Tuesday, December 08, 2009
School that Beat the Odds? Nope.
Despite the claims of conservatives and the Heritage Foundation, it turns out there's no such thing as schools that beat the odds: that is, that have high-poverty kids with behavioral issues, and yet the schools manage to have high test scores. Read this extremely important Crooked Timber article about how the figures get massaged to sort of look as though such schools exist, and why they really don't.
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5 comments:
Good article--thanks for posting it. If there were a reliable way to "beat" long odds, wouldn't they then automatically shorten? I very seldom came home winners from Golden Gate Fields.
I'm less interested in philosophical conundrums about odds-making than in knowing: does this mean that all those Inspiring True Stories about remarkable teachers who go to failing ghetto schools and all of their students suddenly start getting accepted to college are false? Or that the students were all previously considered college-prep material anyway? Or what?
Not sure if you looked at the article or not, calimac. It's about the non-existence of schools conservatives are building school funding on, via NCLB, etc., not about philosophical conundrums. I can't answer your question, however.
The "philosophical conundrum about odds-making" I was referring to was the one offered in the first comment above.
Well, if California was serious about its public schools, it would repeal Prop 13 tomorrow morning. Pigs, flying, you know the deal, however. I'm so grateful that I graduated high school in 1978, the last year before the catastrophic Prop 13 took hold.
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