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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am opening a specialized topic for people to put research about effectiveness of integration / boundary changes to reduce the achievement gap.  BOE is collecting opinions from parents.  While people may take different approaches, some of us are more quantitative in our thinking, and would like some familiarity with the subject.

https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/publicinfo/boundary-analysis/

Please leave the debate about property values outside this thread.  I feel you pain, but we need data.
Please leave the emotional appeals of whether diversity is good or bad outside this thread.  Opinions are like buttholes; we all have them.  Stick to the facts please.
If you are a professional sociologist / researcher in this area, you are more than welcome to sign your posts as Researcher or Sociologist  or similar, and we may clarify some point with you later.  That way, your identity remains mostly shielded, but it helps us understand that you know this issue in depth.
Any disrespectful interactions will be reported - I cannot control what Jeff chooses to erase, but I will report.

If you are posting an article for or against, please:
*  post it accessibly - behind a firewall does not work
*  please note if the integration also improved funding / class size etc for the FARMS / URM kids
*  was there self-selection involved (i.e. did the BOE move the entire district, or did parents have a choice to stay in the old place or move to the new place)
*  how big the change was

Thank you, a Normal Parent collecting data because that's what techy people do when facing an issue.[/quote]

Then may I ask a basic question: why do we need to "group" people first, and then look at which group is performing better/worse, or if there is "gap" between "groups"?
Those data may be meaningful for sociology studies, but for educational purposes, would it not be simpler to deal with the low performers directly?

How does it help to identify these people as a member of a certain group? If they belong to "low income" family, are we going to give them money to make them not "low income' to solve the problem? If they belong to URM, are we going to change their race so that they are not part of the URM any more?

Apparently not.

Why can't people just look at who perform better and who perform worse, and deal with that directly?

Is it because when people claim "we need to help the low-income families" or "we need to help the URM", it sounds better and more appealing than "we need to help those low-performers"?

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