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

[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

[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

[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

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!

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.

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.