Reply to PARCC Comparison for MIDDLE SCHOOLS in MoCo and Upper Northwest

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "PARCC Comparison for MIDDLE SCHOOLS in MoCo and Upper Northwest"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, there is a huge huge assumption underlying your post -- that demographic categories are monolithic. You are assuming that SES and cultural capital holds constant across the demographic groupings in the data. It's an interesting way to crunch the data but it's not standard for the ed. field.[/quote]

I don't understand this criticism. OP is only assuming subgroups are similar across the schools. That is, white students at Deal are similar to white students at Pyle, Westland and Hardy, or that Asian students are comparable across these four schools. This is reasonable given the schools being compared are all within three miles or so of the DC-MD border. They're all within a four mile radius from Westmoreland Circle. 
[/quote]

It is not reasonable to assume nationwide that all white kids are similar. White kids in appalachia versus white kids at prep school on the upper east side, etc.

But when comparing the DC area schools that OP compared, it's fair enough to treat the racial demographic as a broad proxy. It's infortunate that this is appropriate, says a lot about racial inequality in DC. But it's appropriate. 
[/quote]

I get what the first poster is saying.  OP could have avoided any confusion by stating outright this analysis was only useful when comparing scores of wealthy white children, not all children.  [/quote]

Ha! Yes, it probably *is* appropriate to assume that the white kids in the analysis are comparable. Is that actually what the analysis is for? That hadn't actually occurred to me, but I can see how there would be many many people on DCUM for whom that would be the primary question in their minds. Ouch.[/quote]

What's your point? It's also safe to assume that the black kids are comparable across the MD-DC border as OP has done. And the asians, and the latinos. The point of OP's analysis is that in the DC region, for whatever reasons, there are racial differences in test scores. Race is a statistically powerful predictor of test score performance in our city. Therefore differences in racial composition across schools leads to misleading comparisons of aggregate test scores between schools. The OP has normalized the data to show us how the schools would perform if they all had the same set of students. And what we see is that Deal looks great on that measure. Which tells us that the instruction etc at Deal is just as good as say Pyle and the difference in test scores can be almost completely explained by differences in demographics.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics