Days 3 & 4--X Marks the Spot/A Night off

Day 3 Time Logged--1:00
Day 4 Time Logged: 0:00

We'll work backwards here.  I took tonight off--I know, after only 3 lousy nights!  I had a rough day, the deadly combination of not enough sleep, work issues, and cancer stress (nothing specifically bad happened, it's just generally stressful when you kid is working through recovery from brain cancer). The next thing I know, it's 9:40 and I feel like I've been worked over by some guys with baseball bats.

So...I'll put in an extra hour sometime this weekend.  Feeling much better today, and actually excited to put some work in.

Two nights ago, I made some big steps.  First, I reworked the dataset to match the Reardon data set.  I added a few districts, but more importantly, did 2 things--1) it dropped some districts that were erroneously reported as being under court order in some previous resources (Reardon's team and I used pretty much all the same resources--specifically John Logan's list from the Mumford Center, correspondence with the DOE, Vigdor/Clotfelter/etc. list from 2004, and Armour and Rossell).  On some of these lists, old cases that were voluntary orders or HEW plans that weren't court-ordered ended up getting treated as court-ordered cases.  The second reason is that Reardon drops all districts under 2000 kids because they tend not to work well with deseg indices.

That's right, deseg indices!  I programmed them in!  Sort off--it turns out that there's a LOT of user-written STATA program packages ("do files" for those of you in the know) including several on segregation matrices.  The trick is making sure you understand how to plug your data into the right spots on the pre-written formulas so that the calculations work.  It took a little while to figure this out, but by the end of the night I was able to calculate dissimiliarity and exposure indices, and the same program with the same structure to the formula can calculate several others that may be useful at some point (isolation, information theory are both possible).

The next step is to run all of the indices on the following match-ups:
1. Black/White
2. White/Nonwhite
3. White/Hispanic
4. Black/Hispanic (not sure what this will reveal, but I think it's worth running if the code's already there)

Once I have all of these, I can start to work towards answering the questions for the chapter.

Doug