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Three Unexpected Data Points Describe Elementary School Quality
garthsundem writes with a link to his story in Wired, according to which "Test scores and student/teacher ratio are nearly meaningless. But three new numbers do describe school quality: 1. (Test Scores/Parent Education): How do scores outpace expectations? 2. Test Score Growth: Any single score can be socioeconomics, but growth is due to the school. 3. (Teacher Salary*%Highly Qualified/Teacher Age): The best teachers will become highly qualified early, and will gravitate toward the best paying jobs." These factors seem to be at least interesting starting points; if you've shopped around for elementary schools, what else did you consider?
Homeschooling?
2. Test Score Growth: Any single score can be socioeconomics, but growth is due to the school.
... if you can keep all other factors constant by freeze-framing the rest of the world.
Every end has half a stick.
Your best bet when shopping for schools is to find out what the average property tax paid in the area was last year. That's really the only way to find out if the school is worth it or not -- how well it's funded.
Looking at test scores is never the right answer. Ever. I can't repeat this enough to parents out there. The only part of the summary I can even remotely begin to agree with is the qualifications of the teachers; my high school, for example, had about 85%-90% of all its instructors with Masters degrees or higher in their fields.
Chances are, I would trust to the experience of my friends and relatives in their experiences of particular schools. Experience in the UK would suggest that once metrics become well known, schools/hospitals/whoever work to manipulate the results. Surveys of actual recent experience work much better.
Awesomeness when you compare two schools by these measures, don't draw any real conclusions, have a huge disclaimer, and then profess that you have unlocked the code to defining good education.
Pre-Bell Decibels / Post-Bell Decibels - results above 2 signify appropriate level of discipline
As a teacher, I agree with the bulk of this article. However, I absolutely disagree with student/teacher ratio not being a factor in quality education. When I started teaching, a mere seven years ago, my average class size was 23:1 with one "giant" class of 32. My average class size now is 40:1. It is impossible to offer the same quality of teaching and one-on-one to a large group. However, good teaching is still good teaching, and we muddle along to advanced scores; but it is much for difficult to help those who are truly struggling.
On another note, the factor of growth being the key metric is essential to understand. Lousy teachers can have great test scores depending on what community they are in (socio-economic), but it takes a truly skilled and effective teacher to be able to help students grow.
A lot of the education/economic data is available on a fairly fine scale from census data, if you're interested. (as opposed to, say, asking the local chamber of commerce or real estate industry, which tend to have a dog in the fight).
Looking at year over year growth (6th grade vs 2nd) is a start, but you also have to consider the past history of the school, to make sure you're doing an apples to apples. For instance, in areas where there is rapid population change, the students in 6th grade may not be the same students in 2nd grade 4 years earlier (extreme example, a big research oriented biotech company comes in with hundreds of graduate level educated employees and their children OR to take the other side, your city opens its doors to refugees from a disaster somewhere else, so you have a cohort of students who have experienced great disruption in their education
Actually, one of the best predictors of performance in schools is the change in scores from sprint to fall (over summer vacation). And that's correlated very well (and probably causal too) to things like the number of books in the parents' house, the availability of appropriate activities over the summer (not necessarily summer school or organized sports, but something other than strengthening your thumb on the remote control) and, of course, that correlates with socioeconomic standing, which in turn correlates with educational attainment (the buzz phrase in the statistics)
In the Ojai data, one has to be a bit careful, because Ojai just isn't that big a place. It's also not very typical in terms of the kinds of people who live there, being a sort of combination of agriculture, artsy folks, and high end tourist resorts, and the service people who serve them. You want to be careful about applying ratio tests derived from large populations on a small population if there is a lot of variability in the ratios. (this is what signifcance testing is all about)
My wife is an excellent teacher who left a prestigious private school for gifted kids and went to a school in a very low socioeconomic area. Why? She said the kids at the gifted school "Just got it" and there was no challenge for her, professionally. Now the students can't spell their names the first day, but thanks to the hard work of a lot of very good teachers, they are average when they leave. Sure, test scores are lower than at the gifted school, but the kids have made a lot more progress.
Oh, her #1 advice to parents of her students: READ TO YOUR KIDS EVERY DAY!
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
Homeschooling?
For decent science and math education, homeschooling may be the only choice. And no, it's not all the Bible thumpers' fault.
I've been very happy with our schools. The teachers are excellent and the administration seems to really care.
A few friends have been looking at sending their kids to private school for the first few years because the private schools offer all-day kindergarten. Our school district doesn't provide it, and the parents are responsible for the noontime pickup / dropoff.
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
1. (Test Scores/Parent Education): How do scores outpace expectations? - My school district is so apathetic score wise that graduating knowing 1+1=2 is a reason to cheer. In fact, any outpacing of expectations is pure grade inflation and studying on how to pass tests than learning itself.
2. Test Score Growth: Any single score can be socioeconomics, but growth is due to the school. - And how do you conclusively prove this enough to do anything with all the spin? Take the current US Presidential election. During the Clinton years the budget got balanced and we have a surplus. Why?
Ask a Democrat: Clinton did it.
Ask a Republican (especially Newt): Republican controlled Congress did it. If you ask Newt, it was his leadership specifically that made it so.
Look at the Sesame Street effect. Designed to help educate poor children with the idea their parents couldn't supply the early home education the well off could. This lead to an early education gap that increased as the kids grew older. S.S. increased the education of these poor kids, but made the gap worse. The well off kids were also watching and due to whatever factor caused the initial gap were getting more out of it.
Education isn't just an open system, but a highly volatile open system with too many actors trying to control the chaos to easily control for this.
3 . (Teacher Salary*%Highly Qualified/Teacher Age): The best teachers will become highly qualified early, and will gravitate toward the best paying jobs." - I checked this out for my county. Best performing school? Third highest wages. Worst performing school, my district, highest wages by $10k on average. Of course I don't know the ages of said teachers.
and put my child in an inner city school because they have an immersion program for a foreign language. This gives him a chance to learn while his brain is still primed to acquire language. Sure, I pay a price - they sent him home once with pages xeroxed from a book because they didn't have enough money for books for all of the kids (with a note asking me not to let him color on the pages because they couldn't really afford copies either) but he is ahead of where either of his two older brothers were at the same age (in an affluent suburban district). There is more about my choice here: http://moderatelyliberal.blogspot.com/2011/12/school-choice.html In general the education establishment pays little attention to what they know works. There is plenty of evidence that later starts for high school, teaching language earlier, abolishing DARE, and feeding kids healthy, less processed foods would help and be inexpensive. Unfortunately the schools are aught in culture wars and battles over union rights.
Should that denominator be the average actual age of the teachers at the school? Or The average years of experience teaching?
Because not everyone starts teaching at the same age.... and heck, a person with more life experience that is only just starting out teaching may be entirely able to outpace younger people with more experience in the field. Not everybody holds the same career their entire life anymore. In fact, most don't.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Any metric is meaningless if the target criterion is meaningless. Everyone talks about school quality. Well, what defines quality? Schools that produce the most college graduates, better paid employees, non-criminals, Nobel laureates? What's the goal of schools in the first place?
Most kids need new parents. Or at least parents that care and take responsibility. Parents that read to their children, help them pick up the basics, teach good study habits and make sure their children do their homework, will have students who do well in any school.
If Johnny can not read, it is mom and dads job to teach Johnny or to find someone who can. For any parent who is literate, the fact that they can have a child hit middle school who cant read is a sign of laziness. You pay taxes so that your city will provide primary education for your child. However you cant just put a sandwich in a lunch bag and send them out the door every morning for 12 years and expect that someone who is paid to show up for 8 hours a day at a union job will do a better job at loving your child and teaching them than you will.
I have 3 adult children. I am a high school dropout. Most of their lives we lived at or near the poverty level. Two of my three kids manage to get scholarships that pay for 90% of all their college expenses. They were all students who received good grades. Sometimes it was a lot of work for us. If a kid has a different learning style than how a teacher teaches, it was up to us to turn the TV off and spend time with our offspring and help them to learn.
I have worked 10 hours, driven another hour home, and then sat down and helped one child with math and read to another child. Face it, teachers are like any other group. Only 10% of them graduated in the top 10% of their class. College only required them to be right 70% of the time. That is right. Your child may be taught by someone who gets 30% of the material wrong, and that is before they perform a poor job at communicating what they DO know.
Many private schools spend half as much as public schools do per student yet the children learn far better? Why is this? Maybe because someone who is taxed for public schools and then still ponies up money for a private insinuation cares enough about their child's education to be involved and make sure that the succeed no matter what.
if you care about your kids. it is YOUR job to make sure they know the things they need to know. Passing it off on someone else and then acting powerless when your child is in 3rd grade has problems and wringing your hands for the next 9 years that nothing can be done is a cop out.
vi +
You're all still fooling yourself thinking these things make a difference? School is about conditioning and beating any sense of individuality out of the person.
It's not what you knwo but WHO you know, always has been that way, and it doesn't look liek ti will ever change.
Where you go to school or how you do makes no difference, want the best example of all? GWB
Man was a less than average student and became president, all onmerit of course. And don't start with Obama, everyone at the top has someone underneath with all the money holding them up.
Teachers and schools get most of the blame for our problems, but from my observation (2nd grader and 4th grader) it begins at home. Things you can control are encouraging work ("Your hard work paid off" instead of "You did well because you are smart") and picking a school with parents that are academically minded.
When we were picking between neighboring public grade schools before buying a house we met the principals and got tours of the schools. The teachers were nice and accommodating; the principals seemed organized and open to questions. Then my wife went to the "new student" parent night of each school. At one school the parents asked about lunch, recess, and generally the schedule. At the other the parents asked about curriculum and the moms were quoting sources like the society for women engineers.
Having moved between continents and school districts within them, look for an area with educated and involved parents. Check out the PTA (or whatever the local equivalent is), what fundraising activities are going on to support extra-curricular activities, how willing are the school staff (principle / headmaster) to discuss the integration of your kids into the local system.
If the parents truly support, and are involved with, the schools then the incidence of problems seems to be far less (yeah, I know it never goes away completely) and more time is spent actually educating the kids. This attracts good teachers. With extra fundraising and parental support those good teachers can think of ways to make the syllabus (which is designed to generally turn out good little proles who will blindly consume and obey) into something a lot more interesting. This makes the kids more interested in their education. It's a virtuous circle.
Of course - this does mean finding somewhere where the local populace treat the schools as something more than state provided child care.
This may mean changing jobs, paying more in mortgage/rent, actually spending time with your kids etc etc. We thought it was worth it. YMMV.
My brother and sister are both retired teachers (I am not).
While I beleive and hope that both of my siblings were "good teachers", both reached to top of their system's payscales by obtaining multiple advanced degrees - up to but not to exceed the number that will maximize pay - as early as possible. (Which affects total compensation including retirement.) My sister has 3 masters, brother has two masters and a PhD.
I have no idea whether or not that translates to "highly qualified". It does translate into "smart enough to know how the system works."
Sooner or later high performing teachers will move to private or better funded districts because unions oppose merit based pay. With enrolling my first child soon, I'm looking at houses at one of the wealthy suburbs around my city where they have their own independent school district.
Honestly, if you really care about *your* kids' education, just look at the FARMs (Free and Reduced Meals) rate. Sure, it's just a reflection of the socioeconomic makeup of the school, but you'll find that it also correlates to parent involvement and overall achievement. It's sad but true. My kids have been in a school where half the school is about 45% FARMs and the other half (where they are) is a special program with about 5% FARMs. The gap is really staggering, and you can spot the differences in behavior even in the hallway. Now that my older daughter is taking more classes with the "general population" she's sometimes amazed - she told me the other day "some of the kids in my class never read!"
The kids in the special program have parents who are involved and supportive, and they are generally well behaved and doing well academically. They are the kids whose parents were reading to them every night before they got to kindergarten, and they are the ones checking with the teachers to make sure everything is going well and getting extra help if it's not. I wish that it weren't the case, but I am ready to move to a smaller home in a better school catchment area for high school. I don't care how much you spend, if you don't have parents backing you up at home you're not going to get the results.
This shouldn't be taken, btw, as saying that we shouldn't try to improve education across the board. Just that in real life, if you want your kid to get the best education possible, you want them surrounded with other kids whose parents are willing and able to support them.
Is there any science behind any of this, or is he just making these numbers up because they seem like interesting numbers?
Has anybody seen any real data to support these measures of quality?
For example, he uses percentage of parents with a graduate-level education as a metric of parental support for child learning. Is there any correlation there at all? Or is it just supposed to be an indicator of socio-economic status?
Props for trying, but this seems like a lot of handwaving to me.
I live in one of the best school districts in the nation, in an affluent suburb. The five years of schooling my child has had so far could easily have been condensed into 2 years. Repetition (which I realize is needed to some extent for memorization and skill to develop) and preparation for standardized tests takes up most of the time. Add in the fact that standards for passing are ridiculously low. Add in the political correctness (don't get me started on the focus on "environmentalism" and being "eco-friendly"). I can only imagine what it would be like if we lived in an "average" area.
I'm tired of this crap. I'll be supplementing my child's public school education starting this summer. My hope is for him to be able to graduate high school as a sophomore. If you think that's unreasonable or that I'm a slave driver, you haven't paid much attention to how easy school is. And my child is one of the smart ones.
Final note -- I have nothing but praise for teachers and others in school who do their best to encourage, motivate and teach their students while putting up with the bureaucracy and system that straitjackets them.
I expect that the very best education comes from nuns. I found that Catholic school prepared me for the real world far better than my public school counterparts. Catholic school students learned more and were better at applying their learning to real world situations.
If it weren't for the anti-Catholic bias in America society (a bias that rivals that of African Americans: and I can easy prove it. 40% of American is Catholic, but we've had only 1 Catholic President, whereas 13% of America is African American, and we've had only 1 African American President), Catholic students would be ruling the country.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
This is the part that gets me. I took the California Achievement Test when I was in elementary and (some of) high school, and not once do I remember the teachers teaching us the material on the test. They went through their regular curriculum during the year, and we were given a 2-3 day overview on how to fill in our boxes, how to spend our time on the test,
These days, teachers will spend up to 6 weeks (or more) actually teaching the material on the standardized test. Wait, what?!? If you aren't teaching the material that's on the test *all year*, then something is seriously wrong. What are you teaching that isn't on the test, and why isn't the test testing the students on that material?
Dollars spent per student matters - some - but isn't the end-all-be-all of measurements. Standardized tests are broken from both ends (they don't measure what is being taught, the teachers are forced to game the system by teaching *to* the test, and the material being taught is suspect if it doesn't match the test). Honestly, I'd like to see a study of school districts measuring this:
$ spent on administration vs $ spent on students directly
My daughter is in 1st grade in a public school in Texas. I'm extremely disappointed with what I see. When public schools focus on standardized testing, they tend to teach towards the lowest common denominator. My daughter's school is very focused on achieving a school wide exemplary rating by having every minority student pass state defined standardized tests. In a school with a lot of non-native English speakers, this equates to a lot of remedial work. The bulk of the time is spent on the students who are going to fail the tests and the goal is to raise everyone up to a very low bar.
As a parent of a highly gifted student, this makes me furious. Budget constraints have killed all gifted programs. I would go so far as say this situation is downright unpatriotic. Gifted kids, our nation’s future leaders, inventors, and decision makers are being short changed. I can afford to send my daughter to a private school for gifted kids, but a gifted child of low income parents has a high likelihood of being screwed.
some will look at that as an easy way to raise test scores. Just pay the teachers more and automatically everything will improve.
Sadly you need to have standards WITH the pay. And as we've seen from the rubber rooms it's almost impossible to fire child molesters that are teachers. So getting rid of teachers that simply aren't good at their jobs is going to be entirely impossible.
What we need are standards for teachers. We need to hold teachers to some kind of standard and then be very comfortable with adjusting their pay based upon their performance and/or firing them if it's unacceptable.
that's the bare minimum. if we can't do that much then we should just try and invoke an across the board voucher system.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
If you want to know where to send your kids to elementary school, get to know some junior high or middle school teachers and find out which elementary students are best prepared for junior high or middle school. You can do the same thing at high school if you need but the choice of the middle grades is less important than elementary. Obviously, you need to know the teacher making the comments, but the teachers I know will give you an honest opinion if you ask. You may have to cut through some bureaucratic double speak.
Obviously this really doesn't matter if you don't have open enrollment. If you don't, then you have to decide where to live first as that will determine everything else.
This isn't a guarantee. The teacher that was doing a great job might leave or retire. Several might get fed up with the administration and leave. Great new teachers might transfer in somewhere else. But it will give a general overview as a starting point.
One of our elementary schools decided to try a radical new approach to teaching. Everything would be electronic. No books. The kids hated it. The school system is still trying to give it a chance - bureaucracy and institutional inertia being what it is. Few enroll there since it isn't working and they can't understand why.
All parents should be involved in their kid's education and should pick up the slack teaching concepts the kids aren't getting at school. Having said that, I'm a firm believer that home schooling is the wrong approach for 90% of the kids and parents who try it. It gets worse the more kids you have and the higher the grade level you try to teach.
My wife and I have four degrees between us, but you can't be an expert in enough things to teach them all subjects well. Trying to teach multiple kids at the same time holds the older kids back (but may help the young ones). Worst, if you can't actually teach or one of your kids just doesn't connect with you as a teacher, they are doomed. At least a bad public school teacher is just for one course or one year at the most. If they're all bad, find a way to go private or move someplace where the schools are good.
My last pieces of advice - make sure to get your children's eyesight tested if there is any doubt. Make sure their eyes track properly (take a pencil and slowly move it towards their nose and then from side to side a few times watching their eyes to make sure they track smoothly). Make sure they hear. Make sure they attend school. Check on their performance and keep them working. Help them to develop a love of books and reading - it will do them a world of good in school and in life as well. Get your noses out of your cell phones and video games yourselves and demonstrate good traits yourself to your kids.
If at all possible, get them away from our terrible 'educational' system and homeschool them (which does not mean they'll never converse with other humans, despite what ignorant people may say).
If you can't, then I pity both you and your children.
I'll tell you why. Those who are "highly qualified", young, and in higher paying positions, don't have the experience to make them effective.
Teaching is not just a job, it's a talent. You're either effective or not. It can't be taught, and seemingly isn't for those with an education degree.
My wife came to teaching as a second career. She is "highly qualified" as per school district requirements through training and continuing education. One reason why she's so effective is she had no pre-conceived notions about teaching before being hired. She found what was effective and stuck to it.
It's less of a skill and more of a talent, especially with primary grades.
completely agree with the first two though.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I realize TFA is more like the author's off-the-cuff musings and less like a rigorous study, but it does recommend looking at test score growth, and in the process fails to mention something that's both nearly obvious but almost always overlooked when discussing test score growth. When test scores grow, one is by definition comparing the scores that one group of students took on one test to the scores that another group of students got on a different test. With that in mind, there are 5 principal ways that test scores can "go up":
1. students cheat on the second test
2. the second test is easier
3. students who score low on the first test don't take the second test
4. students, who score high on the second test, were added to the testing group but did not take the first test
5. more individual students score better on the second test than perform worse on the second test
Cheating does happen, but it's probably rare. Tests can be psychologically validated to ensure constant difficulty, but this isn't done as often as it should. Nevertheless, #3 is by far the most common and least talked about way for test scores (particularly relative test scores) to improve. TFA recommends looking at the relative standing of a schools 2nd graders and 5th or 6th graders. We'd like to think that the students are being educated so successfully that their performance improves, but anyone making such a claim ought to be required to (rigorously and mathematically) prove that changes in the student population are not the primary cause. There is pretty good evidence, for example, that the high-profile improvement in the charter school that Michelle Rhee worked at was rather effective at "counseling out" the consistently low scoring students to have apparent test score gains that had little to do with their instructional program. I can well imagine the administrative staff of a school "working with" the parents to help find a school that's "a better match" to their kid's "unique learning style."
*** Work like a king, command like a slave, create like a dog.
The one number that gives you a quick read on an elementary school is the percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced cost school meals. This number is readily available. While this is a socio-economic index, it is reliably inversely proportional to the amount of parental involvement you can expect to find in the school population; and parental involvement is one of the most important factors in elementary education. (Yes, my family is full of educators.) While there are obviously going to be exceptions to this, it is a good, quick measure of the school. If you have a choice of one school with 25% free and reduced and one with 85% free and reduced, pick the former. Far more of its kids will be going to college. Far fewer will have parents strung out on methamphetamine or what have you. Far fewer will have serious behavioral issues that disrupt education for everyone.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I don't think people realize what those metrics are.
the first is parent education. so you're saying that schools with smart parents have smart students. so you're saying I should select a school based on how others have already selelcted a school.
the second is growing scores. so you're saying improvement is good to see.
the third is teacher attraction. so you're saying that schools that were selected by good teachers are good.
basing my selection simply by following others who have already selected it doesn't help. that's a short term promise that reaches a useless equilibrium. if dumb parents choose a school that has smart parents, it will soon have dumb parents. if bad teachers choose a school because it has good teachers, it will soon have bad teachers.
and test scores can't forever be going up.
"The best teachers will become highly qualified early, and will gravitate toward the best paying jobs."
No kidding? The best education will come from teachers who have a passion to dedicate the cost of a modern 4-year education, master's degree, credentialing, and entry-level experience while they're still young? Wow, that's great to know! Now here's the problem: How do teachers pay for all of that while still safely assuming that there will be a sufficient paycheck on the other side of all the hurdles.
This author of this article may not have noticed, but the economic crash for education has not yet ended. Faculty numbers are still being cut, early retirement is still being suggested, and schools (real schools, not those in Palo Alto and La Jolla) are still looking for the cheapest possible teacher. That teacher likely has very high qualifications because s/he got hired amongst a bunch of under-employed educators, so after 2 or 3 years, that highly qualified teacher will be leaving the scum-hole school that him him/her a job and move on to the higher paying jobs teaching students who aren't in as severe need of dedicated teachers.
Schools refer to this as Overqualified Turnover, Brain Drain, and Talent Sapping... and, believe it or not, it's a disincentive for regular schools to actually put the time and effort into hiring a very good teacher. Many would prefer to have an "OK" teacher that would stick around and have personal investment in their school over a great teacher that is just stopping by for a resume filler.
Your child and everyone's child is better off not flooding to one or a few "best schools" but taking the stand to require adequate public school funding for all schools.
If it weren't for the anti-Catholic bias in America society (a bias that rivals that of African Americans: and I can easy prove it. 40% of American is Catholic, but we've had only 1 Catholic President, whereas 13% of America is African American, and we've had only 1 African American President), Catholic students would be ruling the country.
Only 52% of Americans are women, and we already got Hilllary!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
The problem is Schools/Governments really ignore the normal distribution of students. The average Grade for the students should be a C or a 75% mastery in taught information. However school systems make the C grade considered the Underachiever Passing grade. While what should really be happening Most of the students have D-B Grades, and only a much smaller few would have Fs and As
When judging your school systems Large amount of As or Fs means trouble.
To many As means your course work is too easy for the students. To many Fs means the students it is too difficult. But if you find that the normal grades fit in the Normal Distribution Curve then that means you will relativity on par.
Collages need to start thinking like that when they do acceptances So the Harvard out there who get the best of the best will find where they were use to getting the A student that after the adjustment that they will be more use to getting the A- or B+ student. And the colleges that are not so selective will need to realize that a C- student may still be collage worthy.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
A school with a lot of blacks and/or Mexicans is an educational wasteland, regardless of how inspiring "Stand and Deliver" was.
At first, I thought I'd say something smart about how "good" predictors change over time as people learn to game the system then I read the original piece; is there any serious there there ? Is slashdot really posting random musings based on sample sizes of ~ 1 as something worth thinking about ? maybe thats why I find myself spending less time on /. then I used to
My Ex's family was home schooled. Five children. They aren't religious and lived in the country. Aside from some slight quirkiness, it worked well. The oldest is runs various hospitals. The next is a veterinarian. The third is a doctor. The fourth is about to graduate with a chemical engineering degree, and the fifth is in school to be a nurse.
What it comes down to is good parents who aren't socially crippled themselves.
Most parents seem to go by number of affluent white children at a school. And those schools tend to be in big suburbs with large schools where averages tend to smooth out kids out aren't learning.
My kid's in a title 1 inner-city school with a dual language immersion program. The parents I know in the suburbs are complaining about a lack of academic rigor. The parents at my school are complaining about it being too rigorous. I honestly think "choosing a school" might be a symptom of the problem. We should make sure all schools are fantastic. There are diminishing returns to your kid attending a fantastic school if the rest of your countrymen are not. After all, what's the value of your kid inventing the next iPhone if there is nobody to buy it?
And really what exactly is the value of a fantastic elementary school anyway? Are the kids going to learn their basics better, stronger, faster? As an adult I assure you that I love to read and am just as skilled at it as the kids who went to the "good schools" in my town. And quite frankly my state school college education pays me the same as my co-worker who went to MIT.
You want to know the best predictor of elem school success? You have to promise not to tell anyone, but it's parental involvement. Find a school where most of the parents are engaged with their kids, and regularly volunteer at the school, and you'll find a great learning environment. Everything else - money, test score changes over time, administration, etc. are really secondary. They get your kids for 5 hours a day 180 days a year, and you have them for 19 hours on those days and 24 on the other 185.
The biggest problem with elementary schools isn't money or bad teachers or inefficient administration - it's parents that don't give a shit.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
1. private/public
2. corporal punishment allowed yes/no
That's it.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I live in New Jersey where the standard response for failing schools is to shove them full of spending. Much of it gets wasted.
There's no replacing involved parents.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
But when you peel back the data, things like high test scores mean next to nothing about school quality – isn’t it likely that socioeconomics and not the school itself created these high test scores?
That's about as in-depth as this article gets. The author has no statistics to back-up his guess. He doesn't actually provide any data at all in the article. This is part of a chain of bloggers reiterating the often accepted yet statistically unproven assertion that test scores are useless. The reality is that they are the best measure we have of the quality of education. So before evaluating a school based on one person's opinion of how to do it, make sure you look at the currently accepted best science.
Based on the headline, I expected an article comparing student outcomes against various statistics, and evidence pointing out which statistics are best at picking the quality schools. But this article is merely someone throwing out guesses with no evidence to back it up. This is not worthy of posting on Slashdot.
This last year our son started at a charter school. It has turned out to be an excellent fit for our son. One of the things that became obvious as we were having to make the choice between a charter school and a magnet science program was that all children in all charter schools have parents who are concerned about their children's education and are at least willing to put forth the energy to apply for the charter school. I would say in general that parental involvement in the school is a major thing to consider and the type of parental involvement. Make sure that the level and types of activities expected of the parents (both in writing and through peer pressure) are in agreement with where you think the efforts should be applied. My son attended a highly rated private school for first grade, but the social dynamics of the wealthy mothers and the pressure that my wife felt to do things like extravagantly decorating the classrooms for the holidays were somewhat surreal and in conflict with our own objectives. The parental focus was very narcissistic and not really on the kids at that particular school. If I had not experienced this first hand I would not have ever have thought to make it a consideration.
I'll mod any female /.ers Insightful if in their reply they post links to webcam of themselves and their willing female partner performing sexy time.
On 4chan, I believe the phrase is "tits or GTFO". Succinct and to the point.
My main criteria for choosing an elementary school for my kids is distance. That is, can they walk to it on their own? If yes, then I'm good.
I understand why other parents shop around for the "best" elementary schools, but I don't know that their reasoning is sound, in all (most?) cases. In the end, nearly all schools will be roughly the same. Yes, there are going to be some outliers in both directions, but those are the exceptions.
In most cases, the school will have a mix of good teachers, mediocre teachers, and outright bad teachers. It is my job as a parent to make sure that my kids learn what they need to learn regardless of what kind of teacher they have. That means nightly discussions on what they learned in school that day plus an overview of their homework. If the teacher is good, then my involvement doesn't need to go much beyond that. If the teacher is bad (like my daughter's 5th grade math teacher -- terrible!), then it's my responsibility to step up and fill in the gaps.
So yeah, if the school ended up being one of the terrible outliers, then the amount of time I would need to invest would likely drive me to find a different school... and yeah, a great outlier would mean less time for me, but who cares?
This article fails on so many levels, I'm disgusted it's being re-posted.
List any approaches using psychometric analysis crossing socio-economic backgrounds? Nope!
Bash together random pseudo-factoids from statistical outliers, painting with a very broad brush? Yup!
Of course, this is coming from Wired. Which by now I should know better than to expect anything of substance to come out of their writing.
Look for active parental involvement.
My 3 oldest went to magnet elementary schools, and the first cutoff was that parents had to apply for their kindergartner to be admitted.
That eliminates the families who just point their kid to the corner for the bus to pick them up.
From there, you hope to get a PTA/PFO, Dad's Club , Cub Scouts/Brownies, Little League/Tee ball/Soccer/ . . .
Check with teachers and see if they ask for volunteers - in some cases I have seen an average of 2 full time adults.
Kid #3 went to a language immersion school, which in retrospect was not a good fit for her personally, but also the parental involvement was more difficult because most who wanted to help had a language barrier.
Kid #4 started in the same immersion school as his older sister, but didn't mesh with the teacher, so we pulled him, and sent him to "the neighborhood school" - which turned out to have more parents just showing up to help, and has been a great place for him. There is a higher % of low income, and kids who just get pointed at the bus, but he has learned all the social skill others have mentioned too.
Oh - and get involved yourself
In a public school, salaries are so overly-influenced (if not outright controlled) by the teachers union that they are meaningless as a metric. For a private school, good luck getting them to divulge the salary levels, let alone what level any particularly teacher is currently at.
Up here in Ontario Canada, teachers earn a good salary with excellent benefits and are required to be highly qualified.
The results speak for themselves.
I have experience as a student and parent in several school districts. One big factor was that the smaller, higher quality districts with lower number of students per class and first-name relationship between the superintendent and the parents (not to mention first-name between principals, teachers and parents) had waiting lists for teachers even though they paid substantially _less_ than the bigger districts. The big inner-city districts paid more, had much larger classes, crappy performance, horrific teaching environments, and cost more per student.
One small district (where I went to school) had (at the time) the lowest teacher pay in Multnomah County (Oregon, USA) but had a maximum of 15 students per class, and the teachers and parents ran the district together (WITHOUT the national PTA!!! or NEA!!!)
The district is now so popular that about 1/3 of the students are from other districts, and their parents are paying tuition just like they would at a private school. I have no idea what the teachers get paid these days.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Schools are about much more than being just exam machines. You have to look at ethos, discipline, how happy the children are that go there, and the reputation of the school with employers (if it's a high school). You get that information much better through social networking than through bald statistics.
"Across the United States, research has shown that students in schools with
good school libraries learn more, get better grades, and score higher on
standardized test scores than their peers in schools without libraries. From
Alaska to North Carolina, more than 60 studies have shown clear evidence
of this connection between student achievement and the presence of school
libraries with qualified school library media specialists."
http://www.scholastic.com/content/collateral_resources/pdf/s/slw3_2008.pdf
The author of the article says "My wife and I want education causation and not just correlation." My question is, why? Correlation is just fine for prediction. If certain statistics are highly correlated with successful students, use those statistics as a predictive measure. There is no reason to prove causality unless you are actually trying to change the system. If you can prove correlation, that is good enough.
If there is a correlation between a certain shoe size and good cooking skills, and I want to marry a good cook, I will seek out potential mates with that shoe size. Of course they won't all be good cooks, but I've improved my chances of finding a good cook. On the other hand, if a girl finds that I'm interested in women of a certain shoe size, and she has surgery to meet that requirement, it won't make her a good cook. (It would make her a psycho, though.)
Of course, the irony is that the things he lists are just more correlations. They're just better correlations than the standard ones he mentions.
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"The best teachers will become highly qualified early, and will gravitate toward the best paying jobs."
Really? Best at what? teaching or making money?
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I have a practical question concerning homeschooling: How can you be competent in all fields? I have a strong math/science background but I would not dare teaching anybody something about classical literature, arts or foreign languages that I can only speak somewhat fluently myself.
So how can I give my kids a good education when I am not on the same level as a teacher in every subject?
Around the world, it only takes ~90 hours in a classroom for an adult illiterate to be taught to read, write, do enough numbers so that they can continue their educations entirely on their own, using books.
It is normal for adult minds to continue on to college after 2 or 3 years of self-study, using books. Read O'Neill's 'Summerhill' for an English 'public school' version of this same story.
So, all that parents see happening as their child progresses is simply due to maturation of the brain. The history of mass-education (industrial revolution, kids went to work early, so start teaching reading/writing/arithmetic as early as possible, then teach it again if the kid hasn't gone to work this year) and the self-interest of both parents (want a baby sitter when both kids are working) and teachers (well-paying job) have combined to make everyone think that early learning is important (it is, but not academic learning), and that kids MUST step through the grades in order to learn what they need to know graduating from High School.
In a world with the internet, it is impossible to raise an ignorant child. All children learn, get great enjoyment from learning and displaying their new skills. "Hole in the wall experiment" on Youtube and google 'unschooling movement' for how kids learn without teachers, including reading and writing. 'unschooled' kids continue to college, no problem.
Further, learning by an interested mind is at least 10X as efficient/effective as the standard classroom 'cram it into their little minds'.
So, our kid is spending his time learning languages, music, dance, a lot of practical skills, including TechShop courses. When he is 16 or 17, we will start academics.
At 15, he has downloaded EE texts to learn about computer logic so he can automate his MineCraft farms, games, ... He can discuss the logic of adders and half-adders and 7-segment decoders and clock circuits, ... with enthusiasm. His writing gets better without special instruction.
A great benefit is that our family life is stress-free. No need for rebellion when nobody is pushing him in any particular direction or forcing him to do what he doesn't like.
I attended 10 different public/private schools between kindergarten and college. The only two maybe's from that list are #2 and #3. The first one suffers from too many unknowns concerning testing regimes and near-term exposure of material. It doesn't capture long-term education and it doesn't factor in differences between language and culture - they're just scores.
I can only speak as a student, as I attended some of the worst schools in the area, but I also attended a couple of top-ten schools ranked in the nation. I will not "name names" because that would simply distract from what I see as commonalities of good schools.
First, parental involvement. You need parents at the school through high school. You need parents at home that expect study and work from their kids. I *don't* think most parents should be teaching, but as aids and cafeteria help they are a watchful eye. They also free-up money for more teachers and materials. Parents should have a background check done, they should be qualified to be in the environment, and they should have to take a few classes on behavior and expectations.
Secondly, standardized scores are meaningless until about 9th or 10th grade. In fact, many schools that feed into high-ranking high schools have mediocre to low scores. The reason is that young children have **varied abilities and different strengths** - schools that "teach to the test" are wasting valuable time to only teach a subset of abilities that will earn good marks. Those high-income, lower scoring schools could give a shit less about funding and instead use the class time for individual learning.
Third, teacher-student ratios DO matter, but only through middle school. If you want to grow an amazing student body, then throw all your resources at the elementary schools. If there is any place where you truly need individual attention - it is in elementary school. If you want your students to acquire the skills to succeed, throw your money at elementary school. Kids at that age are desperate to learn, they are information sponges. But they also need lots of art classes, sports and playtime. Having a bunch of jittery kids with no emotional outlets is bad.
Lastly, high school should be *hard*. Earning a degree should require effort and challenge. A great majority of schools don't teach ANYTHING the last two years. Students should be allowed to track into subjects that matter to them and go as far as possible. At my "top-ten" school, in the last two years we were given two open-curriculum classes which were all project/result based. Teachers were allowed to move the proverbial ball as far as they wanted - and it was great. Students picked from a list of topics and we were allowed to study as far as possible - at the end we turned in notes, reports and projects to earn grades.
We know a great deal about memory and learning from neurology and the psycho sciences. For instance, we know that memorizing things *CONTRARILY* requires us to nearly forget things. If you've ever learned a language, you know that you can't bang your head on vocabulary in one day - you must do it once, take time away and then experience it again in hours, then days, and then weeks. Yet our materials and teaching style still has kids banging their heads. Why?
Our curriculums are designed to move through a set of information - and kids often wait a WHOLE YEAR to see the subject material again. It's no wonder that THEY DON'T LEARN IT. Basic knowledge of how we learn tells us that ramping and repetition are the keys to retention. Unit studies should be spread out and scattered through the year. Vocabulary tests should have the difficult words from weeks before until they get it. Vocabulary tests should happen daily, on a computer, where they can track results and rapidly move students forward.
We have computers for god's sake! Teachers should be keeping detailed track of positive and negative retention question-by-question. Students should have their retention times quantified an
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Forget looking at the teachers as a metric, look at the administration.
I'd bet anything that a school with top heavy administration that likes to heap BS on the teachers and students will rapidly lose good teachers. And the good ones that don't leave will likely have to spend enough time dealing with all the crap bored administrators throw at them so as to negate their effectiveness.
Additionally, the 100+k/year salaries that the admin types tend to make could go a long way towards paying teachers better, hiring more teachers, or paying the current teachers better.
(I tried to post this earlier, it hasn't appeared for some reason.)
Kids don't need school at all. It is much better for them if they do not attend school at all.
Adult literacy programs only need 90 hours in a classroom to prepare an adult illiterate to continue their education on their own, using books.
Motivated and intelligent students routinely continue on to college in 2 or 3 years of self-study, using books.
Google for the 'unschooling movement'. Youtube "Hole in the wall experiment". TED talks has that Indian educator giving a talk. Also, O'Neill's "Summerhill" for an English public school version of the same story, that illiterate adults can easily continue to college in 2 or 3 years.
We all have the idea that 'education builds', that you have to start learning to read in first grade in order to do second grade reading. In fact, skip them all, and the adult mind learns in 2 weeks.
Mental maturation + an interested mind == 10X the rate of learning compared to a standard 'stuff knowledge into their little minds' classroom.
Our 15-year-old is learning languages, taking music and dance lessons, doing a lot of reading, spends a lot of time in MineCraft. He will start TechShop and Red Cross first aid, ... life-saving courses soon, will start academics at 16 or 17. His writing (emails) improves without training. He recently downloaded an EE textbook to learn about logic gates so he can automate MineCraft farms and in-game games. He is building a 16-bit calculator, discusses adders, half-adders, his 7-segment display decode logic, ...
We use natural events, like his great interest in getting a car, to teach thinking, spreadsheet use, thinking with numbers, and generally about how to make good decisions. He works with a neighbor who buys and sells used cars, learns about cars and business.
A huge benefit for the family is that we have little stress compared to families where the kids are in school. No homework to worry about, nothing to rebel against because nobody pushes him to do anything.
Meanwhile, the number of topics that he is interested in continues to grow, and he spends a lot of time reading Wikipedia articles. Interesting kid.
With Swiss-watch timing, I just got an email from the Boulder, CO school district informing me that we didn't lottery into any of our three open-enrollment choices. Certainly there has to be a better way? That said, I really can't think of one. Other than homogenizing school quality -- meaning no school would be any "better" or "worse" than another, is there a fair way to allocate kids among schools?
I guess one way would be to further "theme" elementary schools -- one would prioritize art, another math, another sports, etc. so that parents would choose schools according to their very personal definitions of "good" and "bad", thus perhaps getting more kids placed in schools their parents see as good? There have got to be better ideas than that half-brained brainstorm, right?
Now, all I can say is...yikes!
GeekDad, TED speaker, Wipeout loser, author of Brain Trust
The summary makes it sound like these new metrics were "discovered" to have a strong correlation with school quality. The article suggests that these are just 3 metrics some guy decided to use. It's an interesting article, but not very scientific.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Parents are a huge factor in the learning experience. I see some great parents now and then who are asking their kids to spell different produce while shopping, or having the kids add up prices, or figure out which is a better value. I see some horrible parents who just don't know what they're kids are doing at school, who don't even know if their kids had homework, and who never attend school functions. One teacher at my daughter's school recently begged for volunteers for a field trip. They needed 15 adults to assist and they only had 2 who volunteered. Without parent involvement that trip will be canceled and the kids will ALL lose out on a valuable experience.
That's another key point about learning. We have to stop teaching in these silos. Students go to one class to learn math or science or history and it's all disconnected. Scientists are finding that the best way to learn is by interleaving; mixing the study of two or more fields along a common path or toward a common end. Think about if your history teacher coordinated with the biology teacher so that each day the history teacher ended his session talking about the science of the day they were studying. Then the biology teacher picked up from that point and talked about how the science of that time was right or wrong with concrete examples. Then they ended the discussion on some point of math that proves/disproves a theory of that time and leads into the students math coursework.
Right now it's up to the students to figure out how to integrate the knowledge they gain. That leaves them grousing: "I'm never going to need to know why Custer failed at the Battle of Little Big Horn", completely missing a lesson on scientific observation, being prepared, the importance of the march of technology, or taking into account internal stereotypes and prejudices before making decisions, etc.,. Little Big Horn is a key example of the usefulness of techniques like the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act).
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
If you compare the average student teacher ratio for all 50 states and look at their ranking, you will find there is no correlation except when it comes to extreme overcrowding ( > 20). The lowest ranked schools often have just as many students per class as higher ranked schools. 15 seems to be optimal but it's no guarantee for success. The worst ranked state has 16 kids per class on average, and so does the 3rd ranked state.
Work Safe Porn
I'm of the opinion that school quality (i.e. irrespective of the demographics of students) is important, but demographics count for a lot too. Kids tend to do better when surrounded by smart/motivated peers. They tend to do worse when surrounded by less gifted / less motivated peers. This is true irrespective of teacher / school quality. So if a school's student body is "high scoring" purely due to demographics (and not anything having to do with the school per se) then that's still attractive to me, because those are the students my kid will be surrounded by.
What I tend to do is compare schools based on test scores, but account for ethnicity. So I might compare the scores of *only white kids* at school A vs. *only white kids* at school B. (This assumes a situation where white kids are the majority. If the majority were something else then I'd use that ethnicity instead.)
One interesting fact: the "quality" (at least judging by test scores) of the "top" public schools tends to decline as you move upwards in grade level. The "best" public elementary school where I live has something like 95% of students at an "acceptable" level and something like 50% at a "superior" level. The "best" junior high might only have 25% at a superior level. The "best" high school might have only 15% at that level. This makes sense since elementary schools serve a smaller geographic area, so are more likely to have their entire student body coming from a demographic predisposed to have high test scores. Also I think some parents send their kids to public school for elementary then switch to private school for junior high & high school. I don't have data to back that up though.
Public schools have to accept all comers, which means that where there is socio-economic and parent-educational-level diversity (like in a city public school), you will have a range of test scores. The means of these scores in a high-diversity school (almost any city public school) tell you little to nothing. What matters is the spread. If you think your child is exceptional (and who doesn't?) the right question to ask is not how high the average is, but how high the top end is. What fancy high schools do the students end up in? Does the school provide an environment where exceptional students are nurtured and allowed to excel, or do they all have to regress to the mean? Are the classes broken up by ability or simply at random?
Student-teacher ratios can be meaningless if there's a teacher's assistant in the room, for example, with 30 years of teaching experience but no desire/inclination to deal with the certification headaches: They don't count for the ratio, but they count for the educational benefits.
If the teacher retention rate is high, then the school is either really good or really bad - it will be obvious if you visit. All good schools have high teacher retention rates.
Public schools that are run by their own principal (e.g. charter schools) tend to be better than those run from a central education department. There are of course crappy charter schools also, so the principal has to actually be good. Watch out for charter schools run by non-local commercial outfits. The person making the decisions for the school has to be out in front of the parents every single day, at all the events, etc. If they're hiding from the parents, its because they suck or they have no decision-making ability to make the school better.
For private schools, its mostly the tuition. Tuition is used to select the socioeconomic level of the students they want at the school, so pick based on that.
I've heard this before, but I don't understand it. Why can't the parents look at the kid's notes and textbook, understand the procedure, and then go over it with the kids?
Maybe I'm weird because I didn't have a hard time with math, but it seems like it's all just different ways of accomplishing the same task so anyone who understands what's going on should be able to pick up additional techniques of doing the same thing.
If the kids can catch up without undue extra effort, I'm all about doing something interesting and educational outside the traditional school environment. Besides, most elementary schools the first few and last few days of any semester aren't particularly hardcore.
I have friends who are teachers and there have been cases where the highest-paid were the ones that got laid off when times were tight.
Normal distribution assumes a typical distribution, which isn't always the case.
I took Engineering Physics in university. Very tough course, 19 people in my year. We all came in as pretty much straight-A students out of first year, had straight A's in the non-engineering courses (english, psych, etc.), but there was one prof in Physics who insisted on grading on a curve and that the class average should be 70%.
Excellent when done right. Ask both of the founders of Google. My wife's a teacher. "Three Tree Montessori" in my area does it right. My three year old is fucking awesome! When I went to observe there I did it through one way glass. The teachers do not know if they are being observed. This detail made an impression on me. Check it out. Highly recommended.
If you want to know where to send your kids to elementary school, get to know some junior high or middle school teachers and find out which elementary students are best prepared for junior high or middle school.
Sort of reminded me of something I unfortunately learned. If you want to pick an Orthopedic Surgeon to fix your knee and shoulders (that's plural) go talk to the physical therapists. They're the ones who work with the outcome every day - they tend to know better than most who's good, who's not & most importantly, who's really good.
Vote Quimby.
FYI, slashdot had a tangentially related discussion at: http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/02/09/159200/three-unexpected-data-points-describe-elementary-school-quality
In the interest of clarity, I'm homeschooling.
Pre-emptively, I'll ask teachers who object to my post to honestly answer how many students they have flunked. If you have not flunked out a student, then please defend the fact that students pass through the system without the necessary qualifications.
I refrence Gatto's book at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
Please compare yourself to Gatto as you object to my post. Thanks!
If these indicators are your definition of quality, then we can't argue. Can your definition
stand up to measures of effective teaching and learning? Where's the beef?
I think the biggest metric in considering an elementary school is whether they're obligated to conform to the public schooling doctorine, since any lay person can examine the public school system and realize that it too, like toasters, printers, and lightbulbs, is designed to fail miserably at its promised function. Our schools produce consumers and taxpayers, not model citizens, forward thinkers, nor innovators. Cash cows, dumb grass chewers. And it's working. Very very well.