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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Wow.  I'm astonished that OP (who implies she/he is well-educated) is doing such a pathetic job of looking at statistics and then declaring he/she knows whether poor kids benefit from going to school with middle class kids.

First, as someone noted earlier, the testing starts at third grade and there have been any number of changes (or not) going on in the earlier grades.  Second, you have to look at whether there has been any noticeable improvement on the part of individual students over time, NOT AT AGGREGATE SCORES THAT COMPARE DIFFERENT GROUPS OF STUDENTS, which is what you're doing now. Third, you have to compare any change (or lack thereof) to a control group of poor students who have gone to school in majority poor schools.

You have done none of these things so you don't know whether poor students on average have benefited from going to school with middle-class students.  But go on, continue to interpret the data in a way that makes you feel superior, because I know that nothing I say (even though I'm a senior researcher) will make a difference to you.

FTR, I haven't looked at the research myself but I know enough to know when I don't know the answer to something.  You all think you're better educated than you actually are. If you don't want your kids to go to school with a lot of poor students, that's fine.  I can accept that.  But don't give us some bullshit about test scores when you don't know what you're talking about.  Seriously, go back to school and take a research methods course.[/quote]

Given there's no demonstrable difference in performance by SES grouping in more diverse vs. less diverse student bodies, I really don't see what longitudinal studies would add.  I thing they would only be of any value if there were in fact some meaningful difference.[/quote]Please reread what I wrote. You are comparing apples and oranges in that you are taking scores from one group of students at time A and comparing them to a different group of students at time B. That is, a group of third graders takes a test and their scores are registered and organized by race, FARMS, whatever.  The next year, a different group of third graders takes the test and their scores are organized by race, FARMS, whatever.  So when you are comparing the scores from Time A and Time B, you're looking at scores from two different groups of kids. That doesn't tell you anything about whether anyone's performance improved.

And sorry guys this is not my area.  I wish I had time to go to google scholar and review the literature for you but I did have other things I had to do today.  But you could try it yourself.  Go to scholar.google.com and try some search terms and see what comes up.  I believe that this theory about kids from low SES benefiting from attending school with kids with high SES comes from James Coleman's work in the 60s. Now what research has been done since then (and I'm sure there's been plenty), I don't know.  You may all be right in your views but you need to look at actual rigorous research that confirms them and you haven't done that yet.[/quote]

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