Education, Math, and More with Mr. Allison

I was self-employed, making good money. Working hard, 7 days a week, but doing well. When I got out of the Marine Corps we bought 80 acres on the top of a long rocky ridge line in Cleburne County, Arkansas. It was rough ground that had lacked attention for a long time. We put a 16x80 trailer on it and I went to driving a truck, first driving for my grandfather and then purchasing the truck and doing everything on my own. Five years of life on the road got old and my wife and I decided to raise chickens.  Over that five years, we'd cleaned the place up quite a bit. We borrowed a bunch of money and built a 650 foot breeder house, bought a bunch of cows, and started my career in agriculture. We adopted our daughters and life was good.  I think God started dropping hints at what he wanted me to do along the way, but I was too hard-headed to heed them. On a homework assignment once, my oldest daughter had to estimate something and she threw out an insane number for whatever the sit...

 Yesterday I had an opportunity to meet Arkansas's new Secretary of Education, Jacob Oliva. If you're involved in Arkansas education at any level in any capacity, you know the elephant in every room is Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders' attempt to overhaul the state's education system, the LEARNS Act that became law earlier this year. Even though LEARNS is in a state of limbo while it's being challenged in court, smart money says it will be the law when school starts in the fall. Oliva is tasked with implementing LEARNS, which makes him very unpopular with a lot of people. But my first encounter convinced me he's not the bad guy many have painted him. We were at an Arkansas State Teachers Association (ASTA) Member Leader workshop. ASTA is a non-union, apolitical professional organization dedicated supporting to student-centered, teacher-led education in Arkansas. ASTA member leaders serve as points of contact and recruiters for ASTA in schools across the state. Me...

Today began the annual AP Reading for Statistics! Last week, when I was returning from a school safety meeting in Little Rock, someone said to me, "I thought y'all were off for the summer." I just laughed a little and replied, "Yeah. That's what most people think." Au contraire though. There are a lot of teachers hard at work, even as I write this post. As teachers, we're required to spend several days in the summer attending professional development opportunities. Too often, the only benefit we see from PD sessions is the few hours of credit we get from attending. I'd say not much of the PD we're required to do every year actually makes us better teachers, or helps us improve student outcomes.  But my AP-related work, including the annual AP reading, is different. Before this week is over, I'll have scored over 1000 responses to the same question. Today I made it through 80-something. Already I'm seeing common mistakes and misconceptions...

I decided to kick off this summer by developing a model to rank Arkansas high schools, not just based on test scores, but based on how schools scored against how they could be EXPECTED to score. I used a regression model that takes demographic and enrollment data that is beyond the ability of the school to control. The individual schools' data is fed to the model to create predicted ACT Composite scores. The schools' predicted score is subtracted from the actual 2021-2022 average ACT Composite score, resulting in a "residual." Residuals that are greater than zero indicate a school outperformed the model's expectation. Schools with a residual less than zero underperformed against the expectation. Schools were then ranked by residual in descending order. The highest ranked school had the highest residual. Some schools were removed from the ranking as outliers or special cases with attributes that made them so different from typical high s...