In my last post, I wrote about the mastery component of Virginia’s new school performance framework. I’m more or less optimistic about that component of the framework in that it’s straightforward to calculate and the weighting of different proficiency levels feels generous (particularly when compared to a
The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) recently – within the past year or so – completely revamped their school performance and accreditation system. I’m not going to describe all of the changes in detail, but the gist is that we now have 2 different systems – an accreditation system and a “school
I mentioned in last week’s post that people often think of quantitative data as objectively true. Not always, but often. And I'll grant that there is something compelling about seeing some phenomenon bundled up into a tidy, concise metric, some little nugget that we can carry around
Documentation is like sleep. It’s unsexy. It’s boring. It feels like it gets in the way of doing more. It eats up time that you could be using to do something else, something more productive. And yet, if you skimp on it, you always regret it. Maybe not
Student addresses are an interesting, and largely untapped, data point. They’re mostly seen as something that a school district's transportation department needs for creating bus routes...and that’s pretty much it. But there are a handful of cases I can think of where addresses provide us
Back in high school, I ran track and cross country. Every Sunday, my teammates and I would meet somewhere to do our long runs, which typically ranged anywhere from 6 to 15 miles, depending on where we were in our training cycle. I grew up in Northern Virginia, which, despite
We talk a lot in education about “using data,” and my general take is that the phrase “using data” doesn’t actually mean anything. But, if we want to be gracious and ignore all of the vagaries that come along with that phrase, then I think that “applying Bayes’ Rule”
I have a 4-year-old daughter who owns a truly staggering number of stuffed animals, which she calls “stuffies.” Probably literally 60 or so. She sleeps in a full-sized bed, and if she puts all of her stuffies on her bed – some of which are bigger than her – there’s very