Education, Math, and More with Mr. Allison

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...

Since I started in education 18 years ago, I've seen wave after wave of reform measures. At that time, No Child Left Behind was gasping for air. Common Core shot to the fore but crashed and burned like an early Spacex rocket. CC was rebranded and repackaged as Race to the Top almost immediately. Every new reform measure to hit the streets was marketed as "research-based" measures as if that moniker meant it was sure to work. Then, a few years ago we stopped hearing the phrase "research-based" when it was replaced with the words "evidence-based." It was like someone high up on the education policy setting food chain suddenly realized that research on reform measures didn't necessarily imply those reform measures worked. But this epiphany didn't make things any better.  So here we are, now in the third decade of the 21st century, with education in America still floundering. According to Michael Seelig in the Stanford Social Innovation Review , 20...