Just hours ago, the latest round of data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) was released to great fanfare. Under the auspices of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), PISA has been assessing 15-year-olds in reading, math, and science every three years since 2000. This year over 60 “education systems,” almost all of them countries, participated.
In each new round of PISA results, the U.S. has been squarely in the middle of the pack. Our overall scores are statistically indistinguishable from the average of all OECD countries. But some of our economic competitors, including Japan, Korea, and [...]Continue Reading »
The 2013 NAEP results—to some, “the nation’s report card”— came out earlier this month. These state-by-state test scores signal good news: student performance nationally and in most states continues to improve on balance, if only slightly. The District of the Columbia’s trend line is particularly heartening. Along with Tennessee, D.C. Public Schools made the largest student performance gains in the country between 2011 and 2013.
But the results also make for some not so good news: Test-score gaps between student groups are large and stubbornly persistent. On a 500-point scale, in 4th grade math, white students outperformed black students nationally by [...]Continue Reading »
The STEM achievement gap between U.S. students and students in other industrialized countries, such as Singapore, is inciting national policy discussions. And now a National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) study offers a new way to see if our public schools are making progress toward a STEM-literate society.
The recent study linked the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scale to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) scale. That means we can get a much more accurate reading of where our students stand internationally.
Although the U.S. has demonstrated over time that some of our students perform well on [...]Continue Reading »
Now that the U.S. Department of Education has released new data on financial aid for the 2011-12 school year, we can update our calculations that show what students actually pay: “net tuition.” Net tuition is the published tuition minus all grant aid. (Student loans are not subtracted because they have to be paid back.) The graph below shows the average published tuition starting in 1980-1981 and the average net tuition starting in 1999-2000 (the first year the government collected the grant data required to compute net tuition) for all 990 four-year colleges with data. We weight for enrollment to represent [...]Continue Reading »
The 2011–12 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study recently released by the Department of Education is full of interesting details about who receives aid and how much they get. One clear conclusion from the data is that the targeting of two important federal financial aid programs occasionally misses the mark.
Pell grants and subsidized student loans are designed for students from low-income families. But, tables 5 and 6 in the study reveal that among dependent students from families with an income greater than $100,000, 0.4 percent receive Pell grants averaging $2,800, and 23.2 percent receive subsidized loans averaging $3,600. These percentages aren’t [...]Continue Reading »
The U.S. Department of Education’s Degrees of Debt study, released last week, examines data on student borrowing and loan repayment for students one year after graduating in 1994, 2001, and 2009. For me, the most interesting findings included:
From 1992-93 to 2007-08…
The proportion of bachelor’s degrees recipients with student loan debt increased from 49 percent to 66 percent (figure 1). The proportion of upper- income borrowing at public colleges increased from 24 percent to 48 percent (figure 2). The proportion of recent college graduates who enrolled in graduate school increased from 16 percent to 25 percent (figure 9).
From 1999-2000 to 2007-08…
The average salary [...]Continue Reading »Learning through visualization. This physics teacher uses a stretched sheet of lycra to teach students about gravity. He uses heavy objects and marbles to demonstrate orbits and energy to the classroom. (Huffington Post)
Is private school worth it? Not necessary, according to the PISA study. The results show that students in private school do not score much higher in math and English than students in public school. (The Hechinger Report)
Need more time. Many public schools are doing away with the notion of a “lunch hour” and instead giving students as little as 15 minutes to eat lunch. Many people are concerned [...]Continue Reading »
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EducationSector #quickhits : Private school students don't do much better in math and science than public school students. http://t.co/XOkr3IV67k
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EducationSector Higher Ed Data Central -- An Update on Net Tuition: http://t.co/lpNVWZnQL4 #highered #collegecosts
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EducationSector #quickhits : Syracuse University chancellor plans to stay in college dorms for a few weeks. http://t.co/8rWzMLoAkL
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EducationSector MT @Joy_Resmovits : #pisa2012 =choose your own adventure. STEM ppl: results mean we need more stem! #earlyed ppl: we need ece! ...
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EducationSector MT @arotherham : The bottom line on #PISA ? http://t.co/PSvL8UkhJo Do we really need an intl. test to tell us we have big educational probs?
9/4/2013 | Arlington Magazine discusses Sara Mead’s report “The Truth About Boys and Girls.” 
8/30/2013 | The Washington Post talks about Andrew Gillen’s “Higher Ed Data Central” blog post.
7/2/2013 | USA Today talks to Andrew Gillen about default rates and his Chart You Can Trust “In Debt and In the Dark.”