By the numbers: A dispassioned evaluation of Hardy (compared to Deal and Wilson)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm just going to respond to this part:

anonymous wrote: Since this is important, I’ll belabor the point: in DC, “white” is a clean proxy for high income. This does not mean all high income people are white. But what it does mean is that if you’re high income, whether white or AA, the best predictor of your child’s scores is given by the “white” average since this average represents only high income students.

This is not true. In DC "white" is a clean proxy for being the beneficiary of systematic racism. There are so many studies that say that AA kids from highly educated, affluent homes where parents own books, and read to them, and value their education, are not protected from racism. They are subjected to disproportionate discipline, and low expectations, which leads to achievement gaps that continue to exist even when income, parental education, time spent reading, and other factors are taken into account.

Similarly, there are plenty of white kids growing up in DC whose parents don't take them to the library, or have homes full of books, or give a shit about their education. But because of their skin color, teachers and others treat them as if they were growing up in households that do these things, and hold them to the same high expectations.

Really? Prove it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is all true if you choose a school based only on test scores. Does anyone really do that?

I think so from reading some of the threads on this forum.

I didn't. I looked only at demographics, because I care more about those "unquantifiable aspects" of the school experience and trust that my kids' test scores will be fine wherever they are.

[Anonymous]

OP here.

PP believes that expectations are what produces results. He begs the question of how expectations are formed. Likewise, he also ignores what significance his distinction has once expectations are met with results. Does the source of the expectations matter once the expectations are met?

You are about to be tilting at windmills.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:See this shows how stoopid economists are. They don't understand the important things in life, like school uniforms, they think it is all about test scores and academics.

Suppose my kid comes home wearing a uniform, and my neighbor sees it. They will think my kid goes to a ghetto school. I am supposed to start telling them about standard deviations and confounding variables?

Very funny!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here.

As it turns out, I'm a game theorist. So, yes, I COMPLETELY familiar with such concepts as the prisoners' dilemma.

You're confusing matters. The tension in a PD is that everyone has a strictly dominant strategy: fink. Translated here, this is "going private" is the strictly dominant strategy. No one believes, not even yourself.

Instead, what you're actually describing is a coordination game. Stag Hunt is a good example. If you and I agree to work together, we can bring down a large deer and eat like kings. If I work alone, I can catch some rabbits. You too. But if I decide to hunt stag while you go after rabbits, I go hungry while you dine on Bugs Bunny.

Stag Hunt is more applicable here. That's the crux of the matter: if the IB families agree to send their children to Hardy, Hardy will quickly look like Deal. If you look below the surface, it already looks like Deal in several key ways.


An unrelated poster asked about "why would I send my kid to a lesser-quality school (Hardy) when I could just send them somewhere better (private)?" There is a difference in cost, you know. That should be a sufficient answer, but there are other compensating differentials as well.

Moreover, my entire point was that if Wilson is good enough for your child, Hardy is most certainly good enough for him too. If Deal is good enough for your child, you can make a solid case that Hardy is good enough for him too. That's what the data say.

Thank you, OP. You are a sane person.

[Anonymous]

I think OP is ignoring that the Hardy IB parents who send their kids elsewhere do not consider achieving proficiency as a high enough standard.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here.

PP believes that expectations are what produces results. He begs the question of how expectations are formed. Likewise, he also ignores what significance his distinction has once expectations are met with results. Does the source of the expectations matter once the expectations are met?

You are about to be tilting at windmills.

Which PP are you now referring to? Your post makes little sense in the light of anything I've read. Please explain.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

This is not true. In DC "white" is a clean proxy for being the beneficiary of systematic racism.

OP here: lest you think I'm ignoring you, I will not be responding to this statement. If that's your stance, there is likely little possibility for reasonable discussion. (I'm not denying racism; I'm just denying that this is all there is.)

different PP - actually that post is orthogonal to your analysis. Whether the advantages white children have are due to parental involvement (which would be similar for high SES black children) or to racism (which would not be) your analysis and results would still hold. There would be differences in the return to parental involvement (for both races) but that is not the question you address.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Is this OP? Again I appreciate your thoughtfulness, or whoever you are.

...

As for the costs, public schools with great demographics create networks of former classmates who are later successful in their business and professional ventures. Sure, if you attend InnerCity Middle and High School, you probably will still be successful, but you will not have this long-standing network, deep friendships that go back to the playground before any of you had any money or any clue. To me, these social aspects are important. As an economist surely you've seen research on the value of such networks. Plus the benefit of the parent networks, not even considering the kids!

No, I am a different social scientist.

As to the student networks, I am dubious that MS networks matter much to life success. HS networks maybe (but Hardy feeds Wilson, same as Deal does) and college networks matter more. OP did not mention the possible advantages on a college essay of describing an experience at a MS with very high FARMs or minority rates. You can call that a nebulous benefit, but I think it is no more so than a MS network.

As for parents networks, that's a point. Though my sense is that MS parents network less with each other than ES parents, and the need to move out of the neighborhood (if they are not doing the private school choice) could be disruptive to their social networks.

If an anecdote is of any use here, let me say that my kid went to Hardy and is still good friends with a couple of kids she went to school with -- but they are also from a high-income, well-educated family. Dd is in college now and I've been helping her get informational interviews in the field she's interested in through my networks -- which are, of course, completely unrelated to Hardy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

This is not true. In DC "white" is a clean proxy for being the beneficiary of systematic racism.

OP here: lest you think I'm ignoring you, I will not be responding to this statement. If that's your stance, there is likely little possibility for reasonable discussion. (I'm not denying racism; I'm just denying that this is all there is.)

different PP - actually that post is orthogonal to your analysis. Whether the advantages white children have are due to parental involvement (which would be similar for high SES black children) or to racism (which would not be) your analysis and results would still hold. There would be differences in the return to parental involvement (for both races) but that is not the question you address.

OP here. Yes, fellow economist, you are correct. I didn't want to appear to be engaging the prior poster on this point. There are not gains to be had. I appreciate you weighing in here: more critical analysis desperately wanted.

Ideally people will engage the points in the first post instead of devolving into screeds against uniforms or the unquantified value of fitting in.

To the other poster, I will self-identify all of my replies at the outset.

cut the jargon -- "orthogonal" = statistically independent

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Notwithstanding that I fully believe that my kid will do well anywhere, why on earth would I send my kid to the lower performing school, if I had a choice?

The implication of the above is that there are costs to attending such a school for a high SES student (or a white high SES student) that have nothing to do with the student't test scores. One is that there are academic negatives not covered by the tests. More likely is that there are social unpleasantnesses apart from academics. "My kid aced the scores, and eventually went to Dartmouth, where he regaled his classmates with tales of how he was beaten up every day at DCPS"

To the extent that those other costs are relatively minor (not like in the hypothetical quote above) the reason to send the kid to this school is that a family does not want to move, and does not want to spend the money on private school.

Is this OP? Again I appreciate your thoughtfulness, or whoever you are.

I agree but... the point is that it is very easy for many families to avoid such a school. You can rent your place out and live IB for Deal for a few years, then move back, you can sell and in most cases get something really nice in the burbs (IB Hardy real estate is pricey), and for a smaller number of families, private is affordable, especially if it's just for MS and maybe HS. Those years typically correspond with peak or near-peak earnings for parents. It's the early years when parents are most likely to struggle to pay. Bottom line, there are numerous people who have avoided Hardy without great hardship, and without being Rockefellers either.

As for the costs, public schools with great demographics create networks of former classmates who are later successful in their business and professional ventures. Sure, if you attend InnerCity Middle and High School, you probably will still be successful, but you will not have this long-standing network, deep friendships that go back to the playground before any of you had any money or any clue. To me, these social aspects are important. As an economist surely you've seen research on the value of such networks. Plus the benefit of the parent networks, not even considering the kids!

But even if you don't care about that, perhaps because you believe you and your kid can develop networks elsewhere, there is still a lot to academics beyond the test scores. Revisit your data. You see that "90 percent" DCCAS for a school does not mean that this is the average percentage score on the exam. It means this is the percentage of students who are proficient or advanced. But this (proficient) is a very, very low bar! Chosen because let's face it, DC is coming from a long way down. But for me, academics go way beyond these standardized tests. Even among schools boasting 90 plus, there can be big variations in the level of academic rigor and enrichment. And this in turn will mostly be a function of average levels of performance. It is all very well to focus on the "white" scores for your kids, but DCPS central office and the school admins will have a more divided focus, if your school is not uniformly high achieving.

BTW all of this applies equally to Wilson as it does to Hardy, there I agree with OP completely.

Bumping my own post. OP, I don't think you've addressed my first paragraph about the relatively low cost of avoiding Hardy, which was reinforced by the Hearst poster's arguments.

Nor have you addressed my third paragraph about the low bar of proficiency on the (now defunct) DCCAS.

Another poster addressed the social networks issue and made some valid points, but we cannot discount MS and HS social networks entirely. If we could, then why do exclusive private schools even exist in the first place?

You seem to assume that people are irrational in avoiding Hardy. Others, in other threads, assume racism. But the reality is that, for those who can afford it, avoiding Hardy is rational and the costs of doing so are not extreme. Otherwise, why else would so many well educated and successful people be making this choice? Can it really be that they are all ignorant of the testing demographics points you make, points that have been repeatedly and publicly explained over the past several years, even by DCPS? I don't think so.

The coordination or prisoners' dilemma, there we have some explanation at least. But there is another actor whose coordination is needed, namely DCPS and school admin. Suppose many IB parents decide to attend, only to have DCPS increase enrollment and thereby preserve OOB access and maintain the demographics as they are. Then the coordinated effort will have failed to achieve change. That is to say, trust in government or lack thereof is also an issue here.

I am always pleased to see the progress at Hardy, but I think what you are up against here is people with money, and an education system and real estate market that rewards money with excellent education options.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Bloviating aside, this is all besides the main point. Hardy is already good enough for IB students if they actually look at the correct numbers (concerns about looking only at numbers notwithstanding). There are indications greater numbers of parents are realizing this and sending their children to Hardy. This makes the main point more obvious and, hence, makes coordination easier for those who continue to demand coordination.

I mean, that's not wrong -- but lots of parents *aren't* sending their kids to Hardy, too. So obviously there are other factors involved -- and you could quantify them if you wanted to (e.g. the perceived gain that comes from the contacts that you make in the private school system, as a PP mentioned).

I mean, your point is that MC white kids will do okay academically in public school, right? That's not news; I assume parents who choose private have other motivations. And it's "perceptions and feelings" that are driving that. (AKA people are not perfect rational actors, which I think is one of the assumptions of GT, no?)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here.

PP believes that expectations are what produces results. He begs the question of how expectations are formed. Likewise, he also ignores what significance his distinction has once expectations are met with results. Does the source of the expectations matter once the expectations are met?

You are about to be tilting at windmills.

I think you're being unfair to the pp -- and perhaps the pp was being unfair to you. Certainly SES is very strongly related to student success but good solid research has also shown that expectations play a role in student performance. I don't see these factors as being mutually exclusive.

[Anonymous]

OP - thank you so much for this analysis. I'm not IB to Hardy, but we are looking at it as an OOB family.

I am going to be so bold as to ask if you could please do a similar analysis for Stuart-Hobson. I am not an economist by training, and I've been struggling to let more rational, objective measures help guide our MS search.

This analysis about Hardy is just the type of thing that is needed for all families as we navigate DC's schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Ideally people will engage the points in the first post instead of devolving into screeds against uniforms or the unquantified value of fitting in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

OP here. There does not exist a robust theory of decisionmaking that can adequately take into account that which cannot be quantified, measured or even perceived. You are suggesting we make decisions based upon "feelings and perceptions" (don't take these words literally). While that's well-and-good, it sounds an awful lot like simply finding items to include that justify a preordained decision. (I honestly believe that this is what most people do -- myself included at times, but that doesn't mean it is how things should be. It is purely ad hoc.)

The theory implied by your post(s) is observationally equivalent to a person doing whatever he wanted to do in the first place. Data be damned. There is no updating and posterior beliefs match prior beliefs regardless of what is observed in the interim. I don't think this is what you actually want.

Sure there are. Expert rankings, and other methodologies to get estimates of the best outcome (or even forecasts) that reflect knowledge that exists but cannot easily be quantified. People make decisions reflecting things like that all the time and we do not consider them irrational. There are many factors we can perceive but not measure, or can measure but know the measurement to be at best a poor proxy for the relevant factor.

Take someone choosing between two job offers. Job A has a 1% higher salary, and similar (quantifiable) indicators of promotion, human capital development, etc than job B. But the would be employee clicks with the boss at Job B, and feels comfortable with the corporate culture, while at Job A they feel tense with their new boss, one of the senior execs is someone they know dislikes them (but they have no idea what influence on them the senior exec would have) and they find the corp culture uncomfortable. I would suggest that to choose job A in that case is not rational, though all the quantifiable measures (unless we include some soft quantification) support it.

Obviously there is no way to account for what cannot be perceived. There are things that can be perceived, but not quantified, unless we use a very soff approach to what quantification means.