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Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

economist.com

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Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#21

Post by kotaKat »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #20
swaits wrote: post #6

Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade. It brought them from basically the worst State to the 30th percentile in reading for 4th graders. So, common sense? If you’re requiring proficiency in order to promote, then I’d expect to see significantly better results than this. It’s noteworthy that they’re still basically the worst in 8th grade reading and math. Might…

>Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that? It does seem like a lot of public school advocates these days push simply for graduate rate, to the exclusion of meeting common sense aptitude standards. To the point where it is having a downstream effect on universities having to tie up an unreasonable amount of resour…

“No child left behind”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#22

Post by gruez »

fncypants wrote: post #13
gruez wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the chart. Adjusted for "poverty rate and other demographics", the top states are red states, so it's harder to chalk it up as some sort of n=1 outlier.

What does that mean, "adjusted for poverty"? Reading level is an absolute. You're either at a third grade level or not. This adjustment seems to have no purpose other than completing a narrative that does not help solve the problem.

>You're either at a third grade level or not. This adjustment seems to have no purpose other than completing a narrative that does not help solve the problem.

How should you measure an education system? Should you measure purely based on the student's performance? What if the students are just better at reading, independent of the school? It's not hard to imagine that even with identical teachers, that inner cities schools would have worse test scores than wealthy suburban schools, especially if the latter are rich enough to afford tutors, the family environment is more conductive to learning, etc. Recognizing this fact, it's fairly obvious that "you're either at a third grade level or not" is a terrible way of assessing how good of a job an educational system is doing.

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#25

Post by CGMthrowaway »

kotaKat wrote: post #21
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that? It does seem like a lot of public school advocates these days push simply for graduate rate, to the exclusion of meeting common sense aptitude standards. To the point where it is having a downstream effect on universities having to tie up an unreasonable amount of resour…

“No child left behind”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act

Can you elaborate? The wiki says NCLB is "outcomes based education" which is further defined as "By the end of the educational experience, each student should have achieved the goal." You seem to be suggesting it's the opposite though?

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#26

Post by prodigycorp »

kotaKat wrote: post #21
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Their solution is that you must read at a 3rd grade level in order to get promoted to 4th grade Can someone explain why we ever stopped doing that? It does seem like a lot of public school advocates these days push simply for graduate rate, to the exclusion of meeting common sense aptitude standards. To the point where it is having a downstream effect on universities having to tie up an unreasonable amount of resour…

“No child left behind”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act

Iirc Obama era policies actually made things worse. There was a plain English episode about it.

To my recollection, the gist of it was that although no child left behind forced administrators to overly index to a certain set of grades, the loosening of it led to the meaninglessness of grades entirely. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/plain-english-with-der...

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#27

Post by HanShotFirst »

1) Reducing chronic absenteeism by more aggressive tracking and offering social and financial support for students who may have difficulties at home. 2) Adding more optional school days during breaks, including busing and school lunches on those days. 3) The third isn't explicitly stated. The article mentions free college for public H.S. graduates, but it's hard to see how that would improve reading and math scores much earlier in life. The article also mentions a switch to phonics education statewide, but doesn't dwell on how it affected reading scores. (My assumption is that it helps greatly.)

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#28

Post by TimorousBestie »

I’m very against financial incentives for perfect attendance. American schools by and large still do not have adequate ventilation and space to prevent the spread of contagious diseases. Combine that with a state like Alabama with low childhood vaccine rates and it’s a recipe for epidemics like measles.

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#29

Post by ZeroGravitas »

Note when they say "shot up the national rankings" they mean relative, since Alabama remained static on scores, but others slipped.

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/...

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...

They might be better looking at what the states going down were doing and using that for (anti-) lessons as maintaining a score hardly seems like a rousing success for new initiatives.

Re: Alabama offers three tricks to fix poor urban schools

#30

Post by squeefers »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #16
fncypants wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that mean, "adjusted for poverty"? Reading level is an absolute. You're either at a third grade level or not. This adjustment seems to have no purpose other than completing a narrative that does not help solve the problem.

To be fair to gruez, the chart was made by the economist and not by them. To be less fair to the economist, "adjusted by poverty level" is a heck of a spin, we've had many generations as a developed nation now, your state poverty level is caused by your state education outcomes. And that's without even speculating about what "demographic factors" means or implies.

> your state poverty level is caused by your state education outcomes.

bad teachers dont make an area poor. a poor area doesnt have the money for good teachers, youve got it the wrong way around.

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