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?

Comments

The Obvious Answer

[SaroDarksbane]

if you've shopped around for elementary schools, what else did you consider?

Homeschooling?

Re:The Obvious Answer

[RazzleFrog]

Even if you are being funny I think enhancing in-school education with some homeschooling is the best option. Parents sitting down with their children and going over their homework with them can make up for almost any crappy school. Assuming, of course, that the parents aren't less-knowledgeable about a subject than their children.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[g0bshiTe]

Someone modded this Funny, they must think you are being ironic. Given the current state of US schools touting SOL scores and pushing the curriculum for, I'd say parent is Insightful.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[Necroman]

Homeschooling is a good option if you have parents that are up for the challenge. My wife plans on homeschooling our kids, as she was home schooled herself (along with her 2 sisters). Homeschooling has gotten a bad rap because it is portraid by either the crazy people or ultra religious people. There are plenty of normal families that homeschool their kids and they turn out just fine, don't be distracted by the crazies.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[SJHillman]

Not to mention covering the huge gaps public education tends to leave out... personal finance in particular. I graduated high school six years ago and the closest we got to personal finance was a lesson on how to balance a checkbook... nothing about making decisions, weighing options, etc. Fortunately, my parents have been pretty money savvy, so I'm doing much better in overall quality of life than most of the people I graduated with - even those in much higher paying fields.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[mdarksbane]

Parents sitting down with their children over their homework has 10x the effect on the overall education and outlook of the children than the quality of the school itself. Even *if* the parents are less knowledgeable than their children - putting a value on education is what is important.

The common thread with every overachieving nerd I've known is that they were taught from an early age to enjoy learning, and that knowledge was important - long before they actually got to elementary school.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[Walter White]

I've always considered the single most important determinant in scholastic success to be my involvement in our childrens education. I didn't consider home schooling because I didn't have the time or inclination to do so and I wanted our children to be in the social situation that school provides. My involvement was twofold. First is helping with homework and asking about what is being taught. Second is adhering to practices that emphasize the value of education. For example, we never pulled our children out of school for an extra day or two of vacation. That simply sends the wrong message.

I suspect the parent was not meant to be funny.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[mdarksbane]

I really want to believe you, and maybe as homeschooling becomes more of a normal thing, it will happen.. but I've volunteered with homeschool groups and had many classmates who were home schooled for their earlier education... and I've never met one that I'd say was well-adjusted. It could be that given their parents, they would be poorly adjusted nerds anyway - but as much as I am tempted, it makes me really scared to try it with my children (or are likely to be on the nerdy end of the spectrum to begin with).

The best results I've seen are my neighbor's kids, who interact very well with adults, but who seem like they will get eaten alive when they go off to college and have to deal with people who aren't inherently nice, logical, and having their best interests at heart.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[Picass0]

It's unfortunate that politicians and bible thumpers have added a stigma to the idea of parents helping their children learn. I also get sick of parents who pretend they are doing their kids a favor by sheltering them from big bad public schools. I imagine the majority of parents who home-school are really dropping a stack of books in front of their kids and telling them "do it".

Parents involving themselves in their children's learning makes a difference. I don't pretend to be an educator and I think my kids have decent teachers. My two very bright girls attend a public school and there's no doubt in my mind they will someday plot to take over the world.

I have two children in 3rd grade at a local elementary. A typical evening it takes ~one hour to help them both with homework. That homework always includes a short book followed by writing a paragraph about the story. Next there's a list of 20 spelling words they must memorize for a Friday quiz. Recently we've been working on division and multiplication flash cards as they are doing timed tests. I also stuck an app on their itouchs with timed math games. They also bring home a "blue sheet" which must be signed every evening where my wife or myself pledge we reviewed and assisted with homework.

Every semester my wife and I are surprised by the number of other parents who skip parent-teacher conferences.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[Dishevel]

100% homeschooled children will never gain the life-skills they need.

Sure they can. Parents can be responsible for socializing their children as well. School is not the only way that children can learn socialization skills.
I can tell you though that getting out of public school in many cases is the only way they are going to learn math.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[bmajik]

I'm glad you've come out and said it: that public schools aren't for teaching our best and brightest, but instead are for some kind of malthusian social conditioning; conditioning our most gifted children to understand that their lives will be controlled by mouth breathing masochists.

No thanks. I won't dump that lie on my kids.

Today, I work for an employer where there are no stupid people and nobody who mistreats me. And I never interact with any human being unless it is on my terms. I carry a gun most places I go because I can, and because when I insist I'd rather not deal with someone, I plan on _meaning_ it.

I consider the idea that a sick and broken world might consider me "mal-adjusted" or "anti-social" a mark of excellence. To be judged normal or sane by a detestable malady of garbage would be a tremendously hurtful insult.

Your social conditoining doesn't interest me.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[RazzleFrog]

It isn't about making friends. It's actually the opposite - making enemies and dealing with having to work with them on projects. Unless, of course, homeschooling parents force their kids to do project with kids they don't like. That would be pretty open minded of them.

Also, most likely they will socialize with kids from similar backgrounds and belief systems. They won't have the experience of meeting and accepting people who are different from them.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[ShanghaiBill]

yup. Books in the home is another interesting metric.

Steven Levy addressed this in his book "Freakonomics". He found that although "books in the home" is correlated with better performance in school, once you correct for the IQ of the parents, it actually makes no difference at all.

People come up with a lot of "theory of the day" explanations for improving education, but the biggest determinants of a child's performance are the IQ of the biological parents, and their birth weight. Instead of spending billions on the schools, maybe we should first spend 0.001% of that on folic acid supplements for pregnant women, and encouraging breast feeding. It would make a bigger difference.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[networkBoy]

We seriously considered homeschool, we settled on one school and entered open enrollment. We were waitlisted, so we went homeschool, until our position in the waitlist came up. The tipping point was that in homeschool it is harder to give your children a real world social education. You will sign them up for Soccer, Swimming, Baseball, Whatever, but this will be full of kids with reasonably like minded parents, which means your kids will be exposed to a relatively homogenous social environment. The world is not like that.
Our outlook is that school is primarily for the social education: pecking orders, dealing with bullies, understanding that differences in race, creed, socioeconomic status are not bad. Hard education (reading, writing, arithmetic) are actually secondary and are taught at home through the "unschooling" methodology whenever possible.
In a nutshell unschooling is the idea that simply drilling math, science, etc. into a child's head is likely to make them resentful of the subject. Instead use applied math when doing fun things like cooking (an excellent way to teach reading, fractions, weights, measures, burn treatment, and first aid). Similar applied education when shopping, going to the zoo, having a pet and accounting for the costs involved, etc.
The upside: Very smart, reasonably well adjusted children. The downside: requires over double the effort as a parent compared to just dropping your kids off at school every day. The way I look at it, you are a parent, this is a job you are morally required to do.
-nB

Re:The Obvious Answer

[garthsundem]

I would agree completely if it weren't for this: despite the fact that I write about the science of education and my wife is a former spectacular teacher, our kids learn better from teachers other than us. For example, we started skiing this year -- my wife and I had our 5yo in a ski harness. Two lessons later with the "Eldorables" program and he's snowplowing independently like a bowling ball on stilts. The same is true of writing -- my wife and I would set up spectacularly fun writing and drawing projects that wouldn't go anywhere -- then in kindergarten, Leif loves the basic assignments they give. Of course we love reading and playing card games with the kids, but in terms of education, I think the culture of school promotes learning in a way we can't mimic at home.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[Sir_Sri]

Learning from an early age that workplaces are diverse in competencies, both at the worker, and managerial levels is hugely important. You learn that in a classroom. Recognizing what diversity means is something you get in a classroom, and recognizing that some people just get screwed by 'the man' so to speak is something you learn in a classroom. Learning to deal with good and bad coworkers, learning to identify them, learning to communicate with all of them is enormously important.

There's also a lot to be said for being taught what everyone else is, so you know what everyone else is taught, and so wherever you go that mommy and daddy can't hand hold you gets a certain known quantity. You can, and should augment what a child learns, and picking the learning environment (school) they go to is enormously influential in how much they get out of it, and their own sanity, that's just like finding a good job. I'd work just about anywhere that was willing to increase my salary by a factor of 5, but if you want to offer me a 500 dollar, or even 5000 dollar a year bump over what I currently have, it has to come with a work environment I'd enjoy more than where I am. And where I am lets me post on /. whenever I want.

I'll give an example from when I was in university. The first years had an 'enrichment' programme of some sort, where they pulled about 50 students out of a science student body of about 2000. In second year we all merged back up again. In my programme (physics) about a third of the class had been from this enrichment. So we get to our first set of assignments and exams, and it turns out, the kids in 'enrichment' had no f'n clue how to do a lot of things the rest of us had been taught. It wasn't 'hard' it just wasn't taught to them, so they didn't know. And they didn't know they didn't know. And now the university was stuck trying to run our programme with a major portion of the class being unprepared for somethings and super well prepared for others (as we discovered later, they'd done a lot more set theory, and ODE's than we had in the regular programme). Which just hurt the education experience for everyone. That's homeschooling. It matters a lot in life that you have a similar background to everyone else, you can augment that on your own, but if kids in public school learn history of slavery as an exercise in human cruelty, whereas a homeschooled kid goes through the technicalities of dred vs scott, the kansas -nebraska act and abolition and the banning of the slave trade in the UK and how it impacted the US, you're getting a very different take on the same thing. And it's really important when communicating with other people to know what they know and try and frame things in a way they would understand. Which on /. is impossible, but in the real world you have to deal with people around you.

Both the US and Canada would be much better served with single federal coherent standards for what is to be covered in schools. That is enormously unpopular is some circles, and I see why. But those kids go to universities and colleges after they finish public education largely. It's hard enough managing students from all over the bloody world, but when we can't count on students from within canada (or within the US if you're there) to all have a reasonably consistent experience you're just wasting time and money getting them all on the same page. And it's a lot of time and a lot of money that could be spent on things that might be productive. Being homeschooled is like intentionally making everything else in life a little bit harder for yourself. If you're stuck in an isolated community, or if your school system largely teaches things which are 'not intended to be a factual statement' well then you may have to give up and homeschool. But that's a sad commentary on the state of education if it has come to that.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[oldmac31310]

What is required is that the parents take turns being bullies, sadistic condescending teachers etc. and creating an environment as dysfunctional and alienating as a typical public school. That way the home schooled child can grow up to be just as maladjusted as everyone else. Simple!

Re:The Obvious Answer

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the whole social experience thing is bullshit. When I was in school, I basically got bullied constantly, first for having glasses and I thought that was pretty bad, but it only really started when somehow the word got out that I liked to read. (And this was at a school with a good reputation; I shudder to think what might have happened at a bad-- worse school.)
The experience has fundamentally put me off people, which may have been a good lesson because people aren't all that great, but there must be less painful ways to learn it. And as I now swim around in professional life, I find that the group dynamics are so utterly different that I find it's been for nothing.
Where I live home schooling is illegal (for very good reasons that even I, with the horrible experience still a relatively fresh memory, can accept) so, yeah. What I look for in a school is:
a) No religious education, creationism, &c. in the classroom.
b) Better science education than I had. The bar was set too low for us and everything we learned can be taught in two weeks, as I found out in university when some friends turned out not to have had any maths to speak of at all. No wonder all the pupils were bored to death.
c) Good language education. Of all the things I learned this has proven the most useful. Even Latin, surprisingly enough.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[snowgirl]

Instead of spending billions on the schools, maybe we should first spend 0.001% of that on folic acid supplements for pregnant women, and encouraging breast feeding. It would make a bigger difference.

Eh... I was born before folic acid supplements were common, and my mom was discouraged from breast feeding (long story, medical condition, her health was more important than any benefits from breast feeding). I am however on the IQ scale a "genius", and I regularly aced tests in education. Standardized tests regularly place me in the top 99%.

You seem to be to advancing a "theory of the day" as well that folic acid and breast feeding help. Meanwhile, as you noted, the parent's IQ has more correlation with the child's IQ than anything else. This could be because of genetic stock, but as well, just a whole culture and attitude about learning. A high IQ parent has both nature and nurture to maximize their child's IQ.

Re:The Obvious Answer

[Minwee]

An iPad counts as a gazillion books, right?

Only if you read them. Most iPads count for about six birds, a slingshot and a handful of green pigs.

ceteris paribus

[CSMoran]

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.

S/T Ratio DOES matter

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:There is never a magic bullet

[Ihmhi]

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.

hahahahahahaha. My home city of Newark, NJ is closing 7 schools for underperforming. Severely.

Our schools are falling apart across the board, too. Wilson Avenue school, for instance, had to be closed because it was flooded with water laced with benzene.

We spend just shy of $17,000 per student. So no, funding alone is not a good indicator at all.

Test Score Growth

[ShavedOrangutan]

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!

Science education

[Anonymous Coward]

if you've shopped around for elementary schools, what else did you consider?

Homeschooling?

For decent science and math education, homeschooling may be the only choice. And no, it's not all the Bible thumpers' fault.

I shopped around

[davidannis]

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.

Re:There is never a magic bullet

[g0bshiTe]

I can attest to this. My child was going in a Title III elementary school. We moved to another district with a higher socioeconomic ratio the school was Title I. Within 2 months she got put into AP classes. Fast forward to today, she's in High School in the Academy program. Had we still let her continue at the Title III school I've no doubt she would be in normal classes and at best an average student. At least 4 times during her time at the Tittle III school she was referred to the AP program of her school but due to funding/teachers leaving she never got accepted. Most of the time the AP teachers were leaving the school. The turn over for AP teachers was 1 per year. All the while this school pushed teaching the kids what they needed to know to keep the score of the school up during SOL's so they could keep their funding next year. As a result my daughter never learned to write in cursive, so we have been teaching her for the last few years.

This is why I'm firmly against basing a school on a standardized test. They will create a curriculum based around it and the tests questions vs teaching the kids anything of actual value.

Re:There is never a magic bullet

[fishthegeek]

There is no correlation between teacher qualification and effectifveness. I truly wish this myth would die.

http://www.commonwealthfoundation.org/policyblog/detail/teacher-qualifications-vs-teacher-effectiveness

http://medwelljournals.com/abstract/?doi=pjssci.2007.599.604

http://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/000002/00000214.asp

New Parents Perhaps?

[fwarren]

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.

Re:There is never a magic bullet

[X0563511]

As a result my daughter never learned to write in cursive

... and nothing of value was lost? I, nor anyone I know, has had any use for knowing this "skill."

Nuns

[Stargoat]

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.

Become friends with teachers in next school level

[hierofalcon]

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.

Test score growth: don't trust it

[Mr. Theorem]

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."

Percentage of Free and Reduced

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

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.

Best predicter of an excellent elem school...

[Overzeetop]

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.

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