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Florida school districts are flooded with applications for new charter schools, motivated by several new laws that make it easier to start traditional and virtual charters. Nearly 100 more new charter school applications have been filed for the 2012-13 school year than were filed at the same time last year -- a 38 percent increase, according to statistics from the Department of Education.

I knew that if I had enough patience the corporate reformers would eventually let slip some data which would prove, once and for all, how unscientific are the metrics they've been using to shut down schools. That day came earlier this week. I'll encourage anyone to recheck my calculations, just in case, but if I've found what I think I've found, it will be the 'death blow' to the New York City 'value-added' model they use to rate and close down schools.

Uneducated Guesses challenges everything our policymakers thought they knew about education and education reform, from how to close the achievement gap in public schools to admission standards for top universities. In this explosive book, Howard Wainer uses statistical evidence to show why some of the most widely held beliefs in education today--and the policies that have resulted--are wrong. He shows why colleges that make the SAT optional for applicants end up with underperforming students and inflated national rankings, and why the push to substitute achievement tests for aptitude tests makes no sense. Wainer challenges the thinking behind the enormous rise of advanced placement courses in high schools, and demonstrates why assessing teachers based on how well their students perform on tests--a central pillar of recent education reforms--is woefully misguided. He explains why college rankings are often lacking in hard evidence, why essay questions on tests disadvantage women, why the most grievous errors in education testing are not made by testing organizations--and much more.

Teacher attrition among first year teachers may be as high as 10 percent, according to a new data analysis from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics.

Education at a Glance 2011: Highlights offers a reader-friendly introduction to the OECD's collection of internationally comparable data on education. As the name suggests, it is derived from Education at a Glance 2011, the OECD's flagship compendium of education statistics.

I entered the fight against the 'reformers' back in February after hearing Duncan claim that a school in Chicago got dramatic results by shutting down and replacing with a charter school in the same building with the same kids, but with different adults. It was important for Duncan to have at least one 'miracle school' to prove that his style of reform was reaping results. Knowing this couldn't possibly be true, I investigated and found him to be using statistics in a very misleading way. This spurred my contacting the 'leader' of the other side (are they 'anti-reformers' or just 'pro-research'?), Diane Ravitch who then featured my investigation in a New York Times OpEd which generated a lot of attention.

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act compelled states to design school accountability systems based on annual student assessments. The effect of this federal legislation on the distribution of student achievement is a highly controversial but centrally important question. This study presents evidence on whether NCLB has influenced student achievement based on an analysis of state-level panel data on student test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The impact of NCLB is identified using a comparative interrupted time series analysis that relies on comparisons of the test-score changes across states that already had school accountability policies in place prior to NCLB and those that did not. Our results indicate that NCLB generated statistically significant increases in the average math performance of fourth graders (effect size 5 0.23 by 2007) as well as improvements at the lower and top percentiles. There is also evidence of improvements in eighth-grade math achievement, particularly among traditionally low-achieving groups and at the lower percentiles. However, we find no evidence that NCLB increased fourth-grade reading achievement.

New federal statistics shared Thursday about thousands of schools and districts show that students across the country don't have equal access to a rigorous education, experienced teachers, early education, and school counselors.

There's no mystery or proprietary secret among academics or statisticians and data geeks as to how to construct simple comparisons of school demographics using available data.  It's really not that hard. It doesn't require bold assumptions, nor does it require complex statistical models. Sometimes, all that's needed to shed light on a situation is a simple descriptive summary of the relevant data.  Below is a "how to" (albeit sketchy) with links to data for doing your own exploring of charter and traditional public school demographics, by grade level and location.

Dozens of schools across the city and state were flagged in a study of 2009 state standardized test scores that sought to use statistical analysis to ferret out possible examples of cheating on the PSSA exam.

With teacher quality repeatedly cited as the most important schooling factor influencing student achievement, there has been increased interest in examining the efficacy of teacher training programs. This paper presents research examining the variation between and impact that individual teacher training institutions in Washington state have on the effectiveness of teachers they train. Using administrative data linking teachers' initial endorsements to student achievement on state reading and math tests, we find the majority of teacher training programs produce teachers who are no more or less effective than teachers who trained out-of-state. However, we do find a number of cases where there are statistically significant differences between estimates of training program effects for teachers who were credentialed at various in-state programs. These findings are robust to a variety of different model specifications.

I did a piece a short while back on TEAM Academy, a Charter school which I thus far admire in Newark, NJ. I admire the school because, while the data I've been able to gather from official sources still indicates that TEAM is far from a statistical match with its surroundings, and appears to have greater cohort attrition than I might like to see, I am, at this point, comfortable stating that TEAM Academy is more comparable than others to its surroundings than other Newark Charters.

This study examines how teacher turnover differs between charter and traditional public schools and seeks to identify factors that explain these differences. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics' (NCES) 2003-2004 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) and Teacher Follow-Up Survey (TFS), we found that 25% of charter school teachers turned over during the 2003-2004 school year, compared to 14% of traditional public school teachers. Fourteen percent of charter school teachers left the profession outright and 11% moved to a different school, while 7% of traditional public school teachers left the profession and 7% moved schools. Using multi-nomial logistic regression, we found the odds of a charter school teacher leaving the profession versus staying in the same school are 132% greater than those of a traditional public school teacher. The odds of a charter school teacher moving schools are 76% greater. Our analysis confirms that much of the explanation of this "turnover gap" lies in differences in the types of teachers that charter schools and traditional public schools hire. The data lend minimal support to the claim that turnover is higher in charter schools because they are leveraging their flexibility in personnel policies to get rid of underperforming teachers. Rather, we found most of the turnover in charter schools is voluntary and dysfunctional as compared to that of traditional public schools.

The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute have put out a report purporting to show that public school teachers are overpaid. It's 23 pages of elaborate statistical justification of right-wing beliefs, all built on a foundation of right-wing assumptions. The basic claims are that while teachers are underpaid relative to other people with similar levels of education, in fact they are overpaid because education programs are easier than other majors and also, teachers are stupid; that public school teachers earn more than private school teachers and this shows they earn more than the market should support; and that people who leave teaching earn less while people who enter teaching earn more, therefore teachers are overpaid.

If you follow education research - or quantitative work in any field - you'll often hear the term "significant effect." For example, you will frequently read research papers saying that a given intervention, such as charter school attendance or participation in a tutoring program, had "significant effects," positive or negative, on achievement outcomes. This term by itself is usually sufficient to get people who support the policy in question extremely excited, and to compel them to announce boldly that their policy "works." They're often overinterpreting the results, but there's a good reason for this. The problem is that "significant effect" is a statistical term, and it doesn't always mean what it appears to mean. As most people understand the words, "significant effects" are often neither significant nor necessarily effects. Let's very quickly clear this up, one word at a time, working backwards.

"This is the executive summary of the statement of the American Statistical Association on the use of value-added assessment to evaluate teachers. Please share it with other teachers, with principals, and school board members. Please share it with your legislators and other elected officials. Send it to your local news outlets. The words are clear: Teachers account for between 1 and 14% of the variation in test scores. And this is very important to remember: "Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.""

"In this post, I address two examples of what I consider statistical smoke and mirrors (in one case coupled with false imagery) used in recent years to re-frame debates over economic and educational "equality" - toward a "post-urban" and "post-racial" domestic policy agenda."

"Several months ago, the American Statistical Association (ASA) released a statement on the use of value-added models in education policy. I'm a little late getting to this (and might be repeating points that others made at the time), but I wanted to comment on the statement, not only because I think it's useful to have ASA add their perspective to the debate on this issue, but also because their statement seems to have become one of the staple citations for those who oppose the use of these models in teacher evaluations and other policies."

"It was determined at trial that between 1 percent and 3 percent-roughly 8,200-of California's 275,000 teachers are grossly ineffective. Yet, only 2.2 teachers, on the average, are dismissed for unsatisfactory performance per year. Although intended to support the case against tenure laws, these statistics are actually an indictment against those responsible for evaluating teachers effectively."

"Andrew Cuomo, the Governor of New York State, recently released a report called The State of New York's Failing Schools. This report claims to present "statistics and facts" that "expose a public education system badly in need of change" and is designed to support Cuomo's proposal to turn "failing" schools over to private management and convert them into charter schools. But are these public schools failing? Are charter schools the answer? The facts say no. To help concretize the question why don't we take a closer look at one charter chain"