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...

  Most of my students are juniors and seniors who take the ACT college admissions test. In 2019, I sat for the ACT for the first time since 1984, the only time I'd ever taken it before. I did so because our school is partly judged on our students' ACT scores. I'd been tasked over the years several times to teach ACT prep classes, but I was taking for granted the materials I was handed really prepared them. I sat for the exam to see for myself what it was really like. When I sat in 2019, I saw just how different the ACT questions are written from the way they are on a typical high school math exam. That summer, I rewrote all my assessments and my assignments for my College Algebra and Pre-Calculus classes as ACT-style questions. My philosophy is test them on the material they are learning, but get them used to the way they're tested on this high-stakes exam while you're doing it. I don't have access to the data for a rigorous analysis, but anecdotal evidence sugg...