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Truly remarkable. You ask for statistics and, when presented with them, sweepingly declare them to be statistically insignificant due to small sample size, presumably. Well...show your work. Actually, forget that, don't bother to meaningfully examine information that challenged your mindset...the Emperor is still certainly clothed. Let's rely instead on those objective, quantifiable measures of "rigorous curriculum" and "elevated expectations" and whatever other tropes you've been trotting out to explain the success of students already demographically predisposed to success.
The real question is, given the above cited statistics, how can it be said that I, as the parent of two boys from upper-middle class origins with two professional parents with advanced degrees, am willfully (but perhaps ignorantly in your view) sabotaging and sacrificing their education and by extension their future, by sending them to PPS? That's the ingrained hubris within the school-rankings game that is so galling to many of us.
Perfect response. Someone please rep Lobick for me... I have to wait before doing it again.
Merely changing the name of social programs that encourage bad lifestyle choices among some people doesn't fix the issue though.
Eh. Frankly we don't have enough jobs in this country for all the able-bodied people who actually want to work, let alone considering those who do not, or are fundamentally unemployable due to some combination of physical, emotional, and intellectual traits. Unless your solution is basically "we'll let them starve to death, and there will be less poor people in the next generation." I don't think there is a real policy solution to eliminate chronic unemployment.
Not to mention if you're talking about the classic person who benefits from "welfare" you're talking about a single mother. I think our society massively undervalues parenthood, and parents in general (regardless of income level) should receive monetary compensation as a "wage" for raising the next generation of citizens.
I've concluded though that the best path for us to go is towards a national minimum income or basic income. Money still goes to those who need it, but there is no more government bureaucracy which has to waste time determining if people are eligible for benefits.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Goinback2011
How do SATs compare?
I don't think SAT scores are published anywhere for high schools. Colleges do disclose what their average SAT score is. I know it has been found that there is a perfectly linear relationship between SAT scores and GRE scores - that basically every college, regardless of it being an Ivy League or a low-ranking state school, boots student understanding over the course of a undergraduate degree by roughly the same amount. Suggesting that higher education itself really doesn't matter that much.
Obviously the smaller the sample size, the larger the margin of error. It's why the state doesn't even bother to report the average test score results for grades within a school where a tracked group has 10 or less individuals. They must feel at least somewhat confident that numbers higher than this have some statistical significance though, or they wouldn't publish them.
I agree that that the smaller the sample size, the larger the margin of error. This is why I do not hold any statistical value to many of the PPS achievement scores that you have posted on your list. A sample size of select groups based solely on race, and has anywhere from 11 students to 65 students in the group, is compared to schools with 100's in each sample group. The results cited by you are as misleading as me posting that Asian-American children at Allderdice perform significantly below average than most suburban school districts. The truth lies within a larger, comparable, sample size
Also, margin of error works both ways. A small sample group could result in a subgroup overperforming due to the luck of the draw, or underperforming. It's statistically speaking pretty unlikely that all four of these city high schools would happen to score high. Together they have a white enrollment equal to a largish suburban high school. The aggregate of all four schools would be very competitive with the top suburban schools.
Why is this only a racial comparison? Why is it that you are not comparing PPS to each school with similar demographics as your own? Your position seems to intimate that the affluent white demographic is not only desirable, but the only one that matters in your world. Could the affluent, black family not be included in the statistical analysis that benefits now, and in the future of PPS?
Another way we could take a look at this is to compare multiple years of data. I don't have the time right now, but if we considered say CAPA's scores over a 10-year period (it looks like data has been tracked for that long) you could not say the results were due to random chance, because you'd have a sample base of hundreds of students from one school.
[b]Because CAPA does not accept every student walking through its doors, it is more similar to a private school (without the tuition) than it is a public school. There is a selection process of which students are both accepted, and rejected. This is probably true for the most desirable of the magnet schools in PPS, and where students are hopeful of acceptance. This removes the randomness of selection and would invalidate any true comparison to a public school.[b]
Finally, calling these manipulated results is false. These are the results the state publicly posts. I did nothing with the data whatsoever. If I tried to do some statistical modeling based upon low-income scores to back out how high-income students in the schools scored, you might have a point. But I'm just using the state's data.
If I was striving to convince you that the Asian population is being poorly served by the PPS and I have the data to prove it, you would be well within your rights to tell me that I was manipulating data to support my contentions. I could say that I have a sample group that shows that Asian children at Allderdice are 36% likely to test basic, or below. Your response could be that the derived data that I am using to support my conclusion is flawed, because the data compiled is both unreliable and invalid. We would both be right.
The information is buried in the Department of Education website someplace. Here is a data that the Post-Gazette found but it is close to 10 years old.
The information is buried in the Department of Education website someplace. Here is a data that the Post-Gazette found but it is close to 10 years old.
Allderdice scores pretty well there, all things considered. Not surprising given unlike PSSA scores, a large proportion of the under-performing students would opt out of taking the test entirely.
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Originally Posted by Retiredcoach
I agree that that the smaller the sample size, the larger the margin of error. This is why I do not hold any statistical value to many of the PPS achievement scores that you have posted on your list. A sample size of select groups based solely on race, and has anywhere from 11 students to 65 students in the group, is compared to schools with 100's in each sample group. The results cited by you are as misleading as me posting that Asian-American children at Allderdice perform significantly below average than most suburban school districts. The truth lies within a larger, comparable, sample size.
Again, if you added up all the white 11th graders who went to CAPA, Obama, Sci-Tech, and Allderdice that year, you'd have 278 students - larger than all but eight suburban 11th grades. An average across all four schools would clearly come out to be a "top school" still. The average would be closer to Allderdice than the magnets, given Allderdice had 153 students while the other three had 125 combined. But still, it would be superior.
Also once again, if you want to take the time you're free to look at the last few years of data. I have looked in past years and the PPS magnet high schools and PPS have always been competitive with top suburban schools when correcting for racial demographic differences. A sample of 30*10 is 300, which clearly has less of a margin of error.
Finally, it should be noted that test scores are not polls, because everyone is supposed to be tested. Thus they do not reflect how a representative sample of the school performed, but the actual results. Even if any one of these schools had a "good year" that means that the students that year were particularly smart and did exceptionally well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Retiredcoach
Why is this only a racial comparison? Why is it that you are not comparing PPS to each school with similar demographics as your own? Your position seems to intimate that the affluent white demographic is not only desirable, but the only one that matters in your world. Could the affluent, black family not be included in the statistical analysis that benefits now, and in the future of PPS?
Unfortunately, the state of Pennsylvania (unlike some other states) does not have a "non-low income" category which it tracks, so you cannot measure class instead of race easily. I can say if you look at the top 10 highest-scoring schools in Allegheny County for black students, you see the following rankings:
I did these scores differently than those for the white students, looking at the sum of the percent of students who scored both advanced and proficient on math and reading. The reason I did so was because the amounts scoring proficient are generally very low (mostly in the range of 10%-30% in the best schools). Regardless, at least within the public school system, PPS (and City Charter) seems to have the highest-scoring black students - which shouldn't be surprising, given the parents who choose to enroll their children there are self-selected, and disproportionately middle class.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Retiredcoach
If I was striving to convince you that the Asian population is being poorly served by the PPS and I have the data to prove it, you would be well within your rights to tell me that I was manipulating data to support my contentions. I could say that I have a sample group that shows that Asian children at Allderdice are 36% likely to test basic, or below. Your response could be that the derived data that I am using to support my conclusion is flawed, because the data compiled is both unreliable and invalid. We would both be right.
Not all Asians are identical however. For example, in that testing year Brashear had 28 Asian 11th graders (the fourth highest amount of any high school in Allegheny County). 64.3% scored below basic on math, and 78.6% on reading. Brashear's Asian population though is low-income Bhutanese refugees, not generally wealthy east and south Asians as in North Allegheny and Mount Lebanon. I don't know what the exact enrollment at Allderdice was that year, but I wouldn't be surprised if a few of the Bhutanese refugees got into one of the career programs there. With such a small sample size, just 2-3 immigrants with poor language skills would make a big difference.
All white populations are not the same as well of course. You better believe the substantial white populations at Brashear and Carrick don't score anything like those at Allderdice or the three magnet high schools (though they also don't score too differently from other working class white areas like Brentwood or Deer Lakes). Still, the white student body at the city magnets in particular is almost all educated professional class (trust me, I meet their parents at PTA meetings - thus analogous to the socio-economic status of the student body at top suburban schools.
I suppose one could argue that the city magnet population is actually naturally smarter than the suburbanites. That the schools are in fact hindering their performance, but only just enough to ensure they're roughly comparable with the average denizen of Mount Lebanon, and they'd shine even more if put into one of those suburban districts. I'm not making that supposition, are you?
It is true that children can attain academic success in underperforming school districts. In fact, I know parents that are quite happy with the quality of the education their children are receiving at Woodland Hills, a district that ranks towards the bottom of test scores in the region.
The truth is that it's not just the test scores that cause parents to avoid underperforming schools. It's that parents do not want their children exposed to the students from dysfunctional families that live unhealthy lifestyles. The children from many dysfunctional families adopt some of the most dangerous, and destructive cultures, and behaviors. You can't blame parents for wanting to protect their children from these bad influences.
I guess the point of this post is that you aren't going to improve the education for underperforming children, until you can improve the the lifestyles of the families these children come from.
My personal opinion is that we need welfare reform. You can't expect that to systemically reward unhealthy lifestyles, and not adversely effect the children raised in these families. Children need two parents with a stable income to provide them with an environment in which they can thrive. The number of children that lack these basic necessities is truly staggering, and is our greatest failing as a nation.
"The truth is that it's not just the test scores that cause parents to avoid underperforming schools. It's that parents do not want their children exposed to the students from dysfunctional families that live unhealthy lifestyles. The children from many dysfunctional families adopt some of the most dangerous, and destructive cultures, and behaviors. You can't blame parents for wanting to protect their children from these bad influences."
This is pretty much what I was trying to say before, as to why i ultimately want to move my kids to a better performing district. A Stable Home life and supportive parents only goes so far as an influence- as the kids get older, the attitudes of their peers are going to become more central.
FC: Class of 2014 – Critical Reading: 568, Math: 583, and Writing: 569
Allderdice: Reading 511.46 Math 520.60 Writing 497.20
I think you can get a good enough education at Allderdice, but the masses aren't getting one and it has nothing to do with quality of teachers, IMHO. It is all about parenting.
FC: Class of 2014 – Critical Reading: 568, Math: 583, and Writing: 569
Allderdice: Reading 511.46 Math 520.60 Writing 497.20
I think you can get a good enough education at Allderdice, but the masses aren't getting one and it has nothing to do with quality of teachers, IMHO. It is all about parenting.
...and parenting has a whole lot to do with socioeconomic factors...
However. While a kid CAN be successful, it seems to me to be an uphill battle, especially as they get older. When younger, their parents and home life exert more influence but when they get into middle school and high school, peers become a much bigger influence. If he's spending 90% of his time around kids who don't value academic success, where being "smart" and making good grades is looked down on by peers, where things like drugs and fighting may be prevalent... I as a parent am going to be battling against that. Some of those things you are going to encounter in any school but in my experience, not as much in a better ranking suburban school (i went to Peters Two btw).
I have to deal with the lack of diversity, which is another important issue for me. I don't mind one bit my white kid going to a black school and in fact would prefer him to be exposed to different races/ethnicities. I just don't want him to be in a place that is unsupportive of academic success. But it doesn't seem like you can have both.
This is the truth. Of course a kid's parents and upbringing contribute greatly to academic achievement, but if a school is too God-awful, that won't help much in the end. I went to Peabody High School, and the place was a joke. You couldn't call it a school, really; it was more like a hangout spot, full of people who you wouldn't want to hang out with. I had one class where the teacher was beaten up, so they gave us a long-term substitute. About a month later he was beaten up. So we were on our third teacher for the year because the first two had taken a beating. It's hard to overcome stuff like this.
And as for diversity: come on. Diversity is something that some white people like to say is a good thing, but it's not something that they actually practice in real life.
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