Reply to Wilson honors for all - how has it worked?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Found the post.  The Chicago study is observational.  The one experimental study I saw was done in Kenya.  It is unclear if that’s very generalizable to DC area.  The Figlio study appears to be high-quality.

That said, the Brookings report is a fair minded and cautious review of the available evidence, in which many different studies confirm what is common sense to any teacher or parent: tracking helps the most advanced and least advanced kids.

[b]The real misfiring of research on the tracking issue came 3-4 decades ago when the education establishment decided, based on “research”, that tracking should be eliminated.[/b]  My aunt was a public school teacher at the time.  She made a stink then, and she was right.  It just took a few decades for the educational establishment to catch up to what all good teachers knew.

Moral: seek out good teachers and parents and listen to them; consider research but do not follow education research blindly.

And the relevant point for the thread topic: Wilson’s “Honors for No One” approach is a terrible idea, and is likely to hurt low-achievement students while driving away high-achievement students, and corroding the quality of the school and its family support.[/quote]

Here's a 2006 paper documenting improvements in lower-SES and minority outcomes on a couple of measures when classes were de-tracked and all students were put into accelerated math classes in one school district in New York (https://cxwork.gseis.ucla.edu/pli/14/mp/js/fieldwo...s-research-article-on-tracking).  These results seems clearly at variance with the larger, longer term Chicago observational study.  The question that's interesting to me is: why?  What's different?  And, which results are more likely to be generalizable to  DC?  I suspect that Chicago is a lot more like DC and that the longer term, larger Chicago study is more representative of what will happen here, but I wonder specifically why the results were different and whether those outcomes persisted in New York.

[/quote]

There was an OP above that said the problem with educational research is the field- it’s just difficult-to-impossible to study.
Outcome measures take years to collect, effects are small, and there are a million endogenous factors that are impossible to completely control.
That’s the problem with these two studies.

Really, don’t tie yourself in knots trying to figure out what went wrong.  Sometimes there is no clear answer from a study.[/quote]

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