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Rational Urbanism
Home » Posts tagged "Urban Schools"

Tag Archives: Urban Schools

PARCC

Posted on November 19, 2016 by Steve

I’ve had a little push back from time to time on the claims I’ve made about urban schools. I’ve acknowledged that data on the few middle class and even wealthy kids who attend poor urban schools is limited and can almost always only be teased out from the much greater focus given to analyzing and understanding the performance of poor children.
That said, my own personal, albeit anecdotal evidence continues to pile up. Having received my step-daughter’s 2016 3rd grade PARCC math score from her “level 4, seriously underperforming, in danger of state takeover” elementary school we saw this:

To put this in perspective, a score of 809 would put her in the 99th percentile, the 99.9th percentile score starts at a score of 836. 


My wife and I do not teach her math at home, though I did once find a video explaining parallel and perpendicular lines on YouTube for her! I find it hard to believe that she has suffered academically in city schools, not any more than my older daughters did.
Nope. I’ll give her, and her failing school, all the credit. When we get her English score, I’ll share that too. 

Update: 826 98th percentile in reading.

Posted in Rational Urbanism | Tags: Education, Testing, Urban Schools | 1 Comment |

Buy All the Books

Posted on October 28, 2015 by Steve

The New York Times had an interesting piece on the NAEP exam and the analysis of its results. In it there was a link to a report by the Urban Institute in which the author explains how and why state policies may impact student outcomes. The report takes as its point of departure the idea that raw test scores are essentially meaningless unless and until the raw data is analyzed through the filter of student demographics. 

Certain states are singled out as having the appearance of delivering a high quality education to their young people, but in truth the favorable demographics of the students they educate masks shortcomings. Conversely there are states whose raw scores appear to represent a failure to deliver quality education to their young people, but which actually do a fantastic job of overcoming demographic difficulties. The section of the report entitled “Do States Matter” concludes with a quote from a researcher saying “[A]nyone who follows NAEP scores knows that the difference between Massachusetts and Mississippi is quite large. What is often overlooked is that every state has a mini- Massachusetts and Mississippi contrast within its own borders”. That has been the message of the entire thread on education here at the Rational Urbanism blog: apparent quality and actual quality can differ greatly.

(As a side note, Massachusetts ranks #1 in both apparent and actual quality. I think a better analogy might have been Connecticut and Texas)
Another point made somewhat relentlessly here on the blog was referenced in the report as well: the student is over 12x more important than the classroom teacher at explaining differences in educational outcomes, and 20x more important than the school or school district.

To personalize this a bit, here is a picture of my stepdaughter with her entire third grade class: 

 
Notice anything? 15 kids. Average elementary school class size nationwide? Over 20. And LuLu’s teacher has a full time aide in the classroom. 

People are paying a whole lot more to live in communities with “apparent” good schools. Are they good schools? To be honest, no one has published the in depth analysis that would prove or disprove the claim, they just know that the raw scores are good. If my wife and I did that we would have to spend easily twice and perhaps three times more on housing than we currently do (and so doing still live in a smaller, lower quality home) and that would have enormous knock on effects. 

For example, LuLu knows that we will buy any standard book at any cost if she wants to read it. At the bookstore the answer is always “Yes!” and that attitude has led to a child who has found a variety of types of books in which she is interested. If we were to spend more than the $1,000 a month we spend now on mortgage/property taxes/insurance and if we needed a second car, we might have to cut back on book purchases, drama classes, theater tickets, concert tickets, and museum trips for LuLu. All to pay for a “better education” which might not be a better education.

15 children in a classroom with a qualified teacher and a highly motivated well prepared student; I think, as with my older daughters, LuLu will do just fine.

Posted in Rational Urbanism | Tags: Education, Urban Schools | Leave a comment |

Good School, Bad School

Posted on August 29, 2015 by Steve

Listen carefully when people use the terms “good school” or “bad school”. What they think they mean, and therefore what they think they know, is that they have the data necessary to judge how close students in that school come to maximizing their potential in terms of academic growth. 

They don’t know that, I don’t know that, you don’t know that, and no one knows that, unless and until they have a least two data sets. One data set would be as large as possible and would assess as many schools as possible doing all of the statistical work necessary to identify the demographic characteristics which impact on as many as possible significant outcomes. The next would be all of that data on those outcomes from the school being judged. You then have to compare the outcomes the demographic information would predict to the actual outcomes over as many years as possible (especially important if the school has a small population). Then, and only then, can you speak knowledgeably about whether or not that school is “good” or “bad”.

Instead when these terms are used what is really being identified is not the capacity to add value or the failure to do so of the school, but rather the demographic characteristics of the students who attend the school which correlate to better or worse outcomes. 

In the greater Springfield area Longmeadow High School has high test scores and an excellent graduation rate. Is it a good school? I don’t know, and you don’t know either. Given its demographics does it over-perform or underperform? I don’t know, and you don’t know either. Commerce High School in Springfield has low test scores and a high drop out rate. Is it a bad school? I don’t know, and you don’t know either. That can only be known if you have all of the relevant data and you’ve compared the outcomes predicted by demographics and the actual outcomes.

Here comes the important question: Does it matter? My answer is “probably not”. Chances are Commerce High School is an average school doing an average job…because that’s what average means, BUT we know who the students are who are struggling in each subject area, and we probably know who the students are which are at risk of dropping out and we have some idea of the research based interventions which can help them. More students are in need of those interventions at Commerce than at Longmeadow. Many of those interventions are costly. Even if we provide all of the resources necessary for as many of the interventions as can be provided the student population of Commerce will still not achieve outcomes equivalent to the population of Longmeadow High School (a fact which is about as meaningless as any I can think of by the way), but their outcomes will improve if resources are provided to do the things which we know tend to work.

The important issue here is this; when we expend resources in ignorance, whether as a society or as individuals, we stand a greater chance of wasting those resources. Moving children from bad schools to good schools might be a good idea. I mean I suppose we could ask the people of Lake Wobegon how we get all of our children into better than average schools, and maybe the headmaster at Hogwarts would know how we get the good teachers in the good schools to teach 2x or 3x the number of students they currently teach and still remain “good teachers”.

Leaving those little conundrums aside, just taking students out of urban districts and sending them to suburban ones takes a lot of money, money which could be used for interventions in the urban districts. In many cases, it also takes the best of the best students out of the urban districts because the type of parents who expend the effort prioritizing schooling by finding out about and following through on what they believe are better opportunities for their children are likely to have children who achieve better outcomes. All this to send students from “bad schools” we really don’t know are bad, to “good schools” we really don’t know are good.


So the next time you hear someone say that some city has bad schools ask them if they know the overall percentage of students on free and reduced price lunch, and the percentage of students who are English Language Learners, and the percentage of students in the district who are transient and how those numbers compare to what would then be the consequent predicted outcomes on standardized test scores, graduation rates, and the post secondary success of the student body. If they don’t have those figures readily available tell them, nicely, to shut the fuck up, they don’t know what they’re talking about.

 

Posted in Rational Urbanism | Tags: Urban Schools | 2 Comments |

The Unintended

Posted on August 23, 2015 by Steve

When my older daughters were attending the Milton Bradley Elementary School in Springfield I spent two terms on the School Centered Decision Making Team which, in theory, acted like a board of directors of the school. At that time the Springfield schools were under the same desegregation order which saw me bused in 1974 from my neighborhood school to another 1.4 miles away. Back in 2000 the schools had implemented a “controlled choice” program wherein parents selected from three schools and every attempt was made to give parents their highest possible selection in such a way that the each school would fall into the range of distribution which was considered “integrated”.

The goal was for each school in the district to fall within a certain percentage of the district’s overall racial or ethnic make-up. At the time Springfield schools were somewhere around 20% White, 20% Black, 55% Hispanic. What I learned was that a Springfield school could be considered segregated if its population was 33% White, 33% Black, 33% Hispanic, but a suburban school, let’s say for example in Longmeadow, was considered “integrated” even if it had a population made up 100% of White students because its school population more closely reflected the overall population of the district. 
Nothing could better illustrate the fact that city dwellers are held to a different standard than suburbanites. 

My parents very well may have selected the house that they did because the neighborhood it was in was, at the time, as white a neighborhood as existed in the city. My father was a little bit racist. He moved the family from the Berkshires to Springfield because it gave him the chance to move up in the United States Postal Service and earn more money, not to seek diversity. He and my mother chose a house at the end of a dead end dirt road, with well water and a septic tank. It was wedged in between some undeveloped land owned by a nearby synagogue and un-developable wetland owned by the city. My parents had lived in that house for a decade and a half before I entered 4th grade and started being bused to Washington Street School. In retrospect there was an increase in diversity. Tiffany Street School had, as I remember, one black girl.

20150823-081707.jpg

In my class at Washington Street there were two Puerto Ricans (who spent most of the day in a separate room!).

20150823-081820.jpg
My dad wasn’t going to “integrated schools”, his life was as insular as ever, he liked his secluded dead end hide-away, and my mom was very close to the neighbors. We stayed. But a look at enrollment in city schools shows a population which was 90% White shrinking to well under 1/3 White in fewer than 20 years. My mom still lives in that house. Its value is probably 1/4 of the value of the suburban home they could have purchased for the same amount of money (or less) before 1974. 

Staying was a stupid decision from a financial standpoint. 

And where did these White people go who fled the cities in the 70’s and 80’s and who have stayed away ever since? The suburbs? The exurbs? The “as far away from any place where the state might tell me I have to send my kids to school with brown people”-urbs? And what has that done to our land use? What has that done to our energy usage?

In combination with the interstate highway system, the defunding of public transit, and red-lining, integration has created the most wasteful society that has ever existed and which sees us spewing more than our share of carbon detritus into the atmosphere destroying the environment and the climate at the same time it immiserates us because it forces us to spend years of our lives enmeshed in metal skins traversing miles of barren asphalt strewn landscapes in order to purchase a gallon of milk.

Isn’t it enough that people who live and work in walkable urban environments do less harm to the environment? Is it necessary to obligate us to involuntarily and disproportionately integrate with people not from our tribe if, within the diverse whole, we choose to group together in enclaves?   

Certainly even someone of average intellect could see that having more people living in cities, even if those cities are somewhat broken up into enclaves, would lead to greater voluntary integration than exists when forced integration shifts the dominant group into enclaves located dozens of miles from minority groups.
Forced integration is a bad idea.  

Posted in Rational Urbanism | Tags: Urban Schools | 2 Comments |

(Links to topics from Strongtowns podcast) More Posts about Buildings and Schools

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Steve

Urban Schools and Education:

http://rationalurbanism.com/its-the-schools-stupid/
http://rationalurbanism.com/its-the-schools-stupid-part-ii/
http://rationalurbanism.com/its-the-schools-stupid-part-iii/
http://rationalurbanism.com/its-the-schools-stupid-iv/
http://rationalurbanism.com/its-the-schools-stupid-part-v/

http://rationalurbanism.com/freaky-facts/
My daughter Xela’s experiences in her own words…and some of mine:

http://rationalurbanism.com/podcasts-1-10/episode-10-education-with-special-guest-xela-shultis/
More of me saying more or less the same things, this time focusing on “school choice”

http://rationalurbanism.com/episode-2/episode-33-the-schools-part-i/
Danger (In no particular order)

http://rationalurbanism.com/tag/dangerousness/
Urban Renewal

http://rationalurbanism.com/tag/le-corbusier/
Pynchon Plaza

http://rationalurbanism.com/features/whats-right-whats-wrong/pynchon-plaza/

Posted in Uncategorized | Tags: Dangerousness, Urban Schools | Leave a comment |

Freaky Facts

Posted on June 22, 2013 by fdsfg23441drghs433retgsd

I was re-reading the opinion piece in which Stanford professor Sean F. Reardon said “It may seem counterintuitive, but schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students”, and I was thinking of some of the other references to data which make the same claim. So I picked up the book “Freakonomics” and I noticed these references to outcomes related precisely to the urban/suburban school issue. (Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind here is that the authors have no dog in this fight, the “urban v suburban” living typology, the point of the book is to show where popular wisdom is demonstrably wrong.)

p 158 “So what did the data reveal? The answer will not be heartening to obsessive parents: in this case school choice barely mattered at all….the students who won the lottery and went to a ‘better’ school did no better than equivalent students who lost the lottery and were left behind.”

p159 “What appears to be an advantage gained by going to a new school isn’t connected to the new school at all. What this means is that the students-and parents-who choose to opt out tend to be smarter and more academically motivated to begin with. But statistically they gained no academic benefit by changing schools.”

On pages 160-166 the “black-white testing gap” is analyzed wherein the authors claim that most of the “gap” is explained by the fact that a disproportionate number of black students come from low-income, low-education households, but even when those factors are accounted for “bad schools” explain the gap which persists. The issue there is that the logic is circular, though I wouldn’t disagree with the claims: students in “good schools” do better than students in “bad schools”. Isn’t that the definition of a good school? What the Donahue Institute data from the MCAS program showed is that sometimes “good schools” (Ones that improve on the outcomes demographics would indicate are probable) are located in cities, and “bad schools” (Ones in which students underperform their demography) are located elsewhere.

Continuing on with the authors of “Freakonomics”:

p168 “A child whose parents are highly educated typically does well in school; not much surprise there.”

“Matters: The child’s parents have high socioeconomic status
Doesn’t: The child’s parents recently moved to a better neighborhood.”

“A high socioeconomic status is strongly correlated to higher test scores”

p 169 “But moving to a better neighborhood doesn’t improve a child’s chances in school…because a nicer house doesn’t improve math or reading scores any more than nicer sneakers make you jump higher.”

(He should have replaced “nicer house” with “better” school. That is really the point, no parent moves to a “nicer house” in a “better neighborhood” because they believe the wainscoting will improve their child’s education! Notice “better” means assumed to be better because test scores are higher because the students who attend the school come from wealthier homes, better WITHOUT the quotes means that the school improves on demography…the only definition which has any educational significance.)

The authors conclude by saying: “It isn’t what you do as a parent; it’s who you are.”

An example of a thing you “do” would be choosing to live in an urban neighborhood, and that is one of the things which “it” isn’t.

Posted in Rational Urbanism | Tags: Demographics, Education, Poverty, Race, Schools, Testing, Urban Schools | 2 Comments |

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