All Children Are Supposed to Be Proficient. What Happened?
npr.org
npr.org
GCSE scores were obtained for 13,306 twins at age 16, whom we also assessed contemporaneously on 83 scales that were condensed to nine broad psychological domains, including intelligence, self-efficacy, personality, well-being, and behavior problems. The mean of GCSE core subjects (English, mathematics, science) is more heritable (62%) than the nine predictor domains (35–58%). Each of the domains correlates significantly with GCSE results, and these correlations are largely mediated genetically. The main finding is that, although intelligence accounts for more of the heritability of GCSE than any other single domain, the other domains collectively account for about as much GCSE heritability as intelligence. Together with intelligence, these domains account for 75% of the heritability of GCSE. We conclude that the high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence.[1]
Even a major educational reform is just tinkering around the edges. Of course, people don't want to hear that so politicians will lie and give us exactly what we want. In this case, illusion that school matters a lot and they can significantly improve it. When it inevitably fails, we will blame them and hang our hopes on a different curriculum, "focusing on growth," getting ivy grads into teaching, or maybe just game the stats to tell ourselves it worked.
Next up, all new episode of democracy in the Middle East.
"Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."
Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...
Really now, before commenting about public policy on the basis of heritability it would be a very good idea to learn what the word "heritability" means and what it does not.
That's like cancer becoming the primary cause of death - not because cancer is getting more dangerous, but because other, competing causes are eliminated.
No. There are children whose brains pretty much failed to form, children with intact brains but severe mental retardation (such as the most serious form of Down Syndrome), and children who were normal until an adverse environment in the womb or later made them seriously mentally retarded, such as fetal alcohol syndrome.
You can reduce the fraction of the children we can't help by defining "read and write and do basic math" as broadly as possible, but that won't be useful from two angles: One, at some level you have to really be able to read and write and do basic math, and, two, some children can't be brought up to any reasonable level.
The fraction of the ineducable might end up being very small, but, hey, you're the one who said 100%.
Intra-school politics aside, in the US class and geography are tightly linked. Schools are locally controlled, so rich areas will have their own schools populated solely with their children, and poor areas will have their own schools populated solely with their own children. Rich schools have more advanced and AP (it's like American IB, basically. Very rich areas will have IB courses too) courses, poor schools often have trouble meeting state and federal requirements that science be taught.
So, since 'rich' and 'academic ability' are tightly linked, whatever the nominal defenses against tracking are, they don't mean anything in practice.
In the US we have two different tests - ACT and SAT - with the latter seen as more rigorous, but many (most?) students take both.
In practice, the only difference between ACT and SAT for decades has been geographic preference. East&West coast schools primarily use SAT and Midwest/Central schools primarily use ACT.
Unfortunately, this is how nearly every department of the government views pretty much anything. That is why the regularly fail, and its also the reason why intelligent, talented people rarely want to work for the government.
Accountability is maybe the solution if the problem is laziness. If your problem is anything else, greater accountability won't solve anything.
As far as accountability in public programs, now that you have made me think about it a bit more, I suppose the greater issue is the fact that the federal government is absolutely terrible at coming up with metrics. Whenever they measure in order to take accountability, they seem to focus on the wrong things.
I think metrics can be helpful in some cases, but in our education system, it would have to be an extremely complicated system, else we would just end up preparing children to take unhelpful standardized tests like we do now.
- or, originally-
"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."
"The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."