The Depressing Truth
Well, events abroad are pretty depressing on their own. Nevertheless, I think this study comparing private schools to public schools is pretty depressing as well. What it shows, roughly, is that once you implement standard demographic controls, kids in private schools do about as well (or as poorly) as kids in public schools. The good news is that this offers a solid talking point against school vouchers, thus bolstering everyone's ability to adhere to the liberal orthodoxy in good conscience.
The bad news is that this once again highlights what seems to me to be the depressing truth about education: Once you control for demographic factors, nothing seems to make a dramatic difference. The trouble here, obviously, is that it would be really fantastic to implement some education reforms of some sort that would dramatically improve poor and minority students' performance. But there don't seem to be any really great solutions in the offing. That, in turn, highlights the vital importance of trying to directly tackle poverty and inequality rather than hoping that the school system -- even an improved version of it -- can redress inequities that arise elsewhere in the social and economic system.
I think you've got it Matt. We've been putting the cart before the horse- hoping that educational reform could undo the effects of social-economic inequality.
Look at the work of social epidemiologists such as Marmot and Wilkinson to see the pervasive effects of inequality.
Let's tackle inequality head on. At first that means slowing and reversing the existing trends towards greater inequality. Then we need to find the boundaries of acceptable ratios of inequality- to find where the social pathologies are bred.
July 15, 2006 2:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
It does show that privitization is not a solution to delivering decent education to all, but it doesn't show that schools can't be better. It doesn't discuss, as Jonathan Kozol did, say, whether simply looking at public schools with varying budgets and class sizes might matter. I'm surprised, in fact, that private schools did this well, since they include choices parents make for reasons other than educational quality (say, religious instruction) and sacrifices in salary that many New York techers make in order not to work in public schools.
The free-market ideology comes down to a dogma that the public sector just doesn't try hard enough, meaning there is some obvious cost efficiency or magic teaching method that we're all too stupid to notice. Like every other aspect of the class war in America, it also serves as an excuse to keep money out of the hands of the needy. Sure, that may primarily have the most impact in remedying family income inequality, although there will always be poor school districts, since concentrations of poverty won't go away regardless. But it needn't exclude any attention to schools.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
July 16, 2006 6:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well, there's one thing that's been tried with some substantial effect; integration by income. Some studies show (one in WI) no effect; some studies show modest (one in NC) improvement; no studies show negative effects.
Another thing which hasn't been tried on any large scale is to rearrange teachers so that "tough schools" have good teachers; teachers that will hold the kids attention, inspire them to stay interested in learning, etc. Most kids at affluent schools will still do okay, because they will always have peer & family pressure to keep them focused on school, and they come from educated families that keep books in the house, etc. And you wouldn't be taking all the great teachers out of affluent neighborhoods; some of them will stay without outrageous financial inducements.
This idea was covered in a WaMo article on Kerry's "quietly radical" education plan; give every school district in America the money to provide four-figure raises to identified "good move into "troubled schools". Food for thought.
July 16, 2006 8:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
That said, your right that focusing on inequality is certainly more important.
July 16, 2006 9:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
what it boils down to is eductaional performance is just a side symptom.
All the reform proposals are like treating chicken pox by covering all the spots with makeup - your just at best hiding the problem.
July 16, 2006 11:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Of course, there's also "dumb as a post" inequality, and short of some technique for rewiring people's brains, you're not going to be able to fix that. What's more, the better the education system becomes at bringing out students' full potential, the more glaring the fact that different people have different potentials will become.
However, I'd say that Beowulf has it right: The only thing that's really going to work, AND be cost effective, (The teachers' unions might like class size of one, but it isn't happening.) is advanced, individualized computer learning. Automation is the future of education, too.
BTW, notice that neither public or private schools got compared to home schooling?
July 16, 2006 2:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Despair not Matt!
It can be done, at least on the individual school level. There are now dozens of dozens of schools across the country that are having great results with the demographically most challenging kids. (See KIPP, Roxbury Prep, Boston Collegiate, Amistad Academy, etc...). Admittedly, these are drops in a huge bucket and no evidence of the possibility of system-wide reform. But you can achieve great results with the "hardest" kids. These schools prove it.
Also, I'm not sure what tackling poverty head-on would look like without an education component? How can we expect our nation to put forth these poverty reforms you speak of, if the folks most affected don't have the education to be effective advocates for themselves?
As for the study, my reading is that religous, academically non-rigorous schools are bringing down the average for the private school group. Surely, Matt you regard your own private school education as being superior than what you would have gotten in the public schools. That is, of course if you didn't go to Stuyvesant.
July 16, 2006 3:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Its all politics and its all a waste of time, except for one thing.
The first person who figured out the score was the late Benjamin Bloom, who published a research article 22 years ago titled "The Two Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring". Sadly its not online but if you google Two Sigma Problem, there are summaries here and there. Here's a home schooler who's collected some Bloom links -- http://lionesshomeschool.blogspot.com/2006/05/golden-quote.html
The average student (being average) scores at the 50th percentile on achievement test. But students who are tutored full-time (like, say, child actors are required to be) scored in the 98th percentile-- Two Sigma above the average.
The beginning and end of education reform is simply this-- creating a system that brings students in school at least in the same ballpark as children who are tutored.
It will likely involved computerized learning (so every student learns at their own rate, just as tutored children do) and will use the Bloom's Mastery Learning or the similiar Keller Plan of teaching subject in modular blocks that each student must pass a quiz on before going on to the next section. The military has been working on the subject for years-- here's a power point presentation from a few years ago -- http://tinyurl.com/ewrhb
July 16, 2006 4:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
So one of the reasons poor hispanic girls do poorly in school is that a lot of them have kids while they're in high school or junior high school. Would this be less of a problem if we raised the minimum wage so their mother made slightly more money? I guess it might, but I'm not really convinced. I think its more likely that the problem is not that their parents are poor, but that they also had kids at an extremely young age and did not receive a real education either. That just correlates really well with poverty. What kind of poverty alleviation program do you have in mind that you think would fix this?
July 17, 2006 11:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
It also serves as an excuse to keep money out of the hands of the needy.
This is unadulterated bullshit. There have been many proposals to have vouchers that are means-tested and geographically limited so that only poor people in the inner city are eligible. The unions have still opposed them.
Now, maybe you don't think sending poor kids to private schools will help matters any, but it's hard to see how that's a plot to keep money out of the hands of poor kids.
July 18, 2006 10:51 AM | Reply | Permalink