Education Next – Caroline Hoxby
“Fifty years on, the sheer scale and thoroughness of the EEOS remain mind-boggling. Despite all of today’s talk of “big data,” there is no contemporary survey-based data set of education that is on a comparable scale to the EEOS. It dwarfs recent surveys conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The workhorse version of the EEOS contains 567,148 students, 44,193 teachers, and 3,941 principals. In comparison, today’s Education Longitudinal Study comprises only about 15,000 students in 750 schools. The accomplishment that the EEOS represents remains immense. Perhaps 1960s scholars had no sense of limits and thus conquered all? Perhaps 1960s survey respondents were incredibly cooperative? In any case, if Coleman were to return in ghostly form and ask me to lead such a study today, I would certainly light all the lamps in the hope of dispelling his apparition. Prior to the EEOS, government agencies gathered data, but they used it almost exclusively to publish aggregate statistics. The EEOS aspired to analyze student data in a deeper way, by correlating achievement and other factors at an individual level. In so doing, it illuminated a world of student heterogeneity that had remained obscure until then. It is not merely that the EEOS data were subsequently used in a great deal of research; it is that such research and much research based on other data would have remained unimaginable without the EEOS. Here endeth the first note of praise.”(more)