Guest Post: No Excuses for obfuscating abysmal attrition data with complex calculations
By John ThompsonMacArthur Genius grant recipient Roland Fryer did some complex calculations in "Creating 'No Excuses' (Traditional) Public Schools" to estimate student performance gains during the first year of Houston's "Apollo 20." The massive pilot program extends "No Excuses" instruction to neighborhood schools. Fryer, however, omitted a simple statement of its most important data for that type of experiment. In contrast to "No Excuses" charters, low-income students were not going out of their way to volunteer for 21% more hours of instruction and much more rigorous enforcement of academic and behavioral standards. Some of those charters have had
Will chess improve school achievement?
Submitted to the NY Times, Oct 18, 2011
The idea that chess will improve academics has made it into the New York Times ("Maybe teach them math, science and chess," Oct 15).
The Times article presents no evidence that chess is helpful. To my knowledge, there is only one study testing this idea: "The Effect of Chess on Reading Scores: District Nine Chess Program Second Year Report" was published by the American Chess Foundation (!!), and claimed that 53 students who voluntarily participated in a chess program in New York improved five percentiles in reading over the year (from the 58th percentile to the 63rd).
Nearly all the gains, however, were from six children who made unbelievable improvements, ranging from 38 to 66