Digest of Education Statistics

The Education Department today released its latest Digest of Education Statistics, packed with data on students, teachers and educational institutions across the U.S., from early childhood centers to universities.

• Spending by elementary and secondary schools hit $700 billion. Schools hired more educators in 2012, which resulted in a ratio of 15.2 students per teacher, down from 15.9 students per teacher a decade earlier. Teacher salaries, however, have not risen much; their average salary of $56,643 for the 2011-12 school year is up just 1 percent — after adjusting for inflation — from the 1990-91 school year.
• The percentage of students eligible for subsidized lunches has soared from 38.3 percent in 2001 to 48.1 percent in 2011-12. The share of students in English-language learner programs has also edged up, from 8.7 percent a decade ago to 9.8 percent in 2011-12.
• Despite the challenges facing schools, the report finds significant improvements in the high school graduation rate. From 1990-2011, the status dropout rate — which includes anyone age 16-24 who is not enrolled in school and has not received a diploma — declined from 12.1 percent to 7.1 percent. (This measure excludes imprisoned convicts.) 
• In 2012, about 88 percent of the adult population had a high school diploma or equivalency degree, and 31 percent had at least a bachelor’s degree. Those numbers are both up four percentage points from a decade earlier.
• The youngest U.S. residents are also spending more time in class. About 59 percent of children age 3-5 attended full-day pre-kindergarten in 2011, up from 53 percent in 2000. Overall, about 64 percent of kids in that age group are enrolled in pre-K.

Bullying Stats

Nearly one in five New York City high school students reported being bullied at some point in 2011, according to a new report from the city health department.

A few trends from the report:
— Bullying in the city is more common among students in ninth  grade than students in 11^th and 12^th grade.
— Gay students reported being bullied 29 percent of the time, more often than the 17 percent rate for students who identified as heterosexual.
— There was no statistically significant difference in the rates of bullying across ethnic groups.
— There was also no statistically significant difference in the overall rates of bulling between girls and boys, but girls where slightly more likely than boys to report having been cyber-bullied (13 percent as opposed to 9 percent).
Students who reported having been bullied were also more likely to report other behaviors that are linked with poor health outcomes. This included smoking, drug use, self-harm such as cutting and missing school because they felt unsafe. Additionally, 16 percent of bullied students had carried a weapon to school in the last 30 days, compared to 7 percent of their peers.

EdTech VC $

Venture capital investment in education technology for the preK-12 market hit  $452 million this year, up 6 percent from 2012, according to a new analysis by the NewSchools Venture Fund.

Among the hottest areas for investment: Big data, computer science and language acquisition.
Jennifer Carolan, managing director of the NewSchools Seed Fund, notes in the analysis that while “data-driven instruction” has been a mantra in K-12 for years, “the technology tools to extract, analyze and make use of that data have been crude and technically unsophisticated.” She finds promise in the big investment this year in data analysis tools: Venture money for the sector totaled $34 million in 2013, up from just $5 million last year.

Carolan also notices a surge in interest in tools that teach students computer science, including coding. That sector was almost invisible last year, but brought in $23 million in investment this year. “We see this trend continuing as more schools integrate computer science into the school curriculum and states recognize computer science as a credit-bearing course,” she wrote.

In other notable developments, tutoring and test prep companies snagged $29 million in capital. Gaming platforms attracted $40 million. Language learning software beat them both out, attracting a whopping $90 million in investment.


Many of the investments were in “seed rounds” for start-up companies.

OCR Data Release

From: POLITICO Pro Whiteboard [mailto:politicoemail@politicopro.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 26, 2013 2:12 PM
To: Nadeau, Gregory
Subject: Education Department data reveal disparities among students of different races

12/26/13 2:12 PM EST

New estimates from the Education Department paint a picture of vastly different educational experiences among children of different racial groups, using data collected about the 2009-2010 school year.

The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights gathered information about dozens of data points from roughly 7,000 school districts through its Civil Rights Data Collection. Combined, the districts represent about 85 percent of public school students in the country.

Using those figures, it estimated, for example that while black students represent about 17 percent of students in the country, they make up a little less than 9 percent of students enrolled in a calculus class during the 2009-10 school year. Hispanic students represent about 22 percent of the student population captured in the data set. But only 10 percent of students enrolled in calculus were Hispanic. In Algebra 2 enrollment, students aligned more closely with their representation in the public school system: about 16 percent of students enrolled in Algebra 2 were black, while 60 percent of students enrolled in the advanced math course were white. (About 55 percent of the 48 million public school students nationwide were white that school year, the national estimates show.)

But only about 10 percent of students identified as gifted and talented were black while 65 percent of students with that label were white.

And while third grade retention has grabbed headlines, the data show choke points in retention elsewhere. For example, states retained more than 116,000 kindergartners, but only about 50,000 third graders — and about 40 percent of the third graders retained were black. Of retained kindergartners, however, about 42 percent were white.

The delicate freshman year proved to be a hurdle for students too: Nearly 279,000 ninth graders were retained, more than in sixth, seventh and eighth grades, combined. About a third each of those freshman retained were black, Hispanic and white.

Also, 33 percent of students suspended out of school more than once were white, and 44 percent of students suspended out of school more than once were black, the estimates find.

However the figures, which the Education Department has said can only be analyzed with great caution, don't provide the total population of kindergartners or third graders.

The Education Department is currently analyzing data collected from the 2011-12 school year, which will include data from every district in the country, rather than a sample.


— Nirvi Shah

Ed Markey's Data Privacy Act

Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, who has expressed deep concern about student privacy, today plans to introduce legislation aimed at protecting children and teens in what he calls the “new Internet ecosystem.”

The Do Not Track Kids legislation would update the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by requiring websites to offer an “eraser button” whenever technologically feasible so that parents and kids can delete embarrassing or inappropriate posts. The bill also includes a “Digital Marketing Bill of Rights” that limits the information companies can collect about children from their online activity and social media posts. And it would prohibit targeted online marketing to children 15 and younger, unless the child or parent consents to receive the advertising.

The bill does not specifically apply to software or websites used in schools; the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, governs those interactions.

But Markey has expressed interest in closely monitoring FERPA as well.

Last month, he sent a letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan requesting more information about changes the department made to FERPA, the primary student privacy law, in 2008 and 2011. The changes eased the way for schools to share more data with third parties, including private, for-profit companies. He also asked whether the department has evaluated the type of information that is routinely shared with third-party vendors. And he asked Duncan whether he believes parents should be allowed to opt out of databases and keep their children’s data private.

MIT's Report on Future of MT Education





 

Download full report here.

 

Google and edX

By Jon Haber, DegreeofFreedom on September 16, 2013

 

Google has made forays into the educational s space over the years, notably by packaging many of their free services such as Google Apps and Calendar in ways that make them accessible (and free) for students and teachers (many of whom have already entered the Google universe via services such as gMail and Google+).

This is in addition to the spontaneous use by educators of Google products such as Google+ Hangouts (offering free video conferencing) which you’ll find integrated into a number of MOOC classes. And Google is already a player (albeit a small one) in the online education space with their Coursebuilder product.

But Coursebuilder’s catalog today consists of just a few dozen classes, most of them fairly specialized (i.e., narrow). And the fact that Coursebuilder has never come up in any of the MOOC conversations I’ve had over the last year is an indication that even an organization as huge and omnipresent as Google isn’t automatically granted dominance in any market it chooses to enter.

Which is what makes the coming together of Google and edX so interesting. For in addition to bringing a robust and open set of teaching technologies to the partnership, edX is also bringing along it’s pedigree as an offspring of two of the world’s most respected universities: Harvard and MIT. Which means that courses launched on MOOC.org are likely to seem more legitimately “MOOC-y” than courses delivered via other platforms.

This halo effect will likely come into play as content starts making its way onto the new platform. For one needs to keep in mind that there already exist platforms that allow anyone to create their own online courses, charge what they like for them (including nothing), and distribute them worldwide. Udemy is a prime example of such a service which today delivers many times the number of courses you’ll find on all of the all of the Big Three MOOC providers combined.

But the bulk of Udemy courses are in areas such as how-to training on technical, business or lifestyle subjects. And the few dozen courses they have that could be construed as paralleling what you’d get at a traditional university (mostly in the humanities and social sciences) can best be described as sketchy when compared to more robust offerings you’d get in a Coursea, Udacity or edX course.

For instance, a Udemy art history survey course I took consisted entirely of dozens of video lectures that seemed like repurposed content from other sources. And another course I just completed on Greek Religion was well taught by an enthusiastic professor, but never provided anything beyond the professor talking into his computer’s webcam.

Apparently other tools such as discussion boards and assessment are available via the Udemy platform, but are used inconsistently, making the product seem primarily like a video delivery system. And small enrollments (except for a few“blockbuster” courses such as ones that teach Microsoft Excel) demonstrate why most people need convincing that such a “come-one-come-all” service should be considers as playing the same game as are Stanford or MIT when they release their massive open classes to the world.

Now it’s not entirely clear who MOOC.org is going to draw with regard to content creation and whether those who take advantage of the platform will think of it as anything other than one more channel for the delivery of homemade content with little regard to polish or academic rigor. But the set of tools provided by edX’s software, and that platform’s open nature (which means programmers will be able to extend the service, as do WordPress add-in developers) means MOOC.org will at least have the potential to do more than offer cooking tips or lessons on how to set up your aquarium.

In a review of that art history course linked above, I talked about how academia –like journalism – is a field where the number of people qualified to participate far surpasses the number of well-paid positions (which, in the case of higher ed, means tenure-track teaching jobs). Which is why you can find such solid educational and academic work on the web, just like you can find quality citizen journalism that offers far more what you’d get in one of the dying daily newspapers or weekly news magazines.

But the Internet’s low barrier to entry also means anyone who feels like it can declare themselves a professor, just as any nut with a grudge can publish whatever crap they like and call it journalism. So even if MOOC.org elevates the capability of what people can use to teach online, content (in this case, creative educational content that makes use of the full facilities of edX) will continue to be king, or at least determine if MOOCs really can make it without Ivy League professors continuing to be the face of learning.

http://degreeoffreedom.org/mooc-org/