The 80 Percent Solution

I think this would be a good time to wax rhapsodic about how wonderful single payer medicine would be.

It`s worth noting that plenty of rural schools are also in bad shape.

Matt -

The reporting on subgroups is the best part of NCLB, but only up to a point. The law allows states to establish a minimum number of students of any particular subgroup [low income, black, Hispanic, etc.] for the reporting requirement to kick in. The level set by states varies from 10 to as many as 50. In NJ, where I live, it is 20 except for Special Ed where it is 35. Thus, under your Type A/Type B dichotemy, a school with 21 African Americans with a 65% proficiency rate would be Type B and labeled failing [or, to use the NCLB euphamism, "in need of improvement"], while another school with only 19 black students, ALL of whom are failing, would appear to be a Type A school without any need to improve. In which school are more minority students being "left behind?"

The minimum-number requirement, like the state-set proficiency standard, is another means for individual states to game the system. It also illustrates that, regardless of the law's intent, it is a blunt, and not particuarly effective, instrument. One quick example: in the first year of reporting, about half the high schools in NJ were labeled "in need of improvement" while fewer than 2% of the high schools in Louisiana were. NJ consistently scores at the top of the NAEP and SAT averages while LA is near the bottom. Could anyone seriously contend that half the high schools in NJ are worse than those in LA? I fail to see a the utility of a statutory mandate -- however well intentioned -- that produces such results.

Good distinction.

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a single school district in the country has shown that it can uniformly create Type A schools. Charismatic principals can, for some period of time, create anomalously strong schools, but it's all pretty fluky.

And, typically, they operate by recruiting better students (like Jaime Escalante at Garfield High recruited the best math students based on test scores out of the 4,000 kids at his disposal), even if the school supposedly operates on a lottery system. I'm highly familiar with the LA magnet schools system, and it's intentionally designed to be confusing and tiresome to discourage dumber and less motivated parents. And, I'm widely told, schools cheat, rigging lotteries to get better students.

ostap, are you confusing single payer with single provider?

I would like to see some evidence type A schools exist.

And a school should be judged on how its students do relative to their potential not on how they do relative to others. A school is not bad just because its students are doing lousy.

It's not *exactly* a test of your dichotomy, but, the way i read it, there's some strong evidence that type A schools probably don't exist.

A great (but rather technical) paper by Jesse Rothstein at Princeton argues that school performance almost never gets off the trend line one would predict just looking at students' family incomes.

When individual schools *do* get off the trend line (posting higher test scores than students' SES conditions would have one predict) it's almost always because they're schools like Bronx Science that choose the best students among many applicants.

paper isn't freely available at the moment, as it just came out in a journal, but, cheap-ish working paper version available here

http://www.nber.org/papers/W10666

> I would like to see some evidence type A schools exist.

That's a tough one, because US exurban living arrangements and patchwork school districts were in part created specifically to prevent such situations from arising. So it would be hard to find evidence that isn't anecdotal.

On an anecdotal level, it happens that the whitebread middle-class suburban district where I live at the moment takes in voluntary transfers from an adjacent (and utterly failed) urban district. Their parents do have to take the steps of applying for the program and get their child to the bus stop every day, so there is a filter to begin with.

The results? Some of these children are very successful; two years ago the #1 ranked high school senior was a transfer student from the urban district and he went on to Stanford with a full scholarship.

Then there are the ones who aren't successful. The district spends tremendous effort on these kids, up to and including individual tutors and behavior counselers (I sometimes think the staff see it as an opportunity to put all their "teaching the disadvantaged student" classes to work). But no matter what they do there is a certain percentage who don't come anywhere near norms for their age level.

Here's the kicker: a few years ago the state funding for this program went away. Given the race/prejudice situation I expected our voters to terminate the program, but they sucked up and we now pay for it out of our own pocket. But we are now in danger of being assessed as a "failing school" under NCLB, because we have more transfer students who don't meet norms than we can hide under the exceptions. THAT is a problem to the local yeomanry, who don't want their property values affected by that "failing school" label. The result is that the program will probably be terminated fairly soon.

As I said, that is just one community (although there are 10-15 districts in the same situation for the same reason in our county). But you can see why I personally don't take a lot of what is said in this debate very seriously.

Cranky

Los Angeles Unified School District is notorious for low test scores ... and yet, it's almost at the median for the 57 school districts in Los Angeles County. In Los Angeles city schools, only about 8% of the students who enter 9th grade will score above 1000 on the SAT test (that's only 930 on the pre-1995 SAT scoring system) by their senior year (about half will have dropped out), but there are 26 school districts in Los Angeles County with lower performance on the SAT!

The LA County school systems with high SAT performance tend to be either look like paradise (Beverly Hills, Palos Verde, La Canada, Los Virgenes) or have very large upper middle class Asian populations (Arcadia) or both (San Marino). I'm not aware of any LA County school district that routinely gets notably better test scores than a simple multiple regression model based on income, English learner status, and ethnicity would predict (e.g., Asians will average higher than whites of the same income).

I'm not saying it's impossible to raise test scores over the quality of the incoming students would predict -- it's certainly possible to do worse than average through administrative indolence -- but it's hard, very hard.

You can find out all about SAT scores in LA County schools at:

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/070128_scores.htm

I agree that true Type A schools don't exist to any substantial degree. [My earlier post was just playing off Matt's (ill-informed) hypothetical.] The NYT did a piece a few months back focusing on the difficulty schools were having closing the achievement gap in standardized test scores five years after passage of NCLB. The piece ended with three schools that had shown some success. All three of them had some combination of the following: significantly lower class sizes, intensive one-on-one tutoring or a health clinic that addressed students non-educational needs. All these things cost mucho bucks that 99% of "Type B" districts don't have. In a similar vein, in his invaluable book, Class and Schools, Richard Rothstein pretty much skewered the claims of groups like Education Trust to have identified what Matt would call "Class A" schools. All the schools had access to greater resources as with the ones in the NYT article or were cherry-picking test scores and/or students. Until the public and the powers that be recognize that the issue is, first and foremost, SES & direct policy efforts in that direction, we are never going to close the achievement gap.

The one thing that we know for sure would ease the burden on overstressed urban public schools is letting in fewer unskilled immigrants.

If you aren't talking about that, you're not serious about helping the public schools.

NPR had a piece today on All Things Considered looking at three very different public schools in Seattle.

My understanding of the disaggregated scores by subgroup provision was that it only made it into NCLB due to a major lobbying push by advocacy groups for poor/minority children - it was not originally intended to work this way. I think that little detail helps illustrate the degree to which it was originally intended to target and destroy poor urban schools, while carefully avoiding parents with political clout.

Matt,

The Type A and Type B distinction is an important one. But it oversimplifies things a bit. One of the problems with NCLB as it is now constituted is that schools either make adequate yearly progress or they don't. And some schools, those that are more diverse, have about 30 hurdles to jump over in order to make it. The problem is, this system doesn't make distinctions between schools for which one group barely misses the mark and those that are truly hurting. They all get the label--and even though the law doesn't technically say "failing," that's what everyone thinks it means--and states and school districts face a dilemma because they don't have enough resources to support every school that's labeled. The Education Department has started a pilot program to measure student growth, which would theoretically give credit to schoiols that are on the upward trajectory even if they hgaven't reached the mark. The Aspen Institute report recommnends extending this to all states, provided that they have the data systems necessary to make it happen.

> I think that little detail helps illustrate the
> degree to which it was originally intended to
> target and destroy poor urban schools, while
> carefully avoiding parents with political clout.

I guess what makes me so angry about this is I have been through this cycle three times since 1965 (NCLB is the third cycle) and it is the same arguments and same agenda from essentially the same players every time. So now there is a new generation of Democratic politicians, policy analysts, and pundits most of whom have no knowledge of what happened between 1965-1985 and - surprise! - they are getting chumped by the same crew of Republicans. Republicans who know exactly what they want and are willing to spend 40 years to achieve it.

Cranky

Schools don't fail tests. Some number of children attending a school fails a test. The root of the problem with NCLB is that it ascribes to an entire school or sub-group what is meant as an assessment of an individual child.

And the reason it does this is to (a)send our tax dollars into the pockets of the billionaires at McGraw-Hill and other publishing giants who are friends of the Bush crime family, to produce the tests, and the textbooks and materials to prepare for the tests; (b)to break the teacher's union by encouraging the creation of alternative and privately funded schools that keep the union out; and (c)ultimately to end our committment to publically funded education.

The law should be repealed. What works is already known. Much higher pay for teachers to attract more really bright and interested people into the profession. More autonomy and longer hours to develop first class curricula for these better quality teachers. A longer school day and year filled with music, art, PE, and foreign language curricula in addition to math, english, science, history, civics and social studies. More staff, nicer buildings, enough counselors and community policing to keep the kids safe and on track.

We know the formula. We need the political will to quadruple the amount spent on education in this country and upgrade all of the ageing school buildings so they look like those in the wealthy districts.

The other problem with NCLB and it's assessment tools is that they are floors; it does nothing to help raise high-end achievement.

In other words, NCLB is designed to ensure that every high school graduate can read a newspaper. Whether the top students can read Milton and Chaucer is irrelevant--so what has happened in many cases is that the programs that taught good students to read Milton have been cut to fund the programs to teach the poorer students to read the newspaper. (Make up your examples for other subjects.)

I strongly suggest the edu-skeptics take a look at this: http://www.achievementfirst.org/about.results.html. The AF schools have bent over backwards to avoid creaming (a la Bronx Science), including using a lottery for admission, and have the same spending per student that surrounding schools have. The AF experience also suggests that it is possible to create a network of schools--that is, it suggests that there are problems with the "lone charismatic principal" theory. The real question is not whether such schools exist, but why what they do is not done more widely.

Steven Teles
Yale University

Thanks
Best regards
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Great comment guidelines. I think you’re on the right track here. Some of those comments should go somewhere else.