When did you arrive?
Can you read, speak, understand?
Did you travel far?

Tags: haiku, CELDT

We're gearing up to exhibit at the SSDA in Sacramento in early April and were discussing our left-over raffle prizes from ACSA last fall. I described the raffle prizes before. Here's an excerpt:

***
We will be giving away graphics packages again, but Sander wanted to spice things up a bit. It looks like these will be our prizes:

(1)
A CAHSEE graphics package for anyone with a high school
~and~
A special KC and the Sunshine Band CD for one lucky winner. (Anyone who stumbled in here not from education, first of all I'm sorry, and second of all, the acronym "CAHSEE" is pronounced the same as "KC" or "Casey.")

(2)
A special school accountability graphics package for any school administrator, billed as graphs to help you through program improvement (PI) or to stay out of program improvement (PI).
~and~
One lucky winner will receive the entire first season of Magnum PI.

***

We were laughing about the prizes last night and my quip in that blog post, "Let's all hope Sander doesn't have "Shake your booty" playing at the booth." My mom said, "Now you've got to have "Shake your booty" playing.

As it is we will have far more excitement in our booth than most people would be brave enough for. I am actually bringing my mother perhaps for some deep-seated emotional reason. I am also bringing my newborn son (perhaps another reason for bringing mom). We are also really excited that our friend Sherrill Hufnagel will be joining us. She worked for more than a dozen years as the superintendent of the Delano Joint Union High School District. We don't see her enough and are looking forward to spending a couple of days together. I wonder if Sherrill would even come if she knew about the dancing?

For the raffle, we probably will offer the snazzy CAHSEE package complete with KC and the Sunshine Band's Greatest Hits. The best PI tool we have now for elementary and middle schools is our CST Self-Study examining performance in all of the subjects of the California Standards Test. Perhaps we'll offer that with Magnum PI.

But what about the music and dancing? I was thinking about that last night when it occurred to me how much babies love both music and dancing. I said, "Sander, call Al Sandrini. Ask if we can have music in our booth."

Tags: SSDA, Conferences

As a sibling to our new CST product -- the CST Self-Study System -- we now have the CAHSEE Self-Study System. Both reports were planned for the fall of 2009 but somebody's WASC process moved the CAHSEE development through rapidly. What a great month it is to have a new report out of development!

The CAHSEE and CST Self-Study reports will join the CELDT Self Study (which is in its final stages of testing) to form the WASC data trifecta.

The reports are designed for high school and dead-on for WASC with in-depth subgroup analyses and comparisons between the school, district, county, and state. I am excited about the types of data in the reports. Both the CST and CAHSEE include cluster and strand analyses. The CELDT report, of course, includes the language acquistition domains. You really can't have enough help with WASC and I am pleased that these reports will provide a good deal of help.

Tags: CAHSEE

"It's too bad companies like yours exist," said our new baby's foot doctor who is also a school board president.

"It's too bad we need you too," I responded.

I gave him a free sample of his school's CST report anyway as well as a report we did for them earlier through another funding stream.

Tags: CST, California Standards Test

We live on a homestead in the Sequoia National Monument and some folks say it’s great we had a boy. You know, he’ll be able to work on the farm some day, like in the good ol’ days. We were lucky enough to have a second baby in December and lo and behold we have a second boy who appears to be downright husky and made for homestead work. But I always say, “Are you kidding? This is my labor pool.” I am referring to data work of course and am working early to develop the talent.

Frederick and I worked on an analysis of baby clothes last fall. The project is incomplete. Actually producing the baby to wear the clothes got in the way of the project.

It is my big plan to have Frederick on the payroll in about a decade. He’s a mathematics crackerjack . Our newest addition could join when Frederick heads to college if he’s so inclined. Perhaps six years apart was a good plan after all.

You’ll find a gallery of baby pictures and other factoids at the other blog.

The pregnancy mania really wasn't clinical, but you never know what's going to happen when you combine pregnancy hormones and data products. I had a plan for two products I would be developing after the school improvement report product, and I'm sorry if you heard about the plan and were waiting for some tidbits to appear on this site. Instead, we have a snazzy CST product ready for August of 2009.



It is a school-level that examines change since 2003:

• Change in performance levels
• Comparison to district, county, and state performance
• Change in numbers tested

This is a high-value product with each page dedicated to a subject, grade level, and subgroup. Depending on the number of subject tests you administer and the number of grade levels in your school, you may have a report in excess of one hundred pages. High schools with several subgroups certainly fit in this category. If you are a small elementary school with no subgroups, your report may only be ten pages. High school prices will be slightly higher than middle and elementary because of the number of subjects, but will be the higher value product.

New schools will not find this report useful since its strength lies in examining change over time. Schools with at least two test administrations by the spring of 2009 will find value in the report.

Some of you may have your sample already. If you don't have yours, contact me and I'll send you yours. The sample is for mathematics only but the product includes all things CST -- every subject, every grade, every subgroup for which there is data for your school.

Tags: CST, California Standards Test

The state board’s new algebra policy is in court. Opponents have won a temporary restraining order on the law which means a judge is willing to listen to the arguments of the opposition. We’ll learn if the judge agrees that there was a basis for the policy (though there seems to be) and whether there was sufficient time for public comment.

Earlier this fall I finished an evaluation of a Math/Science Partnership grant which included an analysis of 8th grade testing in Algebra I. The nearly fifteen partner districts in the grant tested 60% of their 8th graders in Algebra I in 2008 compared to 30% in 2004. Furthermore, the performance of students improved on the Algebra I test even though more were taking it. It was a great finding for the grant and shows good progress. However, the idea of reaching 100% within three years is daunting. Many middle school teachers are simply not ready to teach Algebra I, nor are their colleagues necessarily ready to teach pre-Algebra.

The whole algebra crunch also creates a problem in the 9th grade. Do you put a student in Geometry since they already took the Algebra I end-of-course exam? Theoretically the answer is “yes,” practically speaking it’s a bad idea if the student has not yet mastered Algebra I concepts.

This month should bring interesting news in any case as the judge hears the two sides of the case.

Can you imagine showing up at the ACSA leadership summit in 2009 and being *the one* who had a baby in her ACSA exhibit booth in 2008?

A 4point0schools baby is coming, but we are hoping for December rather than November. Part of me likes notoriety that could come with having a baby in a place where no one has likely ever had a baby before, but I'll only be about 34 weeks pregnant during ACSA, so the notoriety would come along with a preemie baby. That's not good.

I've been having contractions, particularly when I'm overly tired at the end of the day. If there is one thing for sure about trade shows and conferences, it is that you will end up overly tired, even if you are not pregnant. We've scaled back on everything and that includes ACSA. It's kind of sad that we won't be giving out Sander's booth raffle prizes, but I suppose there is always the SSDA.

Tags: ACSA, Trade show

Class size measures loom
Will we weep, rejoice in song?
Soon, we will know soon.

QEIA report

Tags: QEIA, 4point0schools, haiku

In two weeks today we will be hanging our banner in booth #205 at the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA) Leadership Summit in San Diego. We look forward to seeing our administrator friends.

For those who know Sander (he'll be the blonde, curly-headed guy in the same booth), you may also know what a mistake it may be to put him in charge of the give-away prizes from our booth. Last year at CSBA we gave away some very nice coffee baskets. Our friend from Earlimart won who happens to be a member of their school board. Most folks don't even know where Earlimart is and there we were with a raffle, an Earlimart winner, and we not only happened to know Earlimart well, but we knew the winner too. That was cool, but I digress.

At the SSDA, we gave away API graphics packages to everyone who visited the booth. That was a better idea because everyone got something and no one had to haul coffee home.



We will be giving away graphics packages again, but Sander wanted to spice things up a bit. It looks like these will be our prizes:

(1)
A CAHSEE graphics package for anyone with a high school
~and~
A special KC and the Sunshine Band CD for one lucky winner. (Anyone who stumbled in here not from education, first of all I'm sorry, and second of all, the acronym "CAHSEE" is pronounced the same as "KC" or "Casey.")

(2)
A special school accountability graphics package for any school administrator, billed as graphs to help you through program improvement (PI) or to stay out of program improvement (PI).
~and~
One lucky winner will receive the entire first season of Magnum PI.

There you have it folks. This is craziness you will only find at booth #205. Let's all hope Sander doesn't have "Shake your booty" playing at the booth.

(It's stuck in my head now too.)

Tags: ACSA, Conferences, Trade show

My biggest challenge in working on 4point0schools.com projects is that I am also a part-time math teacher. I work a few hours a week providing direct instruction one-on-one and countless additional hours responding to requests such as, "Mama, ask me some plusses like 2/3 plus 8/3." We home school our son after trying our local school option. It didn't work for him and it is the only school within a 40-minute drive. We have three adults in this house long on education with different areas of expertise. As it turns out, he's in a dream school. My problem is I don't always get a lot of work done.

He goes through phases of focus on different areas -- reading, math, crafts, astronomy. When in a phase he is utterly obsessive (a whole lot like his mother). He's in an obsessive math phase right now.

Necessity is the mother of invention and about four weeks ago, I announced that I am training him to work in this business. He had mastered addition and subtraction (and carrying and borrowing), but he had just begun multiplication and division. My goal was to ride his obsessive wave and get him into division so that he could begin the understand what an arithmetic mean is. My thought was "If we can begin to talk about averages, we can begin to talk about data. Once he learns data, he can learn programming in C/C++."

To that end, we are in the middle of a data collection project. Fitting another theme in this household -- the baby coming in about 8 weeks -- I sorted through his newborn outfits and set aside five outfits in three sizes (0-3 months, 3-6 months, and 6-9 months) and created a scorecard for each outfit.

We are describing each outfit and scoring them on three criteria we expect are important to babies: warmth, softness, and cuteness. (OK, so the latter is not likely important to babies, but it was an additional criteria that a six-year-old would have a fighting chance of understanding.)



So far, we have rated ten of the fifteen outfits. The rating itself is going slowly. Zero-to-ten scales are absolutely inappropriate for a six-year-old by the way. I knew that but I wanted quantitative measures to help with the lesson on "averages." When we have finished scoring each set, he says, "Mama, can we please do the math part now?" I put the data into an Excel spreadsheet and also write them on paper with directions for the calculation. I then get him to do about a dozen other calculations of averages with different number sets. He keeps asking, "But what is an 'average'?" I keep saying, "A calculated middle" and give him more calculations. The concept of "division" wasn't all too apparent to him either at first, but after a week or two of examples, he was a pro (a pro for a six year old in any case).

The project is incomplete and he is now on a trip to the coast with his English teacher grandma. I'll post an update of the big baby clothing study.

Tags: 4point0schools, education, home school

There are few jobs more thankless than data management and, yet, data management is the necessary first step to any sort of data analysis, including the descriptive graphs available at 4point0schools. The CST data for instance has a row of data for every subgroup in every grade for every CST test. The data file is mammoth and has required me to buy more RAM for my computer. The CAHSEE data is far more simple. It contains two tests (English and Math) and some subtest data. There are far fewer schools in the data file since, obviously, only high schools administer the California High School Exit Exam. I allocated one day to load in the new data to my system and create the 2008 CAHSEE graphics packages we are giving away this month.

I figured I’d be done by mid-morning and that perhaps I would spend the rest of the day in the hammock or watching MI5 on DVD. (It’s a fantasy of mine that when a certain task is done, I’ll lay in the hammock, but in fact I always end up working on another project.)

On the morning in question, I had already run into a half a dozen problems just a few hours in. Some were typical – the year wasn’t showing up right on the graphs, a title was missing, the current year’s data wasn’t reading properly. But in addition to the usual, there was some serious funkiness that I could not figure out. I sat at my desk six months pregnant having suffered from pregnancy mental health problems in the past thinking, “My God, maybe I know nothing about data.” I emerged from my office on occasion to announce, “This is nuts or maybe I’m nuts.”

Of course in dealing with data, I always assume the problem is mine and it usually is. There are so many ways you can make a mistake. But by the end of the day I walked out of the office and normally would have made the announcement like a peacock (or peahen) but was so beaten and exhausted I simply muttered:

“The problem is with the state data file.”

Once I had identified the problem, I fixed it easily in my data set and moved forward with my graphs since I had already sent postcards to 1,000 high schools in the state offering freebies.

As a good citizen, I sent an email to CAHSEE technical assistance explaining the problem. The only indication I have received that there was a problem is that one week later, the data was pulled for about two days and a new data file was loaded that was 3 megabytes smaller than the original. I’ll not announce what the problem was, but it was consistent with a newer, smaller data set. It was also the type of problem that can happen to anyone. I feel a great deal of sympathy for whomever it is that works with the CAHSEE data even though they did not respond to my email. (This would have been good: “Hi Amanda. No, you’re not crazy, at least not on when it comes to data.&rdquo



All of this is to say, if you get a graph from me and you think there is something “funky” about it, let me know. Not only will I fix it if there is a problem, I will respond to your email and even thank you for the alert. Furthermore, I’ll even give you more free graphs (that hopefully will have no problems).

Data errors are extremely easy to make but with enough checks in place, you can be reasonably sure that your work is accurate. We often end up with mistakes in early drafts of our graphs, but they do have a process that they go through and, to our knowledge, no one has ever received a lemon.

Tags: CAHSEE, 4point0schools

Making graphs for the 4point0 site gets me caught up in more minutiae than most of us would imagine possible. I was putting finishing touches on the CAHSEE package the other day, including testing it on a couple dozen schools. I include big schools and small schools in my tests because there are always different issues with each group.

In the case of the CAHSEE time series plots, small districts often have a single high school with (at most) a small alternative program. In these cases, the school and district results are extremely close if not identical. I run into a problem in the graph below. The school line in the plot lays on top of the district line and yet there is a district line in the legend.



“Where did the district results go?” people will ask.

“Can’t you see the district results under that dark blue line?”

(Me either.)

Making the blue line transparent is not an option. Turning the one or more of the lines into something other than a line insults my sensibilities. I don’t care for hatched lines or squigley lines. Lines should be lines in my opinion.

What I ended up doing was making the district line fatter. It’s a good option when the school and district results are identical as in the graph below. However, when the results are different, it does nearly insult my sensibilities. I tried making the state, county, and district lines fatter as an option but that approach made me want to poke my eyes out. For the 2008 CAHSEE cycle, then, folks can pretty much count on an extra wide district line.



And now I find myself editing this post to say that I changed my mind yet again because the fat district lines, too, made me want to poke my eyes out. There aren’t that many schools in the state that will be affected. If I miss them in punching out the graphs and they wonder where the district line is, I’ll make a set with fat lines too. No problem.

We’ll see what 2009 brings.

Tags: CAHSEE

The CAHSEE is here
Graying hair falls to the floor
My red eyes focus

Tags: CAHSEE, haiku

There are blogs for recipes, celebrity stalking, mineral makeup, preemie twins, and basket weaving. Why not have a little data blog here at 4point0schools? It may not be regular and it may not be as exciting as celebrity stalking, but it’s related to work and that either gives you and me an excuse to read it and write it or reason to run far, far away. Take your pick.

Tags: 4point0schools