Celebrating Others' Work
Good work done by readers of this substack
I am a very bad correspondent. Over the last few months, several readers have shared with me some interesting analyses of their own and not received the timely response from me that their work deserved. I want to go some way towards remedying that by sharing three that particularly caught my eye.
SFUSD Budget Data
Mahdi Rahimi has put together a site that presents a dashboard view of SFUSD’s preliminary 2026-27 budget for each school site. It already looks pretty nice, as the screenshot below shows, but I know he’d welcome suggestions for how to improve it.
SBAC Scores
The official site for SBAC results allows you to do a crude comparison of data from different schools but Rahim Nathwani has built a tool that enables a much nicer graphical comparison.
Rahim has also written a few articles at another site. I particularly liked his takedown of a Jo Boaler article about Healdsburg. For those unfamiliar with the name, Jo Boaler is a professor at Stanford who focuses on math education. When SFUSD eliminated middle school algebra and attempted to get every student to take the same math classes until 11th grade, she provided the academic respectability for the effort and was quick to celebrate its “success”. When California rewrote its math curriculum, she was on the committee and was the most frequently cited researcher. Despite being the most influential voice in math education, she has been dogged by repeated accusations that her claims don’t withstand scrutiny, that she claims implausibly large effects from very small interventions, and that she distorts the work of others to fit her agenda. Rahim’s article shows that her claims about Healdsburg are based on elementary mishandling of data.
UC San Diego Math
In posts about UC Admissions, I referenced a UC San Diego admissions report that documented a huge increase in the number of freshmen who were not proficient in middle school math. Mathias Blume dug into some of the same publicly available data that I did and produced his own analysis. I’m a sucker for a nice chart and Matthias produced this one showing that the worse a school is at Math, the better its students’ chances of getting admitted to UCSD.
This is the last post for this academic year. Enjoy your Summer.