andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-452 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Upon returning from sabbatical I came across a few magazines from a year ago that I hadn’t gotten around to reading. I’m thinking that I should read everything on a one-year delay. The too-topical stuff (for example, promos tied to upcoming movies) I can ignore, and other items are enhanced by knowing what happened a year or two later. For example, the 11 May 2009 issue of the New Yorker featured an article by Douglas McGray about an organization in Los Angeles called Green Dot that runs charter schools. According to the article, Green Dot, unlike typical charter school operators, educate just about everyone in their schools’ areas and so don’t benefit so much from selection . I don’t know enough about the details to evaluate these claims, but I was curious about this bit: [L.A. schools superintendent] Cortines has also agreed in principle to a partnership in Los Angeles. . . . Green Dot could take over as many as five Los Angeles schools in 2010, and maybe more. This mont
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1 Upon returning from sabbatical I came across a few magazines from a year ago that I hadn’t gotten around to reading. [sent-1, score-0.433]
2 The too-topical stuff (for example, promos tied to upcoming movies) I can ignore, and other items are enhanced by knowing what happened a year or two later. [sent-3, score-0.554]
3 For example, the 11 May 2009 issue of the New Yorker featured an article by Douglas McGray about an organization in Los Angeles called Green Dot that runs charter schools. [sent-4, score-0.375]
4 According to the article, Green Dot, unlike typical charter school operators, educate just about everyone in their schools’ areas and so don’t benefit so much from selection . [sent-5, score-0.489]
5 I don’t know enough about the details to evaluate these claims, but I was curious about this bit: [L. [sent-6, score-0.058]
6 schools superintendent] Cortines has also agreed in principle to a partnership in Los Angeles. [sent-8, score-0.327]
7 Green Dot could take over as many as five Los Angeles schools in 2010, and maybe more. [sent-12, score-0.163]
8 This month, Barr expects to meet again with [teacher's union leader] Weingarten and her staff and outline plans for a Green Dot America . [sent-13, score-0.468]
9 There are risks for Barr [the operator of Green Dot] in this kind of expansion. [sent-21, score-0.153]
10 It will be months, and maybe years, before there’s hard evidence about what Green Dot has accomplished at Locke [High School]. [sent-22, score-0.08]
11 And that one takeover put a real strain on the organization. [sent-23, score-0.185]
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Introduction: Upon returning from sabbatical I came across a few magazines from a year ago that I hadn’t gotten around to reading. I’m thinking that I should read everything on a one-year delay. The too-topical stuff (for example, promos tied to upcoming movies) I can ignore, and other items are enhanced by knowing what happened a year or two later. For example, the 11 May 2009 issue of the New Yorker featured an article by Douglas McGray about an organization in Los Angeles called Green Dot that runs charter schools. According to the article, Green Dot, unlike typical charter school operators, educate just about everyone in their schools’ areas and so don’t benefit so much from selection . I don’t know enough about the details to evaluate these claims, but I was curious about this bit: [L.A. schools superintendent] Cortines has also agreed in principle to a partnership in Los Angeles. . . . Green Dot could take over as many as five Los Angeles schools in 2010, and maybe more. This mont
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Introduction: Interesting discussion here by Mark Palko on the difficulty of comparing charter schools to regular schools, even if the slots in the charter schools have been assigned by lottery. Beyond the direct importance of the topic, I found the discussion interesting because I always face a challenge in my own teaching to assign the right amount of homework, given that if I assign too much, students will simply rebel and not do it. To get back to the school-choice issue . . . Mark discussed selection effects: if a charter school is popular, it can require parents to sign a contract agreeing they will supervise their students to do lots of homework. Mark points out that there is a selection issue here, that the sort of parents who would sign that form are different from parents in general. But it seems to me there’s one more twist: These charter schools are popular, right? So that would imply that there is some reservoir of parents who would like to sign the form but don’t have the opp
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Introduction: Faithful readers will know that my ideal alternative career is to be an editor in the Max Perkins mold. If not that, I think I’d enjoy being a literary essayist, someone like Alfred Kazin or Edmund Wilson or Louis Menand, who could write about my favorite authors and books in a forum where others would read and discuss what I wrote. I could occasionally collect my articles into books, and so on. On the other hand, if I actually had such a career, I wouldn’t have much of an option to do statistical research in my spare time, so I think for my own broader goals, I’ve gotten hold of the right side of the stick. As it is, I enjoy writing about literary matters but it never quite seems worth spending the time to do it right. (And, stepping outside myself, I realize that I have a lot more to offer the world as a statistician than literary critic. Criticism is like musicianship–it can be hard to do, and it’s impressive when done well, but a lot of people can do it. Literary criticism
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Introduction: Phil Harris and Bruce Smith write: We have only recently chanced upon your blog while we were looking for responses to the “decline effect” in medical and scientific studies. We were especially taken by your comment that there is something wrong with the scientific method “if this method is defined as running experiments and doing data analysis in a patternless way and then reporting, as true, results that pass a statistical significance threshold.” To us, that seems to be standard operating procedure in much of social science, including our own field of education. Indeed quasi-experimental designs are the stock in trade of those who attempt to use “science” — we dare not say haruspicy, but you can if you like — to influence the course of public policy. Now, a new entrant into the cherry pickers sweepstakes seems to have emerged. It is on Charter School Performance in Indiana Schools . We are by no means professional statisticians or data analysts, but we have some background in
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Introduction: Frank Hansen writes: Columbus Park is on Chicago’s west side, in the Austin neighborhood. The park is a big green area which includes a golf course. Here is the google satellite view. Here is the nytimes page. Go to Chicago, and zoom over to the census tract 2521, which is just north of the horizontal gray line (Eisenhower Expressway, aka I290) and just east of Oak Park. The park is labeled on the nytimes map. The census data have around 50 dots (they say 50 people per dot) in the park which has no residential buildings. Congressional district is Danny Davis, IL7. Here’s a map of the district. So, how do we explain the map showing ~50 dots worth of people living in the park. What’s up with the algorithm to place the dots? I dunno. I leave this one to you, the readers.
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Introduction: Howard Wainer writes : When we focus only on the differences between groups, we too easily lose track of the big picture. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the current public discussions of the size of the gap in test scores that is observed between racial groups. It has been noted that in New Jersey the gap between the average scores of white and black students on the well-developed scale of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has shrunk by only about 25 percent over the past two decades. The conclusion drawn was that even though the change is in the right direction, it is far too slow. But focusing on the difference blinds us to what has been a remarkable success in education over the past 20 years. Although the direction and size of student improvements are considered across many subject areas and many age groups, I will describe just one — 4th grade mathematics. . . . there have been steep gains for both racial groups over this period (somewhat steeper g
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Introduction: I encountered this news article , “Chicago school bans some lunches brought from home”: At Little Village, most students must take the meals served in the cafeteria or go hungry or both. . . . students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria. . . . Such discussions over school lunches and healthy eating echo a larger national debate about the role government should play in individual food choices. “This is such a fundamental infringement on parental responsibility,” said J. Justin Wilson, a senior researcher at the Washington-based Center for Consumer Freedom, which is partially funded by the food industry. . . . For many CPS parents, the idea of forbidding home-packed lunches would be unthinkable. . . . If I had read this two years ago, I’d be at one with J. Justin Wilson and the outraged kids and parents. But last year we spent a sabbatical in Paris, where . . . kids aren’t allowed to bring
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Introduction: Sharon Otterman reports : When report card grades were released in the fall for the city’s 455 high schools, the highest score went to a small school in a down-and-out section of the Bronx . . . A stunning 94 percent of its seniors graduated, more than 30 points above the citywide average. . . . “When I interviewed for the school,” said Sam Buchbinder, a history teacher, “it was made very clear: this is a school that doesn’t believe in anyone failing.” That statement was not just an exhortation to excellence. It was school policy. By order of the principal, codified in the school’s teacher handbook, all teachers should grade their classes in the same way: 30 percent of students should earn a grade in the A range, 40 percent B’s, 25 percent C’s, and no more than 5 percent D’s. As long as they show up, they should not fail. Hey, that sounds like Harvard and Columbia^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H various selective northeastern colleges I’ve known. Of course, we^H^H
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Introduction: This assessment by Tyler Cowen reminded me that, in 1980, I and just about all my friends hated Jimmy Carter. Most of us much preferred him to Reagan but still hated Carter. I wouldn’t associate this with any particular ideological feeling—it’s not that we thought he was too liberal, or too conservative. He just seemed completely ineffectual. I remember feeling at the time that he had no principles, that he’d do anything to get elected. In retrospect, I think of this as an instance of uniform partisan swing: the president was unpopular nationally, and attitudes about him were negative, relatively speaking, among just about every group. My other Carter story comes from a conversation I had a couple years ago with an economist who’s about my age, a man who said that one reason he and his family moved from town A to town B in his metropolitan area was that, in town B, they didn’t feel like they were the only Republicans on their block. Anyway, this guy described himself as a “
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Introduction: I saw the trailer for the new Mr. Peabody movie and it looked terrible. They used that weird animation where everything looks round, also the voice had none of the intonations of the “real” Peabody (for some reason, the trailer had the original English voices, maybe they didn’t get their act together to make a dubbed trailer in time for the release here), also the scenes looked pretty stupid. I went back home and checked out Peabody on wikipedia and it turns out that they made 91 episodes! I had no idea. Anyway, here’s my real question: Why bother making a Mr. Peabody movie if you’re not going to do it well? I understand that lots of moviemakers are hacks and there will always be a huge audience for crap in any case, so I’m certainly not demanding that all movies be “good” (in whatever sense that means, from my perceptions). But there are lots and lots of opportunities to make crap movies, there are a million toys and video games and comic book characters and fairy tales and br
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