EDSTAR Analytics

09/14/2026

Why are there 60 seconds in a minute?

Everything else we count runs on ten. Then we get to time and suddenly it is sixty. It feels random. It is the opposite of random.

More than five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, Babylonian scribes pressed reed styluses into wet clay and built a number system out of two marks. One wedge meant one. A different wedge meant ten. That was the whole alphabet. And when they reached sixty, they started a new column, the same way we do at ten.

They had one big problem: no zero. An empty column was just a wider gap in the clay, and messy handwriting could turn one number into a completely different one. It took them until around 300 BCE to invent a placeholder to fix it.

But sixty stuck, because sixty is a remarkably useful number. It divides evenly by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30. Fractions were easy. Astronomers loved it. So did everyone after them.

Every time you check the time, you are using a system a scribe invented on a clay tablet five millennia ago.

New video, a few minutes long, with a worked example of how to write 72 the Babylonian way:

Opens with the hook question about 60 seconds, sets the scene in Me...

08/24/2026

What happens after high school is one of the biggest financial decisions a person ever makes. Most students make it with a fraction of the information.

EDSTAR Pathways is free and open now. It walks students through the parts nobody explains well: the seven real paths after graduation and what each one costs, how to match a career to your actual interests and skills, which classes college admission requires, how grants and scholarships and loans differ, what a paycheck really looks like after deductions, and how GPA is actually calculated.

Students move through the lessons at their own pace and end with a plan they can print on one page. Counselors and teachers get a guide with a ready-to-use lesson plan and discussion questions.

No accounts. No email required. Nothing is tracked. What a student types stays on their own device.

Free, for any student:

Every option after high school, how to pay for it, and the classes that keep doors open, one place, step by step.

08/21/2026

Follow one child through North Carolina's mathematics pipeline.

In fifth grade, a teacher decides whether to recommend her — before end-of-grade test results exist. Her district decides whether she is gifted; there are 115 separate local plans for how. In seventh grade, state law says a top score entitles her to the advanced course. The State Board decides what a top score means. Her district decides whether the course is even offered, and whether anyone is there to teach it — mathematics has been a federal shortage area in North Carolina every year since 1998-99.

Then the State Board sets what counts toward graduation. The UNC Board of Governors sets what counts for university admission. The community college system uses different placement criteria altogether.

Ten decisions. No two consecutive steps use the same definition of ready. And no one measures whether any of it worked.

Here is the strangest part: she can satisfy the graduation requirement exactly as written and still fall short of the admission requirement of her own state's universities, because the two rules define a mathematics course differently. Nobody has to tell her that, and nobody does.

The whole path is on one page: https://seats.edstaranalytics.com/overview.html

08/17/2026

Start with 103 children.

A middle school in a large North Carolina district had written criteria for its top math track. Meet two of three and you were in. One year somebody checked and found 103 sixth graders who met the criteria and had not been placed. Many had previously been designated low achieving.

The principal put them in the class. No tutoring first, no summer program, no catching up. One semester later their grades looked like the grades of children who belonged there, because they did.

The math faculty had not agreed. The principal overruled them. Then the principal was reassigned, and the next year's equivalent children were not placed, because the new principal would not overrule the faculty. The evidence that it had worked was published in the same report. It changed nobody's mind.

In 2018 the state took a run at the same problem statewide. Score at the highest level, and the advanced course is automatic. It passed 114 to nothing and 47 to nothing.

Fourteen months later, the State Board adopted new cut scores and applied them to tests students had already sat. On the high school Math 1 exam, students clearing the highest level fell from 13,317 to about 1,450. An 89 percent drop, and 85 percent of it happened in one year.

One in nine became one in sixty-three.

Did the children get worse? Over the same period, the share of eleventh graders meeting the ACT math benchmark ran 28.8, 25.4, 24.2, 24.0, 23.9, 23.4, then 26.8. It dipped through the pandemic and came back. One of those lines is a story about students. The other is a story about a cut score.

Dr. Janet Johnson has the whole account here: https://janetljohnson.substack.com/p/one-in-nine-became-one-in-sixty-three

Then look up your own district: https://seats.edstaranalytics.com/

Since 2009 North Carolina has known that tens of thousands of students who could succeed in advanced math are not in it. The law meant to fix that reaches almost nobody. An Edstar Analytics investigation.

07/30/2026

There is a moment in Mismatched where evaluators discover entire data departments that could not build a pivot table. Not would not. Could not. Decisions about students got made on gut feeling while the answers sat in a spreadsheet.

The quiet punchline: pivot tables take about a minute to learn.

Select your data. Insert a pivot table. Drag three fields into place. That is it, no formulas, no code, and suddenly you can see totals by school, by quarter, by program, by whatever you need.

Watch the walkthrough in our Excel Tips series: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKQ6KcvXIo06jP8u5FESg21WVuCvhWzz0

07/23/2026

North Carolina had to pass a law to get its own top math students into advanced math.

Here is why. When we analyzed North Carolina middle schoolers, fewer than half of the students predicted to succeed in 8th grade algebra were actually placed in it. About 35,000 kids were held out, and more than 25,000 of them went on to earn top algebra scores anyway. The gatekeeper was the teacher recommendation, which was right about 60 percent of the time. The state's own predictive model was right 95.9 percent of the time.

So in 2018, the state made it automatic: earn the top score, get the seat.

Did it work? For the students it covers, yes. But a year later the state changed its scoring system, and far fewer students now reach the top level at all. The law protects a shrinking group, and for everyone below that line, the old gatekeeping is still in place.

Dr. Janet Johnson tells the full story in The Algebra Gatekeepers: https://www.educationprogress.org/p/the-algebra-gatekeepers

Watch The Math Opportunity Gap: https://youtu.be/-Ok0onb5MNY

07/17/2026

A school missed its testing targets, so it launched free after-school tutoring for low-income students. Sounds reasonable, right?

Then the evaluators looked at the data. Most of the students sitting through remedial phonics drills were already reading at or above grade level. Straight-A students. Top scorers. Their achievement data was never consulted. Poverty alone decided who got pulled in.

When the evaluators raised the alarm, the district misunderstood entirely: "they thought we were telling them the students were not poor." The idea that a child could be both poor and high-achieving simply would not compute.

Chapter 8 of Mismatched names this "institutional blindness": the total fusion of two ideas that should have stayed distinct. As Dr. Janet Johnson puts it, it was as if hospitals administered chemotherapy based on patients' zip codes rather than medical tests.

Watch the Chapter 8 summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFCKx3uhjbk&list=PLKQ6KcvXIo068Cl7pDLpr3ErSeAnz5Z7r&index=9

07/16/2026

Teachers, this one's for you.

Deep Dive 5 just got a complete rebuild: self-paced enrichment for curious kids, from math puzzles to Greek mythology to the solar system. The interactive units now come with full teacher kits, including standards-aligned lesson plans, answer keys, and printable worksheets.

Best part: no student accounts, no data collection, no privacy paperwork for your district.

Find your next lesson: https://deepdive5.sparc37.com/

06/12/2026

Every color on your screen is really just three tiny lights: red, green, and blue.

This short visual explainer follows one color on its whole journey. From the glowing pixels you are looking at right now, to the hex codes programmers type, to the ink that hits the paper when you print.

Simple math, no coding needed. The STEM and STEAM hiding inside a single color.

Watch it here:

Every color on your screen is really just three tiny lights — red, ...

06/04/2026

What does a panicking KFC manager have in common with a frozen grant writer? Both confronted basic arithmetic and blinked in confusion.

Chapter 7 of Mismatched finally names the pattern that has been building all book: the Lotta Chicken Principle. Institutional authority meeting basic quantitative reasoning and freezing up.

A few of the moments it traces:
- A KFC manager named Dave, stunned that numbers could solve a real problem: how much chicken a Little League order needs.
- A head grant writer who called enrollment projections impossible, until a simple spreadsheet modeled student flows and secured 10 million dollars in federal funding.
- PhDs summing columns by hand on paper printouts. Computers sitting on desks as expensive electric typewriters.
- Data departments where no one could build a pivot table, write a formula, or run a query, making decisions in an evidence vacuum while surrounded by unused data.

The solution was almost always trivially simple. The blindness was the problem.

Dr. Janet Johnson conclusion: the taxonomy that sorts students also sorts educators, rewarding credentials over capability at every level. The sorting machine doesnt just sort students. It sorts everyone.

Watch the Chapter 7 summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdbNlZNp1jk&list=PLKQ6KcvXIo068Cl7pDLpr3ErSeAnz5Z7r&index=10