Steve Nelson writes here about the erroneous assumptions behind the New York Times’ article on the “broken promise of school choice,” posted earlier today.
I was especially happy to see this article, because I sensed something awry about the Times’ article, and Nelson nails it.
By the Times’ definition, the schools that select the most accomplished students are the “best” schools, and the non-selective high schools are “bad” or “not good” schools.
These are false assumptions, he says. And he is right. If a school cherrypicks the best students with the highest scores, then the school will have a high rating based on its students’ test scores and academic accomplishments. Both public and charter schools have recognized this truism, but the media should have the sense not to buy it.
This is the same fallacy that lies behind the U.S. News & World Report rating of high schools: the best schools are those that weed out the weak students or cull the best ones. The best high school might be the one that takes all students and helps all of them reach their full potential.
Nelson writes:
The first assumption is that there are easily identified “good” schools and “bad” schools – or, more diplomatically, “less good schools.” Readers are asked to stipulate, for example, that Stuyvesant High School is a “good” school – a really “good” school – and that Herbert H. Lehman High School in the Bronx is a “bad” or “less good school.” The “good” schools are more selective, whether by entrance exam or grade point average and the “less good” school are less selective, often to the point of being a last resort for students who fail to gain entry into a “good” school.
The assumption is categorically false. Stuyvesant is assessed as “good” on the basis of the relatively conspicuous achievements of its students, particularly as measured by graduation rate and college placement. The further assumption is that Stuyvesant’s faculty and program were the critical variables in achieving those ends. Accepting those assumptions then leads to the final, implicit assumption resting under all this statistical clutter; that exposing more students to Stuyvesant’s faculty and program would bring similar results, thus helping solve the education reform problem.
Stuyvesant may or may not be a “good” school by other, more meaningful measures, but it is certainly not a “good” school because its carefully culled flock performs precisely as the culling process would predict. Many kids who get into Stuyvesant might do quite well if they didn’t go to the school at all.
At the other end of this delusional continuum, Herbert H. Lehman is considered a significantly “less good” school because its graduation rate is about half of Stuyvesant’s rate and its graduates seldom matriculate at highly selective colleges. Herbert H. Lehman may or may not be a “less good” school by other, more meaningful measures, but it is certainly not a “less good” school because its very different culled flock performs precisely as the culling process would predict. I propose that you might take all of Stuyvesant’s faculty members and switch them with Lehman’s faculty members, and the results would not be substantially different.
This meaningless game plays out in the private school world and in higher education too. Highly selective schools attract students who are most likely to succeed, based on factors from privilege to preparation, and the schools are then considered fabulous by virtue of the glittering credentials of the students they selected. Not a dollop of meaning in that self-fulfilling prophecy of pretense.
It doesn’t mean that Choate and Exeter or Harvard and Stanford are lousy. It merely means that they are not “good” just because they admit only the most successful students. As many honest observers note, even within the lofty confines of the most selective colleges, undergraduate classes at Yale are not necessary better than, or even as good as, undergraduate courses at SUNY Binghamton…
When viewed through this clearer lens, the article, and the process, is a farce of Shakespearian proportions. Young children are sifted through a bureaucratic sorter, spilling out in relatively unchanging proportions to the “good” schools and “less good” schools depending on their predictors of success. This process, however earnestly designed or studiously analyzed, simply perpetuates the glowing or dim reputations of the schools where the children are dropped.
This in essence is the mirage of school choice in all its fraudulent glory. By rigging the system, by cruel attrition, by statistical sleight of hand, the choice movement is simply sifting kids through a similar sorter, leaving the false impression that the plutocrat-funded, heavily-hyped charter schools are “good,” and the increasingly deprived district schools are “less good.”
Instead of sifting and sorting America’s least advantaged children through these arcane systems, we should be investing in early childhood experiences, ameliorating poverty, facing racism honestly, and providing generous support to the least privileged among us.
Thanks, Diane!
I have said many times that if the faculty of the school in the high poverty district from which I served as principal were switched with the faculty of the school in the low poverty district in which I live and which my biological kids attended my blood-related kids would see little or no difference in achievement levels. On the other hand, my school kids might do even worse because their new teachers have no experience teaching in a district with such a high percentage of kids who receive free lunch, whose first language is not English and who have IEPs.
These ‘best’ lists only feed into the false narrative of the bogus education ‘reform’ movement.
Terrific analysis.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
Great analysis. I’d add, though, that the less privileged kids need exposure to a knowledge-rich curriculum instead of their current knowledge-poor Common Core curriculum. The core capacities of reading, writing and thinking depend, above all, on a brain stocked with general knowledge. Reading comprehension depends on word recognition. You can’t re-cognize a word if you haven’t “cognized” it at least once before. Content-rich lessons provide this initial exposure to words. Professional parents provide this initial exposure to words, which is why professionals’ kids are better readers. Practice at using context clues, a fashionable approach to “teaching reading”, avails you nothing if you don’t recognize most of the words in the context. Schools ought to be supplying this knowledge of the world and the words that describe it so as to increase the likelihood that you’ll grasp the context. But the “authorities” in education today discount the importance of knowledge. They say that the brain is a muscle that just needs workouts, not knowledge. Common Core is based on this faulty premise. This is a catastrophic error that is preventing the less-privileged from rising.
Excellent comment I agree 100%. Summarizes everything that’s wrong w/CCSS-ELA. Are there curricula you like as models for the content-rich approach?
E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum looks very good to me. However most any teacher can build knowledge if he or she starts to make a point of building knowledge. The problem is that teachers have been taught that that’s malpractice. If there’s one thing all teachers “know”, it’s that teaching facts is for losers. We once had an “authority” from the county office come tell our faculty that teaching facts is pathetic; that we ought to be eliciting “higher-order thinking” all the time. She did not grasp that higher-order thinking (as well as reading and writing ability) depends on a solid foundation of facts. Education schools would do well to start teaching prospective teachers the art of teaching facts well. Teaching so that the facts stick. There is an art and science to it. However the education schools have much loftier goals: teaching how to “teach critical thinking”. How to teach the “skill” of reading comprehension (NB: it’s not a skill). Etc. They will not stoop to talk about the disreputable business of teaching facts well.
“We should be . . . providing generous support to the least privileged among us.”
How about offering financial aid to more than just 20% of your elite private school’s students? How about eliminating the requirement that all families pay a minimum of $1,500, an amount that is far out of reach for huge numbers of the working class and working poor, nevermind families who are homeless or on public assistance?
http://www.calhoun.org/page.cfm?p=646
Tim,
Calhoun doesn’t receive public funding, unlike the privatized charter schools you work for, which suck resources away from public schools.
You persuade me that charters are parasites on the body politic.
I agree with Nelson’s assessment of choice systems. In high school I attended a selective, urban public school. The girls that attended this school were considered among the best and brightest in the city. The school was very competitive and stressful, especially during the freshman culling of the herd. I survived and excelled because I was determined to make it. Overall, I got a good education here, but I did not like the fake sense of “elitism” that was fostered by the school administration.
I taught high school for several years in a diverse, comprehensive suburban public high school that had about a thirty percent poverty level. I was amazed by how this school managed to successfully serve such a disparate group of students. I taught the ELLs from poor countries, some of whom could not read in their native language. This high school also had many students accepted to excellent colleges, and a few that were accepted by elite schools. In state rankings this high school generally rates in the high middle, with the more homogeneous school districts “scoring higher”on standardized tests. Scores tell us nothing about the culture of a school or the character of the students that attend it. Comprehensive public high schools can be excellent and inclusive of individual differences. Perhaps this is a more authentic way to evaluate a school, not just by test scores alone.
Pretty much perfect. I’ve been a special education teacher in New York City for 14 years, the number cited in the previous post about “choice” in New York. I’ve seen this scenario play out with terrible predictability, in three different schools, for the duration of my tenure here.
And thanks, Steve Nelson, for your frank assessment of this mess.
Diane,
THANK YOU for this.
LOVE IT.
What you wrote.
And I include the thread.
😎
I agree, but with one caveat.
Parents may refer to Stuyvesant as a “good” school, but Stuyvesant itself is not holding itself out as a model of how easy it is to educate at-risk students and makes no claims that its teaching methods and teachers are superior to teachers at other schools and can turn struggling students into scholars. Neither is the NYC DOE. The same is true with all “good” NYC public schools and their principals.
It takes a special chutzpah to make the claim that because your school has a huge advantage in funding, ability to force a parent (or student) to jump through hoops before enrolling, AND no qualms about suspending any at-risk 5 year old who just doesn’t cut it, it demonstrates that you are better than the failing public school next door.
There is an integrity about how “good” NYC public schools characterize themselves that is sadly missing from the completely unethical charter folks ready to lie and make reprehensible claims about how a child of 5 “deserved” every suspension and humiliation given to him in order to pretend you are better than a public school.
It takes a certain kind of lack of any ethical core to lie like that so that the most vulnerable children pay the price while you enrich yourself by your dishonest claims. President Trump is a man who can do that without a bit of conscience. And so can certain charter school CEOs.
I have yet to see a public school principal at any of those “good” public schools who makes those kinds of dishonest claims about their school.
In the future world where “market” and “choice” rule, the school with the least integrity and highest marketing budgets will be rewarded — something that I suspect is exactly what Trump himself would rejoice in.
Amen, NYC parent! I never claim that my school is “good” because of our privilege. I met with a community board panel in Harlem a few years back and acknowledged that my progressive school didn’t perform magic. Much of our perceived “success” is selection and self-selection. Much of our “success” is due to privilege and an average class size of 12 or 13.
If kids without privileged experiences are to succeed, we need similar size classes in all public schools to partially mitigate the effects of social neglect and deep poverty. We have many students of color who are not privileged by any measure, but even they succeed in part because of selection and self-selection.
I think my school does a terrific job in many respects, but recognition of privilege, particularly white privilege, is mandatory if we are to make progress. I’m retiring in 50 days and all my efforts will be directed toward public education.
How refreshing it is to hear class size brought to the forefront of the discussion. It seems such a no-brainer– parents generally start there when comparing school quality– and yet it’s never mentioned among the ed-reform crowd as a measure for improving ed-quality in poor areas. (Other than pointing to one weak study claiming ‘master’-quality teachers can succeed with any class-size.
Just extrapolating from my own paltry experience in the private-ed realm… I was able to swiftly develop teaching skills in my first gig at a medium-quality academy only because of small class size (ave 15/class). How else could I have juggled 5 daily preps for Fr I-IV + AP? Meanwhile the kids presented some behavior issues, & I could tackle them 1 by 1 while developing rudimentary class-mgt skills. More recently, in 15+ yrs of free-lance PreK Sp/Fr enrichment, I had the luxury of gradually bldg class-mgt skills & adapting curriculum to ever-larger groups, so that today I can comfortable manage 18-20 3-4-y.o. wiggleworms while reaching every kid. None of that is possible for pubsch teachers.
Class size is shunted to back-seat consideration because it’s too expensive. I’d like to have all that $ back from the stds-assessments-data-mining-techgadgets movement [incl the millions wasted on bureaucrats to administer it]– plus the scads lost to failed choice experiments– bet it would be enough to reduce poor-area pubsch classes to a size maximizing 1-on-1 teacher attention.
I’d be curious as to how you’d compare the benefits of a smaller class size relative to having a capable assistant/associate in the classroom..
Would you prefer to teach a class of 15 by yourself or 25 with a capable colleague whom you could help select? Which do you think most of your fellow teachers would prefer? Thanks.
Steve Ronan, that’s a great question. In my fantasy-ideal school, the admin-faculty planners would have the flexibility to apply either (or other options) as suits the situation. In a world-lang dept, how great would it be to have multi-lingual colleagues so we could divvy the class into 2 teacher-led conversation groups a couple of days a week? I can imagine similar arrgts for other subjects, where concepts studied large-group are applied in smaller-group hands-on sessions. To me the point is, smaller is always better & should be the first budgeting priority. Daily co-teaching for a class of 30+ is a band-aid & will help some. For a class of 25 it could be useful a couple of days/wk, w/some planning, but will be difficult to schedule. Unnecessary for a class of 15. And the other point: put the budget flexibility into the hands of those closest to the problems/ solutions.
Just my take from far less teaching exp than many here (& as a Mom whose 3 experienced all variations).
Thanks, Bethree5! That all sounds sensible to me.
Thank you Steve, for telling the truth and truly advocating for a good education for everyone. This starts with an honest acknowledgement of the facts on the ground. You are a credit to our profession and an advocate for the public as well as private sectors.
This is a bit tangential, but I was impelled to visit the Stuyvesant web site to observe first-hand its alleged modesty relative to charter schools. Right away, I find the mission statement that starts out:
“Stuyvesant High School has been a symbol of excellence in education for over a century. Our mission is to continue and enhance that commitment by providing…”
“That commitment”? What commitment is that? Being a symbol is a commitment? Yikes…
So, I go then next to the web site of a charter school in Boston, don’t immediately find a mission statement, but at “About Us”: “Match Charter Public School (Match) is an innovative, high-performing free public school in Boston. Match is widely recognized for its success in preparing students for success in college and careers.”
OK. That’s not too bad. But perhaps overdoing it a bit with the “success”, eh? How about “Match is widely recognized for its excellence in preparing students for success in college and careers.”
Nah, “excellence” implies excelling relative to others. Next thing you know it’d be getting vilified for such hubris.
Perhaps if the NY Times copy editors have some minutes to donate both schools could benefit.
Stephen,
Stuyvesant High School is an exam school. All of its students are admitted via a highly competitive examination. Only the very highest scorers are admitted. The same is true of Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, Townsend Harris, and a small number of other exam schools. Stuyvestant can boast of its excellence, but it does not pretend to admit all kinds of students, as charters claim. It is honest about what it is and does. Efforts to diversify the entry process for these schools are hotly resisted by their alumnae, who are outspoken and influential.
Diane: “Stuyvestant can boast of its excellence, but it does not pretend to admit all kinds of students, as charters claim.”
The claim I, myself, have made on your blog recently about charter schools is not that they “admit all kinds of students” but that here in Boston, for example, they exhibit less selectivity than many of the public district schools. While by standard measures they improve students’ academic performance more rapidly than many of those more selective schools.
To compare enrollment in the two schools whose boast (Stuyvesant) and modest, almost self-deprecating, self-assessment (MATCH) I alluded to:
Stuyvesant
Hispanic 3%
Black 1%
White 20%
Asian 74%
Students with special needs 1%
ELL 0%
Click to access School_Quality_Snapshot_2016_HS_M475.pdf
MATCH
First language not English 60%
ELL 34.2%
Students with disabilities 19.3%
High Needs 76.1%
Economically disadvantaged 56.4%
African American 45.9%
Asian 1.3%
Hispanic 46.7%
Native American .5%
White 3.5%
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/profiles/student.aspx?orgcode=04690505&orgtypecode=6&
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/profiles/student.aspx?orgcode=04690505&orgtypecode=6&leftNavId=305&
Now, you and NYC school parent seem to think that Stuyvesant’s commitment to remaining a symbol of excellence, or whatever exactly it was they were boasting about, is justified if they sincerely publicly celebrate their selectivity. The logic escapes me. Perhaps it is a good school, but it’s not at all clear that, following Steve Nelson’s analysis, it’s any better than the average charter school in Boston.
Be glad to review the relevant research with you to examine that question more closely. Perhaps starting with this:
Econometrica, Vol. 82, No. 1 (January, 2014), 137–196
THE ELITE ILLUSION: ACHIEVEMENT EFFECTS AT BOSTON
AND NEW YORK EXAM SCHOOLS
BY ATILA ABDULKADIROGLU ˘ , JOSHUA ANGRIST, AND PARAG PATHAK1
Parents gauge school quality in part by the level of student achievement and a school’s racial and socioeconomic mix. The importance of school characteristics in the housing market can be seen in the jump in house prices at school district boundaries where peer characteristics change. The question of whether schools with more attractive peers are really better in a value-added sense remains open, however. This paper uses a fuzzy regression-discontinuity design to evaluate the causal effects of peer characteristics. Our design exploits admissions cutoffs at Boston and New York City’s heavily over-subscribed exam schools. Successful applicants near admissions cutoffs for the least selective of these schools move from schools with scores near the bottom of the state SAT score distribution to schools with scores near the median. Successful applicants near admissions cutoffs for the most selective of these schools move from above-average schools to schools with students whose scores fall in the extreme upper tail. Exam school students can also expect to study with fewer nonwhite classmates than unsuccessful applicants. Our estimates suggest that the marked changes in peer characteristics at exam school admissions cutoffs have little causal effect on test scores or college quality.
[…]
6. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
The results reported here suggest that an exam school education produces only scattered gains for applicants, even among students with baseline scores close to or above the mean in the target school. Because the exam school experience is associated with sharp increases in peer achievement, these results weigh against the importance of peer effects in the education production function. Our results also fail to uncover systematic evidence of racial composition effects. The outcome most strengthened by exam school attendance appears to be the 10th grade English score, a result driven partly by gains for minorities. Given the history of racial preferences (and their more recent elimination) in Boston’s exam schools, this finding seems worth further exploration. Overall, however, while the exam school students in our samples typically have good outcomes, most of these students would likely have done well without the benefit of an exam school education.
And then we could take a close look at Stuyvesant’s comparison group data here:
Click to access School_Quality_Snapshot_2016_HS_M475.pdf
“Comparison Group is made up of students from other schools across the city who were the most similar to the students at this school, based on their incoming test scores, disability status, economic need, and over-age status. The ‘comparison group’ result is an estimate of how the students at this school would have performed if they had attended other schools throughout the city.”
Stephen,
It is absurd to compare Stuyvesant to charter schools. Stuyvesant is a highly selective high school that admits students solely on the basis of a single test.
Charters choose the students they want. They pretend to accept all students but they in fact exclude students who are likely to get low test scores or push them out if they are accepted.
Stuyvesant makes no pretense of accepting all students. Charters do.
Diane: “It is absurd to compare Stuyvesant to charter schools. Stuyvesant is a highly selective high school that admits students solely on the basis of a single test.”
It would indeed be absurd to compare just the scholastic achievement of students at each to the other and make assumptions without considering that to get into a Boston charter school one needs to just give name and address and grade level info and get selected in a lottery. No essays, auditions, interviews or exams is the case in a quite a few of the public district schools here.
But is it absurd to compare each does relative to its “comparison group”?
If so, please explain why. Do have a look at the Stuyvesant “comparison group” data if you haven’t had a chance yet (won’t take but a minute or two), and let me know if you think there’s any value in considering that.
Click to access School_Quality_Snapshot_2016_HS_M475.pdf
Diane: “Charters choose the students they want. They pretend to accept all students but they in fact exclude students who are likely to get low test scores or push them out if they are accepted.”
In respect to Boston high schools your assertions/explanations are not well supported by the academic research literature, e.g., see:
“Charter schools are sometimes said to generate gains by the selective retention of higher-performing students — see, e.g., Skinner 2009. In this view, charter effectiveness is at least partly attributed to a tendency to eject trouble-makers and stragglers, leaving a student population that is easier to teach.
[…]
“These results suggest that positive charter effects cannot be attributed to low-quality peers leaving charter schools. If anything, selective exit of low achievers is more pronounced at Boston’s traditional public schools.”
“Stand and Deliver: Effects of Boston’s Charter High Schools on College Preparation, Entry, and Choice”
http://economics.mit.edu/files/9799
Stephen B Ronan,
Your post shows exactly the kind of dishonesty and lies that the pro-privatization forces who will stop at nothing to undermine public schools are willing to make. You are truly Trump-like in your willingness to mislead in order to promote more privatized schools for the at-risk kids who are profitable to teach.
Here is what you (intending to deceive?) left off of the Stuy mission statement:
“Our mission is to continue and enhance that commitment by providing an environment which will nurture and enhance the special academic talents of the students admitted to Stuyvesant.”
“SPECIAL ACADEMIC TALENTS OF THE STUDENTS ADMITTED TO STUYVESANT” Note there is nothing here about having the solution for failing schools nor serving any child who walks through the door.
That isn’t a sales pitch to get the public to allow them to expand. HERE is the kind of sales pitch you admire so much:
“Build exceptional, world-class public schools that PROVE children from all backgrounds can succeed in college and life; and advocate across the country to change public policies that prevent so many children from having access to opportunity.”
Now THAT is the kind of braggart talk that is worthy of Donald Trump! And no doubt the “mission statement” of Trump University was about as truthful as the typical charter school that the Eli Broad Foundation is desperate to financially reward for their “excellence” in recognizing which 5 year olds are “excellent” enough to be in their school and which are most certainly not worthy.
Now that’s something Betsy DeVos can embrace with all her heart.
It’s public schools that are “preventing” children from having “access to opportunity” for not recognizing that some of those 5 year olds didn’t take advantage of that “opportunity” and need to be warehoused in prison-schools for the children that charter schools deem unworthy.
You represent EXACTLY how pro-charter folks think! At least you show the world how dishonest you are with your attempt to smear Stuy as anything near as dishonest as the charter schools you adore no matter how many at-risk 5 year olds they suspend.
To quote a letter from Alexander Hamilton to George Washington (Aug 18, 1972)
“I have not fortitude enough always to hear with calmness, calumnies, which necessarily include me, as a principal Agent in the measures censured, of the falsehood of which, I have the most unqualified consciousness. I trust that I shall always be able to bear, as I ought, imputations of error of Judgment; but I acknowlege that I cannot be intirely patient under charges, which impeach the integrity of my public motives or conduct. I feel, that I merit them in no degree; and expressions of indignation sometimes escape me, in spite of every effort to suppress them. I rely on your goodness for the proper allowances.
With high respect and the most affectionate attachment, I have the honor to be,
Your most Obedient & humble servant”
p.s. if you haven’t seen the letter’s enclosure, you’d likely appreciate the most currently oft-quoted section of it. “The truth unquestionably is…”
The truth unquestionably is what you wrote in your comment above:
“I was impelled to visit the Stuyvesant web site to observe first-hand its alleged modesty relative to charter schools. Right away, I find the mission statement that starts out:
“Stuyvesant High School has been a symbol of excellence in education for over a century. Our mission is to continue and enhance that commitment by providing…”
The rest of us just wonder what “impelled” you to visit the Stuy website to take out of context a mission statement designed to make them look like they are doing the same kind of bragging about their patented “secret sauce” as the charter schools most favored by Betsy DeVos, Paul Ryan, and the other Republicans whose claims of “doing it all for the poor kids” are about as genuine as yours are.
And you sir, are no Alexander Hamilton. When Hamilton was caught having an adulterous affair with a married woman which he attempted to cover up by paying off her blackmailing husband, he acknowledged what he did. Just think, Alexander Hamilton could have claimed that his “enemies” had set him up just like certain charter schools claim that those 5 year old children and their parents are just “enemies” trying to set them up. Hamilton could have released some privileged information designed to attack his accusers just like certain charter schools will release cherry-picked school records designed to attack a 6 year old who dared to speak out.
Hamilton owned up to his mistakes – to wanting to have it all by keeping his extramarital affair hidden. Maybe it is time that the “high performing” charter schools that are held out as models and honored with lavish awards for “excellence” start owning up to their mistakes instead of doubling down on them.
Those charters are not interested in educating the majority of truly at-risk kids and prefer to shed them instead of changing their methods (or spending the money necessary) to teach them. And rather than tell the truth about that, they continue to attack underfunded, failing public schools for not matching their “results”.
If only they had a fraction of Hamilton’s understanding of the difference between a lie and the truth.