Why ultra-selective high schools don’t make our kids better prepared for college

[Anonymous]

A poster on another forum asked this questions and I was particularly interested in what parents from Blair's Magnet Program and Richard Montgomery's IB Program thought.

[quote][i][b]Curious what people think....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/conversations/why-ul...vbWOJJ_discussion.html?hpid=z7 [/b][/i][/quote]

[Anonymous]

[quote=Anonymous]A poster on another forum asked this questions and I was particularly interested in what parents from Blair's Magnet Program and Richard Montgomery's IB Program thought.

[quote][i][b]Curious what people think....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/conversations/why-ul...vbWOJJ_discussion.html?hpid=z7 [/b][/i][/quote]
[/quote]

If you actually look at the paper he wrote about - all it says is that there is a continuous curve from lower scores to higher scores - and that there is no "bump" along the cut-off point between regular school and magnet school - from that they conclude that there is no "peer effect" of the magnet school because otherwise, for the same scores around the cut-off point, those students in the magnet school should have an extra "bump" in scores because they are with other smart students. That is what the journal paper shows. Now what Jay concludes from this (as usual an exaggeration to generate blog traffic) is that it is "not worth it" to go to a magnet program. That might make sense if nobody applies and so the smart people don't end up their - but the paper clearly contradicts that by showing that the higher parts of the scores curves are all students at the magnet schools - pretty clearly and those students are not at the regular schools. So if you are a non-marginal student, and all the other non-marginal smart students are at the magnet schools, the paper doesn't show or even attempt to show that you would be better off at a regular school. There is no natural experiment where they can show this because the selection mechanisms for the boston and new york magnet schools are pretty efficient so there is no comparison group they can use to prove or disprove that point. So they had to do the analysis around "marginal" students along the cut-off point to have a valid comparison between these two school types - and voila - they show no difference. Big deal - that much we could have predicted. The hard one is to show that regular schools can appropriately challenge really smart students and follow the really smart student cohorts prospetively in a randomized way between regular and magnet schools and show they all end up learning the same amount or achieving the same things - I haven't seen that study yet and would love to see something like that.

[Anonymous]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/17/math-test-proficiency-naep-pisa_n_929498.html


Don't believe all you read.

[Anonymous]

Question everything.