New at Reason

David Weigel | April 10, 2006

Lisa Snell goes back to school to and discovers some hope for the future of education.

Comments

|4.10.06 @ 9:51AM|#

Article:
Miraloma has a new principal with a parent-friendly attitude, has begun to raise its test scores, and is more diversified.

And yet, it's still a "crappy school" :

http://www.greatschools.net/modperl/achievement/ca/6409
"Academic Performance Index" was 20% percentile (relative to other Cal schools) in 2005, and it got worse from 2004 to 2005.

Try searching that website for "Aptos Middle School" and you'll see that "subgroup performance" at the same school varies more than between-school performance; IOW the demographic makes more difference than the school.

Article:
"During a four-year period following the change, [John Hay Elementary School in Seattle] standardized math scores rose from the 36th percentile to the 62nd, and reading scores rose from the 72nd percentile to the 76th. In third grade, black and white students now have identical reading scores, and all of them are at or above grade level."

This report on John Hay school says otherwise:
http://www.seattleschools.org/area/siso/reports/anrep/elem/234.pdf
The report also says that the school got worse between 2003/4 and 2004/5.

s.m. koppelman|4.10.06 @ 10:14AM|#

I read through the article, nodding vigorously, thinking hey, choice within a single public school district, that's great, and then I thought, but wait, this is anathema to the longstanding RPPI line of favoring vouchers that can be taken out of the district and into the private sector.

Sure enough, maybe 3/4 of the way through the piece, after a run-through of how well this form of choiceworks, fostering competition among schools without draining the system or exacerbating city-suburb inequities, Snell makes a sharp turn into non-sequitur into "noting" that this isn't as good as, yes, the standard RPPI prescription of no-strings-attached vouchers applicable to private and parochial schools, even though such schemes have so far been of questionable success at best, at least in terms of educational outcomes and certainly in terms of getting public schools to improve. And then she goes on to erode the credibility of the entire piece by citing the factoid that big-city Catholic schools with the luxury of being able to select their students and students' parents have better educational outcomes than their open-admissions public counterparts.

Gee, no kidding?

For a minute there, I thought the RPPI was on its way to changing its official position from the purely ideological to one that reflected demonstrable results.

|4.10.06 @ 10:19AM|#

A closer reading of "234.pdf" shows that the report isn't even internally consistent: in one place they claim 12% "Asian" students (n=54), then later claim they can't report on "Asian" performance because "N is less then 10" (whether "N" is percent or absolute count they don't say, but in either case N is actually greater than 10 elsewhere in the report).

Obfuscation is common in school-performance reporting.

|4.10.06 @ 10:45AM|#

While this certainly isn't the world's best system....at least there are school systems out there willing to be laboratories for a (quasi) market system. Sure, no-strings vouchers would be a better system....but is a liberal bastion like San Francisco likely to give vouchers a chance? This is progress.

|4.10.06 @ 12:44PM|#

For a minute there, I thought the RPPI was on its way to changing its official position from the purely ideological to one that reflected demonstrable results.

Well, first of all, there seems to be some confusion as to whether these "demonstrable results" are really so demonstrable at all. (See posts above.)

Second, RPPI is a think tank. It therefore has the task--one might even say the obligation--to advocate principles, not moderate, short-term solutions that fall short of creating true choice in education. It's remarkable that San Francisco was induced to accept even a halfway gesture towards a market. It shows, for one thing, how desperate the situation must have been. RPPI's libertarian principle is that choice is best; I hardly think one can criticize them for advocating it.

|4.10.06 @ 1:29PM|#

I thought the "success" of these schools was best summed up in that the English proficiency of the students is approaching 50% and this ranks them an 8 out of 10. I'm sure that as the article suggest, parents are fleeing private schools to enroll their children.