Improving Schools
- From: "BretLudwig" <bratzirules@xxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 06:46:43 -0500
Sailerâ??s Four-Point Plan For Improving Schools
By Steve Sailer
Charles Murray to unveil his plan in his upcoming book, Real Education"How can we improve America's K-12 schools? While we're waiting for
(due in August), here are some ideas I've had.
bullet #1: educators need to stop falling for this year's Solution of the
Century every year.
A huge amount of time is wasted reorganizing schools and retraining
teachers for the latest fad, which, typically, was tried and discarded so
long ago that nobody can remember anymore. (So don't take these ideas I'm
tossing out all that seriously!)
Many teachers and administrators don't mind all the reorganizations
because sitting around playing office politics versus each other is more
fun than trying to get students to memorize the Times Tables.
The dogma of racial equality helps explain much of the educartel's
susceptibility to the latest cult craze. Nobody has ever been able to get
blacks and Hispanics to consistently perform as well as Asians and whites
on a large scale. And, since the obvious implication of this reality is
unthinkable (in many minds, quite literally), then it must be the schools'
fault. What else could it be?
This logic is then used by cranks reformers to justify implementing their
pet obsessions. If the schools are small, for instance, that could be the
reason for the racial gap. So, make them bigger. If they are big, then
make them smaller. Just do something!
For example, the insanely rich Gates Foundation has been pressuring public
schools to deconstruct themselves into "small learning communities"â??which
was what Americans were trying to get away from back when they built big
learning communities.
One way to gain a wiser perspective on K-12 fads is to think about how you
chose which college to attend. For some reason, ideology tends to get in
the way less in individualsâ?? college choices than in debates about
public policy.
Did you pick a small college or a big college?
And did you make the right choice?
You may have a strong opinion on the subject of the optimal college size.
But, whatever it is, you have to admit that other people disagree with
you. After all, both Caltech (864 undergraduates) and University of Texas
at Austin (36,878 undergraduates) seem to have done pretty well for
themselves over the years. Different sizes come with objective advantages
and disadvantages. For example, when I attended huge UCLA, there were
professors on campus expert on practically every topic under the sun, but
my parking lot was a half-hour walk away. Moreover, different people
flourish best in different size schools.
Education fads are seldom motivated by statistical research, since it's
hard to move the needle noticeably for a large number of schools. As we've
known since the Coleman Report during LBJ's Great Society, the students are
more important than the school.
Instead, education vogues are launched by statistical outliers.
Small schools are particularly likely to be outliers, because they are
small. There are so many of them, and unusual things can happen more
easily when fewer people are involved.
These flukes aren't necessarily false results. When the right principal,
right teachers, and, especially, right students come together, good things
can happen.
Not surprisingly, though, outliers are hard to replicate on a large
scale.
Lots of new educational fads are launched by charismatic individuals who
can personally make them work. Charisma can accomplish amazing things.
Rasputin apparently could stop the Crown Prince of All the Russias'
internal bleeding just by talking to him. Nevertheless, "Hire lots of
Rasputins!" is not a reliable strategic plan for hemophilia clinics.
Similarly, there are millions of schoolteachers in America. As the law of
large numbers would suggest, most of them are not charismatic superstars
like the ones they make inspirational movies about.
bullet #2: School size is probably not worth worrying aboutâ??but school
district size is.
That big districts tend to be bad districts is widely admitted to be true.
But the main reason isn't well understood.
Size doesn't necessarily worsen management performance. Wal-Mart, for
example, has 1,800,000 employees, far more than any school district, yet
it manages them better than any school district 1/100th its size.
No, the problem with a big school district is that it's so big that it
doesn't feel much competition from surrounding districts. For example, the
northern and western suburbs of Chicago are famous for quality public
schools. The many small municipalities compete with each other to have the
best schools in order to have the highest property values. If a corporate
worker wants to buy a home within, say, 10 miles of O'Hare airport, he can
choose among dozens of rivalrous towns.
In contrast, the northwest suburb of Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley,
falls largely within the Los Angeles Unified School District (which is
coterminous with the vast city of Los Angeles). For instance, the LAUSD's
Chatsworth High School, in the extreme northwest of the Valley, is over 30
miles from City Hall.
Not surprisingly, LAUSD is notoriously blasé, with a giant downtown
bureaucracy that routinely gets in the way of what its better educators
out in the schools want to do. LAUSD can be this shoddy because it has an
enormous captive audienceâ??over four million people living on some of the
world's prime real estate.
In contrast, several of the smaller school districts within the general LA
area have better reputations than LAUSDâ??not just rich Beverly Hills and
Santa Monica, but also more diverse Long Beach, Glendale and Burbank.
These smaller districts compete with LA for young families more than LA
competes with them.
You can see how school district size affects quality by looking at the
performance of public school football teams. In recent decades, most of
the top high school football teams in the country have come from either
Catholic schools or public schools in smaller municipalities, such as Hart
High School in the Santa Clarita Valley north of Los Angeles. The 2007
Birmingham Patriots from the San Fernando Valley were celebrated as the
exception that proves the rule: the first LAUSD team in twenty years that
was competitive with Southern California's suburban and exurban
superpowers. The big city schools have more black players, who get most of
the college football scholarships for reasons we (but no-one else) have
written about before. But big city teams seldom have the support structure
needed to be competitive at the highest levels.
Why not? Because the politicians and parents in smaller places care more.
Exurban public schools play the public schools of rival exurbs. A winning
team is good advertising for the town. It attracts homebuyers, boosting
the property values of current residents.
But big city schools mostly play other schools from the same big city. So,
when one LA City team beats another, it's a wash to the politicians.
Needless to say, I'm not saying the purpose of high school is to win at
football. But I am able to use football as an example of the mediocrity
caused by lack of competition because it's relatively easy to measure
success in sports. It's much harder to measure how good a job schools are
doing.
Many argue that all we need is a voucher system, and then the market will
perform its magic. As a father who has sent his kids to both private and
LAUSD schools, however, I know how hard it is currently for parents to get
useful information comparing schools.
And that brings us to â?¦
bullet Three: we need independent school achievement testing agencies.
There is a gigantic conflict of interest in current K-12 testing. The No
Child Left Behind act tells the states to make up their own tests,
administer their own tests, grade their own tests, then report back to
Washington on whether the test scores have gone up enough for the states
to keep getting federal bucks.
That's why Mississippi has, officially, the highest percentage of
proficient readers in the country.
In contrast, we don't let law schools hand out licenses to practice law to
whomever they graduate. We insist that would-be lawyers pass an
independently-administered state bar exam. Same for medical schools.
Similarly, for college admissions testing, we have two independent
agencies: ACT and ETS/College Board. The colleges don't trust high school
grades without confirmation by independent test scores.
You'll notice college admissions test scores don't suddenly zoom upwards
from one year to the next the way state-created K-12 tests often do. The
independent agencies aren't perfect, but they have less incentive to
cheat.
bullet #4: we need to measure school achievement relative to the IQ of
each student.
In college and, increasingly, in high school sports, there is a
distinction between coaching and recruiting. In the old days, a basketball
coach like Adolph Rupp of the University of Kentucky would largely restrict
himself to recruiting from his home state, figuring he could outcoach his
rivals. Today, though, the royal road to NCAA success is in luring freaks
of nature from all across the country to come play for you. There's not
much point in trying to teach them basketball fundamentals, since they'll
be off to the NBA after their mandatory one year of college ball.
Something similar happens with school testing. The easy route to success
is in attracting better students rather than doing a better job with the
ones you've got.
For the country as a whole, though, this kind of competitive recruiting is
basically a zero-sum game.
Which is why, for every student in America, we need a baseline measurement
of his or her intelligence. That would allow us to compare their school
achievement scores to their IQ to see how much value the schools are
adding.
For example, in Los Angeles County, the non-exclusive public high school
with the highest average SAT score is San Marino, at 1230. So, the staff
and teachers of San Marino must be doing a bang-up job, right?
Actually, nobody knows. Many of the students are the scions of Hong Kong
millionaires, so anybody not stupefied by political correctness would
expect them to do well because the average IQ of the students is so high
to start with.
What we need is to have each student tested for IQ by an independent
agency when he or she starts at a schoolâ??say, kindergarten, first grade,
and sixth grade, and ninth grade. (Tests are less accurate in the early
years, so it's useful to have two scores when the child is young.)
The figures would be kept encoded in a national database (with all the
usual privacy protections). The schools would be publicly graded on how
much achievement it elicits from its students relative to their IQ.
Schools could use this information as well. They could specialize in
different types of studentsâ??they could advertise to parents that they
are a good at adding value for students with two digit IQs or for students
with IQs over 115 or whatever.
Whether or not we go to a voucher system, we still need this kind of
testing system to figure out which schools are doing a good job and which
ones aren't
Will these reforms do much to fix America's schools? Well, see suggestion
#1â??don't get too excited over new education ideas!
On the other hand, it's hard to see how they would hurt.
The hard truth is that the quality of the students matters most.
And that's why the surest way to relieve some of the pressure on American
schools is to end our post-1965 immigration disaster."<<
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