Reply to RHEE-SULTS: A LITTLE RED MEAT FOR THOSE senti-MENTAL Rhee/Kaya supporters... ENJOY!! Fight Back!

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Reply to "RHEE-SULTS: A LITTLE RED MEAT FOR THOSE senti-MENTAL Rhee/Kaya supporters... ENJOY!! Fight Back!"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

As someone who doesn't have a particular dog in this race, I think there's pretty obviously some motivated thinking and cherry picking going on here. If the results were truly as bad as they claim, they wouldn't have to be so selective in their comparisons. It's possible that this executive summary just looks biased and there is intellectual rigor at the next level, but where there's smoke...

The final paragraph is particularly rich, where they hold up affluent MoCo as the model and point to its high test scores as proof, while simultaneously trying to make the point that test scores aren't how you should measure success and that the problem with DC NY and Chicago is SES, not teachers. WTF?[/quote]

For someone who doesn't have a particular dog in this fight, I find it amazing that you claim to have read the report so carefully and conclude that it's cherry picked and may lack intellectual "rigor."

Seems like strange behavior for someone so disengaged.[/quote]

Well I'm someone who tends to read most things critically. So I notice when something seems to be making a broad point by citing data that doesn't justify the point.  For example, if you say "A study shows that Rhee's reforms broadly worsened the performance of DCPS schools," there should be more than "because the gap between reading scores for poverty level AA students and affluent whites increased by two points as compared to non-reform jurisdictions where it decreased four points." While that may be one metric worth considering, it's not the single one that makes the case. For example, its possible that while the test score gap between low SES blacks and affluent whites increased by 2 points, it did so because the low SES blacks' scores went up and average of 12 points and the whites' went up 14. It could be that in the "nonreform" districts the gap closed because both groups' scores went down but the whites' went down four more than the blacks'.

The first few pages had several examples of this type, while dismissing out of hand DCPS's standard for reading proficiency. From that I infer that performance probably improved as measured by the reading proficiency standard--if not they surely would have mentioned it. And while there may be a good reason why proficiency is a bad standard (i.e. the intellectual rigor I mentioned) it's not apparent from the executive summary.

I read closely precisely because I am not an expert in this. I don't know what the right answer is, but I do know when my leg is being pulled.[/quote]

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