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Friends:<br>
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Below is a link to, and excerpt from, a blog post from this week's
Education Week. The underlying study is a working paper that hasn't
yet been peer-reviewed. The paper costs $5.00 to download and I
haven't done it yet but here's the link:<br>
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<a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w18277" eudora="autourl">http://www.nber.org/papers/w18277<br>
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</a>Top Math Achievers Are Spread Unevenly Across Similar Schools<br>
By Erik Robelen on August 15, 2012 11:55 AM<br>
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Looking at more than 2,000 U.S. high schools that one might imagine are
most likely to succeed based on their student demographics, a new study
finds strikingly wide variations in the share of top-achieving students
in mathematics. A small subset of those public schools, for example,
about 4 percent, have rates of high-flyers at least three times the
average for all the schools examined—with a handful as high as ten times
the average.<br>
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The variation is even more pronounced for girls.....<br>
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"Our biggest finding is that schools do seem to matter a lot for
high-achieving students," said Glenn Ellison, an economics professor
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-authored the study,
which was published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic
Research, based in Cambridge, Mass. "Even among schools with fairly
similar demographics, we see a lot of difference in the [rates] of
high-achieving students.".....<br>
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<font color="#0000FF"><u><a href="http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2012/08/schools_matter_for_high-achiev.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS2" eudora="autourl">http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2012/08/schools_matter_for_high-achiev.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS2</a></u></font>
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