September 13, 2006
Cause for optimism?
Today's P-I reports on Seattle Schools Superintendent Raj Manhas' "State of the District" address. Manhas is "more optimistic now than I have ever been about the academic future of our children" and noted that "Seattle students performed better than the state average in 11 out of 12 categories".
He didn't mention that Seattle students performed better than the state average in some of those areas only because their pass rates didn't fall by as much as the state's did. In seventh grade, for example, the district's reading pass rate dropped 4.3 percentage points, while the state's declined 7.5 percentage points.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at September 13, 2006
03:57 PM | Email This
1. Hopefully Manhas will remain optimistic long enough not to ask voters for another huge influx of cash to prop up Seattle Public Schools.
Doubtful.
2. As a current public school student, I can testify to there being a lot of fallacious thinking about year-by-year test scores. One year is by no means a good indicator of much of anything. The vast majority of teachers don't even change their curriculum between years. Measuring it positively or negatively solely based on a year-to-year change is (feel free to eviscerate me if I am ignorant on this) kind of ignorant as to any effective end results of the progress.
3. Alcon -- You're right that placing too much emphasis on any one statistic can often be a bad idea. But the Law of Large Numbers tells us that *something* changed. Averaged out over many data points (30 data points is the minimum at which a data set begins to have some statistical significance), averages really shouldn't move that much. A 4.3% drop in the pass rate seems pretty significant, given that tens of thousands of students took this test. Playing devil's advocate, maybe the Bell curve of students' scores is relatively tight (i.e. small standard deviation), and straddling the pass/fail point. In such a case, a small change in the average could result in a relatively large change in the pass rate. But with student aptitudes as diverse as they are, there's little reason to suspect a tight Bell curve -- probably the opposite. It's very possible this year's test contained questions that were slightly harder on average, or the test was administered at a different time of day when everyone's blood sugar level was low, or something, but that many data points don't generally pack up and all move in the same direction for no reason.
4. Didn't I hear the other day that because Wa. students didn't do so well with their WAS-- math test that efforts were to be made to lower the requirements for that segment? So much for acedemic "ho hum-nes.
5. For the antidote, visit the website of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=7923
This article, "Public Schools Can Provide a Choice to Every Parent," by Angus McBeath (former superintendent of Edmonton, Canada public schools) relates how changes in policy, including parental choice; autonomous schools; and data-driven accountability, are not only attracting increasing numbers of students to its system, but even successful former private schools, as well.
6. Come on people, we know that the answer is more money to do more of the same!
/sarcasm
7. of course Raj is optimistic; after this job,(good or bad), he'll rack up consulting fees in the private sector with all his contacts in the system;
i'm not so optimistic; the WEA, entrenched edu- bureaucracy, the p.c.-diversity tilt of Seattle all work in harmony to deep-six any meaningful reform; add to that idiot taxpayers who keep raising their taxes without demanding accountability/results and you have the "perfect (perpetual) storm"
let's try a handful of schools operating under Evergreen Freedom Found.'s suggestions and see what happens; what do we have to lose? ruffle a few lazy worker feathers? use the best (working) ideas from private and public schools to test a new concept;