Reply to What happened to Oakland Terrace?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]But doesn't this still mean that schools with no diversity are getting a total pass? E.g., a very wealthy district that is mostly white, and even the small number of minorities are also high-income and high-performing get a great score.  The schools with much greater SES diversity that are dealing with tons of ESOL kids, etc. get dinged - not necessarily because the quality of the school is worse, but because the challenges they are dealing with are greater.[/quote]

It's not a perfect system, but what the new metric does is allows schools that are actually doing a good job with high needs populations to raise their scores a bit by showing that even kids coming into the system with multiple marginalizations perform better than the state average. [/quote]

But that wasn't the point of PPs post: the issue (correctly raised, I think): is that GS conflates having majority wealthy and/or white students with quality of education offered.  The highest ranked schools don't even have "high needs" populations, or at least, very few of them.[/quote]

I think the point is that GS has ALWAYS had this issue. Since the moment it was invented and pushed onto every real estate website in the country, it has contributed to maintaining and deepening segregation. Racial and economic justice advocates have been yelling about this for YEARS. See here: https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/10/10/495944682/race-school-ratings-and-real-estate-a-legal-gray-area

So, this has always been an issue. Now Great Schools has responded to public pressure and tweaked the algorithm a little so that schools with some diversity will be dinged if they aren't moving those kids along as well. However, you are right that it doesn't touch the issue of all-white, all-rich schools. Unfortunately, that's the problem GS has had since the go. So the newest iteration is slightly better than the original GS algorithm but racism and classism are still baked into the crust. Still, incremental change is still change. [/quote]

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