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Old 08-16-2010, 01:15 PM
 
20,273 posts, read 32,895,370 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by stevo6 View Post
In my opinion, the quality of a school has mostly to do with the people who attend it and little to do with the teachers, administrators, or amount of money that is funneled into it. Motivated people create a better learning environment.
Certainly test scores have a lot to do with the nature of the students, but then why give credit to the school/"learning environment"? The children of well-educated, well-off, caring parents will do well almost anywhere they go, regardless of who else is around them. The challenge for our society is how to handle the children coming from less-than-ideal circumstances.

Conversely, some schools do in fact regularly do better than other schools, despite having similar student bodies. It isn't just a question of money (although more money spent specifically on instructions, as opposed to other things, does have a positive correlation with outcomes), but I do think there are best practices that can be adopted, pitfalls to be avoided, and so on. And again, we owe it to the children to do the best we can.
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Old 08-16-2010, 03:58 PM
 
Location: S.W.PA
1,360 posts, read 2,940,711 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
Certainly test scores have a lot to do with the nature of the students, but then why give credit to the school/"learning environment"? The children of well-educated, well-off, caring parents will do well almost anywhere they go, regardless of who else is around them. The challenge for our society is how to handle the children coming from less-than-ideal circumstances.

Conversely, some schools do in fact regularly do better than other schools, despite having similar student bodies. It isn't just a question of money (although more money spent specifically on instructions, as opposed to other things, does have a positive correlation with outcomes), but I do think there are best practices that can be adopted, pitfalls to be avoided, and so on. And again, we owe it to the children to do the best we can.
Agreed. My point was that the blunt fact is, in broad terms (and maybe not so welcome terms), that there is a direct correlation between "good" schools as measured by test scores, and income. We can pour tons of money into city schools and optimize them, but that won't raise their test scores but a handful of points.
The other way to look at it is that in any school, there is the potential for a student to have a great education. The thing to consider for parents is to what degree the negative elements will effect their kid. There are a bunch of schools in the city in which there are some really positive experiences being had alongside a few negative ones, and the school's reputation therefor is one of mediocrity, which may not be fair to that school. Alderdice is an example I think.
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Old 08-16-2010, 04:12 PM
 
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There is more observed variance between schools/school-districts with similar student bodies than you are suggesting. It is true that if every school was performing well, you would likely see a persistent gap in test scores between schools based on differences between the student mix. But some schools are not performing well, and they could be targeted for improvement (or sometimes closure).
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Old 08-16-2010, 05:53 PM
 
Location: Highland Park
90 posts, read 130,980 times
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Consider that test scores are only one way to measure the quality of an education. Attending a city public school, I interacted daily with individuals of different genders, races, religions, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic statuses. I view these experiences as invaluable, though unquantifiable aspects of my education. As a general rule, such experiences are largely unavailable to students of affluent suburban schools.

Of course, test scores are not to be ignored entirely; I would simply suggest that one not reject a city school with "good" scores in favor of a suburban school with "great" scores.
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Old 08-16-2010, 06:03 PM
 
398 posts, read 699,345 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
Just an aside, but I would really be cautious about using sources that rate schools using raw test scores, since non-school factors can have a big impact on test scores. This ranking still isn't ideal, but at least it has something of a value-added approach:

Overachiever ranking (Pittsburgh metro schools) - Pittsburgh Business Times

Unfortunately they don't break it down by grade, just school district.
This is a case where controlling for macro factors makes sense when making macro decisions, not when making micro decisions.

In other words, just because a school is doing well relative to other schools with an equivalent amount of highly disruptive students, fights and violence, lack of grade-level preparedness, malsocialized students, etc. might mean that we shouldn't threaten to cut the salaries of teachers there because they are doing a great job with the resource they have; it doesn't mean that a parent shouldn't prefer, if possible, not to send their child to a school with a large number of highly disruptive students, fights and violence, lack of grade-level preparedness, malsocialized students, etc.

eta: Heh, sorry for that triple negative in the last sentence!
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Old 08-16-2010, 07:31 PM
 
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Violence is one thing, lack of "preparedness" something else entirely. I am aware of no evidence that if a school is doing a relatively good job with relatively unprepared students, it won't do a good job with a well-prepared student.
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Old 08-17-2010, 07:30 AM
 
Location: North Pittsburgh
353 posts, read 1,723,751 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cxa180 View Post
We just moved here from Baltimore after having our second child and focused on the following school districts: North Allegheny (where we ended up moving to), Hampton and Pine Richland. North Hills is also getting very promising.
All these schools are great. However, North Allegheny is a huge district with a huge enrollment in the high school. There are several elementary schools in the district. Pine Richland, Hampton and North Hills are small districts - so there is a smaller enrollment. Of the last three schools, there is a tremendous amount of parent involvement which, as another poster pointed out, can be more important than the test scores.

As for drugs, they are everywhere.
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Old 08-17-2010, 09:42 AM
 
398 posts, read 699,345 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
I am aware of no evidence that if a school is doing a relatively good job with relatively unprepared students, it won't do a good job with a well-prepared student.
Well, if by "good job" you mean meeting some not-too-demanding threshold of mastery, sure, that's probably true. But that's not what I am arguing.

Pretty much every study using a VAM for education shows that on average, all students' mastery -- regardless of that student's SES status, parents' education, single-parent or intact family, etc. -- is worse off than it would otherwise be if their classmates were better prepared, of higher SES, etc. The only case where this is not true is for especially unprepared students, as the "flounder effect" starts to kick in. The VAMs don't market their results this way, because it's not the goal of their studies -- the hot thing today is figuring out how to use VAMs in assigning merit pay to teachers or highlight failing schools, which means that people are primarily interested in the teacher and school effects.

But the coefficients (and more importantly, their signs) on every other variable are right there for all to see.

Now you're welcome to argue that, you know, "back in my day, nobody had to know how to read in kindergarten!" Fine, that brings to the mediocre threshold position. But to refer back to my original comment, it's not unreasonable for parents to want their students to master as much as possible during the school year. Oftentimes, that means raw test scores are absolutely the best indicator of where to send one's child.

In other words, saying to someone "Oh, you don't want to send your kid there -- those kids only excel because so many of them come from loving, educated, financially and emotionally stable families that dote on them, read to them, and generally structure their considerable resources around advancing the interest of their children" is pretty ridiculous, as the research shows that the effects of privilege are contagious. It's not ridiculous to point out that those schools have it easy, and shouldn't be "rewarded" with excess tax dollars or whatever, but for the parent making a decision about where to send their child, value-added analysis is not the way to go.
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Old 08-17-2010, 10:13 AM
 
20,273 posts, read 32,895,370 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by caroline2 View Post
Pretty much every study using a VAM for education shows that on average, all students' mastery -- regardless of that student's SES status, parents' education, single-parent or intact family, etc. -- is worse off than it would otherwise be if their classmates were better prepared, of higher SES, etc. . . . But the coefficients (and more importantly, their signs) on every other variable are right there for all to see.
Can you share some links or citations to the studies you have in mind?

Quote:
Now you're welcome to argue that, you know, "back in my day, nobody had to know how to read in kindergarten!" Fine, that brings to the mediocre threshold position.
Just an aside, but I think some skepticism about whether knowing how to read in kindergarten is a worthwhile goal isn't about defending mediocrity so much as trying to tailor the educational process to the development process in appropriate ways.

Quote:
But to refer back to my original comment, it's not unreasonable for parents to want their students to master as much as possible during the school year. Oftentimes, that means raw test scores are absolutely the best indicator of where to send one's child.
Holding aside my quibble about pure quantity of learning versus developmentally-appropriate learning, obviously this point depends on whether the raw test scores of other students actually tell you all you need to know about how much your individual student is going to learn. You are saying the studies will support that claim, but I'd like to see them first. And unless this factor dominates every other factor, it is entirely possible you would still want to look past raw test scores.

Quote:
as the research shows that the effects of privilege are contagious.
Again, it is obvious your argument depends on this claim, so I'd like to see that research.

Quote:
but for the parent making a decision about where to send their child, value-added analysis is not the way to go.
I thought you were claiming that proper value-added analysis will support the notion that "the effects of privilege are contagious". That is an important point if the research supports your claim, but I still don't see why you would ever just dump value-added analysis: instead, you would want to incorporate this "contagion" effect into your value-added model, then reassess the available schools accordingly.
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