Mr. Reilly is a professor of political science at Kentucky State University, and his interest in hate crimes dates to his graduate-school days, when he became aware of several widely reported incidents in the vicinity of his hometown that turned out to be fake. In 2012 a popular gay bar in suburban Chicago was destroyed by fire, and the owner cited homophobia as the reason. The same year, black...
Does teacher training actually work? Apparently not
From American Economic Journal: Applied Economics: Does Teacher Training Actually Work? Evidence from a Large-Scale Randomized Evaluation of a National Teacher Training Program Despite massive investments in teacher professional development (PD) programs in developing countries, there is little evidence on their effectiveness. We present results of a large-scale, randomized evaluation of a...
Ed researchers: dodgeball is a tool of oppression
No word on whether wrenches are also tools of oppression. When the Canadian Society for the Study of Education meets in Vancouver at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, a trio of education theorists will argue that dodgeball is not only problematic, in the modern sense of displaying hierarchies of privilege based on athletic skill, but that it is outright “miseducative.” Dodgeball...
Emergency financial aid does not seem to matter
Community college completion rates are extremely low, especially among low-income students. One potential explanation is that low-income students have limited capacity to overcome financial shocks, such as large medical, legal, or car repair bills. Some programs offer “emergency financial assistance” (EFA) to prevent these events from curtailing educational progress. We test the...
Experiments make people uneasy
In an important and sad new paper Meyer et al. demonstrate the phenomena in a series of 16 experiments which show that unease with experiments is replicable and general. The authors, for example, ask 679 people in a survey to rate the appropriateness of three interventions designed to reduce hospital infections. The three interventions are: Badge (A): The director decides that all doctors who...
Almost a quarter-million teachers physically attacked in public schools
A record 220,300 public school teachers reported that they were physically attacked by a student during the 2015-2016 school year, according to a report jointly published this month by the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The data for 2015-16 comes from the NCES’s National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS). The data for previous school years going...
Reign of terror at Virginia Tech
Sounds like the administration is putting up a stiff resistance to this guy; it’s definitely not the time for a limp response. A torrent of penis drawings in different locations across the Virginia Tech campus last fall drew numerous bias complaints from students, leaving university administrators grappling for answers as to whether the university had been targeted by a penis-drawing bandit...
Idea that rich people have lots of debt was due to a simple Stata error
There but for the grace of God go I: Back in January, the Urban Institute—a widely respected Washington think tank—published a statistic about student debt that pretty soon caught fire among economics journalists. Based on an analysis of federal data, its researchers concluded that 49 percent of all outstanding education loans belonged to highest-earning quarter of American households. In other...
Educational RCT’s are uninformative
From the abstract: There are a growing number of large-scale educational randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Considering their expense, it is important to reflect on the effectiveness of this approach. We assessed the magnitude and precision of effects found in those large-scale RCTs commissioned by the UK-based Education Endowment Foundation and the U.S.-based National Center for Educational...
Unskilled and entitled students will “eat you alive”
Students who can’t get into elite schools through the front door based on academic merit don’t change once they’re in class. They can’t do the work, and are generally uninterested in gaining the skills they need in order to do well. Exhibit A from the recent admissions corruption scandal is “social media celebrity” Olivia Jade Gianulli, whose parents bought her a place at the University of...