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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Unsurprising. Under NCLB and related measures, schools are incentivized not to promote advanced students faster than their age peers, since they are rewarded for improvement in (and punished for insufficient improvement or backtracking in) the percentage of students performing at or above grade level, so students that would otherwise have been advanced in grade ahead of their peers are held back to the normal advancement rate to make the schools' results look better.

You get what you pay for.

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Yeah, careful what you measure, because that's what will be gamed towards. It reminds me of what I heard[1] (I didn't check my sources carefully, whatever) is one reason station wagons fell out of favor relative to SUVs in the USA -- federal fuel economy standards that were divided into separate categories for trucks and non-trucks, incentivizing the sale of small trucks rather than big cars, even for a big car that is smaller and more effecient than a small truck :-(

[1] http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2012/10/how-cafe-killed-com...

You may also be interested to know that there has been, for much of the recent past, a significant tax incentive to buy large SUVs (actually more to finance them.) If GWVR> 6000 lb., you could expense $25k, vs only $11k for smaller vehicles. I don't know the current status of this.

When I starting searching "vehicles with gwvr..." google autocompleted ".. over 6000lb." Then I found this helpful webpage on how to reduce my tax burden by driving a stupidly large vehicle. http://www.linkcpa.com/tax-savings-still-available-for-heavy...

Thanks for the info! Wow, even more nonsense encouraging excessive weight, I had no idea but am sadly less and less surprised :-(

This whole situation is especially horrible in light of research [1] that shows that extra weight on motor vehicles is more dangerous to other road users and that any extra safety for those inside the heavier vehicle is strictly speaking being achieved by an equal and opposite "zero sum" reduction in safety for all other road users

[1] http://www.accessmagazine.org/articles/fall-2014/pounds-kill...

I'd like to know about this. Can you link to something about the incentive programs? I thought that they were heavily regional, but I admit that I haven't looked too deeply.

> Can you link to something about the incentive programs?

Well, the negative side is mostly the consequences for failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under the NCLB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adequate_Yearly_Progress

AYP is out. The goals looked good on paper, made good sound bites for the news, but weren't realistic. NCLB is out too. The new thing is the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

Right, but ESSA is less than a year old; NCLB and its AYP-based incentives spent nearly a decade and a half shaping American school outcomes (and many of the state and local laws and policies established in order to meet NCLB requirements and the incentives of the AYP system haven't been revised.)

ESSA, OTOH, maintains the basic structure of NCLB, including the same kind of accountability system, but leaves detailed setting of standards and interventions to the states. It may weaken, but seems unlikely to eliminate, the pressures against advanced promotion (particularly in grades 3-8, where it continues the requirement for annual testing) created by NCLB and its AYP-based interventions.

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