Massachusetts
mikethemadbiologist | July 29, 2010Yesterday, I described the relationship between low-income and poor performance in English and math in Massachusetts (see the post for methodological details). Well, I've saved the worst for last--science education:
Just to remind everyone, the horizontal axis is the percentage of children in a school who qualify for free lunch, and the vertical axis is the percentage of children who, according to their MCAS scores, are either classified as "Need Improvement" or "Warning/Failing" in science.
The R2--how much of the school to school variation is accounted for by variation in school lunch…
mikethemadbiologist | July 28, 2010I've described before how there is a significant correlation between poverty and educational performance when we use state-level data. But as I pointed out, one of the interesting things is that the residual--the difference between the expected scores for a given state and the actual scores--can be quite large for some states (e.g., Massachusetts does much better than expected, Arkansas much worse). We can learn a lot from these differences (i.e., what does MA do differently from Arkansas). But if we look at only one state, can we determine what the effect of poverty is?
To do this, I've…
mikethemadbiologist | May 5, 2010Last week, we looked at how the Obama Administration's "Race to the Top" education 'reform' legislation screwed over Massachusetts because MA had the silly idea that changing the curriculum (dumbing it down, actually) of one of the most successful educational systems in the world should be presented to the citizens of the Commonwealth. Silly Mad Biologist: we want to teach kids about democracy and citizenship, not have them grow up and do them. Jeepers. Some people.
Anyway, "Race to the Top" also screws over science education, especially innovative programs to expose young children to…
mikethemadbiologist | April 15, 2010It's supposed to be rainy, so why not attend? Carl Zimmer will be there. MAS does really cool outreachy things like teacher training so they're worth supporting, even if you can't attend. Anyway, this found its way into my email machine:
Join the Massachusetts Academy of Sciences as we spend a day at the Museum of Science, Boston celebrating science and our efforts to improve the state of STEM education in Massachusetts! We've got a packed day planned for our members and registrants, and we'd love nothing more than to spend the day with new and not-so-new friends!
Interested? You may…
mikethemadbiologist | April 10, 2010I'm skeptical. Floyd Norris, who usually is smart enough not to join the 'Pain Caucus', claims it is in The NY Times:
The federal government is now starting to build the institutions that will try to reduce the soaring growth of health care costs. There will be a group to compare the effectiveness of different treatments, a so-called Medicare innovation center and a Medicare oversight board that can set payment rates.
But all these groups will face the same basic problem. Deep down, Americans tend to believe that more care is better care. We recoil from efforts to restrict care.
Managed care…
Does Anyone Know If the HCR Does Anything to Stop Hospital Price Gouging? The Coakley Report Edition
mikethemadbiologist | March 22, 2010Since the Congress passed Romneycare, it's worth looking at the major driver in Massachusetts of medical inflation--price gouging by hospitals and physicians groups that are able to set prices due to de facto monopoly power. From the MA Attorney General's office (italics mine; underscore original):
In a presentation at the hearing, Attorney General Coakley, with the assistance of staff from her Health Care Division and two expert witnesses, outlined seven key findings that have powerful implications for the health care marketplace in Massachusetts...
2) Price variations for hospitals and…
mikethemadbiologist | March 19, 2010Universal Hub linked to my post about the non-existent educational crisis in Massachusetts. In the comments was this really good point about not racing to the bottom (italics mine):
While I am a frequent critic of the Boston schools and government waste, on the whole Mass is fantastic thanks to the rigorous standards we impose (the MCAS isn't perfect, but based on some of my analysis, school improvements appear to be almost directly correlated to some of the standardized testing reforms). One more reason I'm opposed to using tax breaks to generate jobs - why do we always compete just on…
mikethemadbiologist | March 17, 2010It's bad enough that the Texas Board of Education, through its new 'standards', will result in the mass mental disability of millions of American students. But the new federal standards could potential harm Massachusetts' educational system--and if it's working well (and it is)--then don't fix it. With friends like Arne Duncan and the Obama Administration, who needs enemies (or Republicans)? Ze'ev Furman and Sandra Stotsky:
The Obama administration plans to make states adopt proposed national academic standards as a condition for receipt of federal education grants. The problem is what the…
mikethemadbiologist | March 14, 2010The discussion of education in the U.S. typically is very weird: it's one of the few areas where advocates routinely claim how poorly they're doing. Some of that is an attempt to gain additional funding and support, but a lot of it seems to be propaganda that has taken on a life of its own (and, with the rise of the for-profit school industry, there is also a financial incentive in some quarters). Consider this snippet from a Boston Phoenix editorial reviewing Governor Deval Patrick's accomplishments:
The sweeping education-reform act Patrick shepherded through the legislature is a real…
mikethemadbiologist | February 14, 2010By way of the Universal Hub, we find that Ross Levanto has good news--MA Governor Patrick has signed into law the Green Ticket Law:
The law that is now in place (whoo hooo!) will allow the City to better penalize trash scofflaws. The City will now be able to put in place procedures that attach unpaid trash violation fines to a property's tax bills. This will give those violations weight. It will also wake up absentee landlords throughout the city (building owners who rarely visit their properties and check on their tenants).
What's critical about these liens is that you can't sell the…
mikethemadbiologist | January 24, 2010I made this point Wednesday, but Steve Singiser breaks down the numbers:
But the "tack back to the center" crowd ignores a critical stat from yesterday evening: 44% of the people who cast a ballot for Barack Obama in 2008 in the state of Massachusetts either (a) cast a vote for Scott Brown, (b) cast a vote for Joe Kennedy, or (c) withheld their vote. The math tells us that option (c) was the most likely of the three.
Indeed, a good deal of Martha Coakley's problem last night was that communities that were absolute strongholds for President Obama in 2008 failed to turn out in the numbers that…
mikethemadbiologist | January 21, 2010I think this is only part of the story, but it seems that the 'Democratic Machine' in Massachusetts might have slipped a gear:
"Nobody likes her" says mom. What she means is, Coakley had no friends in politics. The Democrats in Massachusetts let this happen because - "I don't know" says mom.
Maybe they weren't about to let Western Mass manipulate them. Maybe it all comes down to nothing more than who is friends with whom.
All Scott Brown did was see an opportunity and turn it to his advantage.
There is no deeper national implication. This is not a death knell for the Democratic party or Obama…
mikethemadbiologist | January 15, 2010It might come as a shock to some, but, temperamentally, I'm conservative, at least when it comes to things that are critical. One of those things is education. So when I read in The Boston Globe that various groups want to increase the number of students in charter schools and also the number of charter schools (currently, about four percent of students attend charter schools), I really fail to understand why. Massachusetts, year in and year out, does incredibly well, if not leading the nation, on the NAEP tests. Likewise, if MA were a country, it would beat, hands down, all of Europe and…
mikethemadbiologist | January 12, 2010One of the claims that has been going around is that healthcare in Massachusetts is affordable; in fact, MIT economist Paul Jonathan Gruber, who has come under fire for conflicts-of-interest, has made this claim:
In considering affordability for a group, we need to establish a sensible benchmark whereby insurance is considered affordable if "most of" a group can afford it. We can disagree about what "most of" means, but it would be wrong to define "most of" only as "very close to 100%."
Well, that's good to know. Because most humans, as opposed to MIT economists, would think, when it comes…
mikethemadbiologist | November 2, 2009There's an election Tuesday in Massachusetts, and here's who the Mad Biologist endorses.
U.S Senate: This is tough. Both Rep. Mike Capuano and Attorney General Martha Coakley have strengths and weaknesses. Both are reliable liberals, but they have different emphases. Capuano has very good constituent services, and he understands the importance of scientific research to the MA state economy. He does, however, have some shady fundraising associations with Rep. Murtha. Coakley has a very good record as Attorney General, including bringing successful suits against Wall Street firms for…
mikethemadbiologist | August 28, 2009In a bunch of different contexts, I keep reading about how poorly the U.S. is doing in science. And that's true at the national level--we do fare poorly in comparison to other countries. But it's worth remembering that the U.S. is a really large country, geographically and in terms of population, and that certain regions do very, very well. I don't just mean the occasional affluent county, but entire states.
A while ago, I discussed a re-analysis of math test scores that compared individual U.S. states' scores to other countries--in other words, states in the U.S. were treated as if they…
mikethemadbiologist | August 18, 2009...I was wrong. African-Americans and Latinos are already showing elevated numbers of swine flu hospitalizations in Massachusetts:
Since its arrival in Boston in late April, swine flu has proved to be a particular source of misery to the city's African-American and Hispanic residents, causing hospitalizations at far higher levels than other groups, disease trackers report.
More than 3 of every 4 Bostonians who have spent time in the hospital because of the viral ailment are black or Hispanic, a finding that may reflect broader social ills, the top official at the Boston Public Health…
mikethemadbiologist | June 22, 2009...they live in Massachusetts. Most of us have read the "ZOMG!! AMERICAN KIDZ DON'T KNOW TEH MATHZ!" stories. But a recent study (pdf), found by way of Matthew Yglesias, points out that some states in the U.S. actually do better than most countries (and then there's Mississippi, Alabama, and Washington D.C.).
The authors took the NAEP test, which is administered to U.S. fourth and eighth graders, and used a cohort which also took the international TIMSS test, to transform the NAEP data into equivalent TIMSS scores.
Looking at the fourth grade scores, MA, with an average TIMSS score of 572,…