How many people do genuinely care about this? People go to top schools in order to improve their life prospects, not necessarily to get the best education (but they get that too anyway).
(I’ll see if I can dig up the research later when I have more time and link to it).
Edit:
"we find that students who attended more selective colleges earned about the same as students of seemingly comparable ability who attended less selective schools. Children from low-income families, however, earned more if they attended selective colleges."
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/117/4/1491/187...
> But it turns out that the proportional increase for those who grew up poor is much less than for those who did not. College graduates from families with an income below 185 percent of the federal poverty level (the eligibility threshold for the federal assisted lunch program) earn 91 percent more over their careers than high school graduates from the same income group. By comparison, college graduates from families with incomes above 185 percent of the FPL earned 162 percent more over their careers (between the ages of 25 and 62) than those with just a high school diploma:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/02...
This also appears to lack any kind of control, whereas the other study tried to control for the student's abilities.
Apparently college is almost useless for rich white guys but it's progressively more useful if you're not rich, white, or a guy.
However as a civilization it's important that a school like the one I'm hypothesizing exists because selection bias is not really sustainable, nor does it help those who genuinely want to improve but are otherwise not particularly able.
I also imagine if a "performance school" actually existed its influence would extend far beyond traditional education. It would prove that there's some means in which people can learn optimally. Presumably that mechanism would spread to all industries and we all would be better for it.
You can measure it in terms of career success, but even there it's very hard to deal with the selection bias. Those who succeed are those who succeed.
I'm a big fan of Signum University, which is an online-only university dedicated to the soft skills that have to be taught personally, rather than a MOOC. It can't develop connections like Harvard and Stanford but it can develop those skills that make the hard-to-measure differences between those who succeed and those who are merely very good at taking tests. It remains, however, impossible to factor out those connections, which seem to make the biggest difference.
You can measure wealth, but I'm suggesting that wealth outcomes has more to do with your life circumstances than with how much knowledge you acquire in school (by whatever mechanism you would measure that).
> Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random, and through some means (whether authoritarian, or montessori, waldorf, immersion, etc.) shows that beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects.
This view of higher education as training students or increasing the socioeconomic prospects of students is fairly new and it's not working. The former view is better. College should be for academically gifted high school graduates.
At the same time, a college degree should not be required to get a good entry-level job.
For example, I had very poor grades in high school (would not have been described as academically gifted) and used state funds to go to undergrad to study science. Ended up just being a late bloomer, graduated summa cum laude with a degree in chemistry and went on to get a PhD in theoretical chemistry. Higher education shouldn't be restricted to just students who appear gifted, but should be available to anyone who wants to put in the work.
I agree that college should not be a requirement for good entry-level jobs, however, I don't think that college admission in general (there will always be elite private institutions) should be heavily restricted based on my personal experience.
Edit due to sibling comment: I did poorly on the math placement test for college as well and had to take remedial math courses. I ended up minoring in math and taking some graduate level courses in numerical analysis during undergrad. So the idea that colleges shouldn't have remedial classes is ridiculous.
Please ignore the vast gulf of quality between child jails, if they were gifted students they would have risen to the top anyway.
But it's clear to me that the current system is not for "those who want to learn". College is just what you do after high school because an undergraduate degree is a requirement for some bizarre reason.
3.0 high school GPA 3.0 undergraduate GPA
Now in year 3 of a PhD program. I wasn't even considered academically gifted in undergrad! Yet I think I am a pretty good researcher.
So yeah, study and research are very different.
I've explored a PhD in CS, and reading what people write I've gotten the impression that it is extremely difficult to get into programs.
I was pretty lazy in my UG, and (for the first time in my life) competing against people just as smart as me. So I did pretty badly.
I did demonstrate strong research aptitude in my project, as well as a bunch of other classes. I kinda skipped a bunch of stuff in second year, and second year was 33% of the final grade, so I did pretty crap.
To be fair, I came to the department with a proposal, found my own supervisors and got my own funding (through a government scholarship), so I didn't really cost them much.
You can use community college to go from being a college dropout to transferring into Berkeley. It's important that we preserve those mechanisms for social mobility.
I’d argue the idea of college being vocational is not very new. The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 was, in part, a way for training people to better integrate into a more industrialized economy.
“to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”
I had a low GPA in high school and a high one in college.
It's not a challenge intellectually, it's a challenge to your work ethic and discipline as well as (very important) social skills, none of which I had in high school.
So, what you're saying is false. Because when you say academically gifted, I picture fast learners or creative minds, not the hardest of the hard workers.
The things you're saying are contradictory. If all the good people go to college then college will always be required to get a good entry level job by definition. Why would any employer give someone a "good" job if they didn't go to a "good" college that has all of the "good" students?
> If all the good people go to college then college will always be required to get a good entry level job by definition. Why would any employer give someone a "good" job if they didn't go to a "good" college that has all of the "good" students?
I did not equate "academically gifted high school graduates" with "good people". You did! What an insane idea. It's very clear to me that most jobs do not require a 4 year degree. The fact that we only give good entry-level positions (that aren't manual labor) to college graduates is an absurdity.
College should be for the most promising, academically interested students. Students who have a good shot at a career in academia. Employers won't be able to only hire from that pool because it will be a very small pool.
Why do you think college is a requirement now to begin with? Is it some sort of conspiracy? What I'm describing has already occurred. Sorry, but you're living in a fantasy - the vast majority of people who go to college couldn't care less about working in academia nor would there be room for all of them to be academics to begin with.
The number of good jobs is not a function of the number of college grads. If there are fewer college grads, employers will have to broaden the search. Let high school graduates apply to entry level positions that aren't manual labor.
> Why do you think college is a requirement now to begin with? Is it some sort of conspiracy? What I'm describing has already occurred. Sorry, but you're living in a fantasy - the vast majority of people who go to college couldn't care less about working in academia nor would there be room for all of them to be academics to begin with.
I'm saying that people who are going to college to get a degree so they can get an entry level job should not be in college. They should just be able to apply to those jobs out of high school.
The people left over, the people who actually want to go to college for the sake of knowledge, will be academically talented (or at least interested).
Again most if not all good jobs require skills - skills that must be taught. What is this hypothetical "good job" that requires no training? You're seriously not living in reality, this is 2021, not 1950.
No matter what, if the people with more skills are going to college, employers will make college a requirement, even if a college education is not strictly necessary to do the job. This isn't some hypothetical, it's already happened.
No one is forced to go to college, they do so because the opportunities are there and employers want college educated employees. Conversely, employers need not hire exclusively college graduates, but it turns out that people who don't go to college generally do not perform (of course there are exceptions).
> I'm saying that people who are going to college to get a degree so they can get an entry level job should not be in college. They should just be able to apply to those jobs out of high school.
They already can, they will just likely be rejected.
The general pursuit of academic science could be funded by other means. but it will be hard to match the amount of revenue generated from wealthy parents and alumni
* the low performer will be left behind, because the course moves too quickly or sets the bar beyond their abilities
* the class will have to be dumbed down so that the low performer can participate, which means that the high performers haven't realized their full potential
That said, I take your general point about Ivy Leagues and I am curious to know if we can come up with an objective way of comparing them to other schools. As a prerequisite, you would need a way to measure someone's ability before and after admission.
Ability to do what exactly? Your premise is based on this idea of "performance" as if it that is easily measurable or is some innate quality of a person. Performance is a function of the system itself though.
Speaking from the perspective of someone in the United States: I didn't "perform well enough" in middle school and so got ignored by staff and counselors in high school, so then "underperformed" there as well.
I got lucky and had a peer mentor me and help me figure out the importance of education. I went to community college and transferred to a top tier public university and went on to get a Master's degree, and now I am a high earning, tax paying, productive member of society. Could just be another "underperformer", but I lucked out and received someone else's empathy.
We should be seeking to build a system that works for a variety of learner's, a variety of life situations, and a variety of subjects. We certainly have the technology and we understand that it isn't as simple as "high performers" and "low performers".
US college admissions today are basically a joke though, given universities mostly admit upper-middle class kids with perfect grades who can write an essay where they pretend that their life was hard.
There would be no doubt in anybody's mind that we shouldn't take a kid whose mathematical abilities are counting to 10, and adding and subtracting one digit numbers, and toss them into a calculus course.
So given that there is some boundary, that ability is meaningful in _some_ way, we can start to narrow it down. We can think about methods for measuring ability. What knowledge and understanding is required before you can tackle algebra II?
Again, not perfect, but certainly necessary and better than nothing.
I didn’t pursue a bachelors after high school. For a couple reasons I regret this now and tried to apply to a handful of state schools.
One thing that felt very clear to me was that if you don’t fit that archetype, they don’t really want you. I have a feeling they cared more about my high school discipline record than my industry and open source experience.
This ability may vary wildly across subjects (maths vs biology vs history), and with time (acute cases of interest / commitment, or distracting factors like romance or gaming).
In any case, batching people by the level of current ability is helpful. This is a complete opposition to typical public schools, which batch kids by age and zip code. No wonder many of them dislike it and underachieve.
Again, you have kind of a chicken-and-egg problem here. Ability is typically measured by standardized testing, which is a poor proxy. The same way engineering interviews are a poor proxy for actually measuring engineering ability or ability to add value as an SDE.
Unfortunately, measuring ability this way also captures your socioeconomic status, family stability, medical conditions, and many other things that adversely impact your "ability" to perform well on a standardized test.
We could argue it's not on Princeton or other institutions to account for that, but as a society I think we could probably do better in that regard, by offering a variety of solutions to this complex problem.
Just offer different classes, with different difficulties. Some people will be bored and go to more advanced classes, others will struggle and move to less advanced classes.
There's actually a well-organised system that almost does this - primary school! Except that there, people are forcefully grouped by age, when there's really no need for that. That's (one of the reasons) why I advocate for mixed-age education.
Intuitively, I would wager those who receive support from others typically fare better in most ways—whether that is familial relationships, mentorship, or peers. I did a quick search, and depending on how we're defining "success", there are a number of studies.
From my recollection in general what happens is that there's a certain ratio in which low performers and high performers interact. If the ratio is stacked towards high performers in general the low performers end up doing significantly better than they would've if they were in a group consisting of people entirely like them.
This would suggest that societally there's some ratio that's optimal such that we intentionally put in "low performers" as a mechanism to raise their performance. As long as this is done very carefully it simultaneously increases the performance of low performers and maintains the potential of high performers.
Conversely if you have too many low performers and put in a high performer, not only is their potential not met, but it's generally detrimental.
In other words there's a sort of "force" pulling everyone to the mean. The "dilution" that results from adding high or low performers to an otherwise low or high performing group depends on how high or low they are and the group itself. With data this can be optimized such that low performers exceed their potential. Given the rate of change for low performers vastly exceeds high performers inherently, this is the societally optimal outcome.
That being said K-12 education isn't like higher ed is that it's lower level (intellectually).
Measuring ability is tricky, which is why schools rely on grades for prerequisite courses. As a simple, contrived example: you can't really learn how to add if you don't even know your numbers yet.
I think you're right on about K-12 being lower level is also a massive factor. I coasted through K-12, personally. I know a lot of people who did. But college kicked my ass in a lot of ways. I would argue that for higher education, matching courses to ability is _even more_ important because what you're studying is that much more difficult.
I'm not necessarily against tracking (which is what we're describing) - but when you have a fixed number of resources and a mentality that the best should get more resources all you really end up with is a situation where the poor students are setup to fail.
Grades pretty much exist because we decided that they need to be out of the traditional school system by 20 or so (in most school systems you can only be held back a couple of times). I disagree with grades in general but that's another discussion.
This isn't really a scientific analysis, just basing that on my own lived experience and what I've learned from other people over the years.
I went to an inner city school. Inner city schools here offer fewer honors courses as compared to their suburban counterparts. My experience generally is that people who went to suburban schools are better educated. Suburban schools have higher graduation rates and kids get into college with more college credits than their urban peers.
> I'm not necessarily against tracking (which is what we're describing) - but when you have a fixed number of resources and a mentality that the best should get more resources all you really end up with is a situation where the poor students are setup to fail.
Well yeah, I think we're in complete agreement that some schools just don't have enough resources to do what they need to do. The goal should be for every child to realize their full potential. For some kids, that means you need to move a little slower. For others, that means you need to challenge them.
> Grades pretty much exist because we decided that they need to be out of the traditional school system by 20 or so (in most school systems you can only be held back a couple of times). I disagree with grades in general but that's another discussion.
I dunno, I think they are a useful metric for gauging ability in general terms. Not perfect. But I've yet to really see anything better.
http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/108013/chapters/What-...
> Do students differ in talents and achievement? They do. But when those observed differences are reinforced by track placement and grouping practices, and children then internalize those differences, learning opportunities become limited for all but the elite student. The talents of late bloomers go undiscovered, and the rewards of hard work and diligent study are never realized.
> As our school district began its detracking reform, we began to pay attention to our language. Language shapes our thinking and our beliefs. We began with the word "ability" and made a conscious effort to replace it with "achievement." Thus, we write about, study, and talk about students who are lower achievers or higher achievers. Achievement is a measurable construct that describes what a student knows at a given point in time; ability implies an innate quality that cannot change and that limits success. As we made this commitment personally, we shared it with our faculty. Our language began to change, and so did the way we viewed students. Discussions about the labels placed on students and the beliefs they represent can help a faculty that is embarking on a detracking reform question constructs and practices that they have taken for granted. Being conscious of our own language can help us understand how deeply ingrained the culture of student sorting is. Language awareness is also likely to help uncover other justifications for tracking.
> Both students and adults mistake labels such as "gifted," "honors student," "average," "remedial," "LD" and "MMR" for certification of overall ability or worth. These labels teach students that if the school does not identify them as capable in earlier grades, they should not expect to do well later. Everyone without the "gifted" label has the de facto label of "not gifted." The resource classroom is a low status place and students who go there are low status students. The result of all this is that most students have needlessly low self-concepts and schools have low expectations. Few students or teachers can defy those identities and expectations. These labeling effects permeate the entire school and social culture.
Anybody who has been through education has observed that there are the people who "get it" and the people who struggle. And similarly, if you take an expert in some field and have them start explaining concepts to a random person that are at the very edge of the expert's knowledge, said person will be completely lost. This is a real thing we all can relate to.
The idea that "we all can do it" because "we're all equals" is doing a disservice to the kids who struggle. You better prepare them by putting them in courses that are matched to their level and challenge them appropriately.
You can't take someone who weighs 600 lbs, say "okay, go run a marathon" and expect success. Even if that person really wants to suceed. What you can do is train them in a way that is tailored to them, and eventually they may be able to run that marathon.
One idea I agree with is that we should evaluate kids more regularly to see how their abilities change over time. If they show improvement, their coursework should be adjusted accordingly. But all this "not sorting" kids stuff? That's just nonsense.
I've been through education, and my take-away is that it's quite a bit more nuanced than that dichotomy. Get what? Struggle with what?
> The idea that "we all can do it" because "we're all equals" is doing a disservice to the kids who struggle. You better prepare them by putting them in courses that are matched to their level and challenge them appropriately.
Strawman. The idea isn't simply "everyone is equal". The literal first thing I quote mentions differences.
> To be blunt
> But all this "not sorting" kids stuff? That's just nonsense.
Careful not to confuse being blunt with being upset and stubborn! Or maybe you just really like the hat in Harry Potter!
Seems like a bit of a bad faith take here. Of course I didn't mean that there "are kids who are good at school and kids who suck" and that's it. Some kids are really strong in a particular subject. Some kids really struggle in a particular subject.
Growing up, we have all observed peers who are in say, math class, and kids seem to grasp every new concept that is taught intuitively. There are others who seem to struggle with everything. There is also the wide range in between.
> Strawman. The idea isn't simply "everyone is equal". The literal first thing I quote mentions differences.
It does mention differences, and then follows up with something to the effect of "well if we only didn't take note of their differences, and try to give them appropriately challenging coursework, they would do better!" As if to imply that really they're not that different. They are just as capable and the difference is mostly a result of reinforcing their ability by track placement.
It's flowery language. Some people are dumb, some people are geniuses, and most people are just mediocre. It's not fair, but that is the way life is.
> Careful not to confuse being blunt with being upset and stubborn! Or maybe you just really like the hat in Harry Potter!
No need to assume my emotional state here now. No ill-will was intended -- that text just rang my bullshit alarm and was woefully unconvincing to me, that's all. Sorry if I offended you.
Any time somebody writes things that presume to understand the myriad factors in someone's psyche, and how particular words are impacting them or not, need to show up with a mountain of evidence. There are way too many factors at play, and way too little evidence for such a bold claim to stand up to any scrutiny.
What you are dismissing as "flowery language" appears to be a different epistemology from yours. I cannot reconcile "there is a wide range in between" with these concrete categories you are giving.
If you believe in these categories wholeheartedly, then it makes sense to figure out the true category a person is in. It is wholly consistent to believe that you cannot ever know with complete certainty the true category someone is in, but that there is some underlying truth. You can imagine measurements that provide information about those categories (no one seriously believes a test could directly detect such a thing, however).
I am confident that I understand the appeal of that worldview. It certainly is tidy (maybe this is the bluntness you speak of)! But I have a different take on education, and the purpose of education. I do not see myself arguing in bad faith. If you can express your worldview without so heavily relying on [ad hoc] dichotomies and categories, then I will respond to that.
> What you are dismissing as "flowery language" appears to be a different epistemology from yours. I cannot reconcile "there is a wide range in between" with these concrete categories you are giving.
Think about it like this: there is a color gradient that transitions from blue on the left, to purple in the middle, to red on the right, smoothly. If I point to the leftmost part of the color gradient and ask people what color it is, they would say "blue". Likewise for the right, they would say "red".
In the middle it gets a little more tricky. If start on the left and move in a touch, most people will probably say blue. Move a bit further and some people might say purple, and others blue (would anybody say red? probably not). Move further and now you're in pretty solid purple consensus territory, though you might get the odd person claiming red or blue. You get what I'm trying to say.
There absolutely are children who are "blue" or "red". There aren't a lot, but they are there. Most are purple, and sometimes you can get a sense for whether they're more bluish-purple or reddish-purple. The analogy isn't perfect, because ability is a multidimensional and complex but I think it applies fairly well if you limit your gauge of "red" or "blue" to particular subject matters.
I agree with your assertion that you can't know _everybody's_ category with complete certainty. There are some whose ability or lack of is very apparent, and others that require a bit more inspection.
> You can imagine measurements that provide information about those categories (no one seriously believes a test could directly detect such a thing, however).
A test is one way to help gauge it. But some people are poor test takers. A test doesn't account for someone not sleeping well the night before, or having recently experienced something traumatic. Tests can't effectively differentiate between rote memorization and real understanding, in a lot of cases. You need a good educator to provide a bit more context if you _really_ want to know.
And that's really what it comes down to. Context is everything here. A letter grade can't really tell you if a student is overwhelmed or unmotivated.
I think, when it comes to grades and tests, the outliers I described above will average out over time. A percentage grade alone is not sufficient to provide good direction for a child's education, but a low grade does a pretty decent job of letting you know that something is going wrong.
It is perfect. Color, as you're using it, is a phenomenon of human perception. Different people have different color categories altogether [1]. Think of it this way, there is no spectrum of EM energy that is red or blue. But you can get a bunch of people to agree on naming some spectra "red" or "blue" based on how they appear. How do you do that? You teach people those categories. That's culture. We uphold these color categories with TV shows, toys, etc. I think there's a lot of use in categories like "red" or "blue". I find relatively less benefit in categories like "genius".
Let's see, you (paraphrasing) say "it's nonsense not to sort students" and also say "most students are purple, so how do we sort them?". It's my turn to be blunt: I see no coherence in what you're saying.
Winners tend to win more.
I don't think this is something that is trivially solvable. I suspect (though don't know) that teachers are happier when they have gifted students than not. You'd feel like a success, even if you didn't really need to do much. I imagine teaching spots in honors courses would be coveted.
Some people are there to just get a piece of paper that shows they graduated from a top school, regardless if their GPA was a A or a C; and that school name on that piece of paper could still open doors a lesser school might not.
It's kind of like FAANG. You could have an engineer with FAANG on their resume who otherwise did relatively unremarkable work. Another person has only no-name companies but has accomplished a lot. Yet the FAANG alumni is the one who will have recruiters and employers groveling to hire them, not the other guy.
Typically kids are learning a series of loosely related concepts that require different skillsets to process. If for one person integrals are intuitive but vectors are not, while for another vectors are intuitive while integrals are not, both would average roughly the same rate of learning, but you are still faced with the same dilemma - either you're slowing down to make sure the one student gets the concept they struggle with at the expense of the one who wasn't struggling or you move ahead quickly at the expense of the straggler. Both students would appear to be equal performers but that doesn't mean it made sense to group them together. While perhaps classes could be designed to have good correlation between concepts, you certainly couldn't do so for a well rounded education - there is absolutely no reason to believe someone who learns mathematical concepts quickly would also pick up literary concepts quickly. There may be small populations who do learn everything quickly and others that learn everything slowly, but certainly the overwhelming majority of the population would fall in-between.
I would argue this is not quite the problem you make it out to be, because generally speaking, people tend to be strong or weak in a subject overall.
If you're generally good at math, getting tripped up by vectors is not a death knell for pursuing coursework at that level. But there is a massive divide between the ability of someone "generally good" at math and "generally bad" at math. Tests do a really good job of capturing that, actually.
I think K-6 are where we struggle. At least that's my experience.
If you talk to the admissions department of every top school, they will all admit that they reject a large number of perfectly capable students.
So why don't they try to expand their programs and increase their acceptance numbers? I can only guess. Scared of change. Politics as well, I imagine. Afraid of not appearing selective, pissing off alumni, that sort of thing. [1]
It's depressing to me how hard it is to get into a top school these days. I bet many of us who went to an amazing school 10-20 years ago would be unable to afford or get into that school today. If you wanted to get into MIT 40-50 years ago, and you were capable, you were pretty much guaranteed a space.
Something has to change, or extreme class divides will just keep on growing, and meritocracy will become a distant memory.
[1]: A notable exception being Georgia Tech's OMSCS program. They basically admit anyone who wants to get in, and offer the program at cost, so 7k for the entire thing. Graduating is another matter entirely - it's very difficult. The goal of the program is specifically to offer a high quality education to anyone who wants it. It's been an interesting experiment, and shows what is possible.
I've been to college, and while there is value there, it's mostly not in the education. Virtually everything important I've learned that is directly applicable to my life and career I either learned in elementary school, learned through experience, or learned myself.
The value in college, at least for me, was its environment, social network, and opportunity network. People underestimate how valuable these things are, and similarly fail to realize just how bad the internet is at all three. Online education is stunningly comprehensive, but the internet is a terrible learning environment, just as it is a terrible social and opportunity environment.
The goal of modern society should be to realize that the qualities which make colleges so good at these things are not fundamentally connected to their curriculum, and can be incorporated into society at large. There is no reason why we couldn't create districts in cities which have the same learning, social, and professional qualities for young people as a university. For certain professions we arguably already do, and that is with literally no coordinated effort to create them.
Imagine if we actually tried.
I work at a school and we are pretty much tapped out for space, so we wouldn't really be able to add more classrooms even if we wanted to.
Princeton spends roughly $270,000 per student (see footnote). I'm sure some of that goes into research as well, but it's a relatively small fraction, since Princeton prides itself as being a teaching university. I suspect that you can build a more successful university by paying students $100,000 a year, hiring grad students to teach, and paying for modest facilities.
(742,123,000/.33)/ 8,374 = 268552 https://profile.princeton.edu/finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_University
They do take undergraduate teaching much more seriously than most of their peer institutions--much less instruction is relegated to graduate students. But they hire and promote for research, at least in the departments I'm familiar with.
A) Innovative teacher decides to go out on his own
B) 20 parents like what he has to say and want to enroll their kids
C) Existing tax money pay the per-student rate for the 20 enrolled to participate
D) Program is successful, more parents and students want to enroll. New teachers are hired and trained on the approach, bigger building is leased.
E) Schools that see students departing start to wonder what's going on and hire the teacher to train their staff on his methods so they can see if it can be adopted into the program.
This is how everything should work, but the nature of our mostly centrally controlled schools simply doesn't allow for it.
"Move fast and break things" is great when your worst-case scenario is your parents letting you move in while you clean up after your failed startup. It's got a lot more downside when it's an experiment with the development of real humans.
My kids went to a private school for elementary in the middle of the common core dust up in public schools, so before we enrolled them the one of the first questions we asked about was common core.
They told us they were also adopting the approach but that their teachers had been discussing it for years, had a complete transition plan for how to introduce it at each grade level, transition kids based on what they'd been taught at previous grade levels and how to inform parents about what to expect.
The key was that the teachers and admins, through their own professional expertise, were able to research options to improve how they taught and implement them with the blessing of the parents who choose to send their kids to the school. And it went great.
All of the common core horror stories that I've heard, especially around math, were due to horrible execution after the program was essentially forced on everyone. It's a completely different experience when everyone involved decides, "this is the best way and here's how we're going to do it well" vs "everybody has to do it this way now."
Common core was the main driver of choosing a private school for elementary up to at least 4th grade largely because we wanted a consistent learning experience for our kids in their early developmental years. I didn't want risk politics causing disruption in those early years (ideally ever, but early years are where I have my biggest concerns).
This assumes that common core was a good thing, and that the resistance to it was thus incorrect. Which is controversial at best - retrospectives are not generally positive.
> A decade later, scant evidence exists that Common Core produced any significant benefit. One federally funded evaluation actually estimates that the standards had a negative effect on student achievement in both reading and math. Fortunately, the overall impact is quite small.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/04/05/common-c...
> By 2017 — seven years after most states had adopted them — the standards appear to have led to modest declines in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math scores.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2019/4/29/21121004/nearly-a-decade...
It's all "selection bias"? Now that's a hot take.
You seem to be laboring under the assumption that elite schools exist as some kind of public service to improve the prospects of average, or randomly selected students. They aren't. They are elite schools, in both good and bad senses. You might as well start comparing the luggage compartments of top fuel dragsters with sedans.
I agree that everyone should get opportunities regardless of affordability (ex: international talent), but having non-intelligent agents in control by gaming the system is very dangerous (as seen in politics).
I think ethics matter more in the long run, maybe that should be a factor for university screening. We have too many intelligent people doing harm in the world (ex: ad business)
This is subjective and not a universal truth. I wouldn't want that at all, nor would I consider that ideal. My ideal is keep everything the way it is, just bring other institutions up to the level of ivy leagues (since we're talking ideals and not practical options).
Anyway, if applicants opt out of the SAT/ACT they have to submit other evidence of their qualifications.
It's not a good test.
I think the conferral of a degree is supposed to symbolize more than that, though. An institution's degree asserts some minimum level of education broadly, with an emphasis in the field of study you chose.
I don't think the SAT measures a "basic grasp" of English, it measures memorization skill.
However at the differences at the top 5 or even 10% are marginal at best, and even the top 5% represent a more than magnitude of students than have slots at elite schools.
I would be cautious about schools that do this. Unless its published that SAT score presence didn't affect chances to get in, I would assume its largely a play to get more applicants to reduce acceptance rate, with no scores counting against you heavily.
Anecdata of 1, but in my grad program, standardized test scores were used to sort students best to worst, and then they were evaluated one by one, given an accept/reject rating until all slots were filled. The score didn't affect your chance of being accepted given you were considered at all, but it did determine the chance of being considered.
But you do need to demonstrate some base level of academic ability.
Part of the issue is that the SAT is not difficult enough to stratify the applicant population, which means that it's not a super useful tool for schools at the very top. The elite liberal arts college I attended liked to brag that they turned away half of the 1600s that applied — and their overall acceptance rate is much higher than H/Y/S.
It would be interesting to think about what would happen if the SAT were more rigorous (or if there were another test that students could take that offered this stratification). Some schools (think Caltech) would probably put a decent amount of weight on such a test. Other schools, who currently optimize for more variables, would presumably not pay much attention.
If you come from a lower income background such as myself college is needed since you need to surround yourself with better people.
Then analyze their careers after college -- this should tell you whether the education of that specific university contributed or not to the student's prospects.
Its not a flawless proposition. But it does mean that those students who spend years and go heavily into debt pursuing higher education wouldn't then be force to compete only for the highest paying jobs that will cover their loans. Upset that the greatest minds in our generation work in advertising? Wondering why more highly education people aren't willing to take teaching positions or devote themselves to societal service? Here's your fix.
My favorite silver bullet solution for the mounting debt and affordability crisis is to allow student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy, and force colleges and universities to carry some substantial amount (20-30%) of the debt load they force their students to take on.
It has all kinds of negative consequences for admission of at-risk / low-income students at risk-averse institutions, but it does solve some of the game theoretical problems with rising tuition costs.
Not to mention that as you go lower in rank, yes, there are fewer good students. This is pretty much inherently true (not to say that lower ranked schools don't have good students, which is not true at all, but as a percentage yes it will decrease drastically).
Basketball teams do not pick the shortest, weakest players just so they can prove random internet commenters they are the best at turning regular unfit humans into Michael Jordan. They can just pick Michael Jordan.
UBI will almost certainly be a necessity, but then the question is who will mop the floors and what is the impetus of progress.
I do agree though there is a lot of wasted talent and effort.
Princeton and Harvard admit, for the most part, people who already excelled significantly in high school. Such excellence is already indicative of ability.
Ideally our fixation would be on a hypothetical institution that admits people entirely at random, and through some means (whether authoritarian, or montessori, waldorf, immersion, etc.) shows that beyond a reasonable doubt the school itself has improved the persons educational prospects.
You'd think by now, some sort of Google-like data driven school would've emerged by now for K-12 and higher ed.