I think there is value in taking into account the starting point of various schools in setting goals, but I can't believe they would be dumb enough to use a suspect classification (race) as the metric instead of something like socioeconomic status or the original passing rates for individual schools.
I don't really understand why they need to do it on a group basis at all. It's easy enough to put each student in a database at the very beginning and say, "the school should provide a net improvement of N% for each student." There is no reason to set a target for a group as a whole when technology allows us to track individuals just as easily.
This is my thinking as well. When I was teaching and had students which performed below our expected outcomes, we didn't sit around and ponder their ethnicity or socioeconomic status, we simply worked hard to figure out how best to get that particular student caught up (or closer to their peers than before).
In my estimation, the best way to break away from this ridiculous tendency to group people it to treat everyone like an individual.
Not if by performance you mean "in comparison to everyone else". In that case education is zero-sum.
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.
Why can't we measure a student's progress longitudinally? It can't be a cost problem.
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?
We can. This was, if I'm not mistaken, the fundamental idea behind NCLB. Schools had been hiding behind average test scores that obscured the fact that some kids were excelling while others were being shuffled along. So you test every student and grade schools on the absolute fraction that are hitting desired progress toward grade-level competency, not on averages or relative rates for different subgroups.
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.
> 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.
Some school systems are beginning to track educational achievement longitudinally. The Data Quality Campaign is a national effort to promote and coordinate these efforts.
Unfortunately, socioeconomic status doesn't work. Poor white kids, for example, have this bad habit of out-scoring black children from the highest income brackets on the SATs.
This is the same reason that AA-preferences in college admissions use race instead of SES.
> 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.
Socioeconomic status is hard to measure directly without requesting a lot of family data, and school data is not that fine-grained. If you're trying to measure relative improvement year-on-year, then race is a statistically useful proxy.
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.
The school does, however, have detailed information on how students were performing the previous year which they can use without tarnishing themselves with this "statistically useful proxy" that happens to also amount to political suicide. The problem with doing that isn't that it is difficult, it's that it doesn't introduce enough misdirection for them to get away with what they're trying to get away with. 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. They're trying to obscure their inability to teach effectively by throwing in the racial component. It's bullshit, and people are right be outraged by it, and the administrators responsible for it should be made to pay for it.
No, they don't necessarily have that information. It's not available for either first-graders, and not reliable for transfer students without knowledge of the standards employed at the previous school.
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.
You need two data points to measure progress. First graders are the first data point. Transfer students alone are not a dominating element of the population. Pointing to an inability to get reliable test results from other districts is trying to excuse failure with more failure.
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.
Your accounting argument simply makes no sense. Try stating it with specific groups and numbers to see why. How do you write off a lack of progress for one group when it's there in its own category for everyone to see? And what backs your assumption that there's a preponderance of disadvantaged kids in every school?
Their reasons are malformed whatever they happen to be. My argument is merely that they chose this malformed option over other more obviously malformed options because they hoped it would better disguise their malfeasance. If they had grouped students by performance instead it would amount to saying nothing: poor performing students continue to perform poorly, and good ones well, and excellent ones excellently.
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.
That's a good point that I didn't think of, and would certainly be worth using. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, though, race affects test cores even more than socioeconomic status.
Really? I understand the difficulty in getting data for individual students, but for the areas that a school serves, I figured that there was some sort of public demographic data for them.
If it is, than they could simply use past test scores, giving a curve for schools that have done the worst in past years.
Assuming five races: Given that there are more than five schools, than using a school's past score performance or socioeconomic status is going to be closer to their individual score than the aggregate for their race.
tl;dr School is finer grained than race because there are more schools than races.
And let's face it: also some of our own segregationist instincts. Even liberal San Francisco recently abandoned its eminently egalitarian policy of mixing up the public school population by not basing assignments on neighborhood. I'm not the only progressive who cringes at the thought of not being able to buy my daughter into a particular type of school district.
I attended Virginia schools from grades 4-12, and my particular school district decided it would be a good idea to have a "prestigious" grading scale (A=93-100, B=87-92, C=78-86, and so on). It seemed like a good idea at first: A public school system would be known for having "higher standards" than others. The problem? Colleges didn't give a damn what grading scale you used. Your GPA was the same as anyone's, which made it harder on every student without any real benefit.
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"
This is not exactly true. The best public schools (e.g. in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology) will have a relationship with the admissions committees at the best colleges in the area and nationally. In these cases they really do know and care about how the grading system is applied. For good private schools, the effect can be even greater.
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.
My college had the same idea. To 'boost' the program they made the average GPA 2.8.
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 HN title, "Grading kids by race" is misleading. It's not grading kids by race, it's setting different passing rate goals for different minority groups.
"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."
[After edit: the submission title has been changed to match the original article title, in accord with the Hacker News guidelines. This is an interesting article on an important issue.]
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,
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.
(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 think this should be judged on its merits (results and intent). In the end, is this system better able to track progress and lift academic competency for affected children? Arguably race isn't and should not be the best or even the preferred selection criterion. Maybe economics, entrance exam results, etc., should guide the classification and tracking, regardless of race.
While I think this is interesting in that the state is trying something new (I didn't even know states could get waivers for no child left behind) I can't help but think this will have a negative impact on the kids.
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.
Think about it in the other direction too- if you're an asian who isn't the best at math you're considered a failure for not getting consistant B+ and A grades.
If I understand this correctly, they're not saying asian students have to score almost twice as highly than black students. Instead, they're saying, "Okay, a majority of asians are passing our standards and proportionally fewer of black students are, so let's set those as a baseline and seek to improve from there."
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.
No, affirmative action is this: when two candidates are approximately equally qualified but one was raised black in the inner city and the other white, then it's best practice to choose the black candidate.
I would use more general qualifiers in place of those specific expressions of the problem:
"When comparing two candidates of otherwise approximately equal qualification, apply historical socio-economic advantages/disadvantages as modifiers to get their probable scores in the absence of those modifiers, then re-evaluate accordingly."
Compare it to testing two sets of children, one that was kept up all night and one that got to sleep after studying, and extrapolate writ-large.
In a similar vein, we can't make useful assessments about alcoholism susceptibility in Native American populations without first accounting for all of the historical socio-economic pressures that would likely drive a disproportionate amount of any given population to drink.
No, affirmative action is this: when a white candidate is only slightly better qualified than a black candidate, the black candidate should be preferred, even if the black candidate came from a wealthy home and the white candidate grew up poor.
Not to respond to a glib response, but the issue crops up when the minority population is underrepresented as part of the company/college/etc. So for Morehouse (for example, a historically black college in the US) the reverse might be true.
There's lots of literature backing this up - when you have a MORE diverse population in your company/college/whatever, it performs by almost any measure you can come up with, better as a whole.
I think it would be a good idea to expect everyone to learn the material and be evaluated on their ability. If someone does a better job, they should get a better grade.
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.
"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.
What? I'm saying that dropping standards doesn't solve anything. Relabeled incompetence is still incompetence.
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?
They're not dropping standards as far as I can see. They're setting goals for relative improvement. If blue people average 40% on tests and green people average 60%, and after a year those scores have increased to 50% and 70%, respectively, one group has seen a 25% improvement and the other a ~17% improvement.
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.
It would be, if all kids were mythical blank slates of equal ability. But all the evidence is that they're not; they carry in a lot of economic and cultural baggage.
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.
