It sounds to me like Matt is arguing that the "Extended closures of schools that hurt students’ measured learning outcomes and widened the racial gap in measured learning outcomes" was not worth the lives saved by these closures.
Isn't it possible to agree that "Extended closures of schools ... hurt students’ measured learning outcomes and widened the racial gap in measured learning outcomes" while believing that it is possible for other concerns to rise above these?
If this is in fact logically possible, then the question is not whether "Extended closures of schools ... hurt students’ measured learning outcomes and widened the racial gap in measured learning outcomes" but rather, was it worth it?
I believe that this question has no correct answer, and as such, folks will have opposing opinions about it.
I can imagine someone making the (pro-life?) argument that a single life saved is worth the damage done to students "learning outcomes" and I can imagine someone making some counter argument.
In the everlasting debate between the idealists who ponder what is the moral thing to do and the realists who ponder what is the winning move, Matt seems to be quite the political realist.
Yes, it might be true that keeping kids out of school was a political loser that will cost Democrats. It could also be true that keeping kids out of school, while costing Democratic careers, saved lives.
One contrarian argument in support of a weak version of Ibram X Kendi's argument that standardized testing is racist:
The way that standardized test questions are fielded is often based off of measurements that place questions at different levels of difficulty based on the number of students that answer them correctly. Questions that fit the bell curve nicely are put into the test, and questions that don't fit get left off. The problem is that this approach tends to favor questions that majority students answer well, while leaving off questions that minority students answer especially well because those questions don't fit the bell curve well.
You can see an empirical example of this in reading comprehension questions that ask students to make inferences that are partially based off cultural assumptions, such as questions based off a passage on tennis.
This isn't to say that standardized testing is bad -- obviously their uniform nature allows for cross-school comparison -- but it is good to charitably evaluate others' arguments, which I'm sure you're in support of, Matt.
I am generally an apologist for testing, along lines like Matt's -- as an educator, I have seen and heard about many instances of students finally buckling down and studying because a standardized test was coming up, and in many cases students being incredibly proud to have worked hard and then done well. I disagree with my fellow progressive educators when they complain that knowledge can't be captured by multiple choice; sure, some knowledge can't, but plenty of knowledge can, and plenty more can be captured by test essays. I have taught many students many things, but I have yet to encounter a student who truly knows the material confidently but just cannot perform on a mainstream subject test, unless they have a very specific subset of disabilities.
All of that said, I recently read this comparative analysis of different countries' approaches to public education, and I was surprised to see that very few other developed countries do anywhere near the amount of testing we do -- and that the most educationally successful countries do only a small fraction.
My mom's (a teacher) take on her union was that they're good for protection against administration (the district was corrupt, as in raids and indictments) but not interested in education policy itself.
My dad was on a school board (different district) before and during covid and it was interesting to learn about the inner workings of public education. They literally defunded the district police dept a few years ago because it was more expensive than the alternatives. During covid, he kept the culture war controversies from taking up a bunch of time because other things deserved more attention.
Your line "initiatives that are run by people who are somewhere between stupid and fraudulent" is great because so much of that stuff is high drama, requires low effort, and is also low impact. He is a strong believer in DEI but his big push was to really make sure the lower-performing schools (in this district, these were more Hispanic and less Asian) functioned well. This required a ton of effort from a lot of people and even included some administrators and teachers swapping schools for a time. It really was a masterclass in the Pareto principle where focusing on high-impact, low-drama things proved to both be broadly popular, effective, AND gave the Board the breathing room necessary to handle things when disaster struck. All changes ultimately start with basic organizational competence. You can't teach CRT well without it. ;)
1. Public sector unions are sometimes responsible for pushing policies not in the general public'c best interest.
2. In the absence of these unions, public sector employees generally receive less pay under worse conditions
3. In the absence of these unions, public services are usually worse
Rather than "unions are bad" or "public sector unions are bad" or "unions/public sector unions are good," what reforms or systems are out there demonstrated to improve public service *and* protect public sector labor interests?
I live in Vancouver, Canada but I read Matt's stuff cause I am interested in how public policy works in general. I am also a member of a teacher and a member of the BC teacher's union. I think the point Matt makes between testing as a teacher evaluation tool is wrong. Tests are a poor form of assessment. But they are a tool, like any other assessment tool. The problem is that they are given so much weight. There are so many reasons why a student can do poorly on a one off tests (they're sick, they had to work the previous day, a fight, low iron, whatever) , especially a test that could determine not only whether they get into the school they want but could also literally decide if their favourite teacher gets fired or give a raise!
I think teachers do need to be evaluated. We need to know what the kids think about what we do and how we can get better. I would love for my union and my employer to sit down and try to come up with a policy that would allow that to happen in a way that was fair to everyone. It would make education better. But using standardized tests as the only way to assess teachers is very bad policy.
To prove that standardized tests suck, I offer a question from the 2019 Ohio American History test. See if you can spot the part that might confuse a high school student. Better yet, see if you can answer it.
Question 19: Under the Articles of Confederation, the new national government was unable to repay the debt accumulated during the Revolutionary War. The Constitution was written to address this and other problems.
An excerpt from Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution is shown.
Select the three provisions that were written to address the debt faced by the United States under the Articles of Confederation.
Excerpt from Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States, but all Duties, Imposts, and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States
To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;...
To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin...
To establish Post Offices and post Roads;
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times and Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
To constitute Tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court;
To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and offenses against the Law of Nations;
"but do involve crossing critical GOP red lines like “wanting to help poor people” or “caring about pollution.”"
Come on MY, I expect better from you. You are better than stereotypical leftist talking points.
Not supporting leftist solutions doesn't equal not wanting to help poor people, or caring about pollution.
To take an easy example, minimum age to $15 an hour. The reason I don't want to raise the minimum wage isn't because I don't like the poor. It's because I believe raising the minimum wage increases unemployment (mainly of the poor). And that raising the minimum wage will often cause inflation. In short, if you raise the minimum wage higher than the value of the labor being supplied, then either the labor is replaced with automation (now made profitable by the higher minimum wage) or prices are raised to pay for the higher labor costs.
Either way, the poor are largely not helped as a group.
Similar logic applies to the environment of course. Nobody wants to breathe dirty air, or drink dirty water. But what's the cost to clean it?
What feels lost to me in this debate is context about our actual education system in the US. First, American education funding is driven almost completely by where you live in many, if not most states. This is predicated on a known systemic racist housing policy from post-war (and before) well into the 90s and probably still today. This makes the US one of 3 countries in the OECD (out of 40) that fund poor students less than wealthy ones. And since wealth and race are very tied together this is obviously systemically racist.
On top of that, we added NCLB, which used student proficiency as a metric for school effectiveness, despite it being quite clear that it was also very highly correlated to socio-economic status. Essentially, we built a system where poor, often black schools were asked to do more with less and then sometimes closed when they could not do that. While this is different in different states, it is a mess of a policy set. Much of this policy set is driven by a suburban communities (often progressive).
All to say that we seem to be having this pseudo debate about inclusivity, because we are unwilling to have the actual debate about the issues of our education system.
There is another whole conversation to be had about the teaching profession in this country. But too much for one post.
Throwing money at the problem hasn't and won't accomplish anything. What you need is school choice, and competition. Stop trapping millions of kids in these poor performing schools year after year
Let's say you believe choice is the answer. What I am saying still applies. Hard to imagine that a school being measured on percent of students proficient is going to be keen on taking students who are lower performing for fewer dollars. I find it a little bizarre when people who believe in market economics suggest that funding does not matter. It's probably not the only thing that matters, but unlikely that it does not matter.
DC is not a great example to base an argument on. It has very different governance than almost anywhere else. Its poor population is also much poorer than the average.
Well the key driver of raising costs is Baulmol’s cost disease, so you wouldn’t expect them to increase productivity ex ante, and there are still huge relative gaps even if absolute levels have raised
Also you can’t compare a 90% minority, 100% urban district that’s a poster child for white flight to whole states. Of course DC does worse than the state of Virginia, it would be a phenomenal result if it was even similar. And since teacher wages are such a large proportion of ed spending, ed spending correlates strongly with cost of living, which is extraordinarily high in DC.
Spot on. I live in a mid-size city in the south and pay a premium to live in one of the few good public school districts. It’s just me and the kiddo, so I also have too much house because there’s nothing smaller in the district.
Funny thing is: we’re very diverse racially. But most people in the area can’t afford to live here. So they get lousy schools and, absolutely, the closures are worse. Can’t imagine the madness for hourly workers.
@Milan - Some thoughts on the graphs: 1) Using four shades of one color for the lines makes it difficult to read. 2) Pick one color scheme and stick with it. I'd go with the gray and blue from the Slow Boring logo, a light blue, and grayish green or yellow. That's your palette for every Slow Boring graph. 3) If the label for every data series has the same thing in it (e.g. black/white gap), take that out and put it in a sub-header. 4) Legend is better under the graph.
As a parent of an 8 year old in a mixed-income neighborhood in the pacific northwest, this column encapsulates my experience so exactly it’s startling. The school closures were terrible (and in retrospect a clear mistake that went on too long); they hurt the literacy progress of my son’s lower SES peers more this his higher SES ones; the district has a variety of equity & DEI initiatives that seem not harmful but just wasteful; and the most politically progressive parents & educators I know are increasingly hostile to banal measurement tests for the kids.
It’s not a catastrophic situation- the school is still good, reasonable people can disagree about the closures & mitigation policies, etc. But the 3 things Matty describes here are a package of trends headed in the wrong direction. Backlash from some swing parents isn’t surprising to me.
Are we convinced measuring learning has done anything for us?
I’m an education nihilist who doesn’t think anything substantive can be done to change education for the better; it’s just glorified daycare from grade 1 to 12.
Maybe it’s better to let this system fail noisily so parents can ask for fundamental changes/bail out, rather than trying to keep some veneer of competence.
But doesn't it seem like the rigor of the 1900s' teaching methods could be reintroduced to dramatically positive effect? I say this with absolutely zero scientific backing.
I think regarding the "measurement of teacher performance", it is important to note that there are real problems with the metrics that have been used. Look up Cathy O'Neil's writing about this. I forget exactly which district it was, but there was a case where you could look at the rating of teachers who taught the same subject to two consecutive grades, and there was absolutely NO correlation between how the system rated them for those two grades. If the tool were a meaningful measure of teacher quality, it makes no sense that it would find teachers are very good at teaching sixth-grade math, but terrible at seventh-grade math.
You can use a metric to measure, or you can use it to reward. As soon as you use the same metric for both it becomes useful for neither. That's the main problem that I have with the use of standardized testing in this essay.
California has tests that measure teaching effectiveness, and those continue even as Californian public colleges have stopped using the SATs for admissions. That seems reasonable to me, and to solve the issue that Matt is particularly concerned about (school/teacher effectiveness not being measured).
The SAT and ACT are dumb! No other countries that I know of even try to do something similar. I totally support standardized testing of specific subjects with a standard curriculum. A standard geography test for Americans would make the world a better place. What the SAT tests is a weird mix of speed and familiarity with below grade math and unusual vocabulary. I wouldn't conflate rejecting the SAT and ACT with "standardized testing" for any purpose.
What Nicholas said ... also while Germany is going through some reforms right now, my understanding is they still tracks students into the vocational schools at age 12 and then there are various exams required for entry into the advanced programs.
The SAT and ACT’s job is to predict whether or not you are going to be able to do well in college. It does this job pretty well. (The claims that is does not are referring to *relative placement within college* - the 1600 students are not necessarily the ones who are top of the class, but it is good at sorting who is and isn’t college material)
Also, other places do similar things. China’s admission exams, for example.
China's admissions exams, like Germany, Britain, India - make sense. Literature, Math, if you're going to study science in college then Physics/Chem/Bio, if arts then History/... meaningful subjects with an actual curriculum.
If someone does well at Gaokao math, they're almost definitely good at math. Crack your A levels in a British school - you're know your subject. It makes a lot of sense to have these levels, so college classes can assume a certain level of competence.
If someone does well at SAT math, they're probably... good at doing 6th grade math relatively quickly and accurately. Why is this important? Ask the marketing geniuses at the private company that thought up this scheme.
Btw the claim of predicting who is and isn't college material is nonsense without the board providing a specific threshold - which it doesn't. The test *only* provides relative placement (and if you look closely, doesn't even claim to provide comparable scores from test to test), leaving it up to the college (or researcher) to figure out the threshold.
This seems irrelevant given that as far as I know none of the people trying to get rid of the SAT for college admissions are advocating replacing it with the Gaokao, or anything else plausibly better.
My point is that people are defending the SAT (and reacting to getting rid of it) as though it were the Gaokao, or A levels, or such, where it is completely not that.
I'm not fully persuaded by the thrust of this post. The three trends are
1. Extended closures of schools that hurt students’ measured learning outcomes and widened the racial gap in measured learning outcomes
2. The adoption of racial equity initiatives with little demonstrated efficacy in improving outcomes
3. The stigmatization of the kinds of tests that are our main tool for assessing whether or not children are learning
In particular, in San Francisco the school board seemed much more interested in doing 2 than ameliorating 1, to predictable backlash. But I don't see how differentiating teacher pay and allowing effective charter school networks to expand follows.
In particular, Matt has little credibility on this issue, having grown up never being educated in a public school and leveraging his connections and background to become successful. Why should we accept privatization of public schools, and why is this snuck in at the end of this post with no support?
This credibility critique just seems like a bizarre ad hominem. What educational background do you need to have credibility on American public schools? Can immigrants join in the discussion? Having a kid in public school seems relevant, and Matt Y does, but gimme a break with this kind of cultural gatekeeping.
Also, behind every successful person there are surely a few lucky breaks, but it sure seems to me that MY works his ass off. Everybody leverages their connections and background, whatever they happen to be.
I'll also add that having attended a public school at some point in your life isn't a particularly high bar in America for credibility. It is also one Matt has conspicuously and consciously failed to meet. Talking about popularism, maybe it isn't the best look for rich private school kids to lecture the rest of us (the 90+%) on how public schools should be run.
Matt has essentially never experienced American public schools (K-university), and he wants us to believe he knows how they work, how they should be improved, and how they should be changed? In this whole thread are a lot of people suspicious of white people telling people what non-white people want. Matt is in exactly that position when it comes to public schools. He opted out of them for his whole career, and now wants to tell us what those of us who went through them and have kids in them what we should do? It's annoying, particularly when his position directly aligns with what other people who grew up in the lap of luxury believe (e.g., Zuckerberg, Gates).
OK, thanks for elaborating for me. I would have described his position as opposite to Zuckerberg / Gates and now I'm wondering which side of that equation I may be missing.
But I still think this is much too much gatekeeping. I went to a public school, along with everyone in my family and my kid will enter one soon. As you said, that background is nothing special. I don't presume that gives me so much more information and context than MY has though. I don't see how his background limits his understanding of learning loss, covid or DEI officers.
Zuckerberg and Gates are big on charter schools, making schools more "efficient", and breaking teacher unions. Again, this whole "I'm against bad DEI programs so we need to break the teacher unions and privatize the public school system" doesn't follow logically. Maybe he will motivate this better in the next post, but a priori "learning loss, covid, and DEI officers" have nothing to do with differential teacher pay or creating charter schools to privatize the public school system.
I just really hope that we will learn from this experience that closing the schools for that long was a big public policy mistake and that will become the consensus view. I think that we have yet to see all the negative consequences, but the kids were for the most part not alright.
It sounds to me like Matt is arguing that the "Extended closures of schools that hurt students’ measured learning outcomes and widened the racial gap in measured learning outcomes" was not worth the lives saved by these closures.
Isn't it possible to agree that "Extended closures of schools ... hurt students’ measured learning outcomes and widened the racial gap in measured learning outcomes" while believing that it is possible for other concerns to rise above these?
If this is in fact logically possible, then the question is not whether "Extended closures of schools ... hurt students’ measured learning outcomes and widened the racial gap in measured learning outcomes" but rather, was it worth it?
I believe that this question has no correct answer, and as such, folks will have opposing opinions about it.
I can imagine someone making the (pro-life?) argument that a single life saved is worth the damage done to students "learning outcomes" and I can imagine someone making some counter argument.
In the everlasting debate between the idealists who ponder what is the moral thing to do and the realists who ponder what is the winning move, Matt seems to be quite the political realist.
Yes, it might be true that keeping kids out of school was a political loser that will cost Democrats. It could also be true that keeping kids out of school, while costing Democratic careers, saved lives.
If that's the choice, what's the right choice?
Lives, or careers?
One contrarian argument in support of a weak version of Ibram X Kendi's argument that standardized testing is racist:
The way that standardized test questions are fielded is often based off of measurements that place questions at different levels of difficulty based on the number of students that answer them correctly. Questions that fit the bell curve nicely are put into the test, and questions that don't fit get left off. The problem is that this approach tends to favor questions that majority students answer well, while leaving off questions that minority students answer especially well because those questions don't fit the bell curve well.
You can see an empirical example of this in reading comprehension questions that ask students to make inferences that are partially based off cultural assumptions, such as questions based off a passage on tennis.
This isn't to say that standardized testing is bad -- obviously their uniform nature allows for cross-school comparison -- but it is good to charitably evaluate others' arguments, which I'm sure you're in support of, Matt.
I am generally an apologist for testing, along lines like Matt's -- as an educator, I have seen and heard about many instances of students finally buckling down and studying because a standardized test was coming up, and in many cases students being incredibly proud to have worked hard and then done well. I disagree with my fellow progressive educators when they complain that knowledge can't be captured by multiple choice; sure, some knowledge can't, but plenty of knowledge can, and plenty more can be captured by test essays. I have taught many students many things, but I have yet to encounter a student who truly knows the material confidently but just cannot perform on a mainstream subject test, unless they have a very specific subset of disabilities.
All of that said, I recently read this comparative analysis of different countries' approaches to public education, and I was surprised to see that very few other developed countries do anywhere near the amount of testing we do -- and that the most educationally successful countries do only a small fraction.
I'm referring to Marc Tucker's 2011 “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants”: http://www.ncee.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Standing-on-the-Shoulders-of-Giants-An-American-Agenda-for-Education-Reform.pdf
My mom's (a teacher) take on her union was that they're good for protection against administration (the district was corrupt, as in raids and indictments) but not interested in education policy itself.
My dad was on a school board (different district) before and during covid and it was interesting to learn about the inner workings of public education. They literally defunded the district police dept a few years ago because it was more expensive than the alternatives. During covid, he kept the culture war controversies from taking up a bunch of time because other things deserved more attention.
Your line "initiatives that are run by people who are somewhere between stupid and fraudulent" is great because so much of that stuff is high drama, requires low effort, and is also low impact. He is a strong believer in DEI but his big push was to really make sure the lower-performing schools (in this district, these were more Hispanic and less Asian) functioned well. This required a ton of effort from a lot of people and even included some administrators and teachers swapping schools for a time. It really was a masterclass in the Pareto principle where focusing on high-impact, low-drama things proved to both be broadly popular, effective, AND gave the Board the breathing room necessary to handle things when disaster struck. All changes ultimately start with basic organizational competence. You can't teach CRT well without it. ;)
Stipulated:
1. Public sector unions are sometimes responsible for pushing policies not in the general public'c best interest.
2. In the absence of these unions, public sector employees generally receive less pay under worse conditions
3. In the absence of these unions, public services are usually worse
Rather than "unions are bad" or "public sector unions are bad" or "unions/public sector unions are good," what reforms or systems are out there demonstrated to improve public service *and* protect public sector labor interests?
I live in Vancouver, Canada but I read Matt's stuff cause I am interested in how public policy works in general. I am also a member of a teacher and a member of the BC teacher's union. I think the point Matt makes between testing as a teacher evaluation tool is wrong. Tests are a poor form of assessment. But they are a tool, like any other assessment tool. The problem is that they are given so much weight. There are so many reasons why a student can do poorly on a one off tests (they're sick, they had to work the previous day, a fight, low iron, whatever) , especially a test that could determine not only whether they get into the school they want but could also literally decide if their favourite teacher gets fired or give a raise!
I think teachers do need to be evaluated. We need to know what the kids think about what we do and how we can get better. I would love for my union and my employer to sit down and try to come up with a policy that would allow that to happen in a way that was fair to everyone. It would make education better. But using standardized tests as the only way to assess teachers is very bad policy.
To prove that standardized tests suck, I offer a question from the 2019 Ohio American History test. See if you can spot the part that might confuse a high school student. Better yet, see if you can answer it.
Question 19: Under the Articles of Confederation, the new national government was unable to repay the debt accumulated during the Revolutionary War. The Constitution was written to address this and other problems.
An excerpt from Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution is shown.
Select the three provisions that were written to address the debt faced by the United States under the Articles of Confederation.
Excerpt from Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States, but all Duties, Imposts, and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States
To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;...
To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin...
To establish Post Offices and post Roads;
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times and Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
To constitute Tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court;
To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and offenses against the Law of Nations;
Agreed with most of this but
"but do involve crossing critical GOP red lines like “wanting to help poor people” or “caring about pollution.”"
Come on MY, I expect better from you. You are better than stereotypical leftist talking points.
Not supporting leftist solutions doesn't equal not wanting to help poor people, or caring about pollution.
To take an easy example, minimum age to $15 an hour. The reason I don't want to raise the minimum wage isn't because I don't like the poor. It's because I believe raising the minimum wage increases unemployment (mainly of the poor). And that raising the minimum wage will often cause inflation. In short, if you raise the minimum wage higher than the value of the labor being supplied, then either the labor is replaced with automation (now made profitable by the higher minimum wage) or prices are raised to pay for the higher labor costs.
Either way, the poor are largely not helped as a group.
Similar logic applies to the environment of course. Nobody wants to breathe dirty air, or drink dirty water. But what's the cost to clean it?
What feels lost to me in this debate is context about our actual education system in the US. First, American education funding is driven almost completely by where you live in many, if not most states. This is predicated on a known systemic racist housing policy from post-war (and before) well into the 90s and probably still today. This makes the US one of 3 countries in the OECD (out of 40) that fund poor students less than wealthy ones. And since wealth and race are very tied together this is obviously systemically racist.
On top of that, we added NCLB, which used student proficiency as a metric for school effectiveness, despite it being quite clear that it was also very highly correlated to socio-economic status. Essentially, we built a system where poor, often black schools were asked to do more with less and then sometimes closed when they could not do that. While this is different in different states, it is a mess of a policy set. Much of this policy set is driven by a suburban communities (often progressive).
All to say that we seem to be having this pseudo debate about inclusivity, because we are unwilling to have the actual debate about the issues of our education system.
There is another whole conversation to be had about the teaching profession in this country. But too much for one post.
This has very little to do with funding. Per Pupil spending has doubled since 1970, with no increase in test scores.
https://www.cato.org/blog/school-funding-system-not-broken-it-just-doesnt-work
In addition, places like DC spend at the top per pupil, and again have dismal test scores
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/school-spending.html
Throwing money at the problem hasn't and won't accomplish anything. What you need is school choice, and competition. Stop trapping millions of kids in these poor performing schools year after year
Let's say you believe choice is the answer. What I am saying still applies. Hard to imagine that a school being measured on percent of students proficient is going to be keen on taking students who are lower performing for fewer dollars. I find it a little bizarre when people who believe in market economics suggest that funding does not matter. It's probably not the only thing that matters, but unlikely that it does not matter.
DC is not a great example to base an argument on. It has very different governance than almost anywhere else. Its poor population is also much poorer than the average.
Per pupil funding overall has still doubled with no real improvement.
As for the worst students, if they are stuck I'm public schools how is that different from now?
At least the rest get out and get an education
Well the key driver of raising costs is Baulmol’s cost disease, so you wouldn’t expect them to increase productivity ex ante, and there are still huge relative gaps even if absolute levels have raised
Also you can’t compare a 90% minority, 100% urban district that’s a poster child for white flight to whole states. Of course DC does worse than the state of Virginia, it would be a phenomenal result if it was even similar. And since teacher wages are such a large proportion of ed spending, ed spending correlates strongly with cost of living, which is extraordinarily high in DC.
Spot on. I live in a mid-size city in the south and pay a premium to live in one of the few good public school districts. It’s just me and the kiddo, so I also have too much house because there’s nothing smaller in the district.
Funny thing is: we’re very diverse racially. But most people in the area can’t afford to live here. So they get lousy schools and, absolutely, the closures are worse. Can’t imagine the madness for hourly workers.
There is probably a political movement captured in this comment.
@Milan - Some thoughts on the graphs: 1) Using four shades of one color for the lines makes it difficult to read. 2) Pick one color scheme and stick with it. I'd go with the gray and blue from the Slow Boring logo, a light blue, and grayish green or yellow. That's your palette for every Slow Boring graph. 3) If the label for every data series has the same thing in it (e.g. black/white gap), take that out and put it in a sub-header. 4) Legend is better under the graph.
As a parent of an 8 year old in a mixed-income neighborhood in the pacific northwest, this column encapsulates my experience so exactly it’s startling. The school closures were terrible (and in retrospect a clear mistake that went on too long); they hurt the literacy progress of my son’s lower SES peers more this his higher SES ones; the district has a variety of equity & DEI initiatives that seem not harmful but just wasteful; and the most politically progressive parents & educators I know are increasingly hostile to banal measurement tests for the kids.
It’s not a catastrophic situation- the school is still good, reasonable people can disagree about the closures & mitigation policies, etc. But the 3 things Matty describes here are a package of trends headed in the wrong direction. Backlash from some swing parents isn’t surprising to me.
Are we convinced measuring learning has done anything for us?
I’m an education nihilist who doesn’t think anything substantive can be done to change education for the better; it’s just glorified daycare from grade 1 to 12.
Maybe it’s better to let this system fail noisily so parents can ask for fundamental changes/bail out, rather than trying to keep some veneer of competence.
But doesn't it seem like the rigor of the 1900s' teaching methods could be reintroduced to dramatically positive effect? I say this with absolutely zero scientific backing.
I think regarding the "measurement of teacher performance", it is important to note that there are real problems with the metrics that have been used. Look up Cathy O'Neil's writing about this. I forget exactly which district it was, but there was a case where you could look at the rating of teachers who taught the same subject to two consecutive grades, and there was absolutely NO correlation between how the system rated them for those two grades. If the tool were a meaningful measure of teacher quality, it makes no sense that it would find teachers are very good at teaching sixth-grade math, but terrible at seventh-grade math.
https://mathbabe.org/2012/03/06/the-value-added-teacher-model-sucks/
You can use a metric to measure, or you can use it to reward. As soon as you use the same metric for both it becomes useful for neither. That's the main problem that I have with the use of standardized testing in this essay.
California has tests that measure teaching effectiveness, and those continue even as Californian public colleges have stopped using the SATs for admissions. That seems reasonable to me, and to solve the issue that Matt is particularly concerned about (school/teacher effectiveness not being measured).
The SAT and ACT are dumb! No other countries that I know of even try to do something similar. I totally support standardized testing of specific subjects with a standard curriculum. A standard geography test for Americans would make the world a better place. What the SAT tests is a weird mix of speed and familiarity with below grade math and unusual vocabulary. I wouldn't conflate rejecting the SAT and ACT with "standardized testing" for any purpose.
What Nicholas said ... also while Germany is going through some reforms right now, my understanding is they still tracks students into the vocational schools at age 12 and then there are various exams required for entry into the advanced programs.
The SAT and ACT’s job is to predict whether or not you are going to be able to do well in college. It does this job pretty well. (The claims that is does not are referring to *relative placement within college* - the 1600 students are not necessarily the ones who are top of the class, but it is good at sorting who is and isn’t college material)
Also, other places do similar things. China’s admission exams, for example.
China's admissions exams, like Germany, Britain, India - make sense. Literature, Math, if you're going to study science in college then Physics/Chem/Bio, if arts then History/... meaningful subjects with an actual curriculum.
If someone does well at Gaokao math, they're almost definitely good at math. Crack your A levels in a British school - you're know your subject. It makes a lot of sense to have these levels, so college classes can assume a certain level of competence.
If someone does well at SAT math, they're probably... good at doing 6th grade math relatively quickly and accurately. Why is this important? Ask the marketing geniuses at the private company that thought up this scheme.
Btw the claim of predicting who is and isn't college material is nonsense without the board providing a specific threshold - which it doesn't. The test *only* provides relative placement (and if you look closely, doesn't even claim to provide comparable scores from test to test), leaving it up to the college (or researcher) to figure out the threshold.
This seems irrelevant given that as far as I know none of the people trying to get rid of the SAT for college admissions are advocating replacing it with the Gaokao, or anything else plausibly better.
My point is that people are defending the SAT (and reacting to getting rid of it) as though it were the Gaokao, or A levels, or such, where it is completely not that.
I'm not fully persuaded by the thrust of this post. The three trends are
1. Extended closures of schools that hurt students’ measured learning outcomes and widened the racial gap in measured learning outcomes
2. The adoption of racial equity initiatives with little demonstrated efficacy in improving outcomes
3. The stigmatization of the kinds of tests that are our main tool for assessing whether or not children are learning
In particular, in San Francisco the school board seemed much more interested in doing 2 than ameliorating 1, to predictable backlash. But I don't see how differentiating teacher pay and allowing effective charter school networks to expand follows.
In particular, Matt has little credibility on this issue, having grown up never being educated in a public school and leveraging his connections and background to become successful. Why should we accept privatization of public schools, and why is this snuck in at the end of this post with no support?
This credibility critique just seems like a bizarre ad hominem. What educational background do you need to have credibility on American public schools? Can immigrants join in the discussion? Having a kid in public school seems relevant, and Matt Y does, but gimme a break with this kind of cultural gatekeeping.
Also, behind every successful person there are surely a few lucky breaks, but it sure seems to me that MY works his ass off. Everybody leverages their connections and background, whatever they happen to be.
I'll also add that having attended a public school at some point in your life isn't a particularly high bar in America for credibility. It is also one Matt has conspicuously and consciously failed to meet. Talking about popularism, maybe it isn't the best look for rich private school kids to lecture the rest of us (the 90+%) on how public schools should be run.
Matt has essentially never experienced American public schools (K-university), and he wants us to believe he knows how they work, how they should be improved, and how they should be changed? In this whole thread are a lot of people suspicious of white people telling people what non-white people want. Matt is in exactly that position when it comes to public schools. He opted out of them for his whole career, and now wants to tell us what those of us who went through them and have kids in them what we should do? It's annoying, particularly when his position directly aligns with what other people who grew up in the lap of luxury believe (e.g., Zuckerberg, Gates).
OK, thanks for elaborating for me. I would have described his position as opposite to Zuckerberg / Gates and now I'm wondering which side of that equation I may be missing.
But I still think this is much too much gatekeeping. I went to a public school, along with everyone in my family and my kid will enter one soon. As you said, that background is nothing special. I don't presume that gives me so much more information and context than MY has though. I don't see how his background limits his understanding of learning loss, covid or DEI officers.
Zuckerberg and Gates are big on charter schools, making schools more "efficient", and breaking teacher unions. Again, this whole "I'm against bad DEI programs so we need to break the teacher unions and privatize the public school system" doesn't follow logically. Maybe he will motivate this better in the next post, but a priori "learning loss, covid, and DEI officers" have nothing to do with differential teacher pay or creating charter schools to privatize the public school system.
I just really hope that we will learn from this experience that closing the schools for that long was a big public policy mistake and that will become the consensus view. I think that we have yet to see all the negative consequences, but the kids were for the most part not alright.