliers can provide proof that poverty doesn't matter. Proof that high poverty schools - with a little grit and determination - can kick the butts of low poverty schools."

"Through storytelling and sobering statistics, American Teacher explores the mismatch between the value of effective teachers and the United States's history of disinvestment in teacher salary, support, and status."

"To prove that poverty doesn't matter, political leaders point to schools that have achieved stunning results in only a few years despite the poverty around them. But the accounts of miracle schools demand closer scrutiny. Usually, they are the result of statistical legerdemain. "

"According to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, childcare workers earn about 4 percent less than animal caretakers-$20,940 and $21,830 per year, respectively."

"What if you could spot a top teacher candidate from an e-mail? It may sound too good to be true, but statistically speaking, it can be surprisingly effective, according to one charter school organization requiring applicants to answer hypothetical e-mails as part of its interviewing process beginning this summer. The e-mail exercise is just part of a larger effort by Uplift Education of Dallas, Texas to use predictive research to help them identify teachers who are most likely to be effective with students and remain with the organization."

"Given the magnitude of the recent recession, and the high-stakes testing the U.S. has implemented under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), it is important to understand the effects of large-scale job losses on student achievement. We examine the effects of state-level job losses on fourth- and eighth-grade test scores, using federal Mass Layoff Statistics and 1996-2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Results indicate that job losses decrease scores. Effects are larger for eighth than fourth graders and for math than reading assessments, and are robust to specification checks. Job losses to 1% of a state's working-age population lead to a .076 standard deviation decrease in the state's eighth-grade math scores. This result is an order of magnitude larger than those found in previous studies that have compared students whose parents lose employment to otherwise similar students, suggesting that downturns affect all students, not just students who experience parental job loss. Our findings have important implications for accountability schemes: we calculate that a state experiencing one-year job losses to 2% of its workers (a magnitude observed in seven states) likely sees a 16% increase in the share of its schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB. "

"Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card" posits that fairness depends not only on a sufficient level of funding for all students, but also the provision of additional resources to districts where there are more students with greater needs. The National Report Card rates the 50 states on the basis of four separate, but interrelated, "fairness indicators" - funding level, funding distribution, state fiscal effort, and public school coverage. Using a more thorough statistical analysis, the report provides the most in-depth analysis to date of state education finance systems and school funding fairness across the nation. The results show that many states do not fairly allocate education funding to address the needs of their most disadvantaged students, and the schools serving high numbers of those students.

It's a data-driven world, or so say the mystics and the statistics of Ed Policy World. The question asked by media, most often, before and after the Save Our Schools March, was: How many people? Show me the numbers.

A handful of states have increased the rigor of their state assessments since 2007, an analysis released today by the statistical wing of the U.S. Department of Education concludes.

The challenge of designing effective performance measurement and incentives is a general one in economic settings where behavior and outcomes are not easily observable. These issues are particularly prominent in education where, over the last two decades, test-based accountability systems for schools and students have proliferated. In this study, we present evidence that the design and decentralized, school-based grading of New York's high-stakes Regents Examinations have led to pervasive manipulation of student test scores that are just below performance thresholds. Specifically, we document statistically significant discontinuities in the distributions of subject-specific Regent scores that align with the cut scores used to determine both student eligibility to graduate and school accountability. Our results suggest that roughly 3 to 5 percent of the exam scores that qualified for a high-school diploma actually had performance below the state requirements. Moreover, we find that the rates of test manipulation in NYC were roughly twice as high as those in the entire state. We estimate that roughly 6 to 10 percent of NYC students who scored above the passing threshold for a Regents Diploma actually had scores below the state requirement.

For more on how credit recovery has led to accelerated rates of credit accumulation, especially at the new small schools, see Jackie Bennett at EdWize.  But the practice of passing students, regardless of whether they have actually attended class or done homework, has become widespread at many, if not most, high schools throughout NYC, as schools are pressured to raise their statistics or else be threatened with closure.  Below is the account of a teacher who, for obvious reasons, would like to remain anonymous.

Minnesota parents who teach their children at home feel like they have received a promotion. "The state is recognizing the validity of home education," Lorna Cook of Willmar said of a new law that frees homeschoolers from most of the bureaucracy of old laws. "To those of us who are home educators, the statistics show that, overall for home education, parents are doing a pretty good job."