There is a lot of debate about standardized testing in schools these days, but one thing seems clear: they are one of the best yardsticks we have today for measuring many of the inequalities in our education system. That being said, there many issues with how standardized tests get used…

In a previous post, we looked at whether it is theoretically possible to fully close the education gaps in public schools using our current education “technology” (which includes software, interventions, etc.). Encouragingly, the answer was yes, with a few critical assumptions. …

From an outsiders perspective, the summer months (equivalent to ~1/3 of the academic year) seem like a huge opportunity to close educational gaps for at-risk students. The research seems to bear this out. National assessment data shows that elementary school students on average lose over 2 months worth of math…

Our last post analyzed our 2020–21 year-end data on relationships, attendance, and practice for our math program at Lowell Elementary. In this post, we’ll dig deep into progress, which we’ll define as growth in math skills. As a quick reminder, here is the theory of action for the program. One…

If you’ve seen our previous posts, you know that we’re testing out a tutoring program at Lowell Elementary to see if we can quantify some of the factors that impact student learning. In this post we’ll look deeper into our data to understand what drives the impact of individual tutors…

We’ve spent a lot of time in previous posts discussing education gaps. While closing gaps is clearly the short-term priority, in this post I wanted to take an optimistic look at the longer-term goal: what would it take to get the students in our program above grade level? …

Our last post analyzed the impact of a math tutoring program we are running at Lowell Elementary. In particular, we found that students in our program have math growth rates of ~2.0 grade levels per year. This is big change from their historical growth rates of ~0.6 grade levels per…

2021–03–23: I’ve updated our estimates of growth rates based on our latest data, which is shown in more detail here. A quick recap: We previously described our experiment to close math gaps at Lowell Elementary in downtown Seattle. Our last post described the system we’ve built to measure our progress…

In a set of previous posts I described an experiment we’re running to try to close educational gaps at a local Seattle school. In this post I want to dig into a really important piece of that experiment: how will we know if it worked? …