March

Brookings recently released a report on DC Public Schools. This report, "We all want what’s best for our kids", uses data from 10 years worth of posts in the DC Public and Public Charter Schools forum. My wife and I own and operate the DC Urban Moms and Dads website and are frequent participants in the DC Schools forum. Moreover, we have two sons who both attended a DC Public Charter School. One attended and one still attends DC Public Schools. Therefore, we know well both the DC public school system and the DC Schools forum.

Having read the report in detail, I believe that the research for this report was lazy, the analysis is flawed, and the conclusions are wrong. The entire report is based on flawed analysis -- word frequency analysis in which keywords are connected to school names -- a technique that does not take context into account. In fact, the report's examples show such context-based errors. The measures of school attention suffer from uncorrected bias due to school size and the uneven geographic sample representation. For instance, Alice Deal Middle School and Woodrow Wilson High School are two of the largest schools in the DCPS system and the in-bounds school for a large percentage of the posters. The finding that they are the two most discussed schools is exactly what would be expected.