Education, Math, and More with Mr. Allison

  Unpopular opinion. We've been making up snow days as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I remember going to school on Saturday. I remember going past the last scheduled day. I remember lengthened school days, all to make up time lost to snow days. One thing we know for sure. Very few kids ever learned anything on AMI days. Heck, our school would not allow teachers to cover any new material for the same number of days we missed when kids came back from AMI days so they could catch up on the work they were supposed to do on AMI days! (Yes. What was the point of AMI days?) We also know that practically everyone bemoaned the fact that AMI days meant no more real snow days, even though most kids didn't do a lick of work while they were gone on AMI days. We KNOW these things! Now people are complaining that we have to make up the days. (Even though most schools have snow days built into their calendars and don't even know yet exactly how many days will be made up.) Now p...

She loved the snow. If she were alive today, she'd be loving this. But 13 years ago today, her life was taken by a drunken, stoned 19-year-old at a party. Teens drinking and using illegal drugs ended the life of Amanda, only four days before she would have turned 18, only four months before she would have graduated from high school. I knew she was partying. I knew she was doing things she shouldn't have been doing. I chalked them up to a teen phase that she would grow out of. She never go the chance to grow out of it. Many teens believe they're immune from harm. Amanda did. She thought she could handle whatever came at her. It's a real phenomenon, a sense of invincibility, a sense of immortality even. If you're a teen, please read the story of Amanda and realize that you're not invincible, and certainly not immortal. Alcohol and other mind-altering drugs may seem fun. Five minutes before Amanda was shot and killed, five minutes before, she texted a friend and sa...

We have a three day weekend in honor of the great civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. No high school basketball games last night, and no peewee games for us today. So I had a little time to play around. A friend of mine gets voter registration information from the Secretary of State every month. He shares the Faulkner County, Arkansas data with me whenever I ask. I'm extremely grateful, and it gives me an opportunity to practice the data science skills I gained when I was tasked with teaching a data science course a couple of years ago. In addition to teaching, I serve as the elected Justice of the Peace for Faulkner County District 3. This year I don't have an opponent, but every two years, I'm up for reelection, and I'm sure the day is coming when I will run against an opponent. The office of JP isn't one that garners tons of donations, so my campaigns are mostly self-funded. I'm not a rich man, so stretching the dollars I sink into running for a...

Unless you're an educator who's been on a deserted island, you've probably been included in some sort of "research-based" school improvement plan. If you're lucky, you and your colleagues were included in the decision making process for how to implement that plan. Maybe you were even asked for input before it was decided. Many aren't so lucky. You've surely heard of John Hattie's research. His rankings of influences and their "effect sizes" allegedly provide teachers a list of strategies ordered by how effective they are for producing student growth. An effect size of 0.4 is said to represent a year's worth of learning growth. Strategies with an effect size greater than 0.4 suggest the strategy produces more than a year's growth. Effect sizes less than 0.4 indicate the strategy does not produce a full year's growth over the course of a year. The larger the effect size, the more effective that strategy is for producing academic...

 

 The time has come for the second issue of my Arkansas High School Rankings. You may recall last year I ranked schools using demographic data and average ACT Composite scores from 232 Arkansas high schools to create a model that produced a predicted average ACT Composite score for each high school. The 232 schools were then ranked by the difference between their actual average and predicted average. The highest ranking school beat its predicted average by a larger amount than any other high school.  CLICK HERE TO SEE FULL LIST OF RANKED HIGH SCHOOLS The Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) released the Arkansas School Report Cards a few weeks ago. Since then I've been working to produce rankings for the 2022-2023 school year. I will give a brief overview of this year's results in this post. You can view the detailed report of the philosophy, methodology, and analysis behind the rankings here , and see the Jupyter Notebook with the code here. Recall, this model does not ran...