Hacker News Reader

Comment by frozenport | Hacker News Reader

Should be titled:

A Middle-School Cheating Scandal Raises Questions About the Effectiveness of Schools

It appears that there was nothing teachers could do to raise students to the level of standardize tests. With schools that are unable to perform their education task, one wonders why we have them in the first place.

One potential solution to these problems is to aggressively segment students into winning and loosing groups based on academic performance. Although doing so has often been met with accusation of racism.

View on HN

We segment our students by real estate into winning and losing groups based on the assumption that parental income = academic performance. The primary result of NCLB is proving this has a rather intense correlation.

Locally our housing is hyper segregated (despite not being in the South) so naturally our schools are also racially segregated, as are our test results.

Racial income inequality is not likely to be solved by metric data worship, although that does act as an effective distractor from the root cause(s).

Big cities are an exception to this as it is not possible to segment further. Examples, such as Chicago or Buffalo New York come to mind where some of the best and worst schools in America exist in the same school district. Opening the avenues between these schools is often met with strong opposition, often from the underprivileged minority groups that would most benefit. Programs that reach out to the community as a whole but fail to represent that community's racial statistics are such targets.

When I was a kid our school admissions was on a lottery system where 70% of the school was admitted, but due to low parent involvement African Americans were made up a few dozen percentage points lower in neighboring schools. They made a majority although not a super-majority. I wondered what the so-called 'community leaders' that would protest this state of affairs hand in mind for the 40% of their skin color.

No, the article suggests that teachers can't raise scores in heavily impoverished unstable areas fast enough to meet demands. That's a much narrower thing than "schools are useless"

> With schools that are unable to perform their education task, one wonders why we have them in the first place.

> One potential solution to these problems is to aggressively segment students into winning and loosing groups based on academic performance. Although doing so has often been met with accusation of racism.

Why stop there? Let's just round up all the kids who can't do Math and just send them to labor camps. Might as well prepare them for what they'll be good for from an early age!

If you read the article, you'll see that the school in question was, in fact, doing extremely well when compared to other schools in the area, before the cheating even began. The use of metrics, as well as the fact that they were arbitrarily or unrealistically set resulted in the disaster (or so argues the author)

Yeah, the harsh reality of the situation is that instead of "no child left behind" we really do need "leave about a fifth of the children behind." At least in terms of academic test performance. I'm sure they can benefit from education in other ways.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com