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Part of it is demographics, and part of it is the fact that non-school factors play a HUGE role in achievement. If you have parents who are trying to get you i

Part of it is demographics, and part of it is the fact that non-school factors play a HUGE role in achievement. If you have parents who are trying to get you into a charter school, you have parents who are making sure you're doing your homework and who care about your education, which already puts you in a higher-achieving sub-set.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
...part of it is the fact that non-school factors play a HUGE role in achievement. If this is true (I believe this is likely to be the case), we should invest vastly less in education than we currently do. Rather than trying to find good teachers, we should just aim for the cheapest warm bodies we can find, not to mention speeding up the process (e.g., graduate at 14). This belief lies behind the signalling model of education - education adds little value but signals to employers that value was already present.
- ZachPruckowski 16y ago
  OK, maybe I was unclear, because we're talking about different things. During your K-12 period, what you learn is more influenced by things like "do I have to worry about whether or not I'll be eating dinner tonight?" and "sweetie, you can't play your Gameboy until your homework is done" than by their teachers. If you're in a stable environment with parents who are involved in your education and who take you to the library or the museum or whatever, then you're going to be better off than the kid raised by the TV.
  - ktsmith 16y ago
    These are absolutely huge issues. The school my wife formerly taught at received Title II funds to provide breakfast and dinner (in addition to the free and reduced lunch program) to 100% of the students at the school due to the 95% poverty level in the neighborhood. Having all of the kids eat breakfast in the classroom for the first fifteen minutes of every day drastically reduced the instances of "my tummy hurts" and nurse visits as well as improving participation and attention levels during the day. I thought it was funny at first because she complained about losing the time in the morning considering how much they have to do each day. By the end of the year there was nothing but praise due to the way it had positively impacted her classes.
- Alex3917 16y ago
  Some problems with this: - Good teaching does make a huge difference. A large amount does get washed out due to other factors, but that doesn't mean it would make sense to purposely hire 'warm bodies'. - Good teachers don't necessarily cost more than bad teachers. - Teachers salaries are only a small part of school spending. I don't know the exact numbers, but my guess would be 30% of the annual district budget, which IIRC wouldn't include extraordinary expenses. - Schools aren't the only component of education. There's also early childhood education, libraries, community colleges, etc.
- dasil003 16y ago
  I have no idea how you come to this conclusion, but it is very very wrong. It only vaguely makes sense if you believe that there can only be one cause for something. However, clearly there are multiple factors at play. I actually had two chemistry teachers in high school who fit this description. The first was a drunk that they hired off the street (seriously, the administration not believe us until we found an empty whiskey bottle in the back cupboard). They replaced her the second quarter with a flighty woman who didn't understand the material and regularly lost our assignments and tests; some time after they fired her I saw an article in the variety section of the local paper showing her in her home, back to the camera, with her hands on her hips staring at the massive pile of junk in her house—it was an article about ADHD adult packrats. For the final quarter they put us in a real chemistry teacher's class, where none of us were at all prepared having learning nothing for the first 2/3rds of the year, and they had to just give us the credit for the year. The point of this anecdote is that there were plenty of smart, motivated students in this class, but the teachers made it impossible to learn, so the performance of everyone was equalized to the lowest common denominator. The only people who learned anything were the ones willing to read the book for its own sake without any guarantee of proper labs or tests. The next year I got into the physics class of a teacher who was widely regarded as the best in the school. We learned a lot in that class, but even there you had problem kids who refused to make any effort, despite the fact that the teacher clearly cared about the students; they saw him as someone to be taken advantage of. So you see, neither factor stands alone. You need decent teachers, and you need kids to show up.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    My statement was a conditional one, as you can see from the words "If this is true". You can disagree with the hypothesis this is based on, but that does not invalidate the conditional conclusion. ZachPruckowski and RyanMcGreal seem to be claiming that variation in teaching methods has little effect on achievement, and demographics/non-school factors seem to be the major cause of variations in achievement. If teaching is not a major cause of achievement, we should not waste time and money on it. Similarly, we should not waste time and money on shark repelling sticks or homeopathy. But I should point out that the anecdote you repeat seems to imply that teachers don't have a particularly large effect on achievement. As you say, "even there you had problem kids who refused to make any effort" and you had "the ones willing to read the book for its own sake". The teacher won't help either of these categories of student very much. Supposing, for the sake of argument, that these two types of students make up 2/3 of the class, and a good teacher can improve the grades of receptive students by 20% over a crappy one, then teacher quality only accounts for 6% of the achievement of the class.
- tptacek 16y ago
  Or, the opposite is true, and we need to spend wildly more to offset the fact that public policy can't fix the non-school factors at play. The average school apparently spends ~100k per student from k - 8. What's the lifetime dollar value of having someone complete high school with grade-level performance, as opposed to having the system give up on them? The average cost per year of keeping someone in prison is apparently $22000.
  - RyanMcGreal 16y ago
    The billion-dollar policy question is whether it makes more sense to spend that money through the school system per se or through a broader social policy that aims more directly to ameliorate the socioeconomic factors affecting school performance.
    - skorgu 16y ago
      Which of course leads to the questions of what that social policy would look like, how we could evaluate it and of course how to ensure that demand meets supply if it does work.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    The gap in earnings appears to be $9k/year, so amortized over a 47 year working career, that's about $200-286k (depending on whether you take a 4% or 2% discount rate). http://www.learnmoreindiana.org/needtoknow/pages/valueofeducation.aspx http://www.learnmoreindiana.org/needtoknow/pages/valueofeduc... As you say, education can increase achievement by 10-20%. Supposing we can get a 20% improvement in graduation rates, that would only be worth $57k/student to the population of future high school dropouts (and it would slightly harm those who don't dropout, but I'll ignore that). A quick google search suggests that about 8% of students drop out. http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16 http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16 $57k x 20% x 8% = $900 (per student, over K-12). If we spend more than $900 to increase graduation rates by 20%, we are wasting our money. If we could reduce dropout rates to 0%, it would be worth $22.9k/student (again, over 12 years). [edit: fixed calculation.]
tptacek 16y ago
If it is the case that charter schools are selecting the most demographically favorable students, isn't it even more damning if only 17% of them are outperforming and almost half of them are only at par with the public school system?

yummyfajitas 16y ago

...part of it is the fact that non-school factors play a HUGE role in achievement. If this is true (I believe this is likely to be the case), we should invest vastly less in education than we currently do. Rather than trying to find good teachers, we should just aim for the cheapest warm bodies we can find, not to mention speeding up the process (e.g., graduate at 14). This belief lies behind the signalling model of education - education adds little value but signals to employers that value was already present.

ZachPruckowski 16y ago
OK, maybe I was unclear, because we're talking about different things. During your K-12 period, what you learn is more influenced by things like "do I have to worry about whether or not I'll be eating dinner tonight?" and "sweetie, you can't play your Gameboy until your homework is done" than by their teachers. If you're in a stable environment with parents who are involved in your education and who take you to the library or the museum or whatever, then you're going to be better off than the kid raised by the TV.
- ktsmith 16y ago
  These are absolutely huge issues. The school my wife formerly taught at received Title II funds to provide breakfast and dinner (in addition to the free and reduced lunch program) to 100% of the students at the school due to the 95% poverty level in the neighborhood. Having all of the kids eat breakfast in the classroom for the first fifteen minutes of every day drastically reduced the instances of "my tummy hurts" and nurse visits as well as improving participation and attention levels during the day. I thought it was funny at first because she complained about losing the time in the morning considering how much they have to do each day. By the end of the year there was nothing but praise due to the way it had positively impacted her classes.
Alex3917 16y ago
Some problems with this: - Good teaching does make a huge difference. A large amount does get washed out due to other factors, but that doesn't mean it would make sense to purposely hire 'warm bodies'. - Good teachers don't necessarily cost more than bad teachers. - Teachers salaries are only a small part of school spending. I don't know the exact numbers, but my guess would be 30% of the annual district budget, which IIRC wouldn't include extraordinary expenses. - Schools aren't the only component of education. There's also early childhood education, libraries, community colleges, etc.
dasil003 16y ago
I have no idea how you come to this conclusion, but it is very very wrong. It only vaguely makes sense if you believe that there can only be one cause for something. However, clearly there are multiple factors at play. I actually had two chemistry teachers in high school who fit this description. The first was a drunk that they hired off the street (seriously, the administration not believe us until we found an empty whiskey bottle in the back cupboard). They replaced her the second quarter with a flighty woman who didn't understand the material and regularly lost our assignments and tests; some time after they fired her I saw an article in the variety section of the local paper showing her in her home, back to the camera, with her hands on her hips staring at the massive pile of junk in her house—it was an article about ADHD adult packrats. For the final quarter they put us in a real chemistry teacher's class, where none of us were at all prepared having learning nothing for the first 2/3rds of the year, and they had to just give us the credit for the year. The point of this anecdote is that there were plenty of smart, motivated students in this class, but the teachers made it impossible to learn, so the performance of everyone was equalized to the lowest common denominator. The only people who learned anything were the ones willing to read the book for its own sake without any guarantee of proper labs or tests. The next year I got into the physics class of a teacher who was widely regarded as the best in the school. We learned a lot in that class, but even there you had problem kids who refused to make any effort, despite the fact that the teacher clearly cared about the students; they saw him as someone to be taken advantage of. So you see, neither factor stands alone. You need decent teachers, and you need kids to show up.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  My statement was a conditional one, as you can see from the words "If this is true". You can disagree with the hypothesis this is based on, but that does not invalidate the conditional conclusion. ZachPruckowski and RyanMcGreal seem to be claiming that variation in teaching methods has little effect on achievement, and demographics/non-school factors seem to be the major cause of variations in achievement. If teaching is not a major cause of achievement, we should not waste time and money on it. Similarly, we should not waste time and money on shark repelling sticks or homeopathy. But I should point out that the anecdote you repeat seems to imply that teachers don't have a particularly large effect on achievement. As you say, "even there you had problem kids who refused to make any effort" and you had "the ones willing to read the book for its own sake". The teacher won't help either of these categories of student very much. Supposing, for the sake of argument, that these two types of students make up 2/3 of the class, and a good teacher can improve the grades of receptive students by 20% over a crappy one, then teacher quality only accounts for 6% of the achievement of the class.
tptacek 16y ago
Or, the opposite is true, and we need to spend wildly more to offset the fact that public policy can't fix the non-school factors at play. The average school apparently spends ~100k per student from k - 8. What's the lifetime dollar value of having someone complete high school with grade-level performance, as opposed to having the system give up on them? The average cost per year of keeping someone in prison is apparently $22000.
- RyanMcGreal 16y ago
  The billion-dollar policy question is whether it makes more sense to spend that money through the school system per se or through a broader social policy that aims more directly to ameliorate the socioeconomic factors affecting school performance.
  - skorgu 16y ago
    Which of course leads to the questions of what that social policy would look like, how we could evaluate it and of course how to ensure that demand meets supply if it does work.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  The gap in earnings appears to be $9k/year, so amortized over a 47 year working career, that's about $200-286k (depending on whether you take a 4% or 2% discount rate). http://www.learnmoreindiana.org/needtoknow/pages/valueofeducation.aspx http://www.learnmoreindiana.org/needtoknow/pages/valueofeduc... As you say, education can increase achievement by 10-20%. Supposing we can get a 20% improvement in graduation rates, that would only be worth $57k/student to the population of future high school dropouts (and it would slightly harm those who don't dropout, but I'll ignore that). A quick google search suggests that about 8% of students drop out. http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16 http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16 $57k x 20% x 8% = $900 (per student, over K-12). If we spend more than $900 to increase graduation rates by 20%, we are wasting our money. If we could reduce dropout rates to 0%, it would be worth $22.9k/student (again, over 12 years). [edit: fixed calculation.]

tptacek 16y ago

If it is the case that charter schools are selecting the most demographically favorable students, isn't it even more damning if only 17% of them are outperforming and almost half of them are only at par with the public school system?