Programming note: I’m back after a long summer hiatus. I honestly just kind of lost motivation to do weekly posts. So, moving forward, I’m not going to promise weekly posts. I’ll shoot for a 1 or 2 times a month, or whenever something strikes me that I
Last week, I gave a talk titled “Data Management Tips for Educators” at the 2025 MERC Summit. For those who don’t live in the Richmond metropolitan area – or for those who do but don’t know about MERC – MERC is the Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium. It’s a partnership
I gave a presentation at yesterday’s 2025 Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium (MERC) Summit titled “Data Management Tips for Educators.” The slides are available here if you’re interested. The gist of my talk is that we, as educators, often have lots of data available to us, whether that’s
I recently read this article on the Ludicity blog about the narrative fallacy, and it got me thinking about how this applies to education. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, the narrative fallacy is a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, The
And we're back from a 3-week hiatus that was the result of a guys' trip, being busy, and being somewhat demotivated. But now we're back! Most of my job in late spring and early summer of every year involves analyzing data from standardized tests, and
Stacked bar charts aren’t good plots, and this is a hill I will die on. Even though everyone over the age of, say, 7, has seen a stacked bar chart at some point in their lives and probably intuits what they are and how to describe them, I’ll
This week's post is going to be pretty short. Over the past week, I've had interactions with two different groups of "AI-in -education experts," and they each left me feeling some combination of despair, disgust, incredulity, and anger. And so I wrote what was
I’ve mentioned in multiple posts on this blog that the primary “point” of data is to help inform decisions. There are probably occasions where it’s useful to just report out on broad compliance-y things, or where we want to explore data with no clear decision in mind in
I’ve been very much into the Acquired podcast lately. The premise of the podcast is that each episode describes a single company, usually beginning at some pivotal pre-company occurrence (the birth of the founder, the invention of some critical piece of technology that enables the company, etc) and proceeding
I recently stumbled onto a preprint research article examining the writing quality of college students before and after the introduction of ChatGPT, as well as some reporting on the same article published on the Hechinger Report. And oh boy did reading it make me feel like Will Ferrell in Zoolander.
I’m both an AI optimist and an AI skeptic. I use AI tools in my day-to-day work, mostly to help with coding, but with some other tasks as well. Google Gemini is one of the tabs I open, along with my email and calendar, as soon as I boot
Programming Note: I’m doing an intensive AI training next week, so there will be no post on 4/4. I’ll be back again the following week. Emily Oster recently published an article (post? blog?) on her website, ParentData, titled “Why We Still Need Test Score Data,” and I
I recently read The Productivity Shift (TPS) – a report from Grammarly with the basic premise that businesses should use AI to help employees communicate better, which will increase productivity. You can skim the report if you want, but it’s mostly a lengthy marketing pitch for Grammarly – a company that
One common use of statistical models is to make predictions about the future. These predictions are ubiquitous in our tech-infused lives today. Meteorologists deliver predictions about the weather to you via the apps on your phone. Your credit card company might flag a transaction as suspicious using a prediction from
I have this thesis that people in education often get frustrated with data – or they feel like data is useless – because the structure of the data they’re collecting doesn’t allow them to answer the question they want to answer. This usually happens because someone – a principal, a social
In the last two posts in this mini-series reviewing Virginia’s new school performance framework, I shared my thoughts on its mastery and growth components. I’d encourage you to check out those posts if you haven’t, but my quick summary of them is that I think the mastery
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