Alex Profile picture
Feb 27 20 tweets 5 min read Read on X
This is the SEED school, a 100% Black public boarding school in DC.

These disadvantaged students here enjoy a rigorous study schedule and a spending per student of 63000$ per year, comparable to some of the best schools in the country.

So, how and what do they do? Thread🧵Image
First SEED takes its unique place as being the first school of its kind, SEED was chartered almost 30 years ago and has been serving mostly Black kids in Washington DC.
They enroll mostly disadvantaged students, only 23 percent of applicants live in a two-parent household and 62 percent live with their mother. 75 percent of students qualify for free lunch.
Here's a map with the school's applicants and the poverty rate of their neighborhood. Image
Students here report more motivation and interest in their studies than their peers at other local schools; compared to their peers, SEED students report:

-Doing 4 more hours of homework a week
-Receiving more tutoring from adults
-Participating in student leadership activities
-More academic motivation
The students are kept on a quite intensive study schedule

Here's a 6th grader's schedule: Image
And here's the High School Curriculum: Image
Because there are a limited number of seats the school holds a lottery. It is random so we can fairly compare the students who won and were given the opportunity for the school and those who did not.

This gives us insight into the school's effect on all manner of outcomes.
First, test scores:

Here is the effect for two cohorts over four years Image
And here is the effect for a few other cohorts: Image
As you can see there are few significant differences between the groups.

Given that, the school sadly has performance comparable to that of the surrounding public schools.
The PARCC is an assessment given to DC students, it is scored on a scale from 1-5 where a 4 is meeting expectations.

Overall, for the SEED high school, the percentage of students who achieved a 4 or higher for the years available was:

ELA: 2.4%-12%
Math: 4%- 7%
For the NWEA MAP assessment, the average student performance ranges around the 30th percentile, sometimes higher.

This is not good for a school.
For the AP tests that the students take I was only able to find evidence that one student from one year has received a passing score.

That student received a 3 (out of 5) and was the only one to do so out of the 26 test takers that year. (3.8%)
Here is the enrollment data over time:

It seems that many of the students that attend de-enroll Image
Also in terms of lottery comparison, the school saw little change in risky behavior. In fact, the only significant difference was where the SEED group performed worse: general risky behavior.

In fact, there was no significant difference in pregnancy/ fathering a child at 26.7%
Overall SEED lottery winners are no more likely to attend college or graduate high school.

There isn't much in the way of measured positive long-term effects.
And in general, the presence of charter schools has a small effect on other schools in the area.

Also, check out my charts of MAP testing for more on student performance in general:

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Alex

Alex Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @notcomplex_

May 19
The Chinese Communist Revolution consolidated its power by taking land from the elite. In the following generation, the previous elite once again reclaimed their social advantage.

This is not an isolated phenomenon: A Thread on the persistence of status 🧵 Image
The Cultural Revolution is one of the most extreme efforts of wealth equalization in all of human history, over 43% of all land assets were transferred to others. The goal was explicit: to eliminate income and wealth differences between the rich and poor in perpetuity. Image
The vision of the revolution was to ensure that the elite could not pass on their status to future generations. So, beyond confiscating wealth, the Communists eliminated merit-based admission into universities.
Read 60 tweets
Apr 14
Vision is expensive. One bit of information in a photo receptor costs 100x to 1000x more energy than in a synapse.

This adds up to ~4% of the entire body's energy budget.

A Story of Energy, Information, and Evolution (Thread 🧵) Image
This is the base reality: The number of ATP molecules used to power transmission is much greater in photoreceptors and LMCs (A type of photocell in flies) than for a regular synapse.

In doing so each photoreceptor can make use of about 10^6 photons per second! Image
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why our field of view is so limited, here's a plot of the field of view of the right eye from the perspective of the viewer (Imagine diagramming on a contact lens). Image
Read 26 tweets
Apr 8
People with better childhood health are more Conservative; those with the best health were 16 percentage points more likely to be conservative than those with the worst.

This study also measured other attributes, academics.... Image
Academics had the opposite effect in the attribute pathway model, with Adolescent Vigor being most strongly associated with conservatism and academics being most strongly associated with liberalism. Image
Another study found a genotypic relationship between polygenic scores for Educational Attainment and left-wing beliefs.

Perhaps a similar relation exists for childhood health?

Read 6 tweets
Mar 20
Mackenzie Scott has donated over 17.3 billion dollars of her and Bezos' divorce settlement. She just released a 2024 update.

So, where is the money going?

Top focus area: Race and ethnicity (39%)
Bottom focus area: Art (1-2%)

Here's the giving by focus area:

Thread 🧵 Image
First, she got her wealth in early 2019 after her and Bezos' divorce. The value fluctuates with the stock price of Amazon, she, even now is worth more than 30 billion. (Forbes) Image
Here's the amount she has given for each year: Image
Read 14 tweets
Feb 11
It's difficult to compare the ability of a high schooler and a grade-schooler. Fortunately, the NWEA, a massive testing non-profit allows for fair comparisons between students of all ages.

Here are each grade's Math scores:

A thread on student ability and growth 🧵Image
Here are the distributions for Reading scores:

As you can see, there is slightly less reading growth overall, this is true for all grades. Image
A more important point is just how fast the learning decreases. Grade schoolers improve around a standard deviation from where they were a year earlier. In other words, the average student improves to the level of an above-average student's scores last year. Image
Read 17 tweets
Jan 13
Some dog breeds are smarter than others!

This data was compiled from a battery of dog-tailored cognitive tasks such as self-control, communication, and memory.

Let’s take a look at the genetic and evolutionary basis of dog intelligence 🧵 Image
Smaller dogs have smaller brains; weight and brain size correlate very well.

Brain size and intelligence correlate at r=0.45. Correcting for measurement error and averaging among breeds we can infer a correlation of nearly 0.65. Image
This is similar for many types of animals:
Read 11 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(