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Shameless Self-Promotion

Last Friday, a project I've been working on for the past year released 2 reports. All the hoo-hah around getting it out the door and following up meant that I haven't had time to post about it until now. But it's pretty exciting!

It's titled Who's Left Behind: Immigrant Children in High and Low LEP Schools. We break public elementary schools into 3 categories: those with high concentrations of LEP kids, those with fewer LEP kids, and those with none, and compare across the three types to examine differences in student populations, teacher and principal training, and special services and programs. For a summary of findings, check out the press release, or go to the whole thing. The demographic profile, which was done by the immigration group here, also has really interesting info here.

This project really turned me on to the wonders of the Schools and Staffing Survey. SASS is a Department of Ed data set compiled from a group of nationally-representative surveys from districts, schools, principals, teachers and libraries. It's got nationally and state representative samples for public schools, charter schools, Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, and private schools. We just worked with the Public Schools set, and it was complicated to learn how to use, (I applied to and went to an NCES Workshop, though, which was a great training experience... it was free, and the staff was really helpful as I was doing the analysis!) but there are *so many* interesting issues that could be studied with it. Makes me want to go do that darn PhD!

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