Sherman Dorn

The 'multiculturalism'/'diversity' tantrum

At least once a semester, at least one of my colleagues or I hear the following complaint from a student: "I've heard enough about diversity and multiculturalism!! Why can't we just treat each other as human beings?" I'd hazard a guess that anyone who's taught a social-foundations course in education or other classes where this topic pops up gets a similar complaint. It's a minor vent/rage against the topic itself as well as a response to disturbing views that someone might be reading. And until recently, I didn't understand it except as someone resisting the analysis required by the topic.

Classroom use at USF

Today, the Oracle, USF's student newspaper, printed a guest column I sent a few days ago. The electronic version is cleaner than the column that appeared on p. 5 of the printed version (the link which will only show the relevant issue in PDF through mid-August 2004), but neither is precisely what I wrote:

When you don't have all grades...

One more idea: what to do with districts that aren't unified—do not have students in all grades? There are bunches of districts in Texas and Massachusetts, for example, that have only elementary or only secondary grades. The iterative process for estimating student net flows relies on the whole grade span in two different ways—you need the upper grades to estimate the lower grades properly, and you need the lower grades to have a baseline net-migrant rate against which to compare the net-flow rates for high-school grades.

So the inverse (or converse) of a jackknife approach is called for.

Net-flow SAS test files

After talking with my colleague John Ferron, I've tried to use the SAS DATA step to calculate the net-flow rates and then to vary the retention-rate estimates randomly around the official figures, to see how that changes the results.

No comments (administrivia)

Since there's only been one legitimate comment on about 120 postings, and a lot of my traffic is from spammers attempting to comment (but generally hidden), I've removed the comment capacity from these posts. It's a matter of practicality.

More on student net flows and dropping out

Sometimes it's hard to sit on the sidelines during a public-policy debate when an ongoing research project is relevant. I've seen that twice this year, first as arguments developed in Massachusetts over whether student dropout rates had increased after the creation of a graduation test and more recently when the Florida Department of Education gave the St. Petersburg Times erroneous figures on the ages of students taking the GED tests. From the first figures produced by Florida's government, the Times wrote an article implying that the new graduation test had pushed a large number of teenagers to drop out of school and take the GED instead.

Happy Birthday, U.S.A.

Today is generally reckoned as the 228th birthday of the United States of America. Some good wishes are therefore in order.