Firestorm Erupts Over Virginia's Education Goals
nwpr.org
nwpr.org
On the underlying policy issue, of course it is a good idea to set high standards for all pupils in a public school system and to manage the system so that as many pupils as possible can meet those standards. One example of good practice in the charter school sector, serving mostly low-income minority students, is the work of the Uncommon Schools charter school network,
http://www.uncommonschools.org/
where Doug Lemov's Teach Like a Champion principles have been carefully monitored for their effectiveness in boosting student learning.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html
http://www.josseybass.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470...
Economist Roland Fryer is convinced that improvements in classroom practice can do much to improve educational outcomes for the most disadvantaged learners in the United States.
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R...
AFTER EDIT: A story from National Public Radio, "Struggle For Smarts? How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning"
submitted to Hacker News by another participant yesterday
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4773019
(alas without comments after not appearing on the front page in time) is a very good supplement on the idea of different teaching practices producing different learning outcomes. That article is based on a comparison of classroom teaching practices between the United States and east Asia. I have lived in one of the countries profiled in that story, and can confirm the general correctness of the facts reported in the story.
I look forward to thoughtful discussion about the policy issues being brought up in this thread.
I don't think it's stupid at all. Although it's predictably offensive, in that it seems expectations or effort are lowered for less well-performing groups, it's time people get to grips with the fact that kids do not all start out with the same opportunities, but are in many cases held back by circumstances before the first day of school.
If it is, than they could simply use past test scores, giving a curve for schools that have done the worst in past years.
tl;dr School is finer grained than race because there are more schools than races.
What they're trying to do, naturally, is the accounting trick of paying for lack of progress by disadvantaged kids with the inevitable progress of privileged kids.
That's a completely illogical argument. If that was their goal, it would be more sensible to ignore race and just aggregate the numbers together so that failing students would become invisible. Breaking results out by race highlights any differences in achievement over the measurement period.
The accounting trick works because it's about comparing percentages rather than raw numbers. The preponderance of disadvantaged kids would swamp the progress of the privileged kids otherwise. This trick lets them point to substantial performance improvements in substantially less than half their students and use it to write off the lack of progress on substantially more than half.
Of course as you say, a better way to actually hide poor teacher performance would be to group everything together, which is probably what the other 49 states did and why we are not discussing them today but instead talking about Virginia. They certainly didn't choose to do something so obviously and outrageously stupid as to segregate the students by race, statistically or not.
This is the same reason that AA-preferences in college admissions use race instead of SES.
Wow, I didn't believe this until I looked it up.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2999198
> In 1997, black students from families with incomes between $80,000 and $100,000 did in fact score lower on the SAT test than did students from white families with income less than $10,000.
A student's improvement should be measured based on that student's previous level, not the level of that student's race.
edit: Basically, wouldn't it be both smart and possible to keep track of a student's education records just like we do with a person's medical records?
But schools and teachers hated the added testing, and hated being labeled as "failing" when they failed to get a substantial fraction of their students up to grade level. Parents hated their schools being labeled "failing" (and feared the corresponding property value hit) while their children were doing just fine.
So now we have waivers from NCLB and we're unsurprisingly back to the "soft bigotry of low expectations".
Sorry to sound cynical about this. Really, I wish the Federal government would get out of the local education business entirely, besides making sure civil rights aren't being violated. But if they're going to be involved, they should be pushing for exactly the kind of student-by-student accountability that NCLB (no doubt with many imperfections) tried to impose.
The reason the federal government is involved in local education is that states do a terrible job of delivering uniformity in educational quality. White flight in the 1960's left urban school districts like Chicago as 85%+ low income and 90%+ black/hispanic. These school districts just don't have the property taxing power that homogenous suburban school districts have, and the federal government comes in to make up the difference.
It is fascinating to browse around the "report cards" issued under NCLB for schools in, e.g., Illinois:
If you measure to an absolute standard it may be easier, but education goals move all the time, and calibrating between them leaves these metrics open to statistical abuse, just like we're seeing here.
In my estimation, the best way to break away from this ridiculous tendency to group people it to treat everyone like an individual.
My question is what does this "achievement standard" do if the grading system stays the same? It doesn't really seem to affect anyone, except maybe takes another step toward eliminating "survival of the fittest"
The result? About 60%(instead of the usual 50%) of the graduating class was automatically denied interviews at company's that had a 3.0 minimum GPA requirement.
The average GPA is now 4.
Here, go to all the interviews you want.
This insight doesn't apply to all public schools, though. If you are a standout student in a terrible off-radar public school, you will have to work harder through other channels than the reputation of your school.
"Virginia's expectation is that all students, regardless of race or ethnicity, will correctly answer the same number of questions to pass the state tests."
They're basically being told that because of their race they have a lower expectation. Regardless of what historic data says, is lowering expectations for certain minorities ever the right approach? This just sounds like treating a symptom.
I find it questionable they would set the bar for what portion of students should pass state standards based on race, but if black students statistically struggle compared to asian students, I can see why they would do this.
Creating tranches by how brown kids are is stupid if not racist.
If people find it hard to do understand the material, the solution isn't to let them scrape by with less understanding. That's doing the students a disservice. Instead, we should be investigating why the students are doing poorly, and at least attempting to fix the root causes. Bring people up to the desired standards, don't drop the standards.
I think it's horrible to think that just because someone started off behind, they're too incompetent to produce the same quality of work as another student that started off with an advantage.
People who start off behind tend to not spontaneously catch up. And yes, it is horrible. "incompetent" is a bit of a loaded term to describe their current levels of understanding, however.
Unless those root causes are strongly correlated with skin color, apparently.
If solving whatever is keeping these students behind has something to do with race, so be it. Let's address the racial issues. But dropping standards on black/latino/... students is just a way of saying "We don't think you blacks are able to perform at the same level as asians, so we'll give you a free pass. After all, we can't expect too much from you."
Yes, actually educating children is hard. Giving them the help they need to perform well isn't a walk in the park. But isn't it worthwhile?
Yes, actually educating children is hard. But isn't it worthwhile?
Of course it's worthwhile. What are you trying to say, that I don't want to educate them? If we posit only a single standard for k-12, what happens when some children fail to reach it is that the educators and parents end up in mutual recrimination. We've tried the one-size-fits-all approach for years and it doesn't work that well in practice.
To quote the superintendent of public instruction, 'So why do we have these different subgroups? Because we're starting with black children where they are. We can't start them at the 82 percentile because they're not there.'
It'd be nice to say that a 100% pass rate is the only acceptable outcome, but the reality is that you can't achieve that in the short term. So you can either a) label everyone who falls short a failure from the outset, or b) set realistic goals for different groups, allocate resources accordingly, and aim to reduce the gap every year until the passing rates for different groups converge to less than a single standard deviation.
It doesn't matter whether you're looking at scores or passing rates. Your objective is year-on-year improvement. I think this is both more honest and more desirable than declaring educational institutions to be 'failing schools' and tarnishing the reputation of everyone who works or attends those schools.