Education, Math, and More with Mr. Allison

 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...

 Math is hard! Even when you're good at it, if you keep learning more math, there comes a point when it's not easy. It takes work and effort and (gasp!!!) thinking. Because it's hard, a lot of kids give up. A lot of parents don't fight too hard when their kids give up because it was hard for them too. Eventually, most students reach a point where taking more math classes is no longer required. Many schools require every student to take an English class every year, but once a student earns four math credits, they don't have to take any more. At that point, why should students take more math? That's the question I want to answer here today. Some do go on and earn five or more math credits. Most of these know their desired career field will require it. Some are pushed by their parents because their parents recognize the benefits of taking more math. A few, very few, have that exceedingly rare quality of enjoying a challenge. Sadly though, most who reach that qualif...