Selection bias is the most powerful force in education
fredrikdeboer.com
Selection bias is the most powerful force in education
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Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education
#2A simple thought experiment.
Consider bussing kids from 'good' places to bad and from 'bad' to good. See after how long their outcomes become equivalent. Do so at different grade levels to measure the convergence time versus age of displacement.
And now for the actual experiment: how do you impactfully present such results? I assume no outcome. Just the existence of an outcome.
I posit that priceless data would be worthless in American society.
Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education
#3A simple thought experiment. Consider bussing kids from 'good' places to bad and from 'bad' to good. See after how long their outcomes become equivalent. Do so at different grade levels to measure the convergence time versus age of displacement. And now for the actual experiment: how do you impactfully present such results? I assume no outcome. Just the existence of an outcome. I posit that priceless data would be wo…
How many parents, who probably paid a lot of money and work two full-time jobs to live in the "good" place so their kids could go to the good school, are going to be OK with this experiment? Do you plan to force them, if there aren't enough volunteers to get statistically significant results?
Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education
#4A simple thought experiment. Consider bussing kids from 'good' places to bad and from 'bad' to good. See after how long their outcomes become equivalent. Do so at different grade levels to measure the convergence time versus age of displacement. And now for the actual experiment: how do you impactfully present such results? I assume no outcome. Just the existence of an outcome. I posit that priceless data would be wo…
Such busing was court-mandated in the US for several decades. It is widely considered to have been a failure.
Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education
#5A simple thought experiment. Consider bussing kids from 'good' places to bad and from 'bad' to good. See after how long their outcomes become equivalent. Do so at different grade levels to measure the convergence time versus age of displacement. And now for the actual experiment: how do you impactfully present such results? I assume no outcome. Just the existence of an outcome. I posit that priceless data would be wo…
How many parents, who probably paid a lot of money and work two full-time jobs to live in the "good" place so their kids could go to the good school, are going to be OK with this experiment? Do you plan to force them, if there aren't enough volunteers to get statistically significant results?
All school is private. Sometimes you pay tuition, which seems better for accountability, and sometimes you pay more for housing. That people send their kids to school is unfortunate. It seems like if you took the daycare out of it, school would not be structured the way that it is at all. It is a source of daycare for children first, and an attempt at productively using that time second.
Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education
#6A simple thought experiment. Consider bussing kids from 'good' places to bad and from 'bad' to good. See after how long their outcomes become equivalent. Do so at different grade levels to measure the convergence time versus age of displacement. And now for the actual experiment: how do you impactfully present such results? I assume no outcome. Just the existence of an outcome. I posit that priceless data would be wo…
Such busing was court-mandated in the US for several decades. It is widely considered to have been a failure.
That depends on what you classify as failure. It failed in the sense that the white and wealthy mostly fled to the suburbs and reversed any progress integration had made. It succeeded in the sense that in the places and times where schools were well integrated the racial achievement gap closed.
Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education
#7Sending a troubled kid to a great private school probably will cause the kid to do better: because all the other students are doing well the bad students peers are working hard so the bad student sees that example and is likely to succumb to peer pressure and do better.
For this to work the troubled kid needs to be kept out of the gangs and whatever else outside of school will lead to bad examples. However selection bias already does this: parents who care enough to send their kid to a private school are involved enough with their kid that they would probably do this anyway. In short these are kids that might have been troubled, but they still would have been at the top of the troubled group.
Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such busing was court-mandated in the US for several decades. It is widely considered to have been a failure.
That depends on what you classify as failure. It failed in the sense that the white and wealthy mostly fled to the suburbs and reversed any progress integration had made. It succeeded in the sense that in the places and times where schools were well integrated the racial achievement gap closed.
Do you have any pointers to data showing this close? Most of what I've seen shows the gap being shockingly persistent in the face of intervention across a wide variety of systems, but I'm always looking for more.
Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education
#9A simple thought experiment. Consider bussing kids from 'good' places to bad and from 'bad' to good. See after how long their outcomes become equivalent. Do so at different grade levels to measure the convergence time versus age of displacement. And now for the actual experiment: how do you impactfully present such results? I assume no outcome. Just the existence of an outcome. I posit that priceless data would be wo…
How many parents, who probably paid a lot of money and work two full-time jobs to live in the "good" place so their kids could go to the good school, are going to be OK with this experiment? Do you plan to force them, if there aren't enough volunteers to get statistically significant results?
San Francisco, some of America's most expensive real estate, doesn't tie school assignments to geography. The system hasn't been voted out yet.
Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such busing was court-mandated in the US for several decades. It is widely considered to have been a failure.
That depends on what you classify as failure. It failed in the sense that the white and wealthy mostly fled to the suburbs and reversed any progress integration had made. It succeeded in the sense that in the places and times where schools were well integrated the racial achievement gap closed.
The racial achievement gap closed? That would be a huge story and I would be surprised if I missed it...unless you mean the gap closed within the school (i.e. not relative to society at large) because the remaining whites achievements were lower than the average before they fled, i.e. selection bias :)