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

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All Hardy feeder schools have great principals and involved parents.

It is naive (and shows a poor knowledge of dynamics at these schools) to think that ES feeder school will allow new OB entrants in 5th grade to keep enrollment high. OB slots are given in lower grades, not at higher grades.

This is what it is safe and considerate to state that kids from feeder schools are academically stronger, as most of them have spent at least 4 years in one of the feeder ES.

School budgets are based on the # of pupils in the school. None of the schools will leave $ on the table if they have space for a few more 5th graders.

You certainly are not from one of the ES feeder school.

Untrue. They increase number of classes at lower grades. As much as Principals might have wanted to do so, parents would not allow it, and would most certainly leave in larger numbers at the end of 4th grade, making the problem worse.

I'm sorry, but that is absurd. The principal at our Hardy feeder school added children from the waitlist for just about every grade, including a grade where all three sections already had 23 or 24 kids. The principal doesn't look to the parents for permission and you are not entitled to or given a report. NOT offering lottery seats in the initial lottery doesn't mean seats aren't later given by going to the waitlist. When downtown tells your principal that enrollment will go up by 45 students in one year, you need get close to that, otherwise you do risk losing budget dollars.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All Hardy feeder schools have great principals and involved parents.

It is naive (and shows a poor knowledge of dynamics at these schools) to think that ES feeder school will allow new OB entrants in 5th grade to keep enrollment high. OB slots are given in lower grades, not at higher grades.

This is what it is safe and considerate to state that kids from feeder schools are academically stronger, as most of them have spent at least 4 years in one of the feeder ES.

School budgets are based on the # of pupils in the school. None of the schools will leave $ on the table if they have space for a few more 5th graders.

You certainly are not from one of the ES feeder school.

Untrue. They increase number of classes at lower grades. As much as Principals might have wanted to do so, parents would not allow it, and would most certainly leave in larger numbers at the end of 4th grade, making the problem worse.

if they only have 15 kids in 5th grade in a room that can hold 25 why would they not fill the room. even if they decide to increase slots at the lower grades where there is more demand anyway?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here.

It is not correct to say that Hardy feeders take in new OOB students in 5th grade to replace those who depart. 5th grade class sizes are simply smaller.

For example,
Mann goes from 46 in 2nd, to 41 in 3rd to 43 in 4th to 18 students in 5th grade.
Key goes from 60 to 61 to 56 to 37.
Stoddert goes from 79 to 62 to 60 to 22.
Hyde goes from 53 to 58 to 54 to 32.

All of these data are from the initial link provided in the first post.

Concerns over hypothetical "new OOB kids" who are unprepared is a false trope. New students are not being added in upper grades at Hardy feeders.

Careful, OP. With your quick access to the data you're going to out yourself pretty quickly. I know who the Hardy feeder school group fed all the 4th and 5th grade numbers to...and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

OP here.

Umm, no. I am an economist employed with a very large organization. I have no connection whatsoever to DCPS and I do not know anyone who works for DCPS (or whatever other related group you insert) either directly or indirectly (e.g., via a contract or grant).

It is fine to dismiss my arguments, but to insinuate via an argument ad hominem that I'm not who I state to be is beneath all of us.

If you can think of a way for me to demonstrate this without compromising my anonymity, I'm all ears.

[Anonymous]

Because you have no connection with DCPS, I'm curious how you found yourself in the DC schools thread and why you decided to track the Hardy discussion so much. Are you doing this for a class or something?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All Hardy feeder schools have great principals and involved parents.

It is naive (and shows a poor knowledge of dynamics at these schools) to think that ES feeder school will allow new OB entrants in 5th grade to keep enrollment high. OB slots are given in lower grades, not at higher grades.

This is what it is safe and considerate to state that kids from feeder schools are academically stronger, as most of them have spent at least 4 years in one of the feeder ES.

School budgets are based on the # of pupils in the school. None of the schools will leave $ on the table if they have space for a few more 5th graders.

You certainly are not from one of the ES feeder school.

Untrue. They increase number of classes at lower grades. As much as Principals might have wanted to do so, parents would not allow it, and would most certainly leave in larger numbers at the end of 4th grade, making the problem worse.

I'm sorry, but that is absurd. The principal at our Hardy feeder school added children from the waitlist for just about every grade, including a grade where all three sections already had 23 or 24 kids. The principal doesn't look to the parents for permission and you are not entitled to or given a report. NOT offering lottery seats in the initial lottery doesn't mean seats aren't later given by going to the waitlist. When downtown tells your principal that enrollment will go up by 45 students in one year, you need get close to that, otherwise you do risk losing budget dollars.

Sure, you do it, but data, good sense and talk to my Principal show that they distribute kids in lower grades.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Because you have no connection with DCPS, I'm curious how you found yourself in the DC schools thread and why you decided to track the Hardy discussion so much. Are you doing this for a class or something?

OP here:

I have a colleague who was doing the lottery for his children. They are in-bounds to a school in Columbia Heights (that I will purposely not name). We ended up talking about middle schools and that prompted me to look into them in DC.

As for why I know lots of data, besides being interested in quantitative analysis: I have a very, very good memory so that whenever I saw someone link to a data set, I looked at it and took account of what it contained.

Why today? I was reading a Hardy thread (they all seem to degrade into the same morass of statements lacking any empirical basis) a few nights ago when someone linked to those DCPS data sets. I decided to look at the data myself, so I came into work early, took some Ritalin (it's true; the benefits of an anonymous forum) and preceding to spend the morning obsessed with Hardy predictions.

[Anonymous]

Whether or not a significant number of OOB children are given spots in 5th grade does not change the fact that several children from Hardy feeders leave for charters after 4th grade, thus reducing the pool of IB students who might attend Hardy. Which is why it is very important that the 5th grade be very attractive to IB families.

I agree that the numbers of IB families who are seriously considering Hardy is on an upward trajectory, but it's not there quite yet. I'm praying for a "flip" this year because my child will enter Hardy in 2017-18.

As for whether or not the principal taps the waitlist for 5th comes down to how many sections of 5th are planned and how many students will be in each class. If they're looking at potentially two classes of 15 kids each, the principal may very well decide its necessary to go to the waitlist, particularly if overall, the school is off the pace with regard to school-wide enrollment and the lower grades already have class sizes in the mid-20s. Obviously, if a school has whittled down to one section of 5th and it will have 25+ currently enrolled students in it, the principal won't tap the waitlist. But to say that the principal won't tap the waitlist out of deference to IB parents is silly...it's only one factor among many.

[Anonymous]

It's not silly. It's calculation. She/he will have a problem in the following year if she/he fills the 5th grade with 8 OB students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's not silly. It's calculation. She/he will have a problem in the following year if she/he fills the 5th grade with 8 OB students.

Define problem.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here.

It is not correct to say that Hardy feeders take in new OOB students in 5th grade to replace those who depart. 5th grade class sizes are simply smaller.

For example,
Mann goes from 46 in 2nd, to 41 in 3rd to 43 in 4th to 18 students in 5th grade.
Key goes from 60 to 61 to 56 to 37.
Stoddert goes from 79 to 62 to 60 to 22.
Hyde goes from 53 to 58 to 54 to 32.

All of these data are from the initial link provided in the first post.

Concerns over hypothetical "new OOB kids" who are unprepared is a false trope. New students are not being added in upper grades at Hardy feeders.

Careful, OP. With your quick access to the data you're going to out yourself pretty quickly. I know who the Hardy feeder school group fed all the 4th and 5th grade numbers to...and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Oh stop. Even people outside the feeders know the 5th grades are tiny leading to Hardy (unlike Deal feeders).

[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?

OMG. I really hope you are a troll. Otherwise you sound like a really "complexed" individual that lives conditioned by what others might thing. A total wannabe.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is a long post. It starts with disclosures and ends with predictions. I will try to check in periodically over the coming day/days to answer questions.

Disclosure: I have no children at Hardy, Deal or Wilson. I have no children at a Hardy feeder. I have no immediately vested interest in any of these schools.
I’m an economist and I find the Hardy discussion fascinating because the two “sides” are so directly opposed. I decided to see what the data say.

Data: all data come from http://dcps.dc.gov/DCPS/About+DCPS/DCPS+Data/DCPS+Data+Sets. In particular, I will be using the DCCAS scores from 2006-2007 through 2013-2014. I will discuss the overall scores for reading and math as well as the scores for white students and the (implied) non-white scores. The numbers discussed are the percentage of students scoring advanced or proficient on the DCCAS reading and math exams. If there is a way to post the data in a clean format, I'd happily do that.

Whiteness: I will be using “white” as a proxy for several things. From an objective perspective, all white students in DC appear similar. They generally:
• Come from families with higher incomes;
• Come from homes that value education highly;
• Are likely to have books on the shelves and spend time reading together from an early age;
• Have meals together where the school day is discussed;
• Have parents who take an active role in homework;
• Come to school after a night sleeping with heat and after a morning with food in their bellies.

We don’t care about “whiteness” directly, but we care about the things bulleted above. If you’re African-American but the bullets above describe your household, then you should expect your children to achieve DCCAS scores of “white” students. That is, if those bullets describe your AA household, it is the “white” scores that are applicable to you, not the AA scores.

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.

Nonwhite: while “white” can be taken to mean high income, we cannot assume non-white is not high income. So, in scores broken down by non-white, please have caution in interpreting these numbers. They may be meaningless for drawing conclusions.


So, onto conclusions.

1. “White” scores at all three schools (Deal, Hardy, Wilson) are in the 90s. (That is, 90+ percent of white students score advanced or proficient on the DCCAS for reading and math.)
a. This has been the case since 2006 (at least).
2. “White” students perform as well at Hardy as they do at Wilson.
3. “White” scores are lower (though still in the 90s) at Hardy than they are at Deal. I haven’t checked, but I suspect the difference is statistically indistinguishable given the sample sizes. (Hardy’s “white” scores are sometimes higher than Deal’s “white” scores, by the way.)
4. There is a race gap at all three schools. Non-white scores are roughly 20 points lower than white scores at Deal and roughly 30 points lower than white scores at Hardy and Wilson.
5. Non-white scores are better at Hardy than Wilson. They are better still at Deal. Deal’s non-white scores are in the 70s, Hardy’s non-white scores are in the 60s, and Wilson’s non-white scores are in the 50s. I suspect but cannot confirm that non-whites perform better at Deal because non-whites at Deal feeders (like Shephard) are all described well by the bulleted points above. That is, many non-whites at Deal probably appear pretty similar to whites at Deal. Without a feeder school composed primarily of high income African-Americans, I doubt this is the case at Hardy.
6. Hardy is the least white of the three schools. Deal has never been below 28% white and is now consistently around 43% white. Wilson has never been below 21% white and is now 28% white. Hardy, on the other hand, hasn’t been above 11% since 2007 and has been 10% or below for the last 5 years.


7. The difference in overall scores between Hardy and Deal is overwhelmingly due to composition effects (i.e., demographics). White students score similarly in the two schools (consistently above 90% proficient or advanced). Non-whites score better at Deal than Hardy, but the main driver of the overall scores is the school composition. (See the final sentences of point 5 above for a guess why non-whites perform better at Deal than Hardy.)
8. If the percentages of white and non-white students at Hardy matched those of Deal, Hardy’s overall numbers would be about 10 percentage points higher for each category. For example, the percentage of students scoring proficient or advanced at Hardy in 2012-2013 would be 70% for reading and 77% for math instead of the observed percentages of 62% and 67%. This is without making any changes to performance (i.e., assuming no cohort or spillover effects). Deal’s numbers are still better (83% and 88%), but the gap is cut in half right there.
9. The above bullet understates the gains (in scores) to Hardy from having identical demographics to Deal. If Hardy’s percentages of white and non-white students matched those of Deal in 2008-09 or 2009-10, the schools would have the same overall DCCAS scores. There was no gap once one accounts for demographics. Since a gap does remain currently once demographics are controlled for, this suggests there are spillover effects benefiting Deal. It is reasonable to expect the same spillover effects to benefit Hardy as its demographics change.
10. Deal’s overall DCCAS scores have increased from the low 70s to the mid-to-high 80s over the sample period. This is driven primarily by increased percentages of “white” students – going from 29% to 43% over the timeframe. Using this as a guide, if Hardy should become more in-bounds (i.e., more “white”), a similar transformation would occur.

Main, actionable takeaways:

By the numbers, Hardy at present is at least as good as Wilson at present. If you care about DCCAS scores and you’re willing to send your child to Wilson, you should be willing to send your child to Hardy. “White” students perform as well at Hardy than at Wilson and non-white students perform better at Hardy than Wilson.

Hardy, today, is pretty similar to Deal of six or seven years ago. Deal has been stellar for the last four years or so. With increases in the IB percentage of students attending Hardy, the best forecast is that Hardy should become stellar just as quickly. (For “white” students, it is already stellar, much like Deal years ago. The overall numbers will catch up as the composition changes.)

If you believe that Murch is actually as good as Mann, then you should believe that Hardy is actually as good as Deal. The argument of the Murch supporters is that Murch’s lower overall numbers are explained by the composition of the Murch class. Looking at just “white” scores, Murch performs as well as Mann. An absolutely identical argument can be made for Hardy and Deal.

So, what should you expect for your child? If the bullet points at the beginning of this post describe your household – regardless of race – the white scores are the best predictor for your child. If you’re IB to Hardy, look at the white scores. If you’re IB to, say, Brent or Ross, but OOB to Hardy, look at the white scores. If you’re OOB at a Hardy feeder, chances are the bullet points describe your household. This means, look at the white scores to evaluate how your child will likely do at Hardy. It doesn’t matter if you’re AA or white, the relevant numbers are the white scores if those bullets apply to you.

This is really helpful. Many thanks; again, truly helpful (a concerned parent from a feeder school).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
I agree that the numbers of IB families who are seriously considering Hardy is on an upward trajectory, but it's not there quite yet. I'm praying for a "flip" this year because my child will enter Hardy in 2017-18.

OP here.

I don't think the flip will be reflected until the current 4th graders enroll in Hardy in 6th. This year's numbers likely look similar to last year -- probably an additional 10 IB kids and another additional 20 feeder but not IB kids. (If DCCAS is still administered -- is it? -- the numbers should show some improvement due to (my guess of) 30 more well-prepared students.) Given the class sizes, current 5th graders are unlikely to cause a large bulge in either IB or feeder numbers. But the year after that -- with Hyde, Mann, Stoddert (and Eaton) adding additional 5th grade classes for the coming year -- I would expect to see a significant change in IB numbers.

That said, I completely believe that Hardy is already a good school for IB children. But for those who are waiting until the IB percentage increases before believing the data, the current 4th graders are going to be the first year in which the difference is unmistakeable. That is, by school year 2016-2017, the then 6th grade class should look little like current classes.

[Anonymous]

I don't get why you see an unmistakeable change in two years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I agree that the numbers of IB families who are seriously considering Hardy is on an upward trajectory, but it's not there quite yet. I'm praying for a "flip" this year because my child will enter Hardy in 2017-18.

OP here.

I don't think the flip will be reflected until the current 4th graders enroll in Hardy in 6th. This year's numbers likely look similar to last year -- probably an additional 10 IB kids and another additional 20 feeder but not IB kids. (If DCCAS is still administered -- is it? -- the numbers should show some improvement due to (my guess of) 30 more well-prepared students.) Given the class sizes, current 5th graders are unlikely to cause a large bulge in either IB or feeder numbers. But the year after that -- with Hyde, Mann, Stoddert (and Eaton) adding additional 5th grade classes for the coming year -- I would expect to see a significant change in IB numbers.

That said, I completely believe that Hardy is already a good school for IB children. But for those who are waiting until the IB percentage increases before believing the data, the current 4th graders are going to be the first year in which the difference is unmistakeable. That is, by school year 2016-2017, the then 6th grade class should look little like current classes.

The change in testing this year could help or throw a wrench into things. OP, DCCAS have been abandoned and this year DCPS adopted a new test--PARCC. It is my understanding that whenever a new standardized test is introduced we are supposed to expect lower scores. And PARCC ratchets up the tension a bit because all the testing is online, not paper and pencil, so we could expect even lower scores because of the change in how the test is administered and how prepared the students were for the logistics of the test, forget the content. Schools' budgets and teachers will not be held accountable for this year's testing results, however, if the drop in scores or significant or not uniform across the city, lots of people could read into that. So, for instance if Hardy's scores drop a lot more than Deal's drop, what will people take from that?