Educational equity, propinquity and school choice
January 15, 2015 12:14 PM   Subscribe

New Study Reveals Much About How Parents Really Choose Schools (perhaps) Link from NPR. For more discerning readers the Executive Summary from the Educational Research Association associated with Tulane is linked. New Orleans as a laboratory for School Choice in process.
posted by rmhsinc (20 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
'Propinquity' is just a wonderful word to say. Propinquity Propinquity Propinquity.
posted by leotrotsky at 12:40 PM on January 15, 2015 [3 favorites]


Academic quality has improved and is more diversely represented, so even if families choose to prioritize other things, they're still getting better education after the reforms. That's good news.
posted by michaelh at 12:49 PM on January 15, 2015 [1 favorite]


From my observations as a teacher, the only effect of charter schools is to skim off a few more of the kids with the most potential... the ones whose parents are willing and able to make some life sacrifices but can't swing private school.

The charters in my area require parents to volunteer a certain number of hours, come to nighttime meetings, get their kids to school themselves, etc. Even the application process can be intimidating to some. So yes, they're randomly picked, but from a group of families that are willing to go through the effort to be in the running.

These kids aren't automatically the best performers, but the more the parent cares, the more the kid cares, the better the kid does.

So you get a few kids going to the charter, which may or may not be a better school, and the ones who are left at the 'regular' school are still stuck in the same situation that they always were, but a few of the higher-performing kids are gone.

The only real way to help those kids is by helping them at the family level... better paying jobs for their parents so they don't have to work insane hours, proper nutrition, social programs, nation-wide, and who's going to vote up the money for that?
posted by Huck500 at 12:53 PM on January 15, 2015 [15 favorites]


Distance matters. A lot. Schools in New Orleans are ranked by letter grades, depending mostly on their scores on state tests. What the researchers found was that three-quarters of a mile in distance was equal to a letter grade in terms of family preferences.
So if improved education for the poor is the goal, your main goal has to be to work on getting good schools into every neighbourhood.

Can the Market do that?
posted by clawsoon at 1:05 PM on January 15, 2015 [3 favorites]


he only effect of charter schools is to skim off a few more of the kids with the most potential...

Actually in this case I think about 90% of the kids in study went to charter schools. And academic potential seems not to have been the top consideration of their parents.

By the way, how would you define "kids with the most potential"? I know you probably believe this, but 100% of kids have potential for great things. That's what I thought when I was a teacher.

Of course, there are many factors that shape school performance - home life, learning disabilities, hunger, attitude of parents towards learning, affluence...

But if there was some way to even the playing field - and I believe there was 35 years ago when I was an elementary school student - every student would have potential.

Right now due to fewer resources, plus the practice of "inclusion" of truly special needs students without providing additional resources (a crime) means that schools are broken.

Here in Canada, I can say that we have our kids enrolled in French Immersion simply because it is the only way they can learn. The English-stream classes are chaotic (from what I've heard) and may as well be another school entirely.
posted by Nevin at 1:11 PM on January 15, 2015


And I do think that parent choice is paramount. We as parents should never be sublimated to the state.
posted by Nevin at 1:11 PM on January 15, 2015 [1 favorite]


Interesting that for elementary-age kids, extended school day (after-school care) moderately increases the choice, but extended school year decreases the choice.
posted by madajb at 1:34 PM on January 15, 2015 [1 favorite]


he only effect of charter schools is to skim off a few more of the kids with the most potential..

Even if that's true, it is not okay to ask higher performing kids to serve as unpaid labor being tutors for the other kids, especially at the expense of their own education.
posted by corb at 1:35 PM on January 15, 2015 [2 favorites]


Sure, that's not a thing that should happen. But lifeboats for some -- not all -- of the kids isn't the answer.
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:47 PM on January 15, 2015




A teacher friend of mine recently complained that there are suddenly so many businesses involved in schools, creating better communication tools, better app integration, cloud-based gradebooks, but no one is creating an app for what some of her students need most-- 3 quality meals a day.
posted by cell divide at 2:33 PM on January 15, 2015 [7 favorites]


Personal anecdote: My parents took me out of the Los Angeles City Schools because of bullies, and put me into a pricey Private School (where my former-teacher mother went to work as a substitute to help pay for it)... where I encountered a much higher socio-economic class of bully (including the son of a television legend who later wrote a book about his parenting failures). It was an education.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:46 PM on January 15, 2015 [3 favorites]


By the way, how would you define "kids with the most potential"? I know you probably believe this, but 100% of kids have potential for great things. That's what I thought when I was a teacher.

But some kids are at a huge disadvantage because of things that are out of their control, or the teacher's control, and charter schools don't fix that. Potential for succeeding or excelling in school, is what I mean.
posted by Huck500 at 3:00 PM on January 15, 2015 [2 favorites]


also, there are no catholic schools analyzed in this piece?

there are almost zero lines coming from white neighborhoods in the four maps selected.

the Catholic school system is a parallel, private schooling system in New Orleans. did they not analyse that system?


I don't think the numbers from Catholic schools would disagree with their report, in fact, I think catholic schools show the same pattern. I went to one school 2 miles from my house, my brother another. My sister, of course, went to a third school, because the catholic system is (mostly) segregated by sex.


Maybe it's not relevant to the non-profiteers' mission to raise more money for themselves, or catholic schools are not relevant to winning some huge school market in California or New York, but these reports omit these huge details that make me wonder about their credibility. The report aint about new orleans, that's all.
posted by eustatic at 3:05 PM on January 15, 2015 [3 favorites]


There's also been a huge jump in home schooling during this period.

The Lens in New Orleans, a non-profit investigative news service, has a section on Charter Schools--trying to make them disclose their financial records.
posted by eustatic at 3:13 PM on January 15, 2015


Academic quality has improved and is more diversely represented, so even if families choose to prioritize other things, they're still getting better education after the reforms. That's good news.

Has it really?

Sorry to say, that Post-Katrina New Orleans' school system looks an awful lot like Pre-Katrina New Orleans' school system (except a lot more people are making money off of it, and a lot of black teachers lost their jobs). The district still continually ranks in the bottom 2-5 of the state.

Moreover, the CREDO study (which was funded by the charter industry) was able to only show a 1.1% improvement in student scores at charter schools over traditional public schools.

Why didn't the reforms work? Well, because the R-Squared score of most standardized tests and median household income hovers in the 0.87 to 0.95 range. (So, 87 to 95% of a schools' mean standardized test scores can be safely predicted by the mean household income of the student body).

In other words, all of the reforms in the world won't improve student achievement, and they certainly haven't in New Orleans.
posted by The Giant Squid at 3:26 PM on January 15, 2015 [4 favorites]


By the way, how would you define "kids with the most potential"?

Put crudely, test scores on entrance exams.

Test-taking is all that matters in NOLA anymore. Well, that, and Landry-Walker vs. Edna Karr.
posted by The Giant Squid at 3:35 PM on January 15, 2015


How to choose a school:

1. Find closest school to your house in your school zone.
2. Choose it.

It helps to be anywhere with a real publicly funded school system, not in the US, and somewhere where there are no charter schools.
posted by clvrmnky at 5:27 PM on January 15, 2015 [3 favorites]


"Why didn't the reforms work? Well, because the R-Squared score of most standardized tests and median household income hovers in the 0.87 to 0.95 range. (So, 87 to 95% of a schools' mean standardized test scores can be safely predicted by the mean household income of the student body)."

That's pretty interesting. Do you have a source on that? I'm curious about what population they drew from and where it was conducted.
posted by klangklangston at 11:27 PM on January 15, 2015


@klangklangston

I don't have a single source (nobody really ever bothers to synthesize this stuff), but we know:

1. SAT scores + Household Income Brackets are consistently 0.95 (for the past decade)
2. ACT scores + Household Income Brackets are 0.89 (at least in 2002, when they stopped publishing the numbers
3. The LEAP test (Louisiana's main standardized test from which school scores are derived) shows a 0.87 R-squared for school districts and free/reduced lunch numbers
4. The LEAP test shows a 0.96 R-squared for general admissions schools (i.e. not magnet/gifted public schools or selective-admissions charters) and free/reduced lunch numbers

Household income won't predict an individual's SAT/ACT/LEAP score, but it can certainly predict a group's SAT/ACT/LEAP score.

We're honestly at a point in Louisiana where we don't even need to waste time with LEAP tests, we can look at the poverty rate at any general-admissions school and predict the school's letter grade (A-F) within about +/- 4 points on the 150 point scale.
posted by The Giant Squid at 5:58 AM on January 16, 2015 [4 favorites]


« Older Are there no workhouses?   |   When proto-Russians met a bear, a dessert was born Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments