It jumped out to me that NHJ has high praise in her piece for the principal at her daughter's middle school, who shares her "anti-racist" worldview. And that principal does sound like a thoughtful, caring and dedicated administrator. But the school didn't assign any homework "because studies show that it does not have much impact on academic achievement"? Her daughter got As in algebra and was told she was excelling even though she "had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions"?
Yes, the structural factors that create separate and unequal schools are a real problem. I don't think NHJ is wrong about that. But so are the counterproductive, radical chic ideas that have taken root with many activists, and that she championed for the last decade plus. Ideas that led to the lowering of standards, the elimination of accountability, and the restriction of options and choices. (To be fair to NHJ, she gestures at this in her piece with the one statement from the principal that in lowering standards they may have practiced "racism under the guise of antiracism.")
For me, the tell here is the maddening truth that black and brown enrollments in NYC's elite high schools used to be much greater, back in the '70s and '80s when racial tensions in NYC were much higher and overtly discriminatory beliefs more widespread in American cities. But then in the name of detracking anti-racist activists demanded that g&t programs in the elementary and middle schools in NYC's poor and minority be dismantled, and as a result the number of kids passing the entry exams to schools like Stuyvesant plunged, and have remained abysmally low ever since. That's not the fault of structural racism, however real, that's an own goal.
A lot of minority students go to high-performing private schools through "Prep for Prep", too, which drives down black/Hispanic enrollment in the specialized schools, at least.
Yes, the prep school recruitment efforts are great, though as I understand it that accounts for only a portion of the drop. There’d be many more black and brown kids in those schools if they hadn’t unwound gifted programs in the schools in many of the poor, minority neighborhoods of the city.
There's a great deal of sense in this article, but it still fails to face up to the central reality that underlies all of these issues.
The presumption, shared by Nikole H-J and others, is that there are "good" schools and there are "bad" schools, and that whites use all their influence to ensure that their kids go to the "good" schools, and hence do well, whereas society is rigged to ensure that black kids get sent to the "bad" schools, and hence do badly. Thus, the holy grail is to find some way of ensuring that black kids get into the "good" schools, whereupon everything would be fine.
The reality is that (to a very good approximation) there is no such thing as a "good" school or a "bad" school. Everything about a school's discipline standards and academic outcomes is actually down to the intake of kids that it gets.
As a thought experiment, consider taking the best-performing and worst-performing schools, and swapping around the cohorts of kids, while keeping everything else the same. Instantly, the "best-performing" school would become bad and the "worst-performing" school would become good.
It's very easy to teach the cohorts of kids that the best-performing schools get (easy to have good discipline, appropriate material, and to properly mark and grade their work) whereas it is almost impossible to do the same for the cohorts of kids that the worst-performing schools get.
It is a refusal to accept the above reality that underlies all the bad policies that keep getting imposed on US schools. We need to stop blaming the performance gaps on the schools; the schools are doing their best.
Whenever we see schools doing much better than others, it is usually down to selection effects, or to cherry-picking statistics done by those who are trying to make their policy look good.
For example the Mississippi "miracle" involves making large numbers of kids re-take a year. That may be a good policy, but it means that, when comparing same-grade kids with different states, theirs tend to be older (so you'd expect better outcome for that reason). That's just an example of why it's not always straightforward to compare systems.
Actually, I'd really like to be proven wrong on this. I'd really like there to be ways in which we can figure out what makes a "good" school, so that we can implement it, such that nearly all kids do well. Wouldn't that be great! But people have been trying this for 60 years. No-one ever seems to be able to implement it in a way that works at scale.
"For example the Mississippi "miracle" involves making large numbers of kids re-take a year."
This is factually incorrect. Actually retention rates are pretty similar to before the new law passed.
Karen Vaites had an excellent piece over at The Argument on the subjec. Derck Thompson also covered this on his latest Plain English Podcast.
"One popular critique is that Mississippi’s third-grade retention policy — that students who can’t read at the end of third grade don’t go on to fourth grade — is artificially raising its scores by ensuring kids are older when they take the test. But this cannot account for the past decade of steady improvement; during that decade, the share of Mississippi students held back has not risen. The average age of students taking the NAEP hasn’t changed."
or "In short, the state’s educational improvement appears to be legitimate and meaningful. It’s true that calling these gains a “miracle” seems overstated, and some questions about them warrant further investigation. But there’s little if any evidence they’re artificially inflated. "
"Hiltzik, the Los Angeles Times columnist, advanced two major critiques of the state’s test score gains in a recent column.
First, he argued that by holding back struggling third-graders, the state had inflated its test scores by removing those students from the pool of fourth grade test-takers.
In reality, this could help explain test scores jumps for a short period of time, but it doesn’t make much sense for longer-term gains. Eventually, students who are retained in early grades will move up to the next grade — they are not held back forever. Because Mississippi has seen sustained improvements, retention gaming appears to be an unlikely explanation."
First, I'm all for good schooling, and, yes, students will do better with better schools. But the central point here, as in my first comment, is that improving schools will not "close the gaps" between high-performing demographics and low-performing demographics.
The first link you give accepts this ("No one claims that Mississippi eliminated its achievement gaps"). In short, we should not blame the schools for the gaps between demographics. That issue is ignored in the NH-J article.
On the narrow point of Mississippi's policy: in comparing Mississippi with other states, we do need to compare like with like (so same-age comparison, not same-grade comparison). Retention rates being similar over time in Mississippi is less relevant than how they compare with the states that Mississippi is being compared with.
No; schools like the UK's Michaela show that there's more to it than this. The population a school is aimed at serving does not make the school good or bad; how serious and effective the school is at meeting that specific population's needs determines whether it's good or bad.
As Freddie deBoer is fond of pointing out, it's true that schools will rarely change the relative rank-order of their students compared to each other. But you can teach a fast child poorly, and you can teach a slow child well. It is both possible and worthwhile to build effective schools across the spectrum of student learning speed and background.
I agree that we should hope for effective schooling across the ability range. My point is pretty much the same as deBoer's, that good schooling is worthwhile across the ability range, but does not close the gaps. The demand that schools must close the gaps is the driver for much wrong policy in American schools.
The Michaela school is interesting, but it's still a "selective" school in the sense that parents need to know about the school, want their kids to go there, opt for it, accept the strict discipline policy, and reinforce the discipline policy with their kids. All of that means their intake is not representative of London as a whole.
And while Michaela is largely "ethnic minority", many of those minorities are capable kids (kids of Chinese migrants to the West seem always to do well; kids of migrants from India seem to be well-disciplined and do well in the UK). Michaela is only 3% "black Caribbean", which is the demographic closest to the demographic that causes all the problems for US education.
I think the clear answer for those failing. Public schools is to look to places like mississippi or louisiana that have turned things around and see what they do. And then implement them and not just part of it. All of it
Implement things like frequent low stakes testing, along with clear communication to the parents when the kids are failing
Implement mandatory grade failing if kids can't pass and end of the year test.
And make sure you are communicating that to the parent often that they are behind. And will fail
Make sure you're doing phonics in a content rich curriculum.
Even better standardize that curriculum. So the end of the year test tests on the content as well. You should also test on science and social studies and history.
Also, make sure that kids are behind. Get high intensity, small group tutoring to get them caught up.
We've seen again and again that an accountability culture can produce results. Especially if paired with the right curriculum
When we were starting charter schools, I heard a similar argument from christian friends, telling me that 'we should be salt and light' in the secular square. It's rubbish. Your children are not a sacrifice to your stupid religious virtue signaling. You don't stand on the edge of the abyss and toss your children in to the pit to Baal and tell them, "You kiddies be salt and light down there, ok!! Make Jesus proud!!".
This is why we can't have nice things. Because christians are so clueless.
Right on target.
It jumped out to me that NHJ has high praise in her piece for the principal at her daughter's middle school, who shares her "anti-racist" worldview. And that principal does sound like a thoughtful, caring and dedicated administrator. But the school didn't assign any homework "because studies show that it does not have much impact on academic achievement"? Her daughter got As in algebra and was told she was excelling even though she "had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions"?
Yes, the structural factors that create separate and unequal schools are a real problem. I don't think NHJ is wrong about that. But so are the counterproductive, radical chic ideas that have taken root with many activists, and that she championed for the last decade plus. Ideas that led to the lowering of standards, the elimination of accountability, and the restriction of options and choices. (To be fair to NHJ, she gestures at this in her piece with the one statement from the principal that in lowering standards they may have practiced "racism under the guise of antiracism.")
For me, the tell here is the maddening truth that black and brown enrollments in NYC's elite high schools used to be much greater, back in the '70s and '80s when racial tensions in NYC were much higher and overtly discriminatory beliefs more widespread in American cities. But then in the name of detracking anti-racist activists demanded that g&t programs in the elementary and middle schools in NYC's poor and minority be dismantled, and as a result the number of kids passing the entry exams to schools like Stuyvesant plunged, and have remained abysmally low ever since. That's not the fault of structural racism, however real, that's an own goal.
A lot of minority students go to high-performing private schools through "Prep for Prep", too, which drives down black/Hispanic enrollment in the specialized schools, at least.
Yes, the prep school recruitment efforts are great, though as I understand it that accounts for only a portion of the drop. There’d be many more black and brown kids in those schools if they hadn’t unwound gifted programs in the schools in many of the poor, minority neighborhoods of the city.
There's a great deal of sense in this article, but it still fails to face up to the central reality that underlies all of these issues.
The presumption, shared by Nikole H-J and others, is that there are "good" schools and there are "bad" schools, and that whites use all their influence to ensure that their kids go to the "good" schools, and hence do well, whereas society is rigged to ensure that black kids get sent to the "bad" schools, and hence do badly. Thus, the holy grail is to find some way of ensuring that black kids get into the "good" schools, whereupon everything would be fine.
The reality is that (to a very good approximation) there is no such thing as a "good" school or a "bad" school. Everything about a school's discipline standards and academic outcomes is actually down to the intake of kids that it gets.
As a thought experiment, consider taking the best-performing and worst-performing schools, and swapping around the cohorts of kids, while keeping everything else the same. Instantly, the "best-performing" school would become bad and the "worst-performing" school would become good.
It's very easy to teach the cohorts of kids that the best-performing schools get (easy to have good discipline, appropriate material, and to properly mark and grade their work) whereas it is almost impossible to do the same for the cohorts of kids that the worst-performing schools get.
It is a refusal to accept the above reality that underlies all the bad policies that keep getting imposed on US schools. We need to stop blaming the performance gaps on the schools; the schools are doing their best.
This is obviously not the case.
Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to see states like mississippi, make huge gains in education with the same schools and students
Same when roland fryer took over twenty of the worst performing schools in houston
In fact, many of the schools aren't doing their best. They are being run poorly. They often have poor curriculum on top of it
And some of the staff shouldn't be there
Whenever we see schools doing much better than others, it is usually down to selection effects, or to cherry-picking statistics done by those who are trying to make their policy look good.
For example the Mississippi "miracle" involves making large numbers of kids re-take a year. That may be a good policy, but it means that, when comparing same-grade kids with different states, theirs tend to be older (so you'd expect better outcome for that reason). That's just an example of why it's not always straightforward to compare systems.
Freddie deBoer has written about how this sort of "miracle" school or miracle system always seems to turn out to be an artefact of measurement. e.g. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/there-are-no-miracles-in-education
Actually, I'd really like to be proven wrong on this. I'd really like there to be ways in which we can figure out what makes a "good" school, so that we can implement it, such that nearly all kids do well. Wouldn't that be great! But people have been trying this for 60 years. No-one ever seems to be able to implement it in a way that works at scale.
"For example the Mississippi "miracle" involves making large numbers of kids re-take a year."
This is factually incorrect. Actually retention rates are pretty similar to before the new law passed.
Karen Vaites had an excellent piece over at The Argument on the subjec. Derck Thompson also covered this on his latest Plain English Podcast.
"One popular critique is that Mississippi’s third-grade retention policy — that students who can’t read at the end of third grade don’t go on to fourth grade — is artificially raising its scores by ensuring kids are older when they take the test. But this cannot account for the past decade of steady improvement; during that decade, the share of Mississippi students held back has not risen. The average age of students taking the NAEP hasn’t changed."
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/is-mississippi-cooking-the-books?utm_source=publication-search
or "In short, the state’s educational improvement appears to be legitimate and meaningful. It’s true that calling these gains a “miracle” seems overstated, and some questions about them warrant further investigation. But there’s little if any evidence they’re artificially inflated. "
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/7/18/23799124/mississippi-miracle-test-scores-naep-early-literacy-grade-retention-reading-phonics/
"Hiltzik, the Los Angeles Times columnist, advanced two major critiques of the state’s test score gains in a recent column.
First, he argued that by holding back struggling third-graders, the state had inflated its test scores by removing those students from the pool of fourth grade test-takers.
In reality, this could help explain test scores jumps for a short period of time, but it doesn’t make much sense for longer-term gains. Eventually, students who are retained in early grades will move up to the next grade — they are not held back forever. Because Mississippi has seen sustained improvements, retention gaming appears to be an unlikely explanation."
First, I'm all for good schooling, and, yes, students will do better with better schools. But the central point here, as in my first comment, is that improving schools will not "close the gaps" between high-performing demographics and low-performing demographics.
The first link you give accepts this ("No one claims that Mississippi eliminated its achievement gaps"). In short, we should not blame the schools for the gaps between demographics. That issue is ignored in the NH-J article.
On the narrow point of Mississippi's policy: in comparing Mississippi with other states, we do need to compare like with like (so same-age comparison, not same-grade comparison). Retention rates being similar over time in Mississippi is less relevant than how they compare with the states that Mississippi is being compared with.
No; schools like the UK's Michaela show that there's more to it than this. The population a school is aimed at serving does not make the school good or bad; how serious and effective the school is at meeting that specific population's needs determines whether it's good or bad.
As Freddie deBoer is fond of pointing out, it's true that schools will rarely change the relative rank-order of their students compared to each other. But you can teach a fast child poorly, and you can teach a slow child well. It is both possible and worthwhile to build effective schools across the spectrum of student learning speed and background.
I agree that we should hope for effective schooling across the ability range. My point is pretty much the same as deBoer's, that good schooling is worthwhile across the ability range, but does not close the gaps. The demand that schools must close the gaps is the driver for much wrong policy in American schools.
The Michaela school is interesting, but it's still a "selective" school in the sense that parents need to know about the school, want their kids to go there, opt for it, accept the strict discipline policy, and reinforce the discipline policy with their kids. All of that means their intake is not representative of London as a whole.
And while Michaela is largely "ethnic minority", many of those minorities are capable kids (kids of Chinese migrants to the West seem always to do well; kids of migrants from India seem to be well-disciplined and do well in the UK). Michaela is only 3% "black Caribbean", which is the demographic closest to the demographic that causes all the problems for US education.
Very much agreed with all this.
I think the clear answer for those failing. Public schools is to look to places like mississippi or louisiana that have turned things around and see what they do. And then implement them and not just part of it. All of it
Implement things like frequent low stakes testing, along with clear communication to the parents when the kids are failing
Implement mandatory grade failing if kids can't pass and end of the year test.
And make sure you are communicating that to the parent often that they are behind. And will fail
Make sure you're doing phonics in a content rich curriculum.
Even better standardize that curriculum. So the end of the year test tests on the content as well. You should also test on science and social studies and history.
Also, make sure that kids are behind. Get high intensity, small group tutoring to get them caught up.
We've seen again and again that an accountability culture can produce results. Especially if paired with the right curriculum
When we were starting charter schools, I heard a similar argument from christian friends, telling me that 'we should be salt and light' in the secular square. It's rubbish. Your children are not a sacrifice to your stupid religious virtue signaling. You don't stand on the edge of the abyss and toss your children in to the pit to Baal and tell them, "You kiddies be salt and light down there, ok!! Make Jesus proud!!".
This is why we can't have nice things. Because christians are so clueless.