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All good points, and clarifies my wording about Texas doing a good job (relative to other states) of educating Hispanic students that suggested otherwise. But t

All good points, and clarifies my wording about Texas doing a good job (relative to other states) of educating Hispanic students that suggested otherwise. But the widely divergent results between the aggregated and disaggregated view isn't sufficient to declare, like the article does, that the ranking using aggregated view are using a flawed methodology. They're measuring different factors than the authors of the article, and the nuances of both are equally squashed under the pressure of producing a simple metric. Cohorts are useful because they capture a group with some shared attribute, and racial cohorts are particularly useful because they're overwhelmingly consistent through time and datasource for a particular person. The disaggregation into racial cohorts in a ranking like this would be a useful indicator of how the outcomes of a particular person would change solely by moving states. But it's not an effective indicator of evaluating a state taxpayer's contribution to the quality of students coming out of the state's schools -- students who presumably perpetuate the results of the quality of their education in their life, producing a myriad of poorly-understood impacts on the state as they do so. Both of them are worthwhile questions to answer, but they're very different studies. But one calling another flawed on the basis of this is jarring.

thaumasiotes 8y ago
Why isn't it an effective indicator for evaluating how much state taxpayers are getting for their contribution to the state schools? Can you elaborate on the difference between the two questions?
- temp-dude-87844 8y ago
  The "best states to send your kids to school" and the "how much value are students of our state deriving from my tax contribution vs. in other states" are almost mutually exclusive, because in the second case you're deliberately averaging every student out in the whole state, good students and bad, while in the first one you're benefiting from the positive lurking variables associated with other cohorts, yet only being penalized for negative contributions of your own cohort. The first methodology benefits from disaggregation by racial cohorts such that the reader can optimize given their particular circumstances, but the magnitude of contributory factors to that success are opaque and still averaged statewide. Most obviously, this also includes funding, where funding received by particular students -- and especially not funding sourced from parents of students in the same cohort -- are not separated out. They shouldn't have to be, as schooling is a public good, but if they aren't, then the metric doesn't accurately reflect the impact of the socioeconomic condition and proportions of the cohorts in the state, but splits them out the results solely to avoid having to consider races other than one's own. The latter question is typically what is being studied, although pop science coverage often leaves the reader free to interpret it as the former.
rayiner 8y ago
> But it's not an effective indicator of evaluating a state taxpayer's contribution to the quality of students coming out of the state's schools -- students who presumably perpetuate the results of the quality of their education in their life, producing a myriad of poorly-understood impacts on the state as they do so. The opposite is true: the disaggregated ranking is the only good measure of "a state taxpayer's contribution" because the taxpayer has little to do with e.g. the fact that Hispanic students face additional challenges because they're from an ESL household. What you're really saying is that the composite metric is a better measure of the average "quality of students coming out of the state's schools," which reduces to the assertion that it's better to have a school system full of privileged white kids than minority kids who face challenges. I don't think we should be ranking school systems that way.

thaumasiotes 8y ago

Why isn't it an effective indicator for evaluating how much state taxpayers are getting for their contribution to the state schools? Can you elaborate on the difference between the two questions?

temp-dude-87844 8y ago
The "best states to send your kids to school" and the "how much value are students of our state deriving from my tax contribution vs. in other states" are almost mutually exclusive, because in the second case you're deliberately averaging every student out in the whole state, good students and bad, while in the first one you're benefiting from the positive lurking variables associated with other cohorts, yet only being penalized for negative contributions of your own cohort. The first methodology benefits from disaggregation by racial cohorts such that the reader can optimize given their particular circumstances, but the magnitude of contributory factors to that success are opaque and still averaged statewide. Most obviously, this also includes funding, where funding received by particular students -- and especially not funding sourced from parents of students in the same cohort -- are not separated out. They shouldn't have to be, as schooling is a public good, but if they aren't, then the metric doesn't accurately reflect the impact of the socioeconomic condition and proportions of the cohorts in the state, but splits them out the results solely to avoid having to consider races other than one's own. The latter question is typically what is being studied, although pop science coverage often leaves the reader free to interpret it as the former.

rayiner 8y ago

> But it's not an effective indicator of evaluating a state taxpayer's contribution to the quality of students coming out of the state's schools -- students who presumably perpetuate the results of the quality of their education in their life, producing a myriad of poorly-understood impacts on the state as they do so. The opposite is true: the disaggregated ranking is the only good measure of "a state taxpayer's contribution" because the taxpayer has little to do with e.g. the fact that Hispanic students face additional challenges because they're from an ESL household. What you're really saying is that the composite metric is a better measure of the average "quality of students coming out of the state's schools," which reduces to the assertion that it's better to have a school system full of privileged white kids than minority kids who face challenges. I don't think we should be ranking school systems that way.