Misuse of statistics?

Stephen J. Schroeder-Davis wrote a generally good article about "gifted students" being "left behind", "Federal rules leave gifted kids behind", but I have a few bones to pick.

He wrote:

"There are no provisions in NCLB to support gifted students, and these student receive less than 3 cents of every $100 in federal education dollars."

First, are federal dollars the only available money for education? I hope not.

Second, does every student need the same amount of resources to get a good education? For example, advanced students can often be given an assignment and go off by themselves to do it. I would hope that teachers would still be available to answer questions. On the other hand, "average" students would need more attention and help. "Slow" students might need one-on-one assistance.

Third, he assumes that all students should make the same amount of progress throughout their education. He cites a study that low achieving students "were progressing in reading at five times the rate of high-achieving students". Is progress in reading unlimited? If the low-achieving students move from 100 words per minute to 500 wpm, does it follow that the high-achieving students should move from 800 wpm to more than 4000 wpm? Few schools have ever been equipped to teach the techniques to read at that rate.

Fourth, we overuse the word "gifted". Advanced students may have very supportive parents who encourage them to learn. OK, good parents are a "gift". These advanced students may have worked harder earlier and have a good base to learn at faster rates later. Sort of the more you learn, the easier it is to learn more.

I do agree with the author that advanced students could be given many more opportunities to learn as much as they can. It is no fun to sit in a high-school class with people who stumble over book reports. We have cut off many classes that not only would give advanced students more opportunities for learning, but that would give many other students opportunities to expand their interests and abilities. In the interest of low taxes we have considered libraries, foreign languages, music, arts, and other creative subjects as frills. These have been touted by many as keeping young minds more active and receptive to other learning experiences.

Oh, well! I guess we get what we pay for.

Nerd is not a dirty word at these schools

After I wrote "Nerdy words that aren't dirty" and "Blaming the schools for what they can't control" I found out that I had an article on my coffee table that sort of tied the two blog entries together and went even further.

Wired 17.09 contains "Making Geeks Cool Could Reform Education" by Daniel Roth. Several schools have found that by breaking the kid culture, by plenty of adult supervision and by having students work in teams, that kids will do much better academically and more likely to go on to college. This can even happen in schools with mostly lower-income families.

I would say that good education is going to come from the bottom up with many experiments and not from the top down with one size fits all.

If anything is going to come from the top down, it should be the President highlighting a school or a group of schools every month. No money, no laws, just a little bit of publicity.

Blaming the schools for what they can't control

Laura Rowley wrote that self-control is a better predictor of grades or other successes than IQ. See “Why I Canned the Cable”.

College students who multitask heavily fare worse than those who multitask less. See "Multitasking Muddles Brains, Even When the Computer Is Off", Brandon Keim, Wired, 2009-08-24.

If a kid lives in a two-room apartment where the TV is always on and there is at least one conversation going, will he or she do as well in school as someone who has his or her own bedroom in a reasonably quiet house?

Only the most dedicated and clever teachers can work successfully with children with little self-control living in a "busy" home. Especially when there are 30 or more kids in the same room.

The mismeasurement of education

In last Saturday's Budgeteer News, Pete Langr disputed an earlier column on education by another Budgeteer columnist, Virgil Swing. See "Test scores aren't a reliable indicator of quality", Pete Langr, Duluth Budgeteer News, 2009-08-15. Swing used test results to compare the quality of various schools, locally and internationally. Langr wrote that test scores are only part of the picture.

As an example, Langr use a remark by his sister that her school was better than a neighboring school. Her school kicked out its two worst students who went to the other school. That those two students increased the score of one school and decreased the score on another school says nothing about how well the rest of the students are doing. Without the scores of those two students both schools may have done equally well, as measured by standardized tests.

Langr and I exchanged a few emails on his column, and with his permission, here is some of what we wrote.

Magree: Thanks for another good column.

I don’t think many want to make the effort to measure the true success of schools: how happy are graduates with what they do with their lives and how much have they made the lives of others better?

You could measure how much graduates earn, but that doesn’t measure how much better they have made the world.

You could measure how many go on to college but NCLB doesn’t wait that long. For example, if Central High is failing because it didn’t meet AYP standards, is anybody counting how many graduates go on to college? I would bet that there are more Central graduates who go on to college than there are Central students who don’t make Annual Yearly Progress.

I think NCLB and the whole school quality “debate” are hidden ploys to decimate the public school system, ignoring that public schools have helped build a robust economy by producing a huge number of skilled people.

However, an unrestrained “free market” does not lead to a better education system. See “School Politics and the Wealth of Nations”.

Keep writing.

Langr: Your statement "how happy are graduates with what they do with their lives and how much have they made the lives of others better" is well beyond what I was thinking. I think you have a good perspective. I hadn't even got nearly that far. I was accepting the tests, but of course criticizing how they were used. You go way beyond that. Eventually, I will write more about what I think we should do.

I agree with you that much of NCLB actually seems designed to hurt schools, rather than help. We'll see how that plays out.

Thanks for the comment.

Magree: I just got back from choir practice and read your message. I got better music education in public schools than many people seem to have, but not enough to be a good musician. I know how to read music though not how to match it well. But one remark made by a high school music teacher has had a more profound impression on me than all the remembering of FACE and Every Good Boy Does Fine. [For those of you who "can't read music", FACE are the names of the notes between the lines of the usual staff and EGBDF are the names of the notes on the lines.]

In tenth grade music class, the male teacher said, “Anyone with intelligence can sing.” I don’t remember a single other thing he said or taught and only have a vague memory of the class room, but I’ve never forgotten that remark. Do you think any teacher would get performance pay for that kind of remark?