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eduwonkette signs off

Who will make the statistics sing? Meet Professor Aaron Pallas

Teachers College Professor Aaron Pallas

Teachers College Professor Aaron Pallas

Eduwonkette, the soon-to-be NYU professor who specialized in explaining education research to the rest of us, and whose data analysis often contradicted Department of Education claims, signed off this morning. Her many fans are now declaring a collective “Nooo!”

Here’s Nancy Flanagan, in the comments:

Oh, no. No.

Who will make statistics sing? Who will take on the nattering nabobs of educational negativism, the Big Names who blog to hear their own wonky voices? Who will simplify arguments for those who believe that complicated and quantitative = correct? I am, quite literally, crushed.

Nancy, please meet Aaron Pallas, professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University; former statistician for the U.S. Department of Education, and the man behind Eduwonkette’s blogging sidekick, Skoolboy.

Professor Pallas will be keeping up his own sharp analysis of what the New York City data show in a new section of GothamSchools that we and our awesome web brains are furiously working to develop, tentatively titled the GothamSchools Commons. Please look out for his contributions very soon.

  • http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/teacher_in_a_strange_land/ Nancy Flanagan

    Thanks, Elizabeth. And Skoolboy is more than mere trusty sidekick, for sure. He also makes data lucid and develops plausible story lines that resonate with those who refuse to be intimated by my-research-trumps-your-personal-experience types. Give Skoolboy a (very masculine) cape and he, too, soars.

    What I will miss about Eduwonkette is her broad-based focus. I am a Gotham Schools reader, but the Teacher in a Strange Land lives in flyover country (in Failing Auto Industryland, in fact) and what happens in New York ought to stay in New York, if you catch my drift. It’s not that there aren’t common issues, and I care about kids and teachers everywhere. But your excellent blog was designed as an intellectual hot spot for NYC teachers. While your mayor is controlling schools in scary ways, ours is in jail. Hoping that Skoolboy continues to comb through the numbers and extrapolate broadly.

    Also your fan,
    Nancy Flanagan

  • Elizabeth Green

    Absolutely Aaron is more than a sidekick. And true that we’re a blog about New York City only. To my mind that’s more than enough to think about, but I realize there’s demand for Aaron and others’ public intellectual skills beyond NYC, too. Maybe we can work out some kind of shared-custody deal in the future? :)

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