{"id":4313,"date":"2009-12-09T10:56:44","date_gmt":"2009-12-09T10:56:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/12\/09\/even-in-education-the-house-al\/"},"modified":"2009-12-09T10:56:44","modified_gmt":"2009-12-09T10:56:44","slug":"even-in-education-the-house-al","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/12\/09\/even-in-education-the-house-al\/","title":{"rendered":"Even in Education, The House Always Wins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber has a very good post about schools that appear to “beat the odds”<\/a>, getting good results with populations that don’t typically do well in school. It does an excellent job of laying out the problems with the vast majority of attempts to determine which schools are “beating the odds,” let alone what methods are best to use for this. It turns out to be a lot harder to measure than most people think– I was particularly struck by this bit:<\/p>\n

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It gets worse, thanks to my colleague Doug Harris, in his paper, \u201cHigh flying schools, student disadvantage, and the logic of NCLB<\/span>\u201d<\/a>. Using the School-Level Achievement Database and the Education Trust\u2019s definition of high-flying schools (high-performance in either reading or math in the grade and year selected by ET for analysis), Harris has estimated how many schools remain high flying over time, and what the characteristics of those schools are. Using a sample of 18,365 schools he finds that when the definition of high performing is changed to require consistency over time fully 93% of schools identified as high-performing for a year drop out of the category. And whereas low poverty schools are only 3 times more likely to be high performing than high poverty schools on the single-year definition, they are 22 times more likely to be high-performing on the definition that requires consistency over time. Using data on schools with high minority populations he finds that, on the more demanding definition, the \u201clikelihood that a low-poverty-low-minority school is high-performing is 89 times greater than for a high-poverty-high-minority school\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This highlights one of the things that make education so damnably difficult to measure: there is a lot of year-to-year variation in the population you’re dealing with. The students we’re teaching this year are not the same as the students we were teaching last year, or five years ago. It’s not a system well suited to yearly measurements, but longer-term studies are subject to larger-scale drifts in the populations and attitudes of the students being served. On the short term, you’re mostly seeing statistical fluctuations, and on a longer term, you’ve got to worry about demographic shifts.<\/p>\n

It’s kind of depressing in a lot of ways. What it really shows is that the problems of education are inextricably coupled with the problems of society in general, and that the odds of a quick and simple fix are very, very low.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber has a very good post about schools that appear to “beat the odds”, getting good results with populations that don’t typically do well in school. It does an excellent job of laying out the problems with the vast majority of attempts to determine which schools are “beating the odds,” let… Continue reading Even in Education, The House Always Wins<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,49,13,28,82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-class_issues","category-education","category-politics","category-socialscience","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4313\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}