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Bret L Bret L is offline
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Default NCLB and Kryptonite

((Good Catholic boy Sailer is a little disingenuous here, but just a
little. There IS a way to eliminate the racial gap-sterilize everyone
much under 90-95 IQ for at least four generations,say 90 to 120 years.
No matter what their race or background. Of course, the percentage in
each group would differ wildly-Orientals would be little affected,
Blacks substantially reduced. Bret.))


Diane Ravitch, “No Child Left Behind”, And The Racial Achievement
Gap’s Kryptonite Cause

By Steve Sailer

"The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, the new book by veteran education historian Diane Ravitch, has received a lot of publicity for revealing her newfound doubts about the current conventional wisdom on K-12 education reform. Her summary:


"[The Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind Act] introduced a new
definition of school reform that was applauded by Democrats and
Republicans alike. In this new era, school reform was characterized as
accountability, high-stakes testing, data-driven decision making,
choice, charter schools, privatization, deregulation, merit pay, and
competition among schools."

Ravitch notes:

"It was ironic that a conservative Republican president was
responsible for the largest expansion of federal control in the
history of American education. It was likewise ironic that Democrats
embraced market reforms and other initiatives that traditionally had
been favored by Republicans."

But, as demonstrated by our catastrophic experience with the
bipartisan assault on traditional lending standards in the name of
equalizing minority homeownership rates, whenever the Republicans and
Democrats agree on something, you’d better watch out.

The Bush-Kennedy education consensus that pushed through NCLB launched
a decade of sound and fury in public education, signifying, well, not
much in terms of its oft-proclaimed goal: narrowing the racial gaps in
school achievement. And the Obama Administration has largely gone
along.

I will point out here, because no-one else (not even Ravitch) will do
so, that this fundamental goal of No Child Left Behind—closing the gap
between Non-Asian Minorities [NAMs] and whites/Asians—is wrongheaded.

Thus the current ambition of everybody who is anybody is to take the
(roughly) half of the kindergarten population that is minority and
raise their performance by (roughly) one standard deviation, while,
hopefully, doing nothing to improve the performance of whites and
Asians (because if you also improve performance by whites and Asians,
then you can't Close The Gap).

That’s a terrible objective. And it just can’t be achieved in any
practical way because the racial achievement gap is based on the
racial gap in average IQ. I offer my alternative objective at the end
of this article.

Some cure-alls for ethnic disparities, such as "small learning
communities," have fallen out of fashion. But they are always replaced
by new crazes, such as tracking down the best teachers and sending
them to the slums to somehow work their magic.

The plain fact is, however, that nobody has a clue how to eradicate
the racial gap—short of hitting the white and Asian kids on the head
with a ball peen hammer. Thus Ravitch points out that

"In 2008, the federal government’s education research division issued
a report with four recommendations for ‘turning around chronically low-
performing schools,’ but the report acknowledged that every one of its
recommendations had ‘low’ evidence to support it.’"

That Department of Education document, Turning Around Chronically Low-
Performing Schools, admits:

"Unfortunately, the research base on effective strategies for quickly
turning around low-performing schools is sparse. The panel did not
find any empirical studies that reached the rigor necessary to
determine that specific turnaround practices produce significantly
better academic outcomes."

Ravitch notes:

"It seems that the only guaranteed strategy is to change the student
population, replacing low-performing students with higher-performing
students. … Rather than "leaving no child behind," this strategy plays
a shell game with low-performing students, moving them out and
dispersing them, pretending they don’t exist."

Nonetheless, billionaires such as Bill Gates and Eli Broad have
donated enormous sums toward implementing the last decade’s orthodoxy
in its various manifestations. As Ravitch acidly observes, this
"billionaire boys’ club" of philanthropists ignored the existing
infrastructure of alternatives to urban public schools in favor of
arrogantly thinking they should reinvent schools from the ground up.

Citing James S. Coleman’s research, Ravitch explains that

"Catholic schools have a wonderful record of educating poor and
minority children in the cities. It is a shame that the big
foundations have not seen fit to keep Catholic schools alive. Instead,
they prefer to create a marketplace of options, even as the
marketplace helps to kill off highly successful Catholic schools."

For example, the Gates Foundation, excited over the chic leftist idea
promoted by Bill Ayers and Barack Obama in Chicago in the 1990s that
the problem with big city public high schools is that they are too
big, spent almost $2 billion toward creating 1,500 new small high
schools and "small learning communities" within public high schools.
Gates orated in 2005: "If we keep the [high school] system as it is,
millions of children will never get a chance to fulfill their promise
because of their zip code, their skin color, or the income of their
parents."

Thus Gates gave a million dollars to Bill Ayers’s brother Rick (who
also spent years on the lam) so he could set up "small schools" within
Berkeley High School to, in part, take students to Cuba to learn about
"social justice."

In 2009, Gates admitted that he’d largely wasted his donations on this
small schools boondoggle.

Why didn’t the press and the think tanks point out clearly to Gates
that he was being ripped off by charlatans?

Because, as Ravitch points out, the Gates Foundation had bought off
most of the self-proclaimed experts—handing out $57 million to
"advocacy groups" in 2005 alone:

"Never before was there a foundation that gave grants to almost every
major think tank and advocacy group in the field of education, leaving
almost no one willing to criticize its vast power and unchecked
influence."

(“Almost no one” is right. Personally, I’ve been criticizing the
damage being done to children by the Gates Foundation for years. But,
then, I’m not important enough to be bribed by Bill Gates, so why
listen to me?)

Gates has now given up on "small learning communities" as so 2000s.
Now he has jumped aboard the educational fad of the 2010s: Blame
Teachers!

Gates writes:

"It is amazing how big a difference a great teacher makes versus an
ineffective one. Research shows that there is only half as much
variation in student achievement between schools as there is among
classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best
education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned
to a great teacher than to a great school."

This unfalsifiable line of reasoning—"If students succeeded, it was
the teacher who did it. If students got low scores, it was the
teacher’s fault"—has swept wonkdom.

According to Ravitch:

"So, depending on which economist or statistician one preferred, the
achievement gap between races, ethnic groups, and income groups could
be closed in three years (Sanders), four years (Gordon, Kane, and
Staiger), or five years (Hanushek and Rivkin). "

Ravitch marvels:

"Over a short period of time, this assertion became an urban myth
among journalists and policy wonks in Washington, something that that
‘everyone knew.’ This particular urban myth fed a fantasy that schools
serving poor children might be able to construct a teaching corps made
up exclusively of superstar teachers, the ones who produced large
gains year after year."

The hot new idea embraced by the Obama Administration and the Gates
Foundation is to develop statistical techniques to find effective
teachers, so that they can be taken out of white schools and sent to
black and Hispanic schools.

It’s crucial to keep in mind that these influential papers are not
studies of actual success stories of school districts that closed the
racial gaps. Nobody has done that. Instead, they are merely
mathematical projections of what might happen if all else remained
equal. The authors are just assuming that the effect seen in one year
of a good teacher over a bad teacher can be multiplied by any number
of years.

For example, Gordon, Kaine, and Staiger write:

"Therefore, if the effects were to accumulate, having a top-quartile
teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row
would be enough to close the black-white test score gap."

But that turns out to be a big "If." Ravitch notes:

"The fact was that the theory had never been demonstrated anywhere. No
school or school district or state anywhere in the nation had ever
proved the theory correct. Nowhere was there a real-life demonstration
in which a district had identified the top quintile of teachers,
assigned low-performing students to their classes, and improved the
test scores of low-performing students so dramatically in three, four
or five years that the black-white test score gap closed."

Ending the black-white disparity has been the Holy Grail of education
reform since LBJ. Considering all the rewards that would befall any
educator who could achieve it, you might assume that absence of
evidence after all these decades is evidence of absence.

And, theory alone suggests we should be skeptical that the effects of
star teachers would "accumulate" for three, four, or five years in a
row. That’s due to one of the most famous concepts in economics:
diminishing marginal returns.

Consider a hypothetical example from a different kind of teaching:
golf instruction.

These days, I have the money and time to only play golf about twice a
year. I now average about 40 strokes per round worse than the
superstars of the game.

But imagine that I somehow convinced the swing coaches of Tiger Woods,
Phil Mickelson, Pádraig Harrington, and Jim Furyk to drop their most
famous clients and instead each work with me intensively for one year
in succession.

Assume that during the first of these four years, Tiger’s new ex-coach
Hank Haney helps me cut 10 strokes off my average score, from 108 to
98. Does that mean I would therefore be on track over four years to
cut 40 strokes, all the way down to 68, and thus challenge my
teachers’ former pupils for the green coat at the 2014 Masters?

Of course not.

That’s almost as mindless as saying that if I then got a fifth year of
world-class golf instruction, I’d be averaging 58 strokes per round
and winning every pro tournament by 20 strokes.

Similarly, by the logic of this latest schooling theory, if we gave
blacks and Hispanics better teachers for not three, four, or five
years, but instead six, eight, or ten years, then they’d be scoring
twice as high as whites and Asians!

It’s easy for contemporary Americans to understand why the best
imaginable teaching won’t erase the Superstar-Duffer gap in golf. Yet,
apparently, it’s very difficult for most intellectuals to grasp why
returns might diminish in attempts to close the white-Non-Asian
Minority gap in school achievement.

That’s because the racial gap in academic achievement, and its
unmentionable IQ cause, works on American intellectuals, liberal and
“conservative”, like Kryptonite on Superman. It deprives them of all
their powers, leaving them helpless as babies.

If you proclaim enthusiastically that sending the best teachers into
the slums would close the Diversity Disparity, it serves as a sign
that you aren’t one of those horrible heretics who thinks that
genetics might play a role. It’s a way of saying: "Don’t do to me what
you did to James Watson. I believe, I believe!"

The question we should be asking about this latest fad: why would we
want to send the best teachers to teach the worst students?

In all non-politicized forms of instruction, you never hear anyone say
anything analogous. Everybody simply assumes that the best teachers
should work with the best students—that it is reasonable that Butch
Harmon coaches Phil Mickelson rather me, that Phil Jackson coach
Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant rather than a junior high school
basketball team. For 2400 years, it has been assumed that it was a
good thing for all concerned that Plato had Aristotle as a pupil
rather than some random dolt.

Similarly, superstar economics professor and liberal pundit Paul
Krugman is never criticized for being a professor at Princeton. You
don’t hear anyone say Krugman should quit Princeton and go teach at
Passaic County Community College where he could be doing more good.

On the other hand, Ravitch strikes me as overstating her case that (in
the words of her title) Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.
While they aren’t panaceas, I don’t see much proof in her book that
high stakes testing and charter schools are particularly hurting
public education, either.

I haven’t noticed that public schools did a worse job in the 2000s
than in the 1990s. They almost certainly are doing better with the
students they have to work with than in the 1970s, the dark period in
U.S. K-12 education history that Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein
described in The Bell Curve as “The Great Decline”.

For example, in third party tests, the white-black racial gap has been
slightly narrowing on the federal National Assessment of Educational
Progress tests and slightly widening on the SAT. In other words,
despite all the hullabaloo, the results are about the same.

What about charter schools? Ravitch emphasizes that by skimming off
the inner city’s most diligent students, the much-celebrated Knowledge
is Power Program chain of 60 charter schools [KIPP] leaves the nearby
neighborhood public schools with even worse student bodies.
Furthermore, KIPP can’t be mass-produced

KIPP provides a Marine Corps boot camp-like environment that appears
to do some good for a small, self-selected segment of the hardest-
working young people, just as Parris Island does some young men good.
But mass-producing hundreds of Parris Islands wouldn’t solve our
social problems. ("The many, the blasé, the Marines"—not much of a
slogan!) Similarly, KIPP can’t ever become large enough, while
staying true to itself, to move the needle much.

Yet, because they give “the few, the proud” a chance to get away from
ghetto culture, I can’t oppose KIPP schools.

Similarly, we do need better statistics on school and teacher quality.
But, as Ravitch demonstrates, we shouldn’t expect them to be the
miracle cures that Bill Gates, Barack Obama, and Malcolm Gladwell
presume.

As I’ve been pointing out since 1995, the traditional method of
judging the job done by schools from their students’ test scores is
self-evidently silly. Because scores are IQ-dominated, you’re mostly
just measuring how smart the students were before they even enrolled.

Amazingly, over the last couple of years, my long-standing suggestion
that we should instead measure "value added"—how much test scores go
up relative to how smart the kids were when they started—has actually
become fashionable. The Obama Administration is spending huge sums on
capturing this kind of data via its Race to the Top slush fund.

Ravitch, however, contends that value-added statistics are too new,
too iffy, and too manipulable to use in determining teacher pay and
employment. Nobody knows yet, for instance, if a teacher would tend to
average a higher value-added score if she takes on last year’s best or
worst students. But when there’s salary on the line, teachers will
quickly figure out how to game the system.

There’s a lesson here. Innumerate commentators, which is to say
essentially all pundits and politicians, don’t realize that statistics
don’t necessarily tell you what you think they do.

Consider sports statistics. One of the most famous numbers in American
sports history is Wilt Chamberlain’s average of 50 points scored per
NBA game in 1961-62 (including 100 in a single game). Nobody else has
ever averaged 40. He also led the league in rebounding, the second
most prominent statistic, with an astonishing 26 per game. So Wilt
must have been, at minimum, the best player in the league that year,
right?

Wrong. Scoring 50 points per game is more impressive to naïve stats
fans today than it was to Wilt’s rivals and own teammates at the time.
He lost the Most Valuable Player balloting in a landslide to Bill
Russell, who averaged only 19 points per game. Wilt received just nine
first place votes from his colleagues compared to Russell’s 51. Wilt
loved winning statistical championships, but Russell loved winning
team titles. (His Celtics won 11 in 13 years.)

If we had had today’s more sophisticated basketball statistics back in
1962, they might have been able to demonstrate quantitatively what was
apparent to the players at the time: that Russell was better at
helping his team win than Wilt was. It took a couple of generations to
invent the requisite measures.

Moral from the study of sports statistics: it’s easy to come up with
useful measures of small questions, but it requires long, hard work to
devise valid overall summative ranking systems of who is better than
whom—even though that’s what everybody craves.

Bill James, for instance, began revolutionizing baseball statistics in
1975. But it took him until 2000 to come up with his Win Shares for
inclusive ranking of players.

And rating teachers is less like rating players and more like rating
baseball team managers—an even larger challenge, one that baseball
statistic fanatics have made only fitful progress in quantifying.

There’s another problem. While value-added ratings of teachers may be
a good idea, there is simply no chance that they will be implemented
honestly in Obama’s America (or George W. Bush’s, for that matter).

Why?

Because of something that the Educational Establishment has (again)
been too crippled by Political Correctness to foresee: value-added
ratings will have a “Disparate Impact” on black teachers.

Coleman noticed this in his 1966 study of schools: black teachers
averaged more years of formal education, but that didn’t have any
correlations with student achievement. The one thing that did matter,
besides students’ backgrounds, was the IQ of their teachers. But to
avoid hurting black teachers, he left this crucial finding out of the
Coleman Report.

Tellingly, and ominously, Arne Duncan, the Obama Administration’s
Education Secretary who is promoting "value-added" statistics, has
also recently announced a new Civil Rights crusade to demonize school
districts whose policies appear to have disparate impact on protected
minorities.

How are Duncan’s two contradictory campaigns going to be reconciled?

The same way that everything else is rigged in Obama/ Bush’s America:
more quotas and more lies.

Ravitch ends her book with a call for a return to the quality
neighborhood public schools she attended in Houston in the 1940s:

"Going to school is not the same as going shopping. Parents should not
be burdened with locating a suitable school for their child. They
should be able to take their child to the neighborhood public school
as a matter of course …"

But in 2010, this is simply unrealistic. Massive demographic change,
induced by federal immigration policy, has meant that the central
problem with the neighborhood school is, typically, the neighborhood.
As the real estate agents say when talking about "good schools,"
"Location, location, location."

We’re not supposed to talk about the downside of diversity, so the
quality of chatter about schooling is low. Ravitch’s book is well
above average, but it would have been even better if she didn’t have
to tiptoe around this central fact.

So what goal do I propose instead of Closing The Gap?

My goal, instead, would be to raise the average performance of all
racial groups by half a standard deviation.

In other words, both goals are intended to improve the national
average by half a standard deviation—but the Gates-Obama-Bush-Kennedy
consensus wants to do it entirely by raising the scores of the
minority half.

Which objective sounds more achievable?

Mine, obviously, for two reasons:

1. Diminishing marginal returns: a one standard deviation
improvement is not merely twice as hard to accomplish as a half-
standard deviation performance, it's much harder.

2. Real improvements tend to better everybody's performance. For
example, I can drive a golf ball farther off the tee than I could 15
years ago because driver technology has significantly improved.
(Clubheads are approaching the size of toasters, so you can now take a
wild swipe at the ball without fear of whiffing). But then, Phil
Mickelson can also hit the ball farther, too. So the pro-hacker gap in
driving distance hasn't closed.

In summary: my aim is both more achievable, more fair, and more
sensible than the Gates-Obama-Bush-Kennedy consensus.

And therefore, of course, it’s also much more unmentionable."

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/100328_ravitch.htm
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