91–100 of 230 posts
This article is advocating that using poverty-adjusted scores is a better way to assess student education levels. I just can't agree with that. "Your children aren't just dumber, they're also poorer" feels like a very spicy way to elevate the status of a state to me. > Painting the Deep South as an embarrassing cultural backwater is one of the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice among elites. > When the Urban…
This was very interesting to read, and news to me. It's gratifying to see Mississippi prove that it's possible to break out of a pattern of failure. I would love to see a discussion around the specific policies and practices that MS has put in place to actually achieve these results. The article doesn't really discuss that.
That's because the article is really about politics, not education. Education was just a hook for the author to hang a political point on.
If you look at the full table of NAEP scores, you see the differences are not that much. 8th grade reading is 245(WV)-266(MA). That's 20 point spread, where NAEP goes to 500 pts. A 4% difference between the best and worst state is insignificant. They all suck because they are at 50% of the scale.
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This was very interesting to read, and news to me. It's gratifying to see Mississippi prove that it's possible to break out of a pattern of failure. I would love to see a discussion around the specific policies and practices that MS has put in place to actually achieve these results. The article doesn't really discuss that.
Mississippi's average ACT scores are tied for last (edit: tied for second to last). I’m sure some of their educational outcomes are improving, but the demographic-adjusted stats from elementary school students are misleading. Holding kids back for poor performance can really pump their numbers inadvertently. Even if that’s not a very prevalent practice, performance in high school is more important and far more predic…
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Who would have thought that statistics could be improved by eliminating bad data points?
I don't want to strawman your argument but it sounds like you're saying that if you're in 3rd grade one year you should be in 4th grade the next year no matter what. That there's nothing you actually need to learn in 3rd grade in order to be advanced to 4th grade. Is that what you're saying?
See this example of a paradox that applies a lot in educational settings: you can raise the average level of two classes just by shuffling students from one to another:
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They hold students back if they don't pass a basic reading literacy test in third grade.
Who would have thought that not pushing kids forward into an academic environment they're not prepared for would be beneficial?
This was very interesting to read, and news to me. It's gratifying to see Mississippi prove that it's possible to break out of a pattern of failure. I would love to see a discussion around the specific policies and practices that MS has put in place to actually achieve these results. The article doesn't really discuss that.
They teach using proven methods, like phonics. They actually teach math. They test and use that as real information. They focus on results not on ideology. They do NOT encurage using Paulo Freire's "methods".
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Can you clarify what exactly you mean by the idea that adjusting for gender, age, race, and ethnicity makes this less impressive? Generally speaking in order to evaluate the success of a school system you really do want to adjust for the demographics that that school has to deal with, so you don't attribute the effects of, say, private tutors to the public school system. It would be really unfair to judge teachers in…
Great classes which target top-performing students will be different than great classes that target below-average students..