Why American Schools Are Even More Unequal Than We Thought

Using data to inform our conversations about public school performance is a good idea, but too often, the measures we use are reduced to imprecise terms like “proficiency,” which can carry several different meanings when describing a local, state, or national assessment1. As Susan Dynarski notes in The Upshot, this is also a common problem with the most-frequently used proxy for “poverty” in education, Free/Reduced Price Lunch (FRPL) eligibility: “Nearly half of students nationwide are eligible for a subsidized meal in school.

Book Notes - The Checklist Manifesto

Books have always been important to me. My grandmother was a librarian and as she babysat me, I was able to spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours searching, consuming, and falling in love with books. That passion continues today, but I find that I have less time to devote to extended, deep periods of reading. I’m going to follow CGP Grey’s lead and start publicly sharing notes on books I’ve read.

Tinkering

The most recent episode of Mad Dogs & Englishmen1 starts off with a discussion of buying and assembling and AR-15 from scratch. It’s an interesting process, but the conversation took an even more interesting turn as they focused on the decline of a tinkering ethos in our society. The machines and devices we use are often too complex to repair, disassemble, or customize. If you open the hood of your car, you won’t be able to see or even access many of the most critical parts - you’ll most likely see a series of injection-molded plastic meant to not only protect but to discourage amateur tinkering.

Intellectuals are Freaks

Michael Lind on the weakness of intellectuals' approach to inequality: The views of intellectuals about social reform tend to be warped by professional and personal biases, as well. In the U.S. the default prescription for inequality and other social problems among professors, pundits, and policy wonks alike tends to be: More education! Successful intellectuals get where they are by being good at taking tests and by going to good schools.

Time Tracking

I tweeted this out earlier today: Insights from time tracking: I need to do more #rstats programming on Thursday/Friday afternoons. Also, mtgs suck. pic.twitter.com/14dFtGNubP — Alex Spurrier (@alspur) July 29, 2016 Why do I have time tracking charts that break down when I do certain kinds of work? A book ( Deep Work) and a podcast ( Cortex). I know that the ability to focus is important to the work I do, but Deep Work by Cal Newport helped articulate precisely why it’s extremely important to cultivate the ability to perform “deep work.