Firestorm Erupts Over Virginia's Education Goals

http://www.nwpr.org/post/firestorm-erupts-over-virginias-education-goals

by Shivetya • 14 years ago

39 59 14 years ago

rayiner4• 14 years ago

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.

anigbrowl11• 14 years ago

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.

jivatmanx4• 14 years ago

How is race more fine-grained than the socioeconomic status of individual schools?

fusiongyro3• 14 years ago

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.

danielweber• 14 years ago

I think "number of kids who get free school lunch" is the most common measure of economic status. It's rough, but it's something.

schoper• 14 years ago

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.

tedivm2• 14 years ago

That's an interesting comment. I would be interested in seeing a source for that information, as opposed to just taking it at face value.

jessriedel• 14 years ago

> Poor white kids, for example, have this bad habit of out-scoring black children from the highest income brackets on the SATs

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.

aqme28• 14 years ago

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?

portmanteaufu• 14 years ago

Now I'm depressed about the sad state of medical records too. :(

twoodfin2• 14 years ago

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.

snowwrestler• 14 years ago

Some school systems are beginning to track educational achievement longitudinally. The Data Quality Campaign is a national effort to promote and coordinate these efforts.

http://www.dataqualitycampaign.org/

jamesaguilar2• 14 years ago

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.

Jabbles• 14 years ago

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.

stevesearer• 14 years ago

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.

gte910h2• 14 years ago

Florida is doing something similarly horrible.

pc86• 14 years ago

I think it would be more horrible to expect everyone to get 85 regardless of whether they're starting at 82 or 52.

gte910h2• 14 years ago

If you're talking about building standards off of individual students past behavior, I'm listening.

Creating tranches by how brown kids are is stupid if not racist.

ori_b3• 14 years ago

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.

herbig• 14 years ago

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."

mikegioia• 14 years ago

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.

tedivm2• 14 years ago

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.

mc32• 14 years ago

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.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

[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,

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.

firefoxman1• 14 years ago

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"

sachingulaya2• 14 years ago

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.

tomjen3• 14 years ago

Well that seems simple enough to fix.

The average GPA is now 4.

Here, go to all the interviews you want.

abduhl• 14 years ago

Since when is a B the 50th percentile?

hammock2• 14 years ago

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.

patrickgzill• 14 years ago

President Bush may or may not have been an idiot, but his speechwriter coined a useful phrase, "the soft bigotry of low expectations".

arkclark• 14 years ago

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.

woodchuck64• 14 years ago

Policies like this are a result of ignoring good science in social cognition on the reality of stereotype threats. See for example http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2570773/

anigbrowl11• 14 years ago

Being informed that you're attending a 'failing school' strikes me as just as much of a stereotype threat.

Firestorm Erupts Over Virginia's Education Goals

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