Have your considered the possibility that exam schools don't make a difference for marginal candidates but they are important for non-marginal ones? One of the advantages of a school like Bronx Science, is that you have enough kids to run a more advanced curriculum then you could In an ordinary neighborhood school. Maybe moving from the top of your neighborhood school to the bottom of a magnet school is a wash, but moving from the top of your neighborhood school to the top third of a magnet school is a big upgrade due to curriculum effects.
I always wonder this when Matt cites this studies, but I think the counter-argument is that while these top students will *enjoy* their time more at the exam school (way less boring because of the advanced curriculum), these are kids who have the tools to succeed no matter what, so in terms of outcomes they will look good in studies regardless. The question is, are the studies measuring everything that matters?
Exactly. I don’t see anything in Matt’s post about what it’s like for smart kids to spent years of their life being tortured by boredom for hours every weekday. It is torture for many and saying “they still get into college” just papers over years of systematic abuse.
And those kids will likely just leave systems that don't have advanced programs. That said, most of these districts are big enough to have good advanced programs at neighborhood schools.
Are there schools that offer so few advanced courses that smart students are literally “tortured” and “abused” because of it? If so, that seems like a huge problem that is completely unrelated to merit admissions at “good schools” and we should be investing a lot of resources to fix it. Why should we allow any school to not have options or resources for its high-achieving students?
Or more options and resources for all students. In my experience there are plenty of kids "tortured by boredom" who are not "smart" enough to place into advanced courses/schools, and who might benefit from other approaches to learning.
I actually think this is MUCH more important than having exam schools, which not all districts even have! There are probably bored smart kids at every school in America who are being deeply underserved by the system as it is.
But there are different levels of "success". If your only bar is "graduate college", then yeah, maybe the top kids will "succeed" no matter what. But "succeeding" by e.g. founding a successful company is a lot better for everyone than "succeeding" by having >= median income.
There are big differences at the top in both aptitude and outcomes, even though people who focus on helping the lower end tend to ignore them.
I agree. To many researchers, graduating from CUNY is the same as graduating from MIT, but I'm sure parents have a strong preference between those two outcomes.
I also wonder if these arguments are too rooted in an American context. It really is true that students compete on a global scale because the jobs of the future could root themselves in foreign countries if that's where the talent is. Yes, we want immigration for that reason, but the point still stands.
To add to Matt's point that the focus on elite institutions is misplaced, CUNY is a huge engine of upward mobility for the middle class. While graduating from MIT may not be the same as graduating from CUNY, lots more people do graduate form CUNY and attain decent incomes and lifestyles. We can keep our MITs but we should have more CUNYs too.
Absolutely. I think public universities are awesome. Basically what I'm saying is that if you told a parent of a student who was prevented from matriculating into a rigorous exam school "Don't worry! Your student will still have a successful career, but instead of going to MIT, they're going to [school with middling prestige]," they'd still be really upset!
I'm curious about whether there are differences in the rates of kids being referred for mental health services or end up being seen as a discipline problem.
I know several people who were referred for mental health services when they were just smart. Most were lucky and the psychologist/psychiatrist wrote a letter to the school explaining that what the school thought was ADD was in fact intelligence.
There also does seem to be a tendency to see normal bored smart kid behavior as a discipline problem that needs to be addressed with punitive measures when the real problem is that the kid is bored to tears. And this tends to affect black boys the worst. If these selective schools reduce either of these, then it may be a win.
This happened to my friend's kid! He was white and had parents who knew how to navigate the system, so he turned out okay, but I can only imagine what would have happened to a poor, Black boy in the same situation.
Do these highly selective schools do a good job at identifying and training those who will join the top of the elites, whether as scientists, artists or what have you? I know the general social equity question is vitally important, but I'm just curious if future Nobel Prize winners get a big benefit out of going to a Bronx Science or a Stuyvesant.
So, I was a GATE kid in the LAUSD who tested in after a teacher recommended me in 2nd grade. I was often bored in my regular classes--I frequently finished stuff before the other kids, and I also remember that listening to slow readers try to read aloud when they were called on felt like absolute torture. But the hardest part for me, at least once I got to late elementary school/middle school, was that being smart and raising your hand a lot in class was super stigmatized in my urban public school. My life DRAMATICALLY changed for the better when my parents finally saved enough money to buy a house in the suburbs and I started at the local high school, which had some of the highest test scores in the state. I'm pretty sure this had no effect on me academically or in terms of college admission--if anything, I might have stood out much better as a top kid at a worse school instead of a pretty good kid at a top school--but it sure made a huge difference in my social and emotional wellbeing. I still look back at high school as a really happy time in my life, which is of course difficult to measure, but nothing to sneeze at.
Of course, this is anecdotal, and I'm not arguing that my personal experience should guide public policy--as Matt says, this is exactly the kind of dangerous impulse to overgeneralize from our own experiences that makes education policy so hard. I also DO care about school diversity and think more should be done to help shrink the admission gaps for these schools (just testing everyone, instead of just those who opt in or whose teachers recommend them, would be a good start). But I guess I do think that exam schools and GATE programs can provide some important benefits that go beyond academic achievement. Figuring out a way to provide those benefits to more kids would be something worth doing.
I think this is exactly right, the point of exam schools is to expand the type and level of achievement beyond what would be possible in an ordinary school. Just ask graduates of these schools. If you accept that the upper end of achievement in the exam schools isn't possible in ordinary schools (because the advanced curriculum is missing) then the interpretation about the marginal student results are completely different. If the marginal students did worse in exam schools it means that the exam threshold is probably too low. If the marginal students did better the threshold is probably too high. And if the marginal students are no better or worse in the exam school it means the threshold is set about right. So it's odd that what should be evidence of the entrance criterion being appropriately set is instead seen as evidence that the whole approach is broken.
Yeah that's what I was wondering too. I think the question's here are:
1. Is running a customized curriculum for the group of students you've isolated beneficial to them. (I kind of hope so? If the conclusion is "if you attempt to isolate the students who are doing the 'best' and teach them 'more' there is no effect", mostly that would be sad for 'teaching'. Hopefully there is some effect and it is positive...)
2. How much of that changed curriculum could or would have been taught at local schools? And is this affected by school size?
(2) Is "graduated college" the only relevant metric?
I was a very academically oriented student and spent 9th and 10th grades in a well-resourced but "normal" high school and 11th and 12th grades at a selective public magnet school. I don't think it changed my college or career path than much but as a lived experienced it was night and day.
I'm not sure what metrics to base public policy decisions in this realm, but I suspect that "whether marginal students have better college trajectories" isn't the only relevant metric.
Same! I don't think it changed anything for me w/r/t college (what WOULD have helped me was being diagnosed with ADHD instead of being labeled "smart but lazy" by teachers and administrators who couldn't figure out why I got As in most things but kept cutting math class). But anyway, socially, changing schools was a huge life-changer, and I went from having anxiety stomach-aches every morning before school because I was basically an outcast, to having a large friend group and being really happy. I met my best friend in the world because I saw her reading Pride and Prejudice on the bleachers before gym class on the very first day of 9th grade; any kid doing that at my old school would been at best ridiculed mercilessly, and at worst beaten up. But even in light of my experience, I'm not sure this is a good enough argument for more selective schools--maybe we need to work on the climate at all schools better for smart kids?
I would guess that you are correct and MY is wrong about this. But still the most important take away from his post is that the decision on which marginal students get into these schools just doesn't matter very much. It is incredibly low stakes compared to the attention it gets.
The problem is that the proposals are not to change who gets in on the margin. Matt suggests ending these schools in the post (for the students own good, of course). The left wants to end the schools too (because exams are racist). Those aren’t proposals operating on the margin.
I've spent the better part of an hour looking for these studies and I am not sure they exist. If you ever want a doctorate, you've found a gap to fill. (admittedly, I'm doing a somewhat cursory keyword search because I'm supposed to be working!)
I think the problem is that it's hard to study this counterfactual. There are plenty of places where you can find a "natural experiment" separating students who would have just barely made it in from the ones who did just barely make it in. But I think there are fewer where you can find a matched group of students who would have been top students in the special school to compare to the students who are the top students in a special school.
This is actually addressed in the Abdulkadriglu, Angrist, and Pathak (2014) paper that MY cites on Boston: "Of course, test scores and peer effects are only part of the exam school
story. ... [U]nique features of an exam school education may boost achievement in specific subject areas. Students who attend Boston Latin School almost certainly learn more Latin than they would have otherwise." The same is true of calculus, AP science, etc. If students were distributed randomly in the Boston public high schools, there would be few if any AP classes. (And many of the students who would otherwise have comprised such classes would be off to the private schools.)
Ultimately, I think MY is overreading these studies a bit: they are interesting but they don't do all that much to change my priors. If someone had asked, "Do you think the marginal student at [magnet school] is going to be benefitted all that much by going to [magnet school] versus being at the top of the class at [neighborhood school]?" I would have had answered no.
That's not true. I attended one of these schools. There's a base curriculum that all students take, but there were also many advanced classes that students could opt into if they were ahead in a particular subject area.
For example, nearly all students took calculus. Many students completed calculus before senior year; if you do that you can take linear algebra or something next. If you're way ahead in math they offered complex analysis, which is a graduate-level math course. Maybe 3 or 4 students per year would take it.
At a regular high school, you can't offer a complex analysis course for the 1 student every 5 years who's ready for it; how would you even hire a teacher who could teach it? You can only do that if you get all the top math students from a pretty wide catchment area.
You can't offer complex analysis because virtually no high schools in the United States, including magnet high schools, offer complex analysis. I attended a highly selective university and don't think my peers in the math program were bored to tears by having to settle for AP Calculus BC, which virtually all of them maxed out at in high school, and which itself is a program too hard for 99.9% of high schoolers.
We didn't have complex analysis, but I did take differential equations and a numerical methods class, and the transfer credit I got when I went to college meant I had the entire core math requirement of my CS degree completed before I paid a single dollar in tuition money.
I had a similar experience, but this is a weird argument in favor of exam schools. Front loading work so you can have a lighter credit load in college feels like more evidence that advanced curriculum schools don't really shift outcomes.
That's... not at all the correct interpretation, nor the correct measure!
First, it didn't actually make my credit load in college easier - it would have let me graduate a year earlier (financially, a *huge* value, since it's a year of tuition + a year of wages) or in my case, allowed me to get a second major. I use both degrees daily in my job, so this is plenty of value.
Second, "outcomes" is a very vague and indirect way to measure the benefit and leads you to start questioning the "value" of a lot of things that are obviously worthwhile. For example, if you, out of the goodness of your heart, decided to order me a pizza, would that result in me being less hungry? No. But it would still be a perfectly nice thing to do and not useless. And if you had a button that could give me a completely free pizza out of thin air, that would be awesome!
We spend enormous amounts of money and time learning things in high school and college. Unless you have a truly nihilist view of all of it and think it's worthless - which seems obviously false for a class like linear algebra or multivariable calculus - teaching someone this material when they would otherwise not be learning anything at all is obviously very useful.
Having gone to one of these schools, subjectively it was hugely beneficial. These studies are a useful warning that maybe our intuitions aren't right, but I think the evidence needs to be a lot stronger before we completely dismiss the intuitions of students, parents, and teachers.
My experience was that the exam high school provided me at least three major benefits.
First, it was the only time in my academic career where I actually was challenged and had to work hard. I coasted in middle school and at a very selective--but not quite elite--university I easily coasted as well. Upon first going to high school, I had a really hard time forcing myself to do homework and it took a year or two to fully get with the program. When I entered the work force, I was able to be productive right away having learned this lesson.
Socially, it's the only time in my life where I was always a mediocre performer compared to the people around me, and I think that went along way to teaching me some humility (maybe not enough given the claim I'm making here...) that has served me well in life.
And finally, my particular school forced me to many, many presentations. I was shy and had a really difficult time with this. I was made completely miserable by it, actually. But now I am successful at a job that requires me to periodically speak to hundreds of people and present to executives. I guess I would have gotten to the same place eventually, but the practice of hundreds of presentations surely sped the process along. Maybe this would have happened at an ordinary high school, but I doubt it.
Anyway, I think it might both be the case that (a) these are real and valuable benefits conferred upon me by the exam high school and (b) they would not show up in studies like this, unless perhaps it's a thirty year study tracking full career and family outcomes.
It might be that I went to a school that was less selective than you did, but I had really the opposite experience in a lot of ways. I never was challenged and the only times that this was reflected in my grades was when I refused to even do the bare minimum of work. That followed me into college, and it was really the customer service jobs I held to help pay rent that helped me learn about working hard. It felt like for all the claims of pushing us, a good number of students weren't much better off than they would have been at a "normal" school in that respect.
I was also surrounded by a lot of people who did not have any humility at all, and the fact that many of them were blind to their privilege in terms of their parents' occupations and wealth didn't help. One thing we had to do every year was a science fair project that was supposed to last six or seven months. A lot of people knew someone from of the university labs that were nearby, and more or less hopped on as an unpaid assistant before presenting a subset of their PIs research as their own, then went around talking about the work they did on genetic sequencing at 16 (which never actually amounted to what someone in the field would consider "work"). I don't feel like I learned humility; I learned contempt and disdain for most elites because I saw them as teenagers and never wanted them in charge of printing things.
I had many classmates who were arrogant and many who were privileged, but because of the amount of coursework and the demanding pace of classes, it was clear who was incredibly smart and who worked really hard (distinct but overlapping sets). I don't think it's a matter of "less selective" so much as just a commitment from the school to push students hard.
Of course there are downsides to pushing students hard. I'm not sure if there are studies on it but anecdotally there are more suicides and suicide attempts in magnet high schools. That was true when I went and I've heard it's gotten worse.
Selective public high schools have few Black and Hispanic students — there's also no evidence these schools are any good
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Roryjust now
Once again... another subject that I love. The only benefit to gifted or exam schools is acceleration.
Raising 9 kids (5 mine, 4 step-kids)... don't judge me, and having lived all over due to the military, I have experienced multiple school systems.
Gifted programs come in two flavors... enrichment and acceleration.
Enrichment... basically you take the same course in the same amount of time (i.e. Algebra I in year), but they dig deeper (think Honors Algebra 1)... or as I like to put it... they just give you more homework.
At the end of the year, the gifted student is really no further along than anyone else, learned the same things at the same time.
Acceleration... basically you take the same course, but sped up. Think Algebra I in a semester instead of a year. These are actually useful.
An example: So last year, my 8th grader had ran out of Math courses at her Middle School. She had finished Algebra 1 in 7th grade, and they didn't have a Geometry or Algebra II teacher at the Middle School for her in 8th Grade.
Instead, they had her and two other boys sit in the Library during a period, and she took Honors Algebra on the South Carolina State Virtual Website or thing.
The course was meant to last the whole school year, but here is the thing... it was mastery based, so you could progress through it at your own pace.
My daughter finished it by Christmas, and asked me if she could take Geometry as well. I said, hell yeah... go girl power... women is Stem... so I called up the school district.
Dude... they were so resistive. Apparently no one had taken two courses in a semester. They tried to warn me that it could affect her class standing if she didnt get 100%, all sorts of other excuses.
Finally because I'm a pitbull, I got them to agree to let her enroll, but I had to get the Assistant District Superintendent to approve it.
It was a mistake... she failed miserably.
Kidding... of course she kicked ass. She had it finished by April with a 99%.
The point is, the system is set up to put the brakes on kids.
The whole experience has sold me on the value of self-paced learning those who are motivated.
Since this is best given virtually, along with mentors/proctors, anyone who had the motivation would benefit from it.
Instead of a test score to get into a school, make these self-paced courses widely available. That way if a kid didn't score some arbitrary test score, but was highly motivated, they could still choose to take the self-paced course.
One possible benefit of exam schools is availability of classes. I've had multiple kids run out of math classes to take their senior year of High School. Dual enrollment programs fix this, but it depends on access to a local college, and then there is schedule and transportation issues.
Oh yeah, if you are wondering how I found time to write this with so many kids, I have no idea. Luckily all but three are grown.
Yes. I have issues on each side of the Norm. Slows down acceleration, but also has standards that might not be relevant... i.e. most not going to college, but default is college prep curriculum.
Rory -- In very much a The Graduate plastics reference... let me just say for your daughter ... Data Science. It's a fun field with a lot of tail winds.
Great comment. I experienced much of this as a military kid and my kids experienced it with foreign systems as State Department brats.
Seems to me that there should be access to the best courses from wherever. This why can’t a US-based student take higher level math or what have you from another state or country’s system?
"attending a highly selective university is generally not beneficial except for students from disadvantaged backgrounds"
It's really hard to believe this. In my field (programming/CS), top companies tend to recruit at the top schools. Presumably this makes getting a job at a top company easier if you went to a top school. Also, people reading resumes are impressed by top schools. I assume other fields do similar things. These seem like they would produce obvious advantages to going to top schools.
You might be able to tell a story where it doesn't matter for the marginal admits who regression discontinuity usually studies. For a marginal admit, they'll be more job fairs, but the internal competition will be stiffer - and so maybe all the benefit of the recruiting will be captured by your stronger classmates. And you might stand out more at a less selective school.
But this would still imply that top students should go to selective schools. It would just be a limitation of the research, that they can only look at people who barely made it in to top schools because those are the only people with an adequate non-top-school comparison group.
Hmmm....on one hand, Google and Microsoft are going to go fishing in the Stanford CS pond because they've figured out that students who got into the CS program there have been pre-selected to be really good prospects. But...I think that that is partly because the CS labor market, particularly at the top end, is insanely competitive. My company won't go after those students at all because we can't get into a $$ arms race with the big tech companies.
On the other hand, we also hire people without a college degree at all, and we've had fantastic results. And in my career I keep meeting top performers in software who came in via really strange avenues because the field isn't that credentialed - once you've had a few years of job experience, no company that knows what it's doing cares about your educational credentials.
This all might be really different from something like law school, where the degree is a formal credentialing mechanism.
I recall reading some years ago that Google tried to track which managers made the best hiring decisions. Of the whole study, they found only one manager with hiring talent, and even that was due to some unique reasons. Hiring is really difficult and finding unique gems outside the traditional channels really great but not easy.
My friends in tech assure me that having a degree from a big fancy university is a flag for "lifestyle programmer", the lowest rung in the tech hierarchy ladder.
I am in tech, and this is false. Obviously so? Going to a better rather than a worse school helps you get a good job, because better schools produce better graduates (largely through selection in admissions). How would that even work, that going to a better school would be lower status?
What might be true is that *among* the most successful people, not going to a fancy university is a good sign, because it means you must have done something really impressive - probably harder than getting into a top school - to be so successful. But that's just because of the selection effect of only looking at very successful people; most people who go to worse schools are not among the most successful.
Yes, tech not being so credentialist is great! I credit technical interviews for that; you can measure merit in a credible-enough way to swamp the difference between a good and bad resume. (Possibly the field just being new is a bigger effect? Not sure)
But that just suggests its even more important to go to good schools in other fields, the opposite of what the post is claiming.
Yeah, I mean, you can make a case that education has no effect at all, like Bryan Caplan does. I don't deny that there is some evidence for that view, but it just has to be misleading evidence. My suspicion is that good schools are like antidepressants: they have mixed results for many people but very positive results for a good-sized sub-population, which makes causation difficult to measure.
I tend to believe that a good chunk of education is Caplan-style signaling but it does seem to go against so much lived/observed experience, its always a bit jarring. I also came across also this meta-review by Stuart Ritchie, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797618774253).
I like your antidepressants analogy. My own mental mode is that education is probably something similar to the gym. I can't stretch my way to 6 feet but I can definitely train my body to perform better on certain physical tasks.
Yeah, I think the discontinuity studies are interesting, but you're right that they aren't the final word on the total impact of these schools. I think Yglesias is right that the stakes of these debates are lower than they seem, but his more Trollish point of getting rid of exam schools isn't necessarily supported by them.
For starters it's not nothing that the kids seem to enjoy going there more than other schools.
It's definitely not nothing that the kids that go there enjoy it quite a bit more. But we also need to wonder whether the large number of kids that don't get there enjoy their high schools a little bit less once these other kids have been taken out.
Pointing to the Lowell-to-Stanford-to-FAANG pipeline as evidence for the utility of super-selective public high schools and colleges rather than a validation of the most extreme form of the case against them is... certainly something you can do, but I wouldn't advise it.
(I always enjoyed, in the inevitable Degree Dicksizing conversation that would quickly come up among any set of newly-met google employees, casually volunteering that I was a high school dropout.)
You're assuming that the relationship works in one direction: google is successful because it hires a ton of stanford grads and putting an ever-larger bunch of stanford grads together keeps the company successful.
Having worked there I would like to offer an alternative hypothesis: a bunch of stanford grads started a company (a frequent enough occurrence) which became wildly successful (much less frequent) and they kept hiring more stanford grads because they felt like it and there was no impetus to look further afield. Then the entire industry saw the insane amount of money they were making and cargo-culted their HR practices. (Ironically including a bunch that Google itself no longer uses.)
Are you saying that Stanford CS majors aren't any better than the average CS major? This seems obviously false (mainly because Stanford gets their pick of the best CS applicants) Or that Google having better rather than worse programmers working there is not helpful to them?
Obviously there are plenty of good programmers outside the top schools and arguably tech recruiting should be less credentialist and look harder for them, but the basic logic of "we want to hire the best programmers; let's recruit at the best schools" does make some sense.
Hey, Googler party here. Probably the best Staff SWE I've worked with over 9 years at the company went to.... Hillsdale, the kooky right-wing college. He has a bit of a chip on his shoulder that he tries to hide thanks to our culture of credentialism.
Oh, and all the scandal around diversity at the company? People openly shitting on HBCUs? 100% downstream of filling recruiting goals by taking as many elite school grads first and everyone else second. (Of course that would never be a formal recruiting *policy* but it sure seems like the recruiting *culture* based on what folks have tweeted lately!)
I'm not an ex-googler, but I worked at a tech startep founded and staffed mainly by ex-googlers, particularly in the HR dept.
The "culture of credentialism" was a real thing there and it blew my mind with how awful it was. I would never argue that degrees don't matter at all, or that all-else-equal an elite school isn't better than a less selective one, but credentialism can easily be taken way too far and it really hurt the company and was about as societally regressive a culture as I can imagine.
I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that strong candidates can come from any school but that the candidates from elite schools are likely to be better. And the recruiting idea to focus on those elite schools make sense; it's easier to find talented people where talent is dense. But it also makes sense to worry Google etc. are too credentialist right now.
Personally, I hope LeetCode style online assessments become an alternate path into interviews; you've gotta prove you're good somehow, but going to an elite school shouldn't be the only way. One great thing about programming is the possibility of computer-graded skill assessments in a way that just isn't possible in most fields and IMO should be able to make hiring more meritocratic.
Yes, I am saying that I have never seen any reason to expect that Stanford CS majors are better in any measurable sense -- more productive, faster to solve hard problems, better at working in teams -- than anyone else I've worked with in this industry.
They certainly do seem more prone to _believing_ in their own superiority though.
All the people you worked with passed the same hiring bar, so it makes sense that they would have similar skills. But if you didn't have a hiring bar at all, it would be obvious that Stanford CS majors are better than CS majors at random schools.
This is certifiable, Stanford students come from the same pool and are of the same quality as like Dartmouth or UChicago students (statistically they're weaker than the latter), and receive roughly equivalent CS education, and the tech industry doesn't have a huge fetish for Dartmouth degrees. It's obviously just sociological, historical accident plus geographic and social proximity, not merit.
Sidenote: I'm loving that Dartmouth is the poster child for shit-tier Ivy in this discussion, because this first-gen college student turned down a Yale acceptance (and didn't apply to Stanford) to get a Dartmouth CS degree.
Source that Stanford students are weaker than UChicago students?
I think Stanford students are stronger. I don't have any direct evidence for this belief, but I think the following argument is strong: many students apply to both, and the ones who get into both tend to go to Stanford because it has a better reputation.
I certainly hope U of C now has an equivalent CS education to other top schools, as the classes I took in '88 to '90 focused on using Lisp.
Anecdotally, a coworker who went there about a decade later also felt it was wanting. Meanwhile, the grad level classes I took at Illinois Institute of Technology in the aughts were excellent.
If Google, et al is indeed using credentialism to substitute for skill, there's a lot they're leaving on the table.
Read it; enjoyed it. But of course the signaling model suggests there are real (private) benefits to going to the top schools, for exactly the recruiting reasons I mention. The post is claiming there aren't benefits.
The article Matt links is a bit less straightforward than "no benefits". It's saying that attending highly selective school isn't all that much different from attending one that is merely selective in terms of income. This would be your ivies compared with, say, Duke or USC or Virginia Tech even. The differences in income over the long term between groups of students who graduate from these two kinds of schools are minimal. That doesn't mean going to a good school is the same as going to, like, community college. I think he's trying to make a larger point that we spend a lot of time and energy debating (even in SCOTUS) about admissions to top tier schools (high schools and postsecondary) rather than caring about the rest of the schools. It's an opportunity cost kind of thing.
One issue is value added. To what extent do top rated schools just do part of the screening while adding no more of the value added than a lower rated school. Another is the regression discontinuity technique. Another is maybe really good student s DO benefit (in a value added sense) from going to a top ranked university/exam high school
The study cited there says that's only true for people who were accepted to the highly selective schools and went elsewhere. So you're basically comparing an average student at Stanford to the very best student at UCLA (or wherever fits, I don't really know the field). That makes sense to me, intuitively.
OK, but "recruit at top schools" and "be impressed by resumes from people who went to top schools" are not very tech-specific ideas. Doesn't every industry work that way?
No, I don't think they do! Tech and finance, basically. If you're one of the many, many white-collar jobs that want a college degree basically as a proxy for some basic intelligence and work ethic, do you care a lot about whether someone got their BA in English from Dartmouth or their BA in Art History from UCLA?
You don't because Dartmouth and UCLA are both super highly selective (UCLA may actually be more difficult to get into today). The better question is whether you care if they go their degree from UCLA or SF State. There you might. Mainly because of the signaling but the signaling matters.
I think part of Matt’s reply would be that Harvard is not scalable, thus tweaking the admissions to fit whatever new criteria arises won’t impact most college bound youth.
Matt’s biggest point isn’t really getting rid of exam schools or fine-tuning GT programs. It’s the opportunity cost of obsessing over schools that will only ever serve a small number of students while the rest of the system goes off the rails.
Right on the money. We get so tunneled into debating topics that affect a very small group of people, that we often forget the biggest sin is not being on the wrong side, but that we are even wasting our time and energy being in the debate in the first place, There is a real and tangible opportunity cost when we focus on the wrong thing.
The focus on improving the education of the broad majority would have been maintained better if it were not put in the context of how educating smart kids separately is socially ineffective and not really worth doing.
It is likely that these topics get the most consideration because they mostly impact the elites who run our schools, government, and media. Good on Matt for pushing against that!
Matt is discussing how to educate the general masses and what's best. The weak point is that most people reading him want to discuss the education of the elite, because that's the struggle of his readers.
No doubt the Harvard credential was incredible important to Matt's start in blogging and Facebook getting its start.
I think you've nailed the head on this comment section. In my reading, Matt's point was these exam-based high schools, empirically, don't provide as much common good as would this energy focused on improving all schools. But what I've been reading in the comments sort of misses the point; many are declaring that they, as the most advance student, indeed received common good. I'm absolutely positive they did, but top tier education in America is not the concern. This comment section proves we are in a bubble here.
I've audited school districts and seen those that need"...dumb stuff like putting [in] air conditioners." Those kids (and school workers) probably don't even know the world of elite exam-based high schools. But they are also in the US. They don't necessarily needs more money or funding. They need reevaluation of teaching programs and new approaches to work with the local neighborhoods to inspire success in all students. And yeah, probably a function school building with working air-condition units.
We need to be putting brain power to these issues, rather than splitting hairs on whether smart kids enjoy being taught.
I agree that way too much attention is paid to these elite schools--like, why do I, in Southern California, know the intricacies of these local fights happening in NYC and SF? But I don't think that "whether smart kids enjoy being taught" is totally irrelevant for society. In terms of equity, I've seen studies that show that smart Black and Brown kids aren't being identified and recommended for GATE programs and the like at the same rate as other kids (Matt referred to this in the article). Identifying and nurturing these kids could help close racial wealth gaps 10-20 years down the line. For society as a whole, identifying and nurturing smart kids can have huge benefits if those kids end up being future scientists, judges, entrepreneurs, etc. And I also think it's just callous to dismiss the emotional and social wellbeing of ANY kids, even if they happen to have the advantage (which they didn't ask for) of being smart.
I also wonder whether seeing and knowing that plenty of kids who look like you are getting into exam school and gifted programs would help even the minority kids who don't get into these programs do better and enjoy school more. I remember reading a study that said that Black kids do measurably worse on standardized tests when they are reminded that they are Black before the test; I think this is referred to as "stereotype threat" and comes from internalized racism. So I suspect that knowing that Black kids in your district were testing into the good school or the GATE program in reasonable numbers would potentially have a positive effect. You could achieve this in different ways, one of them being universal testing and maybe even universal free test prep, which would erase some of the advantage more privileged kids have. But I think that while it's MORE urgent to fix things like kids going to school hungry and/or having no air conditioners, finding and developing smart kids is something schools should be doing more of, not less.
Ok, and I do want to caveat this by saying that there was a lawsuit here in California about 15 years ago where parents sued the state because their school was in such bad shape, and the facts of that case are absolutely wild and completely unconscionable. I'm talking broken-down buildings, rusted playground equipment, hallways flooded with sewage, unusable bathrooms, cockroach infestations, leaking roofs, a shortage of textbooks and chalk, substitutes instead of regular teachers for most classes, and LITERAL RATS BITING THE CHILDREN in class. The school was basically 100% Black and Latino, and the best example of systemic racism I've ever heard of in my life. So I absolutely think there are urgent issues in the educational system more deserving of immediate attention than whether Stuyvesant should have an entrance exam. I just wanted to add that because I've spent a lot of time on this comment thread arguing that how smart kids are educated matters (and it does! especially to me), but it's definitely a both/and rather than an either/or situation in my mind.
Harvard is weirdly distinctive - as someone who went to Stanford, I'm always amazed at how much my friends who went to Harvard are talking about being in classes with people that I keep hearing about in the news (whether the names being dropped are Matthew Yglesias or Pete Buttigieg or whatever).
When they reach a certain age, they start talking about people they "went to Harvard with" and didn't even overlap there in time. All Harvard alumni went to Harvard together, it seems. Literally, I was talking to a guy the other day who mentioned he went to Harvard with Tyler Cowen. This guy graduated in the 70s and Tyler when there for his PhD, not undergrad. It's a weird school full of weird tropes like "when I went to school in Cambridge MA". Just say the name!
wow, I did not expect that to trigger me so much...
This San Francisco State grad has always taken great glee in firing graduates of writing programs at Harvard, Yale and Stanford for the crime of being illiterate, untalented morons.
He said the same rules don't apply to colleges, likely due to different network effects.
I'd say in addition to network effects the credential itself has more value... while I'm sure there are prep school snobs that have hired on that basis, I've never seen anyone list their HS on a resume.
It may be that for poor high school age kids and lower, the confidence-building and college admissions benefits of being the big fish in a small pond outweigh the benefits of informal learning cultural learning though exposure to more privileged peers, having one's perspective and aspirations broadened, etc. But that's an assumption these studies don't appear to address.
Top law schools (minus Yale) are completely agnostic on where you went to undergrad in admissions, they just care about GPA and LSAT, and as a result they (except Yale) have tons of kids from flagship and even directional state schools who generally do not turn out to be behind the large cohort of Harvard College grads in any way.
Yale Law, on the other hand, scandalously and transparently takes like 50% of its students from the seven Ivies, and among them has a particular preference from Yale and Harvard. It also doesn't have grades, making it hard to compare its students, so they compete on networking. Unsurprisingly it's probably the WASPiest institution in all of elite America.
Right. It just doesn't ring true that there's no benefit from taking a poor kid out an environment surrounded by limited perspectives. Speaking from personal experience, going from a hohum small town high school to a college where students came from all over the world, some of them very privileged, was an eye-opening experience that's just not even comparable to what I would have had if I'd gone to the state college an hour from my hometown.
I'm not a super woke person, maybe call me half-woke? But I also don't get mad about it usually... when friends complain about the leftist woke mob, the most you'll usually get from me is an eye-roll and a "I know some of it's dumb, but it also doesn't really matter, does it?"
That said, the Gabriela Lopez interview made me insane and I'm furious that you linked to it, Matt. She's completely gone.
I think an undercurrent of this post that Matt doesn't quite come out and say is that if we shift focus back to broader efforts to improve schools rather than win symbolic values, we will see that the woke emperor has no clothes.
I'm largely in agreement with our host here, so I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent.
Let's stipulate that even contra the statistical evidence, super-selective public high schools like Lowell and Stuyvesant (and Philadelphia Central, Ann Arbor Community, Boston Latin etc) are a net benefit to their students.
WHY ARE WE NOT MAKING MORE OF THEM?
Stuyvesant has a _3%_ admissions rate. Even granting the frankly dubious premise that any random student in the New York public school system who was interested in the task could not manage the coursework at Stuy given adequate support, it defies belief that _only_ those 3% are capable of doing so. In fact, given that Stuy will happily offer spots to previously-excluded freshmen when a kid from the incoming class moves or decides at the last minute to go to a different school, we can safely conclude that nobody in the school administration believes that either: quite obviously there is a wide tranche of students who by any measure are qualified for the program but who had to be excluded for the simple reason that there wasn't space for them.
This is the logic of an exclusive restaurant: there are only 20 tables available per night, no more and no less, and the cachet of being one of the very few to be there is just as much of the appeal as the food and wine. But that's an insane approach to take to primary education. The model here shouldn't be the French Laundry, it should be McDonalds: we know what works and what people want, so just sign up as many franchisees as possible.
A single-digit admissions rate at a public school isn't a sign of success, it's a screaming indicator of dismal failure: if there are ten times as many kids who desire and are capable of doing the Stuyvesant curriculum than there are spaces at Stuyvesant, the solution is to _build more Stuyvesants_ or turn existing schools _into_ Stuyvesants. The textbooks exist, the lesson plans exist, there is absolutely no magic here: just give them to more teachers.
You can't. What makes the schools great is the great students. If you build more of them, they will have to settle for the less-great students and will be less-great. It's not a money issue.
In NYC at least, Stuyvesant isn't better-funded than other schools. It gets as much per-student funding as every school in the NYC school district. The reason it's one of the best high schools in the country is that the most talented kids in NYC are extremely talented.
Also as a postscript: the fact that Stuy's nominal per-student budget is the same as other NYC's high schools is a sham and a dodge. Stuyvesant's alumni association manages a multi-million dollar endowment and fundraises aggressively for the school, as do the alumni of Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech and the rest.
And that's not even counting the capital cost of their new building, which at $150MM in 1989 was the most expensive public high school ever built.
If you assume that the limiting factor on making More Stuvesants is the supply of teachers capable of teaching the curriculum well and engaging with students, then you probably need to allocate radically more money to teacher salaries, in order to incentivize more people to pursue teaching. Right now, that supply of good teachers is limited to only the people who love teaching so much that they'll do it despite systematically bad pay and constant attack by a right-wing political machine.
This of course also goes to one of Matt's hobby-horses -- the job should be much better paid, and perceived as higher status, while also being less of a sinecure, so people who do it _badly_ can be pushed out. But even with that kind of reform, you're almost certainly going to have to spend a TON more money on salaries, if you want to attract enough really good teachers to open a dozen more high-performing schools.
This, incidentally, might be a contrast with the situation with universities. From what I can tell, there is actually an over-supply of people who would like to make a living as teaching faculty, and even do it pretty well. Teaching courses is ridiculously under-valued compared to getting papers published (many of which are irreproducible crap).
This is my exact point: even if you assume that _some_ students can't hack the Stuyvesant experience, it's complete insanity to assert that _only_ the students who are admitted can.
Nearly 30,000 students apply to Stuyvesant every year. That's already a self-selected group of academic high achievers: there are over a million total students in NYPS. Of those 30,000 applicants, _800_ are admitted as freshmen.
Let's make the completely unlikely and unsupported assumption that 2/3rds of those applicants would not be successful stuyvesant students. That still leaves NINE THOUSAND, TWO HUNDRED students who could have gone there successfully but did not, and were excluded on essentially arbitrary grounds because there were only 800 seats that could be filled.
This is not a case of excluding "B" students to focus on "A" students. This is taking a huge group of "A" students, picking a random one out of a hundred of them and saying "fuck off, loser" to the remaining ninety nine.
It's just wrong to think of "hack the Stuyvesant experience" or "be successful Stuyvesant students" as a binary variable. Achievement is continuous.
You could build more exam schools in NYC (and in fact they have; there are 7 other schools that use the same exam results as Stuyvesant to admit students) and that would be great. But you shouldn't expect as good results as Stuyvesant, because the main variable is the students, and the best students already went to Stuyvesant. But you'll still get great results, because the next most talented group of students in NYC are also very talented. You could (and maybe we should) keep doing this, and just completely assign people to high schools by exam score. But they wouldn't all become as good as Stuyvesant; you would just see a steady degradation in student accomplishment as the schools became less selective.
Absolutely not. The 800 students that Stuy admits are not the _best_ of the applicants either considered as a step or continuous function. They are an essentially arbitrary subset of a larger (potentially much larger) group of qualified students.
The New York Specialized High School Scholastic Aptitude Test is a 114-question test scored at 0 to 800 points. In 2020, the lowest score admitted to Stuy was 566. Even if you were to make the insane assumptions that the SHSAT is a not only _perfect_ indicator of scholastic quality but that single-digit score differences are significant, the facts remain:
- the low score cutoff changes year to year because there are only 800 seats available
- the number of applicants means that there are students with the _same_ score as the lower bound who are not admitted because of space
Was the 2017 freshman class (low score cutoff: 555) was in some small but qualifiable way worse than the 2018 class (low bound: 559)? Were both subtly worse than the 2020 class (low bound: 566)? If all of the students with a score of 566 in 2020 moved away, would the quality of the class be harmed by admitting the student who scored 565?
Obviously not and you'd be laughed out of the room for asserting any of that. But if you don't believe those things, the counterpoint becomes very obvious: there are many students who would by _any_ measure be good Stuyvesant students who are not going there for entirely arbitrary reasons.
Hell, Stuy's own history makes this laughable: the new building in battery park city added roughly a _thousand_ seats vs the old 15th Street location. Did the circle of "the best" students in NYC suddenly expand by a thousand in 1989, or was Stuy simply able to accommodate more of the existing pool of high achievers?
Bam. This is the correct take, and it applies to universities too. See Canada for an example of a place where the most selective universities serve ~40,000 students instead of ~5,000 while still retaining prestige and quality educational and career outcomes for their students.
Too many binaries here. It doesn't need to be "perfect" to not be "essentially arbitrary". "qualified" is not a "yes or no" thing. There's not circle of "the best" students, just a slowly ascending gradient of quality. You're pretending that everyone is the same above some cutoff, and that doesn't make any sense.
All I need is that the test is a noisy measure of scholastic quality. Then you get (slightly) better results by admitting the top students.
There's nothing wrong with adding more slots or schools or the slightly lower-scoring students, but you should expect that the new school won't be as good.
The test is different every year so its not clear the scores mean the same thing. But yes, small differences in scores are probably significant, and yes, the class would be probably be (very slightly) worse if they admitted someone with a score of 565 instead of 566.
When Stuy expanded, they accommodated more strong students, but the marginal newly added students weren't as good as if they'd stayed more exclusive.
All of this falls out easily from imagining student quality as continuous (which it obviously is?) Why are you so insistent that it must be categorical - that either you're a "high achiever" or you aren't? Obviously the cutoffs are just arbitrarily lines, and the students are either side are very similar. But that's totally consistent with students getting less and less similar as the score differences between them get larger. They won't be much difference between 566 and 565, but there will be a noticeable difference between 700 and 400.
It can be true that minor differences in the distribution of test scores in a cohort of students are significant and useful for assembling the "best" student body.
It can be true that minor differences in the distribution of test scores are not meaningful in comparing the quality of different entering classes.
But _both_ of those things cannot be true, and the latter is much more likely than the former. Believing the former requires ascribing perfect accuracy to an admissions test devised by the New York City school system and if that idea doesn't strain your credulity a I don't know what to tell you.
And if you believe the latter, it is _axiomatic_ that there are students who are not being admitted who would be just as "good" as the students who are, and therefore would be just as well served by a Stuyvesant education, and they are being denied admission for reasons that have nothing to do with their quality and everything to do with the size of the building.
If expanding Stuy adversely affected the quality of the student body, you would expect to see that reflected in _some_ useful measurable quantity such as their college admissions rate. Needless to say, this has not happened.
QED: There's nothing magical about the size of Stuy's freshman class. It's the number of available seats in the building modulo their target teacher to student ratio. We should expand or franchise the program until we find the actual limit, which we are presently nowhere near. This is a _public_ high school: its mission is to serve the public of New York City. If people want exclusivity for exclusivity's sake, let them pay the $60,000 a year for Philips Exeter.
The idea that the people currently admitted to Stuy are necessarily the best N students is just laughable. You honestly think our testing protocols have such precision? Come on. It seems like a certainty that among the top hundred people excluded, many if not most would also thrive at Stuy, and many would even end up out-performing some of the people that got admitted.
I would believe that you can't fill _ten_ Stuyvesants with similar-quality students. But two or three? Yes, absolutely you could.
I don't think that's a tangent. I think that's Matt's main point.
>>The real problem here (along with mangling the history of the Penobscot Expedition) is that every day spent having basically symbolic fights is a day you’re not spending doing real evaluations of whatever programs your city has in order to see which of them are working and which aren’t.
That a lot of commenters would prefer to engage in changing the window dressing is very telling. Both sides of the selective admissions debate would rather have that debate than do anything useful for most students.
I think Matt's point also encompasses the questions of "would there be any benefit to selective-admissions schools even if there were a seat available for everyone who qualified?" and "is the massive coursework load at these schools of any benefit to the kids in the short or long term?" and he proposes (and i agree) that the answer is somewhere between "doubtful" and "absolutely the fuck not" but I think that's a much harder sell vs everyone's default intuitions about how "good schools" are supposed to operate.
you can do this with magnet programs, IB programs, etc. within normal schools. it works well and should be expanded. With IB in particular it basically is a franchise model like McDonald’s.
however, these programs are not quite on the level of Stuyvesant and company. I couldn’t tell you why. There is some magic that seems to be hard to reproduce.
Speaking as somebody who graduated from a fancy-name college, and went on to have a quite remunerative career, my feeling is that a large chunk of the magic _is the name_ -- seeing a top 10 school on somebody's resume does help get recruiters to put you at the top of the list. But a much larger chunk is the network -- "it's not what you know, it's who you know." I got introductions for internships at major companies through my professors. That kind of network is _hard_ to replicate, but not impossible.
I had opportunities as an undergrad to join professors' research teams as a research assistant, and I worked in different labs each of soph/jr/sr years. The school's history and stature meant it had good relationships with those big companies, and they actively sent recruiters to campus.
I don't believe there was anything _magic_ about the quality of instruction, though it certainly was good -- for the field I ultimately went into, for my first few corporate jobs, I got to study with the guy that had basically invented the field (like, he used his own textbook for class, because _everyone_ uses his textbook to teach that subject, and always has). But the fact that he was also an excellent teacher and mentor is kind of a matter of luck -- there are a ton of brilliant, prestigious professors, who are _terrible_ teachers.
In any case, there are great research teams at public universities, too. Perhaps we could use federal policy to encourage the development of this sort of college-to-workplace pipeline for public universities. (Some of them, like UC Berkeley and U MD College Park, do this quite well already.)
I grew up in the Ann Arbor area, but I don't remember Community High School having competitive merit-based admissions. I didn't have any close friends there, but it had the reputation at the time of taking an alternative approach to education.
I was a "gifted" student in public schools. A problem I faced was boredom, arising mainly from the need to educate the less rapidly-learning majority. I had a few "accelerated" classes (especially math) where the quality of teacher, the content of the subject, and my own competencies meshed, and these were transformative for me and a number of my friends. I don't think this can be dismissed as "maybe programs for AG kids might help underprivileged children of special abilities," since I wasn't underprivileged. My story represents a tiny minority of the school population, but the lesson might be important, since on average the very best students make outsized contributions to society.
Right. As a parent with a bored 9 year old who already knows more math than he needs to for the next few years, if someone offers me an educational option that _seems_ less wasteful, it's going to be nearly impossible for me to not go for it, and an efficacy study isn't going to override what's going on with my kid in front of my nose.
Results from most educational studies are dominated by majority populations, and effects in small minorities are numerically swamped and effectively hidden.
"The same Barrow, Sartain, and de la Torre study cited above showed that...they subjectively enjoyed their high school experience more."
I've said this before, but SUBJECTIVE ENJOYMENT MATTERS. For high-school students, high school is *their actual life*, happening at a formative moment in their life, and nobody's clamoring to give them other options. Teenagers are people. People like interesting classes and peers that share their interests. We should care about this regardless of whether it improves test scores. It's not that complicated.
...And also, if the students did enjoy their experience more, maybe your first suspicion should be that they're correctly detecting something about its positive life impact that the measures in your study are missing...not that you, wise economist, must know better than them?
I just finished leading a class discussion 20 minutes ago on a paper that claimed workshops in the sciences have no benefit because the participants didn't publish more papers in the next couple of years (among other ways they "tried" to measure an effect). And they specifically called out subjective surveys as useless because participants cannot evaluate themselves properly. Yeah, we tore that paper apart.
The problem with most of the studies is that they're really only obliquely focusing on the actual benefit of selective high schools, GT programs, etc., which is that they advance attainment of *knowledge* in time, sparing kids from wasting time in classes where they are learning nothing.
For the same reason, a GT program or selective high school should not really take much more resources to run than a regular high school, because the primary value add is concentrating enough students in one building to be able to offer advanced classes.
I went to Northern Virginia's tech magnet and it gave me a lot of benefits that would never show up under these measures. In particular, because I was there I was able to take, after calculus, multivariable calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, and numerical analysis. That's two years of coursework I was able to do before college, freeing me up to take more advanced courses sooner (and thus at a minimum saving me tuition money!) None of these classes would ever show up in any math aptitude test like the SAT or even the SAT 2 (which only goes up to Algebra 2 / Trig, which I had already taken before high school). The classes weren't designed to increase my math aptitude, which at that point was as realized as it was going to get. They were designed to teach me actual useful information, much of which I use daily in my career.
The only reason I was able to take these courses was because of the existence of a selective high school. When I took it, I think the differential equations class only had one section, and they actually had a professor from a neighboring college to come in to teach it. That's twenty-odd individuals who would have had to either bus themselves individually to the local college or not take math that semester, in the absence of a magnet school.
I don't think there's any good reason to not provide this service when there is a clear benefit and it doesn't really cost more money.
I’m a high school math teacher and my district only has one high school, so while this is interesting to read about, it doesn’t directly apply to any questions we face.
It does have parallels to an issue we debate frequently, which is whether or not we should have an advanced math track. The school has gotten rid of tracking in all subjects except for math. We are very racially diverse and have a very large (largest in the nation I’ve heard?) racial achievement gap. The racial sorting that happens between advanced math and standard math (which is college prep and totally fine) is extreme. Many want to get rid of advanced math all together, but there is a powerful voice in the community demanding to keep it. This voice is very privileged and mostly white.
I am interested in evidence based takes on this issue that can help move the conversation in a constructive direction. I’m curious what of these studies Matt and the community think might apply to this specific situation, or if there are others about the benefits or lack thereof of tracking math at a high school.
Maybe there is not much point in yet another person-who-majored-in-math-in-college with the obvious personal biases screaming NO NO NO NO NO on here, but I'm going to do it anyway because I can't stop myself. NO NO NO NO NO. Obviously not all students benefit from learning the exact same math at the exact same time. I don't even care if it ultimately doesn't affect test scores. The point of math class is to learn math, not just to take tests, and different students at different points in their lives should be learning different math. Maybe you can promote equity by a stronger culture of allowing students to move between lanes easily and flexibly and providing extra prep for students who are interested in doing so.
If it helps, I am someone who did not major in math in college and did not take advanced math (at least not advanced relative to the school) in high school. I am happy I did not join my friends in advanced math, as I was never a particularly good math student--it never interested me and I'm not particularly good at calculation. Being in the non-advanced math was a little weird socially (since all my friends were in advanced), but it kept math from being an encumbrance on my time and grades. I ended up a lawyer, so feel free to make "haha lawyers are bad at math" jokes.
I actually was a lawyer before becoming a high school teacher. I found my training as a math major to be incredibly valuable for law school. We mostly wrote proofs, which are just legal briefs with more rules.
Oh, absolutely, I'm sure. But pure mathematics is a little weird there; I think the prototypical "math heavy" major isn't even math itself so much as engineering or one of the hard sciences. (I say this as someone dating and living with someone who got a degree in education policy, hated it, and is now going back to school for engineering; her delight in calculus is completely alien to me). I suspect pure math majors have more of an abstract/philosophical focus than the bulk of people whose majors have a heavy math focus/use math a lot to do something else, and most of the people I knew in high school taking advanced math were in it for the science applications. (My high school was about 30% children of Asian immigrants, mostly highly educated ones who came to work in engineering, industrial research, or medicine; my classmates mostly wanted to do that.)
Is that a kind of joke people make?! I considered law too, so I never would...especially since it seems to me that the kinds of abstract problem-solving you do in math and law are not without similarities.
Yeah, though tbh it's mostly a joke we lawyers make about ourselves. There's a lot of talk about "lawyer math" when we get to talking about numbers (by which we mean money).
Generally speaking, the law attracts a lot of people who were bright but for whom math wasn't their strong suit. You're right that the abstract problem-solving of math is somewhat similar to legal reasoning--and speaking for myself, it was the abstract, conceptual parts of math I did best at. It's calculation (not just arithmetic but also stuff like solving for x and whatever) that lawyers like to joke they can't do.
(Also, while legal reasoning can be very abstract, most lawyers' actual work lies primarily in negotiation and persuasion--very different skill set.)
Ah, I see. The funny parallel is that mathematicians *also* joke about being bad at calculations (as opposed to abstract thinking which is what we actually care about)! Mathematicians going out to dinner together (in the days when we could do that etc. etc.) always loudly proclaim their struggles with splitting the check.
(And how much time do we spend actually doing math, and how much time do we spend trying to convince others that our work is interesting? Ehh...)
It's funny, my husband--who studied astrophysics at Caltech before ending up a lawyer--always says he doesn't think I can actually have been "bad at math" because I'm good at abstract reasoning and did well on the LSAT. It's made me wonder when and why I decided I was "bad at math" and whether it was actually just that I was uninterested in math. I suspect a LOT of generally bright people who think they're bad at math just never found that spark of interest in the topic; after all, a lot of mastery is about enthusiastic practice! By the same token, I wonder whether the reason I thought I was "good" at English is just because I developed an early love of reading and therefore ended up a strong reader and writer. I think our culture and educational system tend to over-essentialize people into either humanities people or math/science people, and we're probably all the intellectually poorer for it!
Really interesting how many negative, seemingly emotional reactions this post is getting. And none of them offering any objective insight to the problem, as I requested. I'm curious if those of you posting to tell me what a terrible idea this is had the same reaction to the content of Matt's original post. The two issues are not the same, but they feel similar enough, which is why I brought it up in the comments.
I really appreciate Matt's rationalist approach to policy (that's specifically what I'm here for) and would like to reiterate my desire for that philosophy for rule any discussions we have about this topic.
I think we're willing to entertain the notion that exam schools are not especially beneficial for those who go them. But part of the logic in entertaining that is that some of the benefits can be devolved to the individual schools, e.g., specialized classes. And now you're saying that no, actually those advanced classes should be taken away too. So the needs of the smart kids apparently don't matter at all. They'll be fine anyway, right?
Speaking from my own experience, I couldn't get enough math in high school. If you told me that I couldn't have calculus, AP chem, etc. because it makes some kids feel bad, I would have been miserable. In fact, I probably would have just left a couple years early and gone to college instead.
Yes, but...maybe grade acceleration (such as leaving early for college) is the correct answer for being insufficiently challenged students? As someone who took some college classes in high school, I thought that worked out very well.
Shoshanna never said "So the needs of the smart kids apparently don't matter at all. They'll be fine anyway, right?". She just asked whether *tracking* is the right answer to their needs. (TBF, I think that a lot of people are reading that into her post, which is why she's getting such emotional responses from this readership.)
I also took a college class my senior year, but only because we were lucky enough to have a university in our small hometown and the four of us could get two periods off to drive over there for it. For many kids, leaving for college at 16 or 17 is not practical.
I'll admit, I don't know what tracking is; I assumed it just means putting kids into more or less advanced classes as their ability and desire dictate. And I was definitely triggered by the proposal (I realize it wasn't by her!) to get rid of advanced classes altogether, which seems absurd to me.
This is tragic. I hope your district keeps advanced math so that the students who are best at math can continue to get an education that matches their abilities and interests. Even "privileged" people deserve a good education.
My initial response here wasn't in any way constructive. I'll just say ... wow. Had no idea tracked math was an issue these days. As a tracked math nerd that's generally just such a bummer. I read this as such a perverse way to close an achievement gap ... just take the top off. Good luck here. I do not envy the situation you're in.
I went to this same high school 20 years ago and took advanced math and had a very rich intellectual experience there and went on to major in math in college. It was personally transformative for me. A lot of my resistance to the idea of getting rid of it comes from projecting my own experience onto the situation. It’s very hard to weigh that against science and policy goals. I need someone to make an objective argument about what we should do.
I'm sincerely interested, this is the first I've heard of this ... what is being debated or proposed? Like - they just wouldn't offer a Calc BC class anymore?
This strikes me as an interesting, difficult question. Empirically, does eliminating tracking benefit lower-performing students, perhaps boosting their self-expectations and interest in the material through sharing the class with high-performing students? If so, is it a drag on the learning process of high-performing students? From a utilitarian POV, there is an argument for finding a trade-off which would somewhat sacrifice the high-performing students’ interests – but it would be deeply frustrating to the high-performing students’ parents.
On the other hand, maybe integrating the two groups is a win-win insofar as both groups benefit through participation in a shared classroom experience?
Almost certainly, though, the non-tracked class wouldn’t be able to cover as much advanced material as a tracked, advanced class.
I think this is a good summary of the dilemma. We often discuss the possibility of optional extra work that would lead to preparation for Calc BC, but delivering a curriculum that differentiated all at once is extremely difficult.
Has there been any discussion about changing what the math curriculum is? I mean in the sense of teaching statistics instead of trig or calculus. I was good at both of those subjects in high school, but never took them in college and don't feel like I missed anything, even though I did a lot of software development in my career.
I taught myself to code, and while I probably wouldn't get hired by Google, I can do the vast majority of software development jobs and never need anything more than algebra. Statistics would've been useful too given how many metrics business use (and as a general rule use badly).
We’re a big high school, so we offer a lot of options for students in their senior year, including statistics. But state standards require we offer math 1,2 and 3 to all. I think we should get rid of the math 3 requirement for exactly the reasons you state, but it’s a matter of state law.
Actually I didn’t state that accurately- they don’t have to take math 3 (similar to
Algebra 2) but they do have to take three years of the math sequence. Some have to repeat math 1 or 2 so never get to math 3. They still graduate but this isn’t ideal obviously.
The reasoning is that segregating out the most advanced students from the regular classes deprives the remaining students of the contributions those students bring to class culture. Having fewer students in a class who always do their homework, try the challenge problems, etc. will negatively impact everyone in the class. Adolescents are very sensitive to peer behavior, and we end up with classes where enough students are putting in a low effort that it becomes the norm, and everyone follows suit.
"Having fewer students in a class who always do their homework, try the challenge problems, etc. will negatively impact everyone in the class.". Sorry, I just can't believe that peer influence works this way. It is not symmetrical. Maybe it's just my particular experience, where low effort went together with high status. High-status kids are not influenced by low-status smart kids. But maybe it's different in your school.
How many years have you been teaching high school?
Assuming the answer is 0, and if I’m wrong I apologize, I think this is a perfect example of a problem Matt identified which plagues educators who try to advocate for... pretty much anything. Everyone has an opinion about how school should be run because everyone went to school, so they think they understand how it works.
And, if you’re advocating for any policy improvements that you want to stick, you have to convince parents and citizens who have their opinions and experience and prejudices, just as I do. “I’m a teacher and you’re not” is the opposite of persuasive.
You were? I just read an explanation of why I was wrong. That’s kind of the opposite of being curious, FYI.
More importantly- I am not actually advocating this point of view. I’m unsure what to do, which is why I asked if there was any evidence based recommendations. I see good arguments on both sides of this one. The post you responded to was just me repeating an argument for getting rid of tracking that I thought was valid. But I’m definitely not here to advocate for one side or another.
My school experience was of being mercilessly bullied for being a "teacher's pet" because I was praised for getting good grades on my tests and turning in my homework on time. I literally developed gastritis at one point that the doctor said was from emotional upset. I had nightmares every Sunday night before school. So while I am sympathetic to the argument that having higher-performing kids in the same classes as lower-performing ones, I also get a bit triggered by these kinds of proposals because I don't understand why the higher-performing kids--who are still children, after all!--should be the sacrificial lambs here, and why their wellbeing is somehow implied to be less important than the wellbeing of other kids.
I'm not saying you're doing that, Shoshanna! And I'm really glad you're posting here, because this is super interesting. But I suspect you're talking to a cohort of people who are kind of predisposed to have emotionally intense responses to this discussion because of memories and experiences from our own childhoods.
My experiences were like yours. I think research is predisposed to the greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number thinking which tends to devalue the abundant experience of participants. A little good for a lot of average kids (even below the threshold of being noticed) is deemed to be worth a lot of harm to a few smart kids. Consideration for the needs of smart kids then must be “justified” by large benefits to the wider society, and when this is not found, the conclusion is that this consideration is not warranted. The same standard is not applied to disadvantaged or difficult kids who are deemed worthy of more and more resources on ethical grounds, simply because they need it.
This is right on. We need more win-win approaches to equity and fewer negative and zero-sum ones, which don't actually benefit anyone and actively harm even the people they are supposed to be helping by creating fewer opportunities. Like, even if there are only two Black kids in the advanced math class, those two kids are going to be worse off if the school gets rid of it! Not to mention all the other kids, who may be white and/or privileged, but who are still children who shouldn't be punished for something they aren't at fault for.
The issue with the selective high schools is not academic but behavioral. The incredible hurdle of the testing and the burden of the commute is assurance that when all is done, the kids who make the arbitrary cut are by definition kids whose parents really care about education, and are going to be with other kids whose parents also really care about education.
Even if my smart kid could do well in another type of academic environment, as a parent I would feel there to be a developmental benefit in being in an environment where everyone is on board in really valuing education. I would appreciate that assurance, and I wouldn’t care to much about offering up my kid’s life up to a broader social end. Selfish, yes, but parents will die for their children, so participating this socially imperfect system would just not be a heavy lift for me. And there are lots of people who feel that way in this country. That’s the reality that policymakers must take into account if they want to change the system. They have to build on, not tear down.
The fact that there are many more gifted and talented children out there, especially Black and Latino children, who are being missed and are not being served by the current selective system is just ample reason for establishing many more such institutions, at all levels, selected by more effective means, and that they should be established in black and brown neighborhoods so the students don’t have to commute unreasonable distances. Those institutions will be racially segregated given the size of the city and its residential patterns, but if the smart kids of color thrive in them, what difference does that make?
Many people suggest that grouping high-capability kids doesn’t matter. I disagree with this, and my view comes first from personal experience of being a good student in an egalitarian culture (white, Midwestern) that that did not value education, and how I had to struggle with that even while excelling academically. It informs my perspective that the developmental and cultural aspect is as important as the academic aspect that is focus of the studies. And maybe establishing more G&T programs would help urban educators to concentrate on (and being accountable for) teaching ordinary and difficult students more effectively. If so, that would be a major social benefit. We already know how to teach smart kids.
In New York where I live, professional- and middle-class parents trying to use the public schools have a very narrow path to tread in the system. And it is not because they object to black and brown children in the seats next to their kids. They do object to the behavior of the poor students that would isolate and far outnumber their kids in the average public school. But most of all they object to the complete inability of the City public school system to manage educational and social needs that are so disparate, and to serve those children whose parents who really care about education.
The “common school” idea works when there is some level of homogeneity and community consensus (think of the one-room schoolhouse with the bell, the historical symbol of our American democracy). Suburban schools work on that basis, they force commonality through the real estate market at various income levels and reflecting the various norms of the families. But big cities have always had different types of education for different classes and types of people. The test schools are remnants of what used to exist in all big cities and were innovative in that they provided public support for a type of education previously accessible only to well-off people who could afford exclusionary private schools or tutoring at home. In that sense, they are also part of American democracy. Two schools in a city of 8 million are not a bad thing to preserve.
"I disagree with this, and my view comes first from personal experience of being a good student in an egalitarian culture (white, Midwestern) that that did not value education"
Here's my counter-factual question: it sounds like you had to put up with the annoying-to-you (and maybe not beneficial or harmful) experience of being in a peer group that wasn't uniformly studious. What was the effect in the other direction? Did your fellow students benefit from having you around in terms of setting the tone for how 'everyone' approached school? If you had been separated out with a few of your peers for a different school, how would that have affected those who were left behind?
(I think you can argue that for two schools in an entire city, the affect of the isolated students on the rest of the student body is very, very diluted. But then, do we play the same argument with the top N% of the remaining students and ask if giving them their own environment would help them? Within a high school, sometimes classes are academically tracked.)
Interesting question. My response is that I don't believe in that proposition at all.
I don’t think my peers (other than my friends) even knew of my existence or would have given a damn even if they had. The dominant culture valued athletics and social skills, so the wider school population knew all about and were influenced by the people who excelled at those things. The smart kids had no visibility except to our teachers and to those who would mock or bully us. So I find it hard to imagine the mechanism by which merely existing in a school as a studious minority is going to affect the majority, negatively or positively. Maybe through athletics or schoolwide activities but even those might achieve more by being done out of school, in a club environment that potentially mingles different people outside of their group environment at school.
Maybe the question should really be whether regular kids would benefit from being in a school with enough high-achieving kids to set a tone. But that causes different problems. So I say, just give the smart, average, and difficult kids what they need, and not worry too much about what are effectively theories of social change. Smart kids come from all social groups and classes, they are not some magical species that will solve our educational problems.
BTW I had significant experience with being put in groups with “regular” kids and bad actors on the grounds that my studiousness would rub off on them. In practice I did all the work and had my work stolen by these fellow students. It was very harmful to me, and did not harm them at all. I did not learn to respect them, and they did not learn to improve or to respect me. This informs my point of view, for sure.
I think I can also answer the question, because Rock_M's description of his background matches my own very closely. Just as one example, of the 4 kids on my middle school "math team" one kid's step-father used to throw away his math books so he wouldn't be a "nerd". Another one of them was expelled after stabbing a kid in the neck with a screwdriver who had been bullying him, but I digress.
Taking out any of the academically-oriented kids would have hurt the rest of them, of course. But it would have been much, much better for the kid who was given the greater opportunity. And I don't think it would have had any effect on the majority of kids who didn't really care much about school beyond sports or socializing.
Of course you can take this argument too far and you might end up with an overly-tiered system. But to me, these Magnet schools I hear about in big city districts sound like an amazing opportunity for kids who want something different than the bulk of their peers.
Inclined to agree but wonder the degree to which your/their conclusions are driven by experimental design. Regression discontinuity design relies on outcomes for marginal students on each side of the test score cutoff. These schools may be a wash for these students but may potentially be beneficial for higher performing students. Easy to see that being the case, just as it’s easy to see it not being the case
Some level of sorting seems necessary once you hit around 7th grade, even if it's just sorting kids within the same school. At that age the distribution of math and reading skills is just too wide for a single curriculum to make sense. What does the literature say about within-school tracking (e.g. honors/AP math, history, english, etc...)? That's probably a more common pattern than separate G&T schools.
[I replied to the duplicate that got deleted so I'll copy it here]
The research says that it works as intended. All the kids who have poor academic performance get tracked into academically "low" courses while kids who have high academic performance get tracked into academically high courses. Critics will correctly point out that this sorting happens along race and class lines and maybe successfully argue that it's yet another form of exclusion from rigorous curriculum. So, the challenge becomes locating kids who are presently excluded from these kinds of tracks but who would benefit from being in them. The research isn't really clear on how to make that work and some think we should just scrap it altogether and try something totally different.
I'm mostly interesting in the impacts of tracking on student outcomes (short-term outcomes like standardized test scores as well as longer term outcomes like college graduation). My prior is that tracking is good for higher performing students and maybe also for lower performing students, though I'm less sure about that. I could be wrong, though, and I'm not familiar with any studies on the topic.
What I'm getting at is that I'm much more skeptical of attacks on tracking than attacks on separate G&T schools. It's not clear to me there is much benefit to attending Stuyvesant versus taking honors classes at a neighborhood school. But some form of tracking seems inevitable if we want to maintain the idea that students should be taught at a level that matches their abilities. I am open to alternatives to tracking, especially if they have some evidentiary basis, but I'm skeptical. It just seems like a bad idea to put kids who are 2-3 grade levels apart in the same classroom.
I think one key area where T&G programs as well as other advanced academic tracking programs depart from the discussion of selective high schools admissions is that tracking schemes rely much more on teachers or school faculty. Matt points to one example of this in his post and it's more broadly studied, especially T&G programs. For example, Grissom and Redding (2016) document that black students, even with with high test scores are still less likely than their peers to be in T&G programs. https://doi-org.tc.idm.oclc.org/10.1177%2F2332858415622175 . Klopfenstein (2004) argues that taking advanced placement is best predicted by income, thus it's mostly middle class and up who take them. https://doi-org.tc.idm.oclc.org/10.1016/S0272-7757(03)00076-1 . Corra et al. (2011) looked at a school system with an open enrollment policy around AP classes and found black kids still took those classes at way lower rates, suggesting it's more complicated than tracking alone would explain. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41341104 .
Now, these aren't outcomes so let's look at the outcomes.
G&T courses are good, especially for minority students:
Participation in an AP course while in high school increases students’ exposure to highly qualified and motivated teachers and probability of attending a 4-year university:
Having spent some time searching this morning, I am surprised to find that so much of the literature is based around what are essentially satisfaction surveys. Kids say they like these kinds of programs and they generally feel good about participating in them. Parents say they like these kinds of programs and they generally feel good about their kids participating in them. There is a subset of this research (Dweck and her folks) that points out being in these programs can stress kids out if they feel too much pressure to perform, but that's the only real dissenting strain I saw in my quick look.
Interesting. I should clarify that I'm not wedded to any particular method of assigning students to tracks. At my public HS it was largely based on standardized test scores, but I doubt that's true everywhere. We should definitely be critical of tracking methods that discourage talented minorities from taking honors classes.
>>We estimate the longer-run effects of attending an effective high school (one that improves a combination of test scores, survey measures of socio-emotional development and behaviours in 9th-grade) for students who are more versus less educationally advantaged (i.e., likely to attain more years of education based on 8th-grade characteristics). All students benefit from attending effective schools. However, the least advantaged students experience the largest improvements in high-school graduation, college-going, and school-based arrests. These patterns are driven by the least advantaged students benefiting the most from school impacts on the non-test-score dimensions of school quality. However, while there is considerable overlap in the effectiveness of schools attended by more and less advantaged students, it is the most advantaged students that are most likely to attend highly effective schools. These patterns underscore the importance of quality schools, and the non-test score components of quality schools, for improving the longer-run outcomes for less advantaged students.
Don’t have time to do the research, but I thought a lot of the studies that basically said “Hey parents, don’t sweat the parenting details as much because they don’t have much long term impact on your child.” Stated that peer group effects were more important (except in cases of gross neglect/abuse)?
So parenting doesn’t matter, AND peer group doesn’t matter?
Also I thought there was data showing minorities moving into better neighborhoods after the fall of redlining showed their children were helped a great deal by the new environment? I assumed the main reason was the schools… is it not? Or is it that there is a big difference going from awful school to average school, but just not much going from mediocre to “great”?
I'm wondering about this too. I really appreciate Matt's point that we should spend our time evaluating the existing evidence to see what works for outcomes, and see where there are gaps in understanding where we can do more studies. But, if peer effects are so important for children's development, it seems weird that peers at their school don't seem to matter. The literature here just seems at odds, so I'd want to know more.
imo it's because peer effects are really a proxy for other things. When you measure peer effects, you are really measuring something else that's hard to control for in your data analysis. I don't know that there is good evidence about what specific things it may be a proxy for, at least not yet.
The SAT is a good example. Your score on the SAT is best predicted by your family's income and education levels. This is part of why people criticize the SAT as being biased. But that's only partly correct because what's really going on is that the SAT is a proxy for all kinds of inputs that make you do better on tests. Sure, intelligence is one of them. So is eating breakfast before you test. But we have one measure and it gets all the attention. Matt would say, let's feed kids more breakfast and put some AC in their classrooms.
So, back to peer effects. We have really weird data with peer effects that puts them all over the place. When I see these inconsistent findings, I think it means we have a really bad conceptualization of what peer effects actually are, how they supposedly accumulate, what the important components of a peer group are, and so on. The data and the concept just aren't good enough to generate the kinds of conclusions we want to draw.
Thanks, that's a great point on peer effects likely being a poor concept, and that explaining why it seems to give us weird data/results. Honestly, in my head the idea of "peer effects" seems ill-defined, and could conceivably be any influence that isn't environmental (e.g., lead), parental, or genetic. So, leaves the door open for it to be lots of things. Seems like disaggregating that and sharpening up our concepts could lead to more fruitful research.
I have known a few teachers at the NYC selective schools, and it's even a joke among them that nobody knows if they are good or bad teachers. The students will do great no matter what in terms of college admissions, grades, etc because they are such a narrowly selected slice of the overall student body.
The selective high schools in NYC won't be going away any time soon. They are massively popular among Asian immigrant families. I lived in Queens for many years, and the tutoring places would pass out flyers on the street with pictures of awkward, smiling Chinese and Bangladeshi American teens and the schools they tested into.
There are also robust alumni networks for these schools that don't want them to change. It's sad, but it's not that rare to encounter somebody in their 40's or 50's that makes sure you know real quick that they went to Hunter or Stuyvesant.
Have your considered the possibility that exam schools don't make a difference for marginal candidates but they are important for non-marginal ones? One of the advantages of a school like Bronx Science, is that you have enough kids to run a more advanced curriculum then you could In an ordinary neighborhood school. Maybe moving from the top of your neighborhood school to the bottom of a magnet school is a wash, but moving from the top of your neighborhood school to the top third of a magnet school is a big upgrade due to curriculum effects.
I always wonder this when Matt cites this studies, but I think the counter-argument is that while these top students will *enjoy* their time more at the exam school (way less boring because of the advanced curriculum), these are kids who have the tools to succeed no matter what, so in terms of outcomes they will look good in studies regardless. The question is, are the studies measuring everything that matters?
Exactly. I don’t see anything in Matt’s post about what it’s like for smart kids to spent years of their life being tortured by boredom for hours every weekday. It is torture for many and saying “they still get into college” just papers over years of systematic abuse.
And those kids will likely just leave systems that don't have advanced programs. That said, most of these districts are big enough to have good advanced programs at neighborhood schools.
Are there schools that offer so few advanced courses that smart students are literally “tortured” and “abused” because of it? If so, that seems like a huge problem that is completely unrelated to merit admissions at “good schools” and we should be investing a lot of resources to fix it. Why should we allow any school to not have options or resources for its high-achieving students?
Or more options and resources for all students. In my experience there are plenty of kids "tortured by boredom" who are not "smart" enough to place into advanced courses/schools, and who might benefit from other approaches to learning.
I actually think this is MUCH more important than having exam schools, which not all districts even have! There are probably bored smart kids at every school in America who are being deeply underserved by the system as it is.
But there are different levels of "success". If your only bar is "graduate college", then yeah, maybe the top kids will "succeed" no matter what. But "succeeding" by e.g. founding a successful company is a lot better for everyone than "succeeding" by having >= median income.
There are big differences at the top in both aptitude and outcomes, even though people who focus on helping the lower end tend to ignore them.
I agree. To many researchers, graduating from CUNY is the same as graduating from MIT, but I'm sure parents have a strong preference between those two outcomes.
I also wonder if these arguments are too rooted in an American context. It really is true that students compete on a global scale because the jobs of the future could root themselves in foreign countries if that's where the talent is. Yes, we want immigration for that reason, but the point still stands.
To add to Matt's point that the focus on elite institutions is misplaced, CUNY is a huge engine of upward mobility for the middle class. While graduating from MIT may not be the same as graduating from CUNY, lots more people do graduate form CUNY and attain decent incomes and lifestyles. We can keep our MITs but we should have more CUNYs too.
Absolutely. I think public universities are awesome. Basically what I'm saying is that if you told a parent of a student who was prevented from matriculating into a rigorous exam school "Don't worry! Your student will still have a successful career, but instead of going to MIT, they're going to [school with middling prestige]," they'd still be really upset!
I'm curious about whether there are differences in the rates of kids being referred for mental health services or end up being seen as a discipline problem.
I know several people who were referred for mental health services when they were just smart. Most were lucky and the psychologist/psychiatrist wrote a letter to the school explaining that what the school thought was ADD was in fact intelligence.
There also does seem to be a tendency to see normal bored smart kid behavior as a discipline problem that needs to be addressed with punitive measures when the real problem is that the kid is bored to tears. And this tends to affect black boys the worst. If these selective schools reduce either of these, then it may be a win.
This happened to my friend's kid! He was white and had parents who knew how to navigate the system, so he turned out okay, but I can only imagine what would have happened to a poor, Black boy in the same situation.
Do these highly selective schools do a good job at identifying and training those who will join the top of the elites, whether as scientists, artists or what have you? I know the general social equity question is vitally important, but I'm just curious if future Nobel Prize winners get a big benefit out of going to a Bronx Science or a Stuyvesant.
I have no idea myself.
So, I was a GATE kid in the LAUSD who tested in after a teacher recommended me in 2nd grade. I was often bored in my regular classes--I frequently finished stuff before the other kids, and I also remember that listening to slow readers try to read aloud when they were called on felt like absolute torture. But the hardest part for me, at least once I got to late elementary school/middle school, was that being smart and raising your hand a lot in class was super stigmatized in my urban public school. My life DRAMATICALLY changed for the better when my parents finally saved enough money to buy a house in the suburbs and I started at the local high school, which had some of the highest test scores in the state. I'm pretty sure this had no effect on me academically or in terms of college admission--if anything, I might have stood out much better as a top kid at a worse school instead of a pretty good kid at a top school--but it sure made a huge difference in my social and emotional wellbeing. I still look back at high school as a really happy time in my life, which is of course difficult to measure, but nothing to sneeze at.
Of course, this is anecdotal, and I'm not arguing that my personal experience should guide public policy--as Matt says, this is exactly the kind of dangerous impulse to overgeneralize from our own experiences that makes education policy so hard. I also DO care about school diversity and think more should be done to help shrink the admission gaps for these schools (just testing everyone, instead of just those who opt in or whose teachers recommend them, would be a good start). But I guess I do think that exam schools and GATE programs can provide some important benefits that go beyond academic achievement. Figuring out a way to provide those benefits to more kids would be something worth doing.
I think this is exactly right, the point of exam schools is to expand the type and level of achievement beyond what would be possible in an ordinary school. Just ask graduates of these schools. If you accept that the upper end of achievement in the exam schools isn't possible in ordinary schools (because the advanced curriculum is missing) then the interpretation about the marginal student results are completely different. If the marginal students did worse in exam schools it means that the exam threshold is probably too low. If the marginal students did better the threshold is probably too high. And if the marginal students are no better or worse in the exam school it means the threshold is set about right. So it's odd that what should be evidence of the entrance criterion being appropriately set is instead seen as evidence that the whole approach is broken.
Yeah that's what I was wondering too. I think the question's here are:
1. Is running a customized curriculum for the group of students you've isolated beneficial to them. (I kind of hope so? If the conclusion is "if you attempt to isolate the students who are doing the 'best' and teach them 'more' there is no effect", mostly that would be sad for 'teaching'. Hopefully there is some effect and it is positive...)
2. How much of that changed curriculum could or would have been taught at local schools? And is this affected by school size?
I came here to echo these two points:
(1) What about non-marginal students?
(2) Is "graduated college" the only relevant metric?
I was a very academically oriented student and spent 9th and 10th grades in a well-resourced but "normal" high school and 11th and 12th grades at a selective public magnet school. I don't think it changed my college or career path than much but as a lived experienced it was night and day.
I'm not sure what metrics to base public policy decisions in this realm, but I suspect that "whether marginal students have better college trajectories" isn't the only relevant metric.
Same! I don't think it changed anything for me w/r/t college (what WOULD have helped me was being diagnosed with ADHD instead of being labeled "smart but lazy" by teachers and administrators who couldn't figure out why I got As in most things but kept cutting math class). But anyway, socially, changing schools was a huge life-changer, and I went from having anxiety stomach-aches every morning before school because I was basically an outcast, to having a large friend group and being really happy. I met my best friend in the world because I saw her reading Pride and Prejudice on the bleachers before gym class on the very first day of 9th grade; any kid doing that at my old school would been at best ridiculed mercilessly, and at worst beaten up. But even in light of my experience, I'm not sure this is a good enough argument for more selective schools--maybe we need to work on the climate at all schools better for smart kids?
I meant, "work to make the climate at all schools better for smart kids." Apologies for my butterfingers.
I would guess that you are correct and MY is wrong about this. But still the most important take away from his post is that the decision on which marginal students get into these schools just doesn't matter very much. It is incredibly low stakes compared to the attention it gets.
The problem is that the proposals are not to change who gets in on the margin. Matt suggests ending these schools in the post (for the students own good, of course). The left wants to end the schools too (because exams are racist). Those aren’t proposals operating on the margin.
Is that really true? I assumed that the proposals would be for lotteries or various forms of affirmative action. Probably you are right in some cases.
I've spent the better part of an hour looking for these studies and I am not sure they exist. If you ever want a doctorate, you've found a gap to fill. (admittedly, I'm doing a somewhat cursory keyword search because I'm supposed to be working!)
I think the problem is that it's hard to study this counterfactual. There are plenty of places where you can find a "natural experiment" separating students who would have just barely made it in from the ones who did just barely make it in. But I think there are fewer where you can find a matched group of students who would have been top students in the special school to compare to the students who are the top students in a special school.
This is actually addressed in the Abdulkadriglu, Angrist, and Pathak (2014) paper that MY cites on Boston: "Of course, test scores and peer effects are only part of the exam school
story. ... [U]nique features of an exam school education may boost achievement in specific subject areas. Students who attend Boston Latin School almost certainly learn more Latin than they would have otherwise." The same is true of calculus, AP science, etc. If students were distributed randomly in the Boston public high schools, there would be few if any AP classes. (And many of the students who would otherwise have comprised such classes would be off to the private schools.)
Ultimately, I think MY is overreading these studies a bit: they are interesting but they don't do all that much to change my priors. If someone had asked, "Do you think the marginal student at [magnet school] is going to be benefitted all that much by going to [magnet school] versus being at the top of the class at [neighborhood school]?" I would have had answered no.
The marginal kids get the same curriculum, though.
That's not true. I attended one of these schools. There's a base curriculum that all students take, but there were also many advanced classes that students could opt into if they were ahead in a particular subject area.
For example, nearly all students took calculus. Many students completed calculus before senior year; if you do that you can take linear algebra or something next. If you're way ahead in math they offered complex analysis, which is a graduate-level math course. Maybe 3 or 4 students per year would take it.
At a regular high school, you can't offer a complex analysis course for the 1 student every 5 years who's ready for it; how would you even hire a teacher who could teach it? You can only do that if you get all the top math students from a pretty wide catchment area.
You can't offer complex analysis because virtually no high schools in the United States, including magnet high schools, offer complex analysis. I attended a highly selective university and don't think my peers in the math program were bored to tears by having to settle for AP Calculus BC, which virtually all of them maxed out at in high school, and which itself is a program too hard for 99.9% of high schoolers.
We didn't have complex analysis, but I did take differential equations and a numerical methods class, and the transfer credit I got when I went to college meant I had the entire core math requirement of my CS degree completed before I paid a single dollar in tuition money.
I had a similar experience, but this is a weird argument in favor of exam schools. Front loading work so you can have a lighter credit load in college feels like more evidence that advanced curriculum schools don't really shift outcomes.
That's... not at all the correct interpretation, nor the correct measure!
First, it didn't actually make my credit load in college easier - it would have let me graduate a year earlier (financially, a *huge* value, since it's a year of tuition + a year of wages) or in my case, allowed me to get a second major. I use both degrees daily in my job, so this is plenty of value.
Second, "outcomes" is a very vague and indirect way to measure the benefit and leads you to start questioning the "value" of a lot of things that are obviously worthwhile. For example, if you, out of the goodness of your heart, decided to order me a pizza, would that result in me being less hungry? No. But it would still be a perfectly nice thing to do and not useless. And if you had a button that could give me a completely free pizza out of thin air, that would be awesome!
We spend enormous amounts of money and time learning things in high school and college. Unless you have a truly nihilist view of all of it and think it's worthless - which seems obviously false for a class like linear algebra or multivariable calculus - teaching someone this material when they would otherwise not be learning anything at all is obviously very useful.
Having gone to one of these schools, subjectively it was hugely beneficial. These studies are a useful warning that maybe our intuitions aren't right, but I think the evidence needs to be a lot stronger before we completely dismiss the intuitions of students, parents, and teachers.
My experience was that the exam high school provided me at least three major benefits.
First, it was the only time in my academic career where I actually was challenged and had to work hard. I coasted in middle school and at a very selective--but not quite elite--university I easily coasted as well. Upon first going to high school, I had a really hard time forcing myself to do homework and it took a year or two to fully get with the program. When I entered the work force, I was able to be productive right away having learned this lesson.
Socially, it's the only time in my life where I was always a mediocre performer compared to the people around me, and I think that went along way to teaching me some humility (maybe not enough given the claim I'm making here...) that has served me well in life.
And finally, my particular school forced me to many, many presentations. I was shy and had a really difficult time with this. I was made completely miserable by it, actually. But now I am successful at a job that requires me to periodically speak to hundreds of people and present to executives. I guess I would have gotten to the same place eventually, but the practice of hundreds of presentations surely sped the process along. Maybe this would have happened at an ordinary high school, but I doubt it.
Anyway, I think it might both be the case that (a) these are real and valuable benefits conferred upon me by the exam high school and (b) they would not show up in studies like this, unless perhaps it's a thirty year study tracking full career and family outcomes.
It might be that I went to a school that was less selective than you did, but I had really the opposite experience in a lot of ways. I never was challenged and the only times that this was reflected in my grades was when I refused to even do the bare minimum of work. That followed me into college, and it was really the customer service jobs I held to help pay rent that helped me learn about working hard. It felt like for all the claims of pushing us, a good number of students weren't much better off than they would have been at a "normal" school in that respect.
I was also surrounded by a lot of people who did not have any humility at all, and the fact that many of them were blind to their privilege in terms of their parents' occupations and wealth didn't help. One thing we had to do every year was a science fair project that was supposed to last six or seven months. A lot of people knew someone from of the university labs that were nearby, and more or less hopped on as an unpaid assistant before presenting a subset of their PIs research as their own, then went around talking about the work they did on genetic sequencing at 16 (which never actually amounted to what someone in the field would consider "work"). I don't feel like I learned humility; I learned contempt and disdain for most elites because I saw them as teenagers and never wanted them in charge of printing things.
I had many classmates who were arrogant and many who were privileged, but because of the amount of coursework and the demanding pace of classes, it was clear who was incredibly smart and who worked really hard (distinct but overlapping sets). I don't think it's a matter of "less selective" so much as just a commitment from the school to push students hard.
Of course there are downsides to pushing students hard. I'm not sure if there are studies on it but anecdotally there are more suicides and suicide attempts in magnet high schools. That was true when I went and I've heard it's gotten worse.
The misguided exam school debate
Matthew Yglesias
4 hr ago
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Selective public high schools have few Black and Hispanic students — there's also no evidence these schools are any good
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Roryjust now
Once again... another subject that I love. The only benefit to gifted or exam schools is acceleration.
Raising 9 kids (5 mine, 4 step-kids)... don't judge me, and having lived all over due to the military, I have experienced multiple school systems.
Gifted programs come in two flavors... enrichment and acceleration.
Enrichment... basically you take the same course in the same amount of time (i.e. Algebra I in year), but they dig deeper (think Honors Algebra 1)... or as I like to put it... they just give you more homework.
At the end of the year, the gifted student is really no further along than anyone else, learned the same things at the same time.
Acceleration... basically you take the same course, but sped up. Think Algebra I in a semester instead of a year. These are actually useful.
An example: So last year, my 8th grader had ran out of Math courses at her Middle School. She had finished Algebra 1 in 7th grade, and they didn't have a Geometry or Algebra II teacher at the Middle School for her in 8th Grade.
Instead, they had her and two other boys sit in the Library during a period, and she took Honors Algebra on the South Carolina State Virtual Website or thing.
The course was meant to last the whole school year, but here is the thing... it was mastery based, so you could progress through it at your own pace.
My daughter finished it by Christmas, and asked me if she could take Geometry as well. I said, hell yeah... go girl power... women is Stem... so I called up the school district.
Dude... they were so resistive. Apparently no one had taken two courses in a semester. They tried to warn me that it could affect her class standing if she didnt get 100%, all sorts of other excuses.
Finally because I'm a pitbull, I got them to agree to let her enroll, but I had to get the Assistant District Superintendent to approve it.
It was a mistake... she failed miserably.
Kidding... of course she kicked ass. She had it finished by April with a 99%.
The point is, the system is set up to put the brakes on kids.
The whole experience has sold me on the value of self-paced learning those who are motivated.
Since this is best given virtually, along with mentors/proctors, anyone who had the motivation would benefit from it.
Instead of a test score to get into a school, make these self-paced courses widely available. That way if a kid didn't score some arbitrary test score, but was highly motivated, they could still choose to take the self-paced course.
One possible benefit of exam schools is availability of classes. I've had multiple kids run out of math classes to take their senior year of High School. Dual enrollment programs fix this, but it depends on access to a local college, and then there is schedule and transportation issues.
Oh yeah, if you are wondering how I found time to write this with so many kids, I have no idea. Luckily all but three are grown.
Have a great day nerds.
>>The point is, the system is set up to put the brakes on kids.
Indeed. It's an assembly line for the normative child.
Yes. I have issues on each side of the Norm. Slows down acceleration, but also has standards that might not be relevant... i.e. most not going to college, but default is college prep curriculum.
100% this.
Rory -- In very much a The Graduate plastics reference... let me just say for your daughter ... Data Science. It's a fun field with a lot of tail winds.
She was thinking biomedical engineering. But I might mention it to her.
Great comment. I experienced much of this as a military kid and my kids experienced it with foreign systems as State Department brats.
Seems to me that there should be access to the best courses from wherever. This why can’t a US-based student take higher level math or what have you from another state or country’s system?
Rory you are awesome for this. Enjoy your weekend nerd!
Thanks Tom
"attending a highly selective university is generally not beneficial except for students from disadvantaged backgrounds"
It's really hard to believe this. In my field (programming/CS), top companies tend to recruit at the top schools. Presumably this makes getting a job at a top company easier if you went to a top school. Also, people reading resumes are impressed by top schools. I assume other fields do similar things. These seem like they would produce obvious advantages to going to top schools.
You might be able to tell a story where it doesn't matter for the marginal admits who regression discontinuity usually studies. For a marginal admit, they'll be more job fairs, but the internal competition will be stiffer - and so maybe all the benefit of the recruiting will be captured by your stronger classmates. And you might stand out more at a less selective school.
But this would still imply that top students should go to selective schools. It would just be a limitation of the research, that they can only look at people who barely made it in to top schools because those are the only people with an adequate non-top-school comparison group.
Hmmm....on one hand, Google and Microsoft are going to go fishing in the Stanford CS pond because they've figured out that students who got into the CS program there have been pre-selected to be really good prospects. But...I think that that is partly because the CS labor market, particularly at the top end, is insanely competitive. My company won't go after those students at all because we can't get into a $$ arms race with the big tech companies.
On the other hand, we also hire people without a college degree at all, and we've had fantastic results. And in my career I keep meeting top performers in software who came in via really strange avenues because the field isn't that credentialed - once you've had a few years of job experience, no company that knows what it's doing cares about your educational credentials.
This all might be really different from something like law school, where the degree is a formal credentialing mechanism.
I recall reading some years ago that Google tried to track which managers made the best hiring decisions. Of the whole study, they found only one manager with hiring talent, and even that was due to some unique reasons. Hiring is really difficult and finding unique gems outside the traditional channels really great but not easy.
My friends in tech assure me that having a degree from a big fancy university is a flag for "lifestyle programmer", the lowest rung in the tech hierarchy ladder.
I am in tech, and this is false. Obviously so? Going to a better rather than a worse school helps you get a good job, because better schools produce better graduates (largely through selection in admissions). How would that even work, that going to a better school would be lower status?
What might be true is that *among* the most successful people, not going to a fancy university is a good sign, because it means you must have done something really impressive - probably harder than getting into a top school - to be so successful. But that's just because of the selection effect of only looking at very successful people; most people who go to worse schools are not among the most successful.
Yes, tech not being so credentialist is great! I credit technical interviews for that; you can measure merit in a credible-enough way to swamp the difference between a good and bad resume. (Possibly the field just being new is a bigger effect? Not sure)
But that just suggests its even more important to go to good schools in other fields, the opposite of what the post is claiming.
The post is discussing high schools, not colleges.
I quoted a sentence (discussing colleges) from the post at the top of my comment...
(I also find it implausible that selective high schools have no benefits, but that seems harder to prove)
I haven't dug into the studies cited in the post, but I assume the author has and is accurately relaying their conclusions.
Yeah, I mean, you can make a case that education has no effect at all, like Bryan Caplan does. I don't deny that there is some evidence for that view, but it just has to be misleading evidence. My suspicion is that good schools are like antidepressants: they have mixed results for many people but very positive results for a good-sized sub-population, which makes causation difficult to measure.
Also, it does seem likely that disruptive peers have negative effects on outcomes: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22042#fromrss
I tend to believe that a good chunk of education is Caplan-style signaling but it does seem to go against so much lived/observed experience, its always a bit jarring. I also came across also this meta-review by Stuart Ritchie, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797618774253).
I like your antidepressants analogy. My own mental mode is that education is probably something similar to the gym. I can't stretch my way to 6 feet but I can definitely train my body to perform better on certain physical tasks.
Yeah, I think the discontinuity studies are interesting, but you're right that they aren't the final word on the total impact of these schools. I think Yglesias is right that the stakes of these debates are lower than they seem, but his more Trollish point of getting rid of exam schools isn't necessarily supported by them.
For starters it's not nothing that the kids seem to enjoy going there more than other schools.
It's definitely not nothing that the kids that go there enjoy it quite a bit more. But we also need to wonder whether the large number of kids that don't get there enjoy their high schools a little bit less once these other kids have been taken out.
Pointing to the Lowell-to-Stanford-to-FAANG pipeline as evidence for the utility of super-selective public high schools and colleges rather than a validation of the most extreme form of the case against them is... certainly something you can do, but I wouldn't advise it.
(I always enjoyed, in the inevitable Degree Dicksizing conversation that would quickly come up among any set of newly-met google employees, casually volunteering that I was a high school dropout.)
(I said "pipeline" but honestly I really meant "circle jerk" and should have gone with my first instinct there.)
Not saying that's why they're good, just saying there's probably an effect (the post claims no effect).
They are good because having strong peers is good (also one of the most commonly cited benefits to working at Google).
You're assuming that the relationship works in one direction: google is successful because it hires a ton of stanford grads and putting an ever-larger bunch of stanford grads together keeps the company successful.
Having worked there I would like to offer an alternative hypothesis: a bunch of stanford grads started a company (a frequent enough occurrence) which became wildly successful (much less frequent) and they kept hiring more stanford grads because they felt like it and there was no impetus to look further afield. Then the entire industry saw the insane amount of money they were making and cargo-culted their HR practices. (Ironically including a bunch that Google itself no longer uses.)
For what it's worth, I also used to work there.
Are you saying that Stanford CS majors aren't any better than the average CS major? This seems obviously false (mainly because Stanford gets their pick of the best CS applicants) Or that Google having better rather than worse programmers working there is not helpful to them?
Obviously there are plenty of good programmers outside the top schools and arguably tech recruiting should be less credentialist and look harder for them, but the basic logic of "we want to hire the best programmers; let's recruit at the best schools" does make some sense.
Hey, Googler party here. Probably the best Staff SWE I've worked with over 9 years at the company went to.... Hillsdale, the kooky right-wing college. He has a bit of a chip on his shoulder that he tries to hide thanks to our culture of credentialism.
Oh, and all the scandal around diversity at the company? People openly shitting on HBCUs? 100% downstream of filling recruiting goals by taking as many elite school grads first and everyone else second. (Of course that would never be a formal recruiting *policy* but it sure seems like the recruiting *culture* based on what folks have tweeted lately!)
I'm not an ex-googler, but I worked at a tech startep founded and staffed mainly by ex-googlers, particularly in the HR dept.
The "culture of credentialism" was a real thing there and it blew my mind with how awful it was. I would never argue that degrees don't matter at all, or that all-else-equal an elite school isn't better than a less selective one, but credentialism can easily be taken way too far and it really hurt the company and was about as societally regressive a culture as I can imagine.
I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that strong candidates can come from any school but that the candidates from elite schools are likely to be better. And the recruiting idea to focus on those elite schools make sense; it's easier to find talented people where talent is dense. But it also makes sense to worry Google etc. are too credentialist right now.
Personally, I hope LeetCode style online assessments become an alternate path into interviews; you've gotta prove you're good somehow, but going to an elite school shouldn't be the only way. One great thing about programming is the possibility of computer-graded skill assessments in a way that just isn't possible in most fields and IMO should be able to make hiring more meritocratic.
Yes, I am saying that I have never seen any reason to expect that Stanford CS majors are better in any measurable sense -- more productive, faster to solve hard problems, better at working in teams -- than anyone else I've worked with in this industry.
They certainly do seem more prone to _believing_ in their own superiority though.
All the people you worked with passed the same hiring bar, so it makes sense that they would have similar skills. But if you didn't have a hiring bar at all, it would be obvious that Stanford CS majors are better than CS majors at random schools.
This is certifiable, Stanford students come from the same pool and are of the same quality as like Dartmouth or UChicago students (statistically they're weaker than the latter), and receive roughly equivalent CS education, and the tech industry doesn't have a huge fetish for Dartmouth degrees. It's obviously just sociological, historical accident plus geographic and social proximity, not merit.
Sidenote: I'm loving that Dartmouth is the poster child for shit-tier Ivy in this discussion, because this first-gen college student turned down a Yale acceptance (and didn't apply to Stanford) to get a Dartmouth CS degree.
Source that Stanford students are weaker than UChicago students?
I think Stanford students are stronger. I don't have any direct evidence for this belief, but I think the following argument is strong: many students apply to both, and the ones who get into both tend to go to Stanford because it has a better reputation.
I certainly hope U of C now has an equivalent CS education to other top schools, as the classes I took in '88 to '90 focused on using Lisp.
Anecdotally, a coworker who went there about a decade later also felt it was wanting. Meanwhile, the grad level classes I took at Illinois Institute of Technology in the aughts were excellent.
If Google, et al is indeed using credentialism to substitute for skill, there's a lot they're leaving on the table.
May I interest you in the signaling model?
https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp/0691174652
Read it; enjoyed it. But of course the signaling model suggests there are real (private) benefits to going to the top schools, for exactly the recruiting reasons I mention. The post is claiming there aren't benefits.
The article Matt links is a bit less straightforward than "no benefits". It's saying that attending highly selective school isn't all that much different from attending one that is merely selective in terms of income. This would be your ivies compared with, say, Duke or USC or Virginia Tech even. The differences in income over the long term between groups of students who graduate from these two kinds of schools are minimal. That doesn't mean going to a good school is the same as going to, like, community college. I think he's trying to make a larger point that we spend a lot of time and energy debating (even in SCOTUS) about admissions to top tier schools (high schools and postsecondary) rather than caring about the rest of the schools. It's an opportunity cost kind of thing.
One issue is value added. To what extent do top rated schools just do part of the screening while adding no more of the value added than a lower rated school. Another is the regression discontinuity technique. Another is maybe really good student s DO benefit (in a value added sense) from going to a top ranked university/exam high school
The study cited there says that's only true for people who were accepted to the highly selective schools and went elsewhere. So you're basically comparing an average student at Stanford to the very best student at UCLA (or wherever fits, I don't really know the field). That makes sense to me, intuitively.
Unless they specifically looked at tech, it'd be easy to imagine that any tech-specific industry effects got washed out by other industry practices.
OK, but "recruit at top schools" and "be impressed by resumes from people who went to top schools" are not very tech-specific ideas. Doesn't every industry work that way?
No, I don't think they do! Tech and finance, basically. If you're one of the many, many white-collar jobs that want a college degree basically as a proxy for some basic intelligence and work ethic, do you care a lot about whether someone got their BA in English from Dartmouth or their BA in Art History from UCLA?
You don't because Dartmouth and UCLA are both super highly selective (UCLA may actually be more difficult to get into today). The better question is whether you care if they go their degree from UCLA or SF State. There you might. Mainly because of the signaling but the signaling matters.
Matt, would have you had the same experience if you didn't go to Harvard, but was instead just the smart kid at Florida state?
I think part of Matt’s reply would be that Harvard is not scalable, thus tweaking the admissions to fit whatever new criteria arises won’t impact most college bound youth.
Matt’s biggest point isn’t really getting rid of exam schools or fine-tuning GT programs. It’s the opportunity cost of obsessing over schools that will only ever serve a small number of students while the rest of the system goes off the rails.
Right on the money. We get so tunneled into debating topics that affect a very small group of people, that we often forget the biggest sin is not being on the wrong side, but that we are even wasting our time and energy being in the debate in the first place, There is a real and tangible opportunity cost when we focus on the wrong thing.
The focus on improving the education of the broad majority would have been maintained better if it were not put in the context of how educating smart kids separately is socially ineffective and not really worth doing.
It is likely that these topics get the most consideration because they mostly impact the elites who run our schools, government, and media. Good on Matt for pushing against that!
Matt is discussing how to educate the general masses and what's best. The weak point is that most people reading him want to discuss the education of the elite, because that's the struggle of his readers.
No doubt the Harvard credential was incredible important to Matt's start in blogging and Facebook getting its start.
I think you've nailed the head on this comment section. In my reading, Matt's point was these exam-based high schools, empirically, don't provide as much common good as would this energy focused on improving all schools. But what I've been reading in the comments sort of misses the point; many are declaring that they, as the most advance student, indeed received common good. I'm absolutely positive they did, but top tier education in America is not the concern. This comment section proves we are in a bubble here.
I've audited school districts and seen those that need"...dumb stuff like putting [in] air conditioners." Those kids (and school workers) probably don't even know the world of elite exam-based high schools. But they are also in the US. They don't necessarily needs more money or funding. They need reevaluation of teaching programs and new approaches to work with the local neighborhoods to inspire success in all students. And yeah, probably a function school building with working air-condition units.
We need to be putting brain power to these issues, rather than splitting hairs on whether smart kids enjoy being taught.
I agree that way too much attention is paid to these elite schools--like, why do I, in Southern California, know the intricacies of these local fights happening in NYC and SF? But I don't think that "whether smart kids enjoy being taught" is totally irrelevant for society. In terms of equity, I've seen studies that show that smart Black and Brown kids aren't being identified and recommended for GATE programs and the like at the same rate as other kids (Matt referred to this in the article). Identifying and nurturing these kids could help close racial wealth gaps 10-20 years down the line. For society as a whole, identifying and nurturing smart kids can have huge benefits if those kids end up being future scientists, judges, entrepreneurs, etc. And I also think it's just callous to dismiss the emotional and social wellbeing of ANY kids, even if they happen to have the advantage (which they didn't ask for) of being smart.
I also wonder whether seeing and knowing that plenty of kids who look like you are getting into exam school and gifted programs would help even the minority kids who don't get into these programs do better and enjoy school more. I remember reading a study that said that Black kids do measurably worse on standardized tests when they are reminded that they are Black before the test; I think this is referred to as "stereotype threat" and comes from internalized racism. So I suspect that knowing that Black kids in your district were testing into the good school or the GATE program in reasonable numbers would potentially have a positive effect. You could achieve this in different ways, one of them being universal testing and maybe even universal free test prep, which would erase some of the advantage more privileged kids have. But I think that while it's MORE urgent to fix things like kids going to school hungry and/or having no air conditioners, finding and developing smart kids is something schools should be doing more of, not less.
Ok, and I do want to caveat this by saying that there was a lawsuit here in California about 15 years ago where parents sued the state because their school was in such bad shape, and the facts of that case are absolutely wild and completely unconscionable. I'm talking broken-down buildings, rusted playground equipment, hallways flooded with sewage, unusable bathrooms, cockroach infestations, leaking roofs, a shortage of textbooks and chalk, substitutes instead of regular teachers for most classes, and LITERAL RATS BITING THE CHILDREN in class. The school was basically 100% Black and Latino, and the best example of systemic racism I've ever heard of in my life. So I absolutely think there are urgent issues in the educational system more deserving of immediate attention than whether Stuyvesant should have an entrance exam. I just wanted to add that because I've spent a lot of time on this comment thread arguing that how smart kids are educated matters (and it does! especially to me), but it's definitely a both/and rather than an either/or situation in my mind.
Harvard is weirdly distinctive - as someone who went to Stanford, I'm always amazed at how much my friends who went to Harvard are talking about being in classes with people that I keep hearing about in the news (whether the names being dropped are Matthew Yglesias or Pete Buttigieg or whatever).
When they reach a certain age, they start talking about people they "went to Harvard with" and didn't even overlap there in time. All Harvard alumni went to Harvard together, it seems. Literally, I was talking to a guy the other day who mentioned he went to Harvard with Tyler Cowen. This guy graduated in the 70s and Tyler when there for his PhD, not undergrad. It's a weird school full of weird tropes like "when I went to school in Cambridge MA". Just say the name!
wow, I did not expect that to trigger me so much...
Hahaha, the "I went to school in Cambridge, MA" thing is so true!
I say this as someone who did not go to Harvard and also finds it incredibly annoying.
This San Francisco State grad has always taken great glee in firing graduates of writing programs at Harvard, Yale and Stanford for the crime of being illiterate, untalented morons.
He said the same rules don't apply to colleges, likely due to different network effects.
I'd say in addition to network effects the credential itself has more value... while I'm sure there are prep school snobs that have hired on that basis, I've never seen anyone list their HS on a resume.
Saw someone list Boston Latin on their resume a couple weeks back, but it was striking enough to remember.
It may be that for poor high school age kids and lower, the confidence-building and college admissions benefits of being the big fish in a small pond outweigh the benefits of informal learning cultural learning though exposure to more privileged peers, having one's perspective and aspirations broadened, etc. But that's an assumption these studies don't appear to address.
Here's my experience ... If I'm out with an FSU grad, it's gonna be a good night. A Harvard grad, less so.
Top law schools (minus Yale) are completely agnostic on where you went to undergrad in admissions, they just care about GPA and LSAT, and as a result they (except Yale) have tons of kids from flagship and even directional state schools who generally do not turn out to be behind the large cohort of Harvard College grads in any way.
Yale Law, on the other hand, scandalously and transparently takes like 50% of its students from the seven Ivies, and among them has a particular preference from Yale and Harvard. It also doesn't have grades, making it hard to compare its students, so they compete on networking. Unsurprisingly it's probably the WASPiest institution in all of elite America.
Competitive colleges give minority students the “pedigree “ needed to open the doors to better jobs and careers.
Right. It just doesn't ring true that there's no benefit from taking a poor kid out an environment surrounded by limited perspectives. Speaking from personal experience, going from a hohum small town high school to a college where students came from all over the world, some of them very privileged, was an eye-opening experience that's just not even comparable to what I would have had if I'd gone to the state college an hour from my hometown.
I'm not a super woke person, maybe call me half-woke? But I also don't get mad about it usually... when friends complain about the leftist woke mob, the most you'll usually get from me is an eye-roll and a "I know some of it's dumb, but it also doesn't really matter, does it?"
That said, the Gabriela Lopez interview made me insane and I'm furious that you linked to it, Matt. She's completely gone.
I think an undercurrent of this post that Matt doesn't quite come out and say is that if we shift focus back to broader efforts to improve schools rather than win symbolic values, we will see that the woke emperor has no clothes.
*win symbolic victories*
Gen X? :)
Whoops, accidentally deleted that comment somehow. But not quite — though almost! I’m an old Millennial, right on the border.
I'm largely in agreement with our host here, so I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent.
Let's stipulate that even contra the statistical evidence, super-selective public high schools like Lowell and Stuyvesant (and Philadelphia Central, Ann Arbor Community, Boston Latin etc) are a net benefit to their students.
WHY ARE WE NOT MAKING MORE OF THEM?
Stuyvesant has a _3%_ admissions rate. Even granting the frankly dubious premise that any random student in the New York public school system who was interested in the task could not manage the coursework at Stuy given adequate support, it defies belief that _only_ those 3% are capable of doing so. In fact, given that Stuy will happily offer spots to previously-excluded freshmen when a kid from the incoming class moves or decides at the last minute to go to a different school, we can safely conclude that nobody in the school administration believes that either: quite obviously there is a wide tranche of students who by any measure are qualified for the program but who had to be excluded for the simple reason that there wasn't space for them.
This is the logic of an exclusive restaurant: there are only 20 tables available per night, no more and no less, and the cachet of being one of the very few to be there is just as much of the appeal as the food and wine. But that's an insane approach to take to primary education. The model here shouldn't be the French Laundry, it should be McDonalds: we know what works and what people want, so just sign up as many franchisees as possible.
A single-digit admissions rate at a public school isn't a sign of success, it's a screaming indicator of dismal failure: if there are ten times as many kids who desire and are capable of doing the Stuyvesant curriculum than there are spaces at Stuyvesant, the solution is to _build more Stuyvesants_ or turn existing schools _into_ Stuyvesants. The textbooks exist, the lesson plans exist, there is absolutely no magic here: just give them to more teachers.
"WHY ARE WE NOT MAKING MORE OF THEM?"
You can't. What makes the schools great is the great students. If you build more of them, they will have to settle for the less-great students and will be less-great. It's not a money issue.
In NYC at least, Stuyvesant isn't better-funded than other schools. It gets as much per-student funding as every school in the NYC school district. The reason it's one of the best high schools in the country is that the most talented kids in NYC are extremely talented.
Also as a postscript: the fact that Stuy's nominal per-student budget is the same as other NYC's high schools is a sham and a dodge. Stuyvesant's alumni association manages a multi-million dollar endowment and fundraises aggressively for the school, as do the alumni of Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech and the rest.
And that's not even counting the capital cost of their new building, which at $150MM in 1989 was the most expensive public high school ever built.
If you assume that the limiting factor on making More Stuvesants is the supply of teachers capable of teaching the curriculum well and engaging with students, then you probably need to allocate radically more money to teacher salaries, in order to incentivize more people to pursue teaching. Right now, that supply of good teachers is limited to only the people who love teaching so much that they'll do it despite systematically bad pay and constant attack by a right-wing political machine.
This of course also goes to one of Matt's hobby-horses -- the job should be much better paid, and perceived as higher status, while also being less of a sinecure, so people who do it _badly_ can be pushed out. But even with that kind of reform, you're almost certainly going to have to spend a TON more money on salaries, if you want to attract enough really good teachers to open a dozen more high-performing schools.
This, incidentally, might be a contrast with the situation with universities. From what I can tell, there is actually an over-supply of people who would like to make a living as teaching faculty, and even do it pretty well. Teaching courses is ridiculously under-valued compared to getting papers published (many of which are irreproducible crap).
No. And no.
This is my exact point: even if you assume that _some_ students can't hack the Stuyvesant experience, it's complete insanity to assert that _only_ the students who are admitted can.
Nearly 30,000 students apply to Stuyvesant every year. That's already a self-selected group of academic high achievers: there are over a million total students in NYPS. Of those 30,000 applicants, _800_ are admitted as freshmen.
Let's make the completely unlikely and unsupported assumption that 2/3rds of those applicants would not be successful stuyvesant students. That still leaves NINE THOUSAND, TWO HUNDRED students who could have gone there successfully but did not, and were excluded on essentially arbitrary grounds because there were only 800 seats that could be filled.
This is not a case of excluding "B" students to focus on "A" students. This is taking a huge group of "A" students, picking a random one out of a hundred of them and saying "fuck off, loser" to the remaining ninety nine.
It's just wrong to think of "hack the Stuyvesant experience" or "be successful Stuyvesant students" as a binary variable. Achievement is continuous.
You could build more exam schools in NYC (and in fact they have; there are 7 other schools that use the same exam results as Stuyvesant to admit students) and that would be great. But you shouldn't expect as good results as Stuyvesant, because the main variable is the students, and the best students already went to Stuyvesant. But you'll still get great results, because the next most talented group of students in NYC are also very talented. You could (and maybe we should) keep doing this, and just completely assign people to high schools by exam score. But they wouldn't all become as good as Stuyvesant; you would just see a steady degradation in student accomplishment as the schools became less selective.
Absolutely not. The 800 students that Stuy admits are not the _best_ of the applicants either considered as a step or continuous function. They are an essentially arbitrary subset of a larger (potentially much larger) group of qualified students.
The New York Specialized High School Scholastic Aptitude Test is a 114-question test scored at 0 to 800 points. In 2020, the lowest score admitted to Stuy was 566. Even if you were to make the insane assumptions that the SHSAT is a not only _perfect_ indicator of scholastic quality but that single-digit score differences are significant, the facts remain:
- the low score cutoff changes year to year because there are only 800 seats available
- the number of applicants means that there are students with the _same_ score as the lower bound who are not admitted because of space
Was the 2017 freshman class (low score cutoff: 555) was in some small but qualifiable way worse than the 2018 class (low bound: 559)? Were both subtly worse than the 2020 class (low bound: 566)? If all of the students with a score of 566 in 2020 moved away, would the quality of the class be harmed by admitting the student who scored 565?
Obviously not and you'd be laughed out of the room for asserting any of that. But if you don't believe those things, the counterpoint becomes very obvious: there are many students who would by _any_ measure be good Stuyvesant students who are not going there for entirely arbitrary reasons.
Hell, Stuy's own history makes this laughable: the new building in battery park city added roughly a _thousand_ seats vs the old 15th Street location. Did the circle of "the best" students in NYC suddenly expand by a thousand in 1989, or was Stuy simply able to accommodate more of the existing pool of high achievers?
Bam. This is the correct take, and it applies to universities too. See Canada for an example of a place where the most selective universities serve ~40,000 students instead of ~5,000 while still retaining prestige and quality educational and career outcomes for their students.
Too many binaries here. It doesn't need to be "perfect" to not be "essentially arbitrary". "qualified" is not a "yes or no" thing. There's not circle of "the best" students, just a slowly ascending gradient of quality. You're pretending that everyone is the same above some cutoff, and that doesn't make any sense.
All I need is that the test is a noisy measure of scholastic quality. Then you get (slightly) better results by admitting the top students.
There's nothing wrong with adding more slots or schools or the slightly lower-scoring students, but you should expect that the new school won't be as good.
The test is different every year so its not clear the scores mean the same thing. But yes, small differences in scores are probably significant, and yes, the class would be probably be (very slightly) worse if they admitted someone with a score of 565 instead of 566.
When Stuy expanded, they accommodated more strong students, but the marginal newly added students weren't as good as if they'd stayed more exclusive.
All of this falls out easily from imagining student quality as continuous (which it obviously is?) Why are you so insistent that it must be categorical - that either you're a "high achiever" or you aren't? Obviously the cutoffs are just arbitrarily lines, and the students are either side are very similar. But that's totally consistent with students getting less and less similar as the score differences between them get larger. They won't be much difference between 566 and 565, but there will be a noticeable difference between 700 and 400.
It can be true that minor differences in the distribution of test scores in a cohort of students are significant and useful for assembling the "best" student body.
It can be true that minor differences in the distribution of test scores are not meaningful in comparing the quality of different entering classes.
But _both_ of those things cannot be true, and the latter is much more likely than the former. Believing the former requires ascribing perfect accuracy to an admissions test devised by the New York City school system and if that idea doesn't strain your credulity a I don't know what to tell you.
And if you believe the latter, it is _axiomatic_ that there are students who are not being admitted who would be just as "good" as the students who are, and therefore would be just as well served by a Stuyvesant education, and they are being denied admission for reasons that have nothing to do with their quality and everything to do with the size of the building.
If expanding Stuy adversely affected the quality of the student body, you would expect to see that reflected in _some_ useful measurable quantity such as their college admissions rate. Needless to say, this has not happened.
QED: There's nothing magical about the size of Stuy's freshman class. It's the number of available seats in the building modulo their target teacher to student ratio. We should expand or franchise the program until we find the actual limit, which we are presently nowhere near. This is a _public_ high school: its mission is to serve the public of New York City. If people want exclusivity for exclusivity's sake, let them pay the $60,000 a year for Philips Exeter.
The idea that the people currently admitted to Stuy are necessarily the best N students is just laughable. You honestly think our testing protocols have such precision? Come on. It seems like a certainty that among the top hundred people excluded, many if not most would also thrive at Stuy, and many would even end up out-performing some of the people that got admitted.
I would believe that you can't fill _ten_ Stuyvesants with similar-quality students. But two or three? Yes, absolutely you could.
I don't think that's a tangent. I think that's Matt's main point.
>>The real problem here (along with mangling the history of the Penobscot Expedition) is that every day spent having basically symbolic fights is a day you’re not spending doing real evaluations of whatever programs your city has in order to see which of them are working and which aren’t.
That a lot of commenters would prefer to engage in changing the window dressing is very telling. Both sides of the selective admissions debate would rather have that debate than do anything useful for most students.
I think Matt's point also encompasses the questions of "would there be any benefit to selective-admissions schools even if there were a seat available for everyone who qualified?" and "is the massive coursework load at these schools of any benefit to the kids in the short or long term?" and he proposes (and i agree) that the answer is somewhere between "doubtful" and "absolutely the fuck not" but I think that's a much harder sell vs everyone's default intuitions about how "good schools" are supposed to operate.
you can do this with magnet programs, IB programs, etc. within normal schools. it works well and should be expanded. With IB in particular it basically is a franchise model like McDonald’s.
however, these programs are not quite on the level of Stuyvesant and company. I couldn’t tell you why. There is some magic that seems to be hard to reproduce.
Speaking as somebody who graduated from a fancy-name college, and went on to have a quite remunerative career, my feeling is that a large chunk of the magic _is the name_ -- seeing a top 10 school on somebody's resume does help get recruiters to put you at the top of the list. But a much larger chunk is the network -- "it's not what you know, it's who you know." I got introductions for internships at major companies through my professors. That kind of network is _hard_ to replicate, but not impossible.
I had opportunities as an undergrad to join professors' research teams as a research assistant, and I worked in different labs each of soph/jr/sr years. The school's history and stature meant it had good relationships with those big companies, and they actively sent recruiters to campus.
I don't believe there was anything _magic_ about the quality of instruction, though it certainly was good -- for the field I ultimately went into, for my first few corporate jobs, I got to study with the guy that had basically invented the field (like, he used his own textbook for class, because _everyone_ uses his textbook to teach that subject, and always has). But the fact that he was also an excellent teacher and mentor is kind of a matter of luck -- there are a ton of brilliant, prestigious professors, who are _terrible_ teachers.
In any case, there are great research teams at public universities, too. Perhaps we could use federal policy to encourage the development of this sort of college-to-workplace pipeline for public universities. (Some of them, like UC Berkeley and U MD College Park, do this quite well already.)
I grew up in the Ann Arbor area, but I don't remember Community High School having competitive merit-based admissions. I didn't have any close friends there, but it had the reputation at the time of taking an alternative approach to education.
I was a "gifted" student in public schools. A problem I faced was boredom, arising mainly from the need to educate the less rapidly-learning majority. I had a few "accelerated" classes (especially math) where the quality of teacher, the content of the subject, and my own competencies meshed, and these were transformative for me and a number of my friends. I don't think this can be dismissed as "maybe programs for AG kids might help underprivileged children of special abilities," since I wasn't underprivileged. My story represents a tiny minority of the school population, but the lesson might be important, since on average the very best students make outsized contributions to society.
Right. As a parent with a bored 9 year old who already knows more math than he needs to for the next few years, if someone offers me an educational option that _seems_ less wasteful, it's going to be nearly impossible for me to not go for it, and an efficacy study isn't going to override what's going on with my kid in front of my nose.
Results from most educational studies are dominated by majority populations, and effects in small minorities are numerically swamped and effectively hidden.
"The same Barrow, Sartain, and de la Torre study cited above showed that...they subjectively enjoyed their high school experience more."
I've said this before, but SUBJECTIVE ENJOYMENT MATTERS. For high-school students, high school is *their actual life*, happening at a formative moment in their life, and nobody's clamoring to give them other options. Teenagers are people. People like interesting classes and peers that share their interests. We should care about this regardless of whether it improves test scores. It's not that complicated.
...And also, if the students did enjoy their experience more, maybe your first suspicion should be that they're correctly detecting something about its positive life impact that the measures in your study are missing...not that you, wise economist, must know better than them?
I just finished leading a class discussion 20 minutes ago on a paper that claimed workshops in the sciences have no benefit because the participants didn't publish more papers in the next couple of years (among other ways they "tried" to measure an effect). And they specifically called out subjective surveys as useless because participants cannot evaluate themselves properly. Yeah, we tore that paper apart.
The problem with most of the studies is that they're really only obliquely focusing on the actual benefit of selective high schools, GT programs, etc., which is that they advance attainment of *knowledge* in time, sparing kids from wasting time in classes where they are learning nothing.
For the same reason, a GT program or selective high school should not really take much more resources to run than a regular high school, because the primary value add is concentrating enough students in one building to be able to offer advanced classes.
I went to Northern Virginia's tech magnet and it gave me a lot of benefits that would never show up under these measures. In particular, because I was there I was able to take, after calculus, multivariable calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, and numerical analysis. That's two years of coursework I was able to do before college, freeing me up to take more advanced courses sooner (and thus at a minimum saving me tuition money!) None of these classes would ever show up in any math aptitude test like the SAT or even the SAT 2 (which only goes up to Algebra 2 / Trig, which I had already taken before high school). The classes weren't designed to increase my math aptitude, which at that point was as realized as it was going to get. They were designed to teach me actual useful information, much of which I use daily in my career.
The only reason I was able to take these courses was because of the existence of a selective high school. When I took it, I think the differential equations class only had one section, and they actually had a professor from a neighboring college to come in to teach it. That's twenty-odd individuals who would have had to either bus themselves individually to the local college or not take math that semester, in the absence of a magnet school.
I don't think there's any good reason to not provide this service when there is a clear benefit and it doesn't really cost more money.
I’m a high school math teacher and my district only has one high school, so while this is interesting to read about, it doesn’t directly apply to any questions we face.
It does have parallels to an issue we debate frequently, which is whether or not we should have an advanced math track. The school has gotten rid of tracking in all subjects except for math. We are very racially diverse and have a very large (largest in the nation I’ve heard?) racial achievement gap. The racial sorting that happens between advanced math and standard math (which is college prep and totally fine) is extreme. Many want to get rid of advanced math all together, but there is a powerful voice in the community demanding to keep it. This voice is very privileged and mostly white.
I am interested in evidence based takes on this issue that can help move the conversation in a constructive direction. I’m curious what of these studies Matt and the community think might apply to this specific situation, or if there are others about the benefits or lack thereof of tracking math at a high school.
Maybe there is not much point in yet another person-who-majored-in-math-in-college with the obvious personal biases screaming NO NO NO NO NO on here, but I'm going to do it anyway because I can't stop myself. NO NO NO NO NO. Obviously not all students benefit from learning the exact same math at the exact same time. I don't even care if it ultimately doesn't affect test scores. The point of math class is to learn math, not just to take tests, and different students at different points in their lives should be learning different math. Maybe you can promote equity by a stronger culture of allowing students to move between lanes easily and flexibly and providing extra prep for students who are interested in doing so.
If it helps, I am someone who did not major in math in college and did not take advanced math (at least not advanced relative to the school) in high school. I am happy I did not join my friends in advanced math, as I was never a particularly good math student--it never interested me and I'm not particularly good at calculation. Being in the non-advanced math was a little weird socially (since all my friends were in advanced), but it kept math from being an encumbrance on my time and grades. I ended up a lawyer, so feel free to make "haha lawyers are bad at math" jokes.
I actually was a lawyer before becoming a high school teacher. I found my training as a math major to be incredibly valuable for law school. We mostly wrote proofs, which are just legal briefs with more rules.
Oh, absolutely, I'm sure. But pure mathematics is a little weird there; I think the prototypical "math heavy" major isn't even math itself so much as engineering or one of the hard sciences. (I say this as someone dating and living with someone who got a degree in education policy, hated it, and is now going back to school for engineering; her delight in calculus is completely alien to me). I suspect pure math majors have more of an abstract/philosophical focus than the bulk of people whose majors have a heavy math focus/use math a lot to do something else, and most of the people I knew in high school taking advanced math were in it for the science applications. (My high school was about 30% children of Asian immigrants, mostly highly educated ones who came to work in engineering, industrial research, or medicine; my classmates mostly wanted to do that.)
Is that a kind of joke people make?! I considered law too, so I never would...especially since it seems to me that the kinds of abstract problem-solving you do in math and law are not without similarities.
Yeah, though tbh it's mostly a joke we lawyers make about ourselves. There's a lot of talk about "lawyer math" when we get to talking about numbers (by which we mean money).
Generally speaking, the law attracts a lot of people who were bright but for whom math wasn't their strong suit. You're right that the abstract problem-solving of math is somewhat similar to legal reasoning--and speaking for myself, it was the abstract, conceptual parts of math I did best at. It's calculation (not just arithmetic but also stuff like solving for x and whatever) that lawyers like to joke they can't do.
(Also, while legal reasoning can be very abstract, most lawyers' actual work lies primarily in negotiation and persuasion--very different skill set.)
Ah, I see. The funny parallel is that mathematicians *also* joke about being bad at calculations (as opposed to abstract thinking which is what we actually care about)! Mathematicians going out to dinner together (in the days when we could do that etc. etc.) always loudly proclaim their struggles with splitting the check.
(And how much time do we spend actually doing math, and how much time do we spend trying to convince others that our work is interesting? Ehh...)
It's funny, my husband--who studied astrophysics at Caltech before ending up a lawyer--always says he doesn't think I can actually have been "bad at math" because I'm good at abstract reasoning and did well on the LSAT. It's made me wonder when and why I decided I was "bad at math" and whether it was actually just that I was uninterested in math. I suspect a LOT of generally bright people who think they're bad at math just never found that spark of interest in the topic; after all, a lot of mastery is about enthusiastic practice! By the same token, I wonder whether the reason I thought I was "good" at English is just because I developed an early love of reading and therefore ended up a strong reader and writer. I think our culture and educational system tend to over-essentialize people into either humanities people or math/science people, and we're probably all the intellectually poorer for it!
Really interesting how many negative, seemingly emotional reactions this post is getting. And none of them offering any objective insight to the problem, as I requested. I'm curious if those of you posting to tell me what a terrible idea this is had the same reaction to the content of Matt's original post. The two issues are not the same, but they feel similar enough, which is why I brought it up in the comments.
I really appreciate Matt's rationalist approach to policy (that's specifically what I'm here for) and would like to reiterate my desire for that philosophy for rule any discussions we have about this topic.
I think we're willing to entertain the notion that exam schools are not especially beneficial for those who go them. But part of the logic in entertaining that is that some of the benefits can be devolved to the individual schools, e.g., specialized classes. And now you're saying that no, actually those advanced classes should be taken away too. So the needs of the smart kids apparently don't matter at all. They'll be fine anyway, right?
Speaking from my own experience, I couldn't get enough math in high school. If you told me that I couldn't have calculus, AP chem, etc. because it makes some kids feel bad, I would have been miserable. In fact, I probably would have just left a couple years early and gone to college instead.
Yes, but...maybe grade acceleration (such as leaving early for college) is the correct answer for being insufficiently challenged students? As someone who took some college classes in high school, I thought that worked out very well.
Shoshanna never said "So the needs of the smart kids apparently don't matter at all. They'll be fine anyway, right?". She just asked whether *tracking* is the right answer to their needs. (TBF, I think that a lot of people are reading that into her post, which is why she's getting such emotional responses from this readership.)
I also took a college class my senior year, but only because we were lucky enough to have a university in our small hometown and the four of us could get two periods off to drive over there for it. For many kids, leaving for college at 16 or 17 is not practical.
I'll admit, I don't know what tracking is; I assumed it just means putting kids into more or less advanced classes as their ability and desire dictate. And I was definitely triggered by the proposal (I realize it wasn't by her!) to get rid of advanced classes altogether, which seems absurd to me.
Yes, this topic is kind of triggering for people!
This is tragic. I hope your district keeps advanced math so that the students who are best at math can continue to get an education that matches their abilities and interests. Even "privileged" people deserve a good education.
Sorry I don't have a more constructive response.
My initial response here wasn't in any way constructive. I'll just say ... wow. Had no idea tracked math was an issue these days. As a tracked math nerd that's generally just such a bummer. I read this as such a perverse way to close an achievement gap ... just take the top off. Good luck here. I do not envy the situation you're in.
I went to this same high school 20 years ago and took advanced math and had a very rich intellectual experience there and went on to major in math in college. It was personally transformative for me. A lot of my resistance to the idea of getting rid of it comes from projecting my own experience onto the situation. It’s very hard to weigh that against science and policy goals. I need someone to make an objective argument about what we should do.
I'm sincerely interested, this is the first I've heard of this ... what is being debated or proposed? Like - they just wouldn't offer a Calc BC class anymore?
This strikes me as an interesting, difficult question. Empirically, does eliminating tracking benefit lower-performing students, perhaps boosting their self-expectations and interest in the material through sharing the class with high-performing students? If so, is it a drag on the learning process of high-performing students? From a utilitarian POV, there is an argument for finding a trade-off which would somewhat sacrifice the high-performing students’ interests – but it would be deeply frustrating to the high-performing students’ parents.
On the other hand, maybe integrating the two groups is a win-win insofar as both groups benefit through participation in a shared classroom experience?
Almost certainly, though, the non-tracked class wouldn’t be able to cover as much advanced material as a tracked, advanced class.
I think this is a good summary of the dilemma. We often discuss the possibility of optional extra work that would lead to preparation for Calc BC, but delivering a curriculum that differentiated all at once is extremely difficult.
Has there been any discussion about changing what the math curriculum is? I mean in the sense of teaching statistics instead of trig or calculus. I was good at both of those subjects in high school, but never took them in college and don't feel like I missed anything, even though I did a lot of software development in my career.
I taught myself to code, and while I probably wouldn't get hired by Google, I can do the vast majority of software development jobs and never need anything more than algebra. Statistics would've been useful too given how many metrics business use (and as a general rule use badly).
We’re a big high school, so we offer a lot of options for students in their senior year, including statistics. But state standards require we offer math 1,2 and 3 to all. I think we should get rid of the math 3 requirement for exactly the reasons you state, but it’s a matter of state law.
Actually I didn’t state that accurately- they don’t have to take math 3 (similar to
Algebra 2) but they do have to take three years of the math sequence. Some have to repeat math 1 or 2 so never get to math 3. They still graduate but this isn’t ideal obviously.
The reasoning is that segregating out the most advanced students from the regular classes deprives the remaining students of the contributions those students bring to class culture. Having fewer students in a class who always do their homework, try the challenge problems, etc. will negatively impact everyone in the class. Adolescents are very sensitive to peer behavior, and we end up with classes where enough students are putting in a low effort that it becomes the norm, and everyone follows suit.
"Having fewer students in a class who always do their homework, try the challenge problems, etc. will negatively impact everyone in the class.". Sorry, I just can't believe that peer influence works this way. It is not symmetrical. Maybe it's just my particular experience, where low effort went together with high status. High-status kids are not influenced by low-status smart kids. But maybe it's different in your school.
How many years have you been teaching high school?
Assuming the answer is 0, and if I’m wrong I apologize, I think this is a perfect example of a problem Matt identified which plagues educators who try to advocate for... pretty much anything. Everyone has an opinion about how school should be run because everyone went to school, so they think they understand how it works.
Fellow teacher here. Plus one to this.
And, if you’re advocating for any policy improvements that you want to stick, you have to convince parents and citizens who have their opinions and experience and prejudices, just as I do. “I’m a teacher and you’re not” is the opposite of persuasive.
I was hoping to hear your point of view about peer pressure from your point of observation as a teacher. I guess you didn’t take it that way. Too bad.
You were? I just read an explanation of why I was wrong. That’s kind of the opposite of being curious, FYI.
More importantly- I am not actually advocating this point of view. I’m unsure what to do, which is why I asked if there was any evidence based recommendations. I see good arguments on both sides of this one. The post you responded to was just me repeating an argument for getting rid of tracking that I thought was valid. But I’m definitely not here to advocate for one side or another.
My school experience was of being mercilessly bullied for being a "teacher's pet" because I was praised for getting good grades on my tests and turning in my homework on time. I literally developed gastritis at one point that the doctor said was from emotional upset. I had nightmares every Sunday night before school. So while I am sympathetic to the argument that having higher-performing kids in the same classes as lower-performing ones, I also get a bit triggered by these kinds of proposals because I don't understand why the higher-performing kids--who are still children, after all!--should be the sacrificial lambs here, and why their wellbeing is somehow implied to be less important than the wellbeing of other kids.
I'm not saying you're doing that, Shoshanna! And I'm really glad you're posting here, because this is super interesting. But I suspect you're talking to a cohort of people who are kind of predisposed to have emotionally intense responses to this discussion because of memories and experiences from our own childhoods.
My experiences were like yours. I think research is predisposed to the greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number thinking which tends to devalue the abundant experience of participants. A little good for a lot of average kids (even below the threshold of being noticed) is deemed to be worth a lot of harm to a few smart kids. Consideration for the needs of smart kids then must be “justified” by large benefits to the wider society, and when this is not found, the conclusion is that this consideration is not warranted. The same standard is not applied to disadvantaged or difficult kids who are deemed worthy of more and more resources on ethical grounds, simply because they need it.
This is right on. We need more win-win approaches to equity and fewer negative and zero-sum ones, which don't actually benefit anyone and actively harm even the people they are supposed to be helping by creating fewer opportunities. Like, even if there are only two Black kids in the advanced math class, those two kids are going to be worse off if the school gets rid of it! Not to mention all the other kids, who may be white and/or privileged, but who are still children who shouldn't be punished for something they aren't at fault for.
The issue with the selective high schools is not academic but behavioral. The incredible hurdle of the testing and the burden of the commute is assurance that when all is done, the kids who make the arbitrary cut are by definition kids whose parents really care about education, and are going to be with other kids whose parents also really care about education.
Even if my smart kid could do well in another type of academic environment, as a parent I would feel there to be a developmental benefit in being in an environment where everyone is on board in really valuing education. I would appreciate that assurance, and I wouldn’t care to much about offering up my kid’s life up to a broader social end. Selfish, yes, but parents will die for their children, so participating this socially imperfect system would just not be a heavy lift for me. And there are lots of people who feel that way in this country. That’s the reality that policymakers must take into account if they want to change the system. They have to build on, not tear down.
The fact that there are many more gifted and talented children out there, especially Black and Latino children, who are being missed and are not being served by the current selective system is just ample reason for establishing many more such institutions, at all levels, selected by more effective means, and that they should be established in black and brown neighborhoods so the students don’t have to commute unreasonable distances. Those institutions will be racially segregated given the size of the city and its residential patterns, but if the smart kids of color thrive in them, what difference does that make?
Many people suggest that grouping high-capability kids doesn’t matter. I disagree with this, and my view comes first from personal experience of being a good student in an egalitarian culture (white, Midwestern) that that did not value education, and how I had to struggle with that even while excelling academically. It informs my perspective that the developmental and cultural aspect is as important as the academic aspect that is focus of the studies. And maybe establishing more G&T programs would help urban educators to concentrate on (and being accountable for) teaching ordinary and difficult students more effectively. If so, that would be a major social benefit. We already know how to teach smart kids.
In New York where I live, professional- and middle-class parents trying to use the public schools have a very narrow path to tread in the system. And it is not because they object to black and brown children in the seats next to their kids. They do object to the behavior of the poor students that would isolate and far outnumber their kids in the average public school. But most of all they object to the complete inability of the City public school system to manage educational and social needs that are so disparate, and to serve those children whose parents who really care about education.
The “common school” idea works when there is some level of homogeneity and community consensus (think of the one-room schoolhouse with the bell, the historical symbol of our American democracy). Suburban schools work on that basis, they force commonality through the real estate market at various income levels and reflecting the various norms of the families. But big cities have always had different types of education for different classes and types of people. The test schools are remnants of what used to exist in all big cities and were innovative in that they provided public support for a type of education previously accessible only to well-off people who could afford exclusionary private schools or tutoring at home. In that sense, they are also part of American democracy. Two schools in a city of 8 million are not a bad thing to preserve.
Hi Rock_M,
"I disagree with this, and my view comes first from personal experience of being a good student in an egalitarian culture (white, Midwestern) that that did not value education"
Here's my counter-factual question: it sounds like you had to put up with the annoying-to-you (and maybe not beneficial or harmful) experience of being in a peer group that wasn't uniformly studious. What was the effect in the other direction? Did your fellow students benefit from having you around in terms of setting the tone for how 'everyone' approached school? If you had been separated out with a few of your peers for a different school, how would that have affected those who were left behind?
(I think you can argue that for two schools in an entire city, the affect of the isolated students on the rest of the student body is very, very diluted. But then, do we play the same argument with the top N% of the remaining students and ask if giving them their own environment would help them? Within a high school, sometimes classes are academically tracked.)
Interesting question. My response is that I don't believe in that proposition at all.
I don’t think my peers (other than my friends) even knew of my existence or would have given a damn even if they had. The dominant culture valued athletics and social skills, so the wider school population knew all about and were influenced by the people who excelled at those things. The smart kids had no visibility except to our teachers and to those who would mock or bully us. So I find it hard to imagine the mechanism by which merely existing in a school as a studious minority is going to affect the majority, negatively or positively. Maybe through athletics or schoolwide activities but even those might achieve more by being done out of school, in a club environment that potentially mingles different people outside of their group environment at school.
Maybe the question should really be whether regular kids would benefit from being in a school with enough high-achieving kids to set a tone. But that causes different problems. So I say, just give the smart, average, and difficult kids what they need, and not worry too much about what are effectively theories of social change. Smart kids come from all social groups and classes, they are not some magical species that will solve our educational problems.
BTW I had significant experience with being put in groups with “regular” kids and bad actors on the grounds that my studiousness would rub off on them. In practice I did all the work and had my work stolen by these fellow students. It was very harmful to me, and did not harm them at all. I did not learn to respect them, and they did not learn to improve or to respect me. This informs my point of view, for sure.
I think I can also answer the question, because Rock_M's description of his background matches my own very closely. Just as one example, of the 4 kids on my middle school "math team" one kid's step-father used to throw away his math books so he wouldn't be a "nerd". Another one of them was expelled after stabbing a kid in the neck with a screwdriver who had been bullying him, but I digress.
Taking out any of the academically-oriented kids would have hurt the rest of them, of course. But it would have been much, much better for the kid who was given the greater opportunity. And I don't think it would have had any effect on the majority of kids who didn't really care much about school beyond sports or socializing.
Of course you can take this argument too far and you might end up with an overly-tiered system. But to me, these Magnet schools I hear about in big city districts sound like an amazing opportunity for kids who want something different than the bulk of their peers.
Inclined to agree but wonder the degree to which your/their conclusions are driven by experimental design. Regression discontinuity design relies on outcomes for marginal students on each side of the test score cutoff. These schools may be a wash for these students but may potentially be beneficial for higher performing students. Easy to see that being the case, just as it’s easy to see it not being the case
Some level of sorting seems necessary once you hit around 7th grade, even if it's just sorting kids within the same school. At that age the distribution of math and reading skills is just too wide for a single curriculum to make sense. What does the literature say about within-school tracking (e.g. honors/AP math, history, english, etc...)? That's probably a more common pattern than separate G&T schools.
[I replied to the duplicate that got deleted so I'll copy it here]
The research says that it works as intended. All the kids who have poor academic performance get tracked into academically "low" courses while kids who have high academic performance get tracked into academically high courses. Critics will correctly point out that this sorting happens along race and class lines and maybe successfully argue that it's yet another form of exclusion from rigorous curriculum. So, the challenge becomes locating kids who are presently excluded from these kinds of tracks but who would benefit from being in them. The research isn't really clear on how to make that work and some think we should just scrap it altogether and try something totally different.
Or am I misunderstanding what you're asking?
I'm mostly interesting in the impacts of tracking on student outcomes (short-term outcomes like standardized test scores as well as longer term outcomes like college graduation). My prior is that tracking is good for higher performing students and maybe also for lower performing students, though I'm less sure about that. I could be wrong, though, and I'm not familiar with any studies on the topic.
What I'm getting at is that I'm much more skeptical of attacks on tracking than attacks on separate G&T schools. It's not clear to me there is much benefit to attending Stuyvesant versus taking honors classes at a neighborhood school. But some form of tracking seems inevitable if we want to maintain the idea that students should be taught at a level that matches their abilities. I am open to alternatives to tracking, especially if they have some evidentiary basis, but I'm skeptical. It just seems like a bad idea to put kids who are 2-3 grade levels apart in the same classroom.
I think one key area where T&G programs as well as other advanced academic tracking programs depart from the discussion of selective high schools admissions is that tracking schemes rely much more on teachers or school faculty. Matt points to one example of this in his post and it's more broadly studied, especially T&G programs. For example, Grissom and Redding (2016) document that black students, even with with high test scores are still less likely than their peers to be in T&G programs. https://doi-org.tc.idm.oclc.org/10.1177%2F2332858415622175 . Klopfenstein (2004) argues that taking advanced placement is best predicted by income, thus it's mostly middle class and up who take them. https://doi-org.tc.idm.oclc.org/10.1016/S0272-7757(03)00076-1 . Corra et al. (2011) looked at a school system with an open enrollment policy around AP classes and found black kids still took those classes at way lower rates, suggesting it's more complicated than tracking alone would explain. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41341104 .
Now, these aren't outcomes so let's look at the outcomes.
G&T courses are good, especially for minority students:
https://doi-org.tc.idm.oclc.org/10.1257/pol.6.3.30
https://doi-org.tc.idm.oclc.org/10.3386/w20453
Participation in an AP course while in high school increases students’ exposure to highly qualified and motivated teachers and probability of attending a 4-year university:
https://doi-org.tc.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/j.1745-3992.2011.00219.x
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41064460
Having spent some time searching this morning, I am surprised to find that so much of the literature is based around what are essentially satisfaction surveys. Kids say they like these kinds of programs and they generally feel good about participating in them. Parents say they like these kinds of programs and they generally feel good about their kids participating in them. There is a subset of this research (Dweck and her folks) that points out being in these programs can stress kids out if they feel too much pressure to perform, but that's the only real dissenting strain I saw in my quick look.
Interesting. I should clarify that I'm not wedded to any particular method of assigning students to tracks. At my public HS it was largely based on standardized test scores, but I doubt that's true everywhere. We should definitely be critical of tracking methods that discourage talented minorities from taking honors classes.
Oh hey, this just came across in my feed:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w28194
>>We estimate the longer-run effects of attending an effective high school (one that improves a combination of test scores, survey measures of socio-emotional development and behaviours in 9th-grade) for students who are more versus less educationally advantaged (i.e., likely to attain more years of education based on 8th-grade characteristics). All students benefit from attending effective schools. However, the least advantaged students experience the largest improvements in high-school graduation, college-going, and school-based arrests. These patterns are driven by the least advantaged students benefiting the most from school impacts on the non-test-score dimensions of school quality. However, while there is considerable overlap in the effectiveness of schools attended by more and less advantaged students, it is the most advantaged students that are most likely to attend highly effective schools. These patterns underscore the importance of quality schools, and the non-test score components of quality schools, for improving the longer-run outcomes for less advantaged students.
Like most things, we know less about it than we ought to.
Nice post.
Don’t have time to do the research, but I thought a lot of the studies that basically said “Hey parents, don’t sweat the parenting details as much because they don’t have much long term impact on your child.” Stated that peer group effects were more important (except in cases of gross neglect/abuse)?
So parenting doesn’t matter, AND peer group doesn’t matter?
Also I thought there was data showing minorities moving into better neighborhoods after the fall of redlining showed their children were helped a great deal by the new environment? I assumed the main reason was the schools… is it not? Or is it that there is a big difference going from awful school to average school, but just not much going from mediocre to “great”?
I'm wondering about this too. I really appreciate Matt's point that we should spend our time evaluating the existing evidence to see what works for outcomes, and see where there are gaps in understanding where we can do more studies. But, if peer effects are so important for children's development, it seems weird that peers at their school don't seem to matter. The literature here just seems at odds, so I'd want to know more.
imo it's because peer effects are really a proxy for other things. When you measure peer effects, you are really measuring something else that's hard to control for in your data analysis. I don't know that there is good evidence about what specific things it may be a proxy for, at least not yet.
The SAT is a good example. Your score on the SAT is best predicted by your family's income and education levels. This is part of why people criticize the SAT as being biased. But that's only partly correct because what's really going on is that the SAT is a proxy for all kinds of inputs that make you do better on tests. Sure, intelligence is one of them. So is eating breakfast before you test. But we have one measure and it gets all the attention. Matt would say, let's feed kids more breakfast and put some AC in their classrooms.
So, back to peer effects. We have really weird data with peer effects that puts them all over the place. When I see these inconsistent findings, I think it means we have a really bad conceptualization of what peer effects actually are, how they supposedly accumulate, what the important components of a peer group are, and so on. The data and the concept just aren't good enough to generate the kinds of conclusions we want to draw.
Thanks, that's a great point on peer effects likely being a poor concept, and that explaining why it seems to give us weird data/results. Honestly, in my head the idea of "peer effects" seems ill-defined, and could conceivably be any influence that isn't environmental (e.g., lead), parental, or genetic. So, leaves the door open for it to be lots of things. Seems like disaggregating that and sharpening up our concepts could lead to more fruitful research.
I have known a few teachers at the NYC selective schools, and it's even a joke among them that nobody knows if they are good or bad teachers. The students will do great no matter what in terms of college admissions, grades, etc because they are such a narrowly selected slice of the overall student body.
The selective high schools in NYC won't be going away any time soon. They are massively popular among Asian immigrant families. I lived in Queens for many years, and the tutoring places would pass out flyers on the street with pictures of awkward, smiling Chinese and Bangladeshi American teens and the schools they tested into.
There are also robust alumni networks for these schools that don't want them to change. It's sad, but it's not that rare to encounter somebody in their 40's or 50's that makes sure you know real quick that they went to Hunter or Stuyvesant.