Article makes totally legit points about the efficacy of these schools, but at the same time there is a tone of animosity towards these 'exam schools' that is hard to understand. It's a pretty big leap to go from 'schools not having a measurable effect on test scores' to 'not any good/not worth going to'! Points about efficacy and best overall system/sorting are well taken, but dubbing the entire debate 'chattering class navel gazing' is a very unsympathetic take on parents and community members who understandably focussed on educational excellence. And this coming from a Dalton grad no less! (Dalton with very similar admissions systems as 'exam schools')
Seems flimsy to try to file this whole debate with the school names issue because they are both happening simultaneously in one city. Unlike names this is actually a substantive issue, whichever side you land on.
I attended one of the 'exam schools' mentioned here, and had a good experience. I suppose referencing my educational experience, and not being an academic, makes me persona non grata to Matt. However, I will say that I've thought about this issue as all these schools have been roiled by the same controversy. Where I've landed is that I think we should abolish these schools as existing now, because I think we need less elite gating steps in our society, not more. Up-or-down decision for 14yr olds to access an elite academic resource for the next 4 years is a bit crazy. Instead, I think we should take the advanced courses and labs offered by these schools and make them available to advanced students from all regional high schools based on interest and performance at various levels--a more fluid and accessible iteration of what a Lowell represents.
But I wouldn't castigate these schools or those that care about them. IMO a greater percentage of people who went to Lowell speak positively about their experience there than your typical high school grad. Doesn't that count for something?!
I teach at a selective high school in a large urban district in the midwest. We don't use exams for admission, but we do use grades, writing samples, and interviews with students. So I felt very invested in Matt's post. I'm a little biased, of course, because I like my job, and I think we do good things for the students.
But what are these things? Many people correctly pointed out here that the learning environment is crucial. Here's what Barrow, Sartain, and De La Torre say:
"Overall, students admitted to one of the selective enrollment high schools have a better high school experience in terms of relationships with peers and their personal safety, and we do not find evidence of differential impacts on students from low- and high-SES neighborhoods..."
So if I told you I had a school where your child will be more safe and have better friends, but might be slightly less likely to score high on a standardized test or get into an "elite" college (whatever that means), would you want your child to go to that school? Parents are answering with their feet, and they don't need a "fuzzy regression discontinuity design" to tell them the right answer.
The fact that students admitted to selective schools from disadvantaged back rounds might not "do better" academically should not obscure the fact that many selective schools have a less chaotic atmosphere. We need to focus on improving All Schools and find ways to channel disruptive students into better situations so All Students can have a decent experience at school.
I’m a late arrival here. At age 8 I was removed from my working class grade school into an all day program for students with IQ greater than 120. 1966. It made all the difference in my career because on day one we went into the School Mathematics Study Group math series. First day of fourth grade we learned what a set was. Fast forward 14 years and I graduated engineering school. I can’t imagine what life would’ve been like if some pretentious liberal asshole had complained that our racial composition didn’t reflect the nation at large. F that.
Astute takes. One minor point of contention: can we stop using the word “equity”? It’s a cult word that politicians are using as a dog whistle to the postmodern woke. And it doesn’t have an easily legible meaning. If we mean equality of outcome or representation, we should just say that, as it’s a more precise and less politically freighted word.
It’s interesting to me that this discussion wants to be about science, about focusing on why the system can’t seem to raise the achievement of average kids or especially how to educate poor kids on the necessary mass scale, but it stubbornly comes back to the question of exam high schools and smart-kid education generally. I think the reason for this is that the issue really comes down to a conflict of values. An educator might be focused on the average kid based on the value of having everyone be equally treated. A parent, on the other hand, might care more about the value of honoring and reinforcing achievement. Science can’t tell you whether it's right to sacrifice the interests of smart kids to improve the lives of average kids (or even not to improve them). It depends on your value system.
Leading off by referring to high-performing schools with high-achieving students as “elite” schools whose students are “privileged” is not making a scientific statement, it is making a values statement. It says that the speaker has already made up their mind that this kind of education is undeserved, and worthy of elimination for that reason alone. Science that seeks to prove that it is also ineffective by some measure just becomes a handmaiden to the politics.
The deployment of research that argues that losing that kind of education is “not that bad” for the smart kids and benefits the average kids, comes perilously close to the Lake Wobegon creed:” “who do you think you are? You’re not so smart. You’re just like the rest of us”. Researchers might more fruitfully explore how this egalitarian value system relates to the mediocrity of American education, rather than worrying excessively about the existence of a minority of smart kids in separate learning situations, who are doing just fine and should be left alone.
There's been some discussion here of G&T "Gifted and Talented" programs. A good book from a few decades ago, "Gifted Children: Myths and Realities" by Ellen Winner, suggests very top students ("truly gifted") are almost never well served by school systems and should ideally be skipping many years. The notion, these students could go to school and not be bored, is fantasy. Of course, the larger a population, the larger the number of students at the tail of a distribution will be. And some communities will have overwhelming numbers of students with very highly educated parents. But those are tail environments, not modal ones, and one can't evaluate school systems by their tails as if the whole USA is one system and everyone can be sorted in it. School systems operate within the constraints one can find by looking at the Raj Chetty datasets of opportunity regions. The answer for a top student is not to improve the school system, but for their family to move to a opportunity region fitted to the student, or for the student to supplement their education via libraries or Internet study.
This is one of the saddest subsets of public discourse. Almost no one cares about data, everyone retreats to their prior culture-war factions, and the wealthiest students tend to have an escape hatch, so you never get the Milton Friedman style middle class advocates (and if you do, it's more of a cranky show like those UWS parents apoplectic at the possibility of school integration). The mainstream ideas are very backward looking, and are not properly applying the multitude of new, low-cost, and free tools we have for much better knowledge-sharing.
I am 74 years old. That is important only in that it is a measure of how long I have been hearing these arguments. I have long since tired of the pious assurance displayed by the current reformers on both the left and the right. Whatever is tried nothing seems to change. Learning seems to happen when a student believes in him or herself and a teacher believes in the student. It is beautiful but difficult to replicate in mass. Yet in all our schools both the "failures" and the "successes" it is happening every day.
The opposition to selective public schools is rooted in envy of Asians. If Asians did not make up such a high percentage of them, they would not be controversial.
Strong words, well-considered. I'd go further. There's ample work on peer effects that suggest that depriving schools of their top students by segregating them in other schools hurts achievement of students remaining.
So you think the Wire Season 4 showing that tracking the problem students for intensive intervention with improvements for the whole class was in fact incorrect?
I just can't imagine this is true. It may be a correlation, but I've never heard any halfway plausible theory of causation. Where's the mechanism? At least in big schools, there are so few top students and they are marginalized by the majority, who get to control the character of the school based on what they think is important (which is not grades and academic achievement). I doubt the remaining students would even know the top students were gone.
I'm curious about applying to the "abolish exam schools" idea the same test that Matthew has applied to the "trade schools should be emphasized more" idea. Would the chattering classes prefer to send their own children to a middling nearby school compared to a selective top high school?
Anecdotally, my most privileged peers at Google in the Bay Area actually wanted to avoid the very top schools for their children (assigned purely by geography, not tests) because they were concerned about the environment being too stressful for minimal benefit. It's interesting to hear based on exam school studies that they seem to have roughly the right idea about picking high schools.
Not an educator here, but have some thoughts. The merit system certainly has some flaws insofar as equality goes, not the least of which is the fact that many quite famous people who have advanced degrees from various noted universities seem seriously lacking in reasoning ability and the general knowledge and approach to thinking that a Liberal Arts education can give a person.
Next is the amazing ability of money to buy almost anything in the US and elsewhere. People can buy their way into the university of their choice apparently. Money can buy private tutors. And of course money can buy a lifestyle that includes proper diet, health care, and inclusion.
Another problem is the reality that people born into a certain socio-economic class have an advantage from the beginning in other ways. If they have access to a quality educational system they benefit. Children whose parents read the 'right' fairy tales and other books in the language of the country to them from an early age, children who have an early exposure to powerful literature (e.g., The King James Bible or Shakespeare), to newspapers and other material with writers who know their stuff, children who face certain expectations from the beginning, all of those have an advantage. Not only is their linguistic ability enhanced, but all written material carries an education, for better or worse, in logic, reason, social codes, social mores, self-presentation, and a host of other benefits. Parents coping with substandard wages, a lack of language facility, inadequate housing, barriers to social inclusion, and rapacious employers and financial institutions, etc., are struggling for survival and are not in a position to provide what is needed.
These are all benefits and advantages that could be made available to all children, but are not. They are available on the basis of how much any society or government is willing to invest in them and how high or low the expectation of a particular demographic of children is. That investment is made on an unequal basis. Sticking with an education system that does not make allowance for all of this is willful negligence and perhaps illegal under various constitutions and human rights acts.
There is just not a powerful-enough argument in favour of the existing system to conclude that it should be maintained. What is the point of losing children who could find augmented joy just in living and who might make tremendous contributions to the world?
The arguments against change seem to me to be straw men mostly. "Would you want to end up with a doctor who couldn't pass the high school finals? etc." I cannot see any reason why, given that equal playing field, today's disadvantaged children would not turn out with pretty much the same breakdown of passes and fails as the privileged white population.
As for the Oriental success stories, teachers I know who have taught in China remark on the difference in the students. They want to learn, they know they have to do well, from government down through society, community, and family, they are motivated. And obviously have the natural material to get ahead with. Some say they are pushed too hard. But some of our students are not encouraged strongly enough and know early on that no one cares, no one expects much of them, and they don't just drop through the cracks, they are born in a chasm.
As for the Tech side of things, it might be a hopeful sign that most children seem born with a smart phone in their tiny hands. That might make a huge different in abilities and opportunities going forward.
Forgive me for indulging myself here and meandering. Am trying to grasp an issue that is not my usual field of study or interest.
Off-topic-in-absence-of-Friday-open-thread: regarding Matt's tweet "At the other end of the second dimension, there is an Antisquad of four young members elected in the 2018 midterm wave who are also near the middle of the pack on the first dimension. It's weird." I have chatted with (and volunteered for) Harder. His district is 50/50, with lots of low-information / marginally-attached voters in the D half. He assiduously brands himself as bipartisan, holding weekly meetings to which all are invited and noisily co-sponsoring legislation with Rs. So that position in the diagram may be evidence of his **symbolic** moderation (pick unimportant / uncontroversial bills that aren't progressive to support) rather than his strategic goals.
Regression discontinuity is a very weak form of evidence, the outcomes are insanely sensitive to modeling choices made by the researcher. If you can't see the break by naked eye, it's almost certainly too hard to actually study reliably in practice. Having gone to both poor-ish public schools and very nice private schools I find this all completely unconvincing.
If nothing else, it's a real kindness to concentrate the top students together so they aren't bored and bullied.
Article makes totally legit points about the efficacy of these schools, but at the same time there is a tone of animosity towards these 'exam schools' that is hard to understand. It's a pretty big leap to go from 'schools not having a measurable effect on test scores' to 'not any good/not worth going to'! Points about efficacy and best overall system/sorting are well taken, but dubbing the entire debate 'chattering class navel gazing' is a very unsympathetic take on parents and community members who understandably focussed on educational excellence. And this coming from a Dalton grad no less! (Dalton with very similar admissions systems as 'exam schools')
Seems flimsy to try to file this whole debate with the school names issue because they are both happening simultaneously in one city. Unlike names this is actually a substantive issue, whichever side you land on.
I attended one of the 'exam schools' mentioned here, and had a good experience. I suppose referencing my educational experience, and not being an academic, makes me persona non grata to Matt. However, I will say that I've thought about this issue as all these schools have been roiled by the same controversy. Where I've landed is that I think we should abolish these schools as existing now, because I think we need less elite gating steps in our society, not more. Up-or-down decision for 14yr olds to access an elite academic resource for the next 4 years is a bit crazy. Instead, I think we should take the advanced courses and labs offered by these schools and make them available to advanced students from all regional high schools based on interest and performance at various levels--a more fluid and accessible iteration of what a Lowell represents.
But I wouldn't castigate these schools or those that care about them. IMO a greater percentage of people who went to Lowell speak positively about their experience there than your typical high school grad. Doesn't that count for something?!
I teach at a selective high school in a large urban district in the midwest. We don't use exams for admission, but we do use grades, writing samples, and interviews with students. So I felt very invested in Matt's post. I'm a little biased, of course, because I like my job, and I think we do good things for the students.
But what are these things? Many people correctly pointed out here that the learning environment is crucial. Here's what Barrow, Sartain, and De La Torre say:
"Overall, students admitted to one of the selective enrollment high schools have a better high school experience in terms of relationships with peers and their personal safety, and we do not find evidence of differential impacts on students from low- and high-SES neighborhoods..."
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/app.20170599
So if I told you I had a school where your child will be more safe and have better friends, but might be slightly less likely to score high on a standardized test or get into an "elite" college (whatever that means), would you want your child to go to that school? Parents are answering with their feet, and they don't need a "fuzzy regression discontinuity design" to tell them the right answer.
The fact that students admitted to selective schools from disadvantaged back rounds might not "do better" academically should not obscure the fact that many selective schools have a less chaotic atmosphere. We need to focus on improving All Schools and find ways to channel disruptive students into better situations so All Students can have a decent experience at school.
I’m a late arrival here. At age 8 I was removed from my working class grade school into an all day program for students with IQ greater than 120. 1966. It made all the difference in my career because on day one we went into the School Mathematics Study Group math series. First day of fourth grade we learned what a set was. Fast forward 14 years and I graduated engineering school. I can’t imagine what life would’ve been like if some pretentious liberal asshole had complained that our racial composition didn’t reflect the nation at large. F that.
Astute takes. One minor point of contention: can we stop using the word “equity”? It’s a cult word that politicians are using as a dog whistle to the postmodern woke. And it doesn’t have an easily legible meaning. If we mean equality of outcome or representation, we should just say that, as it’s a more precise and less politically freighted word.
It’s interesting to me that this discussion wants to be about science, about focusing on why the system can’t seem to raise the achievement of average kids or especially how to educate poor kids on the necessary mass scale, but it stubbornly comes back to the question of exam high schools and smart-kid education generally. I think the reason for this is that the issue really comes down to a conflict of values. An educator might be focused on the average kid based on the value of having everyone be equally treated. A parent, on the other hand, might care more about the value of honoring and reinforcing achievement. Science can’t tell you whether it's right to sacrifice the interests of smart kids to improve the lives of average kids (or even not to improve them). It depends on your value system.
Leading off by referring to high-performing schools with high-achieving students as “elite” schools whose students are “privileged” is not making a scientific statement, it is making a values statement. It says that the speaker has already made up their mind that this kind of education is undeserved, and worthy of elimination for that reason alone. Science that seeks to prove that it is also ineffective by some measure just becomes a handmaiden to the politics.
The deployment of research that argues that losing that kind of education is “not that bad” for the smart kids and benefits the average kids, comes perilously close to the Lake Wobegon creed:” “who do you think you are? You’re not so smart. You’re just like the rest of us”. Researchers might more fruitfully explore how this egalitarian value system relates to the mediocrity of American education, rather than worrying excessively about the existence of a minority of smart kids in separate learning situations, who are doing just fine and should be left alone.
There's been some discussion here of G&T "Gifted and Talented" programs. A good book from a few decades ago, "Gifted Children: Myths and Realities" by Ellen Winner, suggests very top students ("truly gifted") are almost never well served by school systems and should ideally be skipping many years. The notion, these students could go to school and not be bored, is fantasy. Of course, the larger a population, the larger the number of students at the tail of a distribution will be. And some communities will have overwhelming numbers of students with very highly educated parents. But those are tail environments, not modal ones, and one can't evaluate school systems by their tails as if the whole USA is one system and everyone can be sorted in it. School systems operate within the constraints one can find by looking at the Raj Chetty datasets of opportunity regions. The answer for a top student is not to improve the school system, but for their family to move to a opportunity region fitted to the student, or for the student to supplement their education via libraries or Internet study.
Skimming through this discussion, perhaps a few survey articles on peer effects would help. Here's one: "Peer Effects in Education: How Might
They Work, How Big Are They and How
Much Do We Know Thus Far?" by Bruce Sacerdote, Dartmouth College and NBER, 2011. From Handbook f the Economics of Education, vol 3, Elsevier https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/4312837/mod_resource/content/0/Cap.%204%20HEE%20-%20Peer%20Effects%20in%20Education.pdf
This is one of the saddest subsets of public discourse. Almost no one cares about data, everyone retreats to their prior culture-war factions, and the wealthiest students tend to have an escape hatch, so you never get the Milton Friedman style middle class advocates (and if you do, it's more of a cranky show like those UWS parents apoplectic at the possibility of school integration). The mainstream ideas are very backward looking, and are not properly applying the multitude of new, low-cost, and free tools we have for much better knowledge-sharing.
Status quo here is really grim.
I am 74 years old. That is important only in that it is a measure of how long I have been hearing these arguments. I have long since tired of the pious assurance displayed by the current reformers on both the left and the right. Whatever is tried nothing seems to change. Learning seems to happen when a student believes in him or herself and a teacher believes in the student. It is beautiful but difficult to replicate in mass. Yet in all our schools both the "failures" and the "successes" it is happening every day.
The opposition to selective public schools is rooted in envy of Asians. If Asians did not make up such a high percentage of them, they would not be controversial.
Strong words, well-considered. I'd go further. There's ample work on peer effects that suggest that depriving schools of their top students by segregating them in other schools hurts achievement of students remaining.
So you think the Wire Season 4 showing that tracking the problem students for intensive intervention with improvements for the whole class was in fact incorrect?
Right, it’s probably truer than the slanted pablum that gets foisted off as documentary.
I just can't imagine this is true. It may be a correlation, but I've never heard any halfway plausible theory of causation. Where's the mechanism? At least in big schools, there are so few top students and they are marginalized by the majority, who get to control the character of the school based on what they think is important (which is not grades and academic achievement). I doubt the remaining students would even know the top students were gone.
I'm curious about applying to the "abolish exam schools" idea the same test that Matthew has applied to the "trade schools should be emphasized more" idea. Would the chattering classes prefer to send their own children to a middling nearby school compared to a selective top high school?
Anecdotally, my most privileged peers at Google in the Bay Area actually wanted to avoid the very top schools for their children (assigned purely by geography, not tests) because they were concerned about the environment being too stressful for minimal benefit. It's interesting to hear based on exam school studies that they seem to have roughly the right idea about picking high schools.
Parents are very exercised in parts of New Jersey because the public schools have become incredibly competitive.
Not an educator here, but have some thoughts. The merit system certainly has some flaws insofar as equality goes, not the least of which is the fact that many quite famous people who have advanced degrees from various noted universities seem seriously lacking in reasoning ability and the general knowledge and approach to thinking that a Liberal Arts education can give a person.
Next is the amazing ability of money to buy almost anything in the US and elsewhere. People can buy their way into the university of their choice apparently. Money can buy private tutors. And of course money can buy a lifestyle that includes proper diet, health care, and inclusion.
Another problem is the reality that people born into a certain socio-economic class have an advantage from the beginning in other ways. If they have access to a quality educational system they benefit. Children whose parents read the 'right' fairy tales and other books in the language of the country to them from an early age, children who have an early exposure to powerful literature (e.g., The King James Bible or Shakespeare), to newspapers and other material with writers who know their stuff, children who face certain expectations from the beginning, all of those have an advantage. Not only is their linguistic ability enhanced, but all written material carries an education, for better or worse, in logic, reason, social codes, social mores, self-presentation, and a host of other benefits. Parents coping with substandard wages, a lack of language facility, inadequate housing, barriers to social inclusion, and rapacious employers and financial institutions, etc., are struggling for survival and are not in a position to provide what is needed.
These are all benefits and advantages that could be made available to all children, but are not. They are available on the basis of how much any society or government is willing to invest in them and how high or low the expectation of a particular demographic of children is. That investment is made on an unequal basis. Sticking with an education system that does not make allowance for all of this is willful negligence and perhaps illegal under various constitutions and human rights acts.
There is just not a powerful-enough argument in favour of the existing system to conclude that it should be maintained. What is the point of losing children who could find augmented joy just in living and who might make tremendous contributions to the world?
The arguments against change seem to me to be straw men mostly. "Would you want to end up with a doctor who couldn't pass the high school finals? etc." I cannot see any reason why, given that equal playing field, today's disadvantaged children would not turn out with pretty much the same breakdown of passes and fails as the privileged white population.
As for the Oriental success stories, teachers I know who have taught in China remark on the difference in the students. They want to learn, they know they have to do well, from government down through society, community, and family, they are motivated. And obviously have the natural material to get ahead with. Some say they are pushed too hard. But some of our students are not encouraged strongly enough and know early on that no one cares, no one expects much of them, and they don't just drop through the cracks, they are born in a chasm.
As for the Tech side of things, it might be a hopeful sign that most children seem born with a smart phone in their tiny hands. That might make a huge different in abilities and opportunities going forward.
Forgive me for indulging myself here and meandering. Am trying to grasp an issue that is not my usual field of study or interest.
Off-topic-in-absence-of-Friday-open-thread: regarding Matt's tweet "At the other end of the second dimension, there is an Antisquad of four young members elected in the 2018 midterm wave who are also near the middle of the pack on the first dimension. It's weird." I have chatted with (and volunteered for) Harder. His district is 50/50, with lots of low-information / marginally-attached voters in the D half. He assiduously brands himself as bipartisan, holding weekly meetings to which all are invited and noisily co-sponsoring legislation with Rs. So that position in the diagram may be evidence of his **symbolic** moderation (pick unimportant / uncontroversial bills that aren't progressive to support) rather than his strategic goals.
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1360321332928520196/photo/1
Regression discontinuity is a very weak form of evidence, the outcomes are insanely sensitive to modeling choices made by the researcher. If you can't see the break by naked eye, it's almost certainly too hard to actually study reliably in practice. Having gone to both poor-ish public schools and very nice private schools I find this all completely unconvincing.
If nothing else, it's a real kindness to concentrate the top students together so they aren't bored and bullied.