Episode 30 · Season III · S3.E8 · Jul 22, 2026 · 30:27

Where Is the Data: The Quantitative Wave (S3 E8)

A doctoral student sits in the back of a Denver board meeting and watches the whole season come to a point in about nine seconds. Community representatives present the findings of the scholars he has spent years reading. A board member leans forward and asks, where is the data. A presenter answers, this is the data. The board member says, where are the numbers. Then silence. Dr. Easton-Brooks has carried that silence for more than twenty-five years, and this episode comes out of it. Between 2000 and 2025 a generation of researchers put a number on what the storytellers had already proven, a number a legislature could not wave away. Christopher Swanson rebuilt the high school graduation measure and exposed how many students of color the country had been counting as finished when they were not. Seth Gershenson and his colleagues gave the same-race-teacher effect a name and a long-run outcome a state dataset could hold. This episode follows that turn, community by community, and counts the cost the scholars of color paid to ask the question in the language the room would finally accept.

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In this episode

00:00Cold open: the board meeting, where is the data
02:30Where this episode sits: the number the story still needed
04:30Part 1: The question that would not leave (Swanson and the graduation measure)
10:00Part 2: Bringing a cultural lens to the numbers
15:00Part 3: The variable finally gets a name (the same-race-teacher effect)
20:00Part 4: What it cost to ask (the diversity tax)
24:30Part 5: What the researchers measured across communities
28:30Do this this week
29:45Landing line

“They had proven it in story. This is the episode where someone finally proved it in numbers.

References (10)

01Swanson, C. B. (2004). Who Graduates? Who Doesn't? A Statistical Portrait of Public High School Graduation, Class of 2001 · The Urban Institute, Education Policy Center.
02Dee, T. S. (2004). Teachers, Race, and Student Achievement in a Randomized Experiment · Review of Economics and Statistics · 86(1) · 195–210.
03Easton-Brooks, D., Lewis, C., & Zhang, Y. (2009). Ethnic Matching: The Influence of African American Teachers on the Reading Scores of African American Students · Journal of Negro Education.
04Eddy, C. M., & Easton-Brooks, D. (2011). Ethnic Matching and Mathematics Achievement of African American Students, Kindergarten Through Fifth Grade · Urban Education · 46(6).
05Hsin, A., & Xie, Y. (2014). Explaining Asian Americans' Academic Advantage Over Whites · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 111(23).
06Egalite, A. J., Kisida, B., & Winters, M. A. (2015). Representation in the Classroom: The Effect of Own-Race Teachers on Student Achievement · Economics of Education Review · 45 · 44–52.

All 10 references in the companion essay →

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Companion essay — Where Is the Data

10 min read · 10 references

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