My child went from a very white private with mixed ability to a DCPS majority black with mixed abilities. Have to say the DCPS school has been a far better experience. This obsession with high achieving cohorts is nonsense. The best thing is a positive school environment. If your child looks forward to going to school, there will be learning. (Disclosure: Kid is in upper elementary. I’m not a parent of a Kindergartener.)

Also I’m tired of the constant “all white kids are gifted” trope on DCUM. They’re not. Also there are many gifted minority students too.

I guess you mean tracking? Look, studies be damned I recall tracking as the best thing that ever happened to me. I got to finally escape all the bozos that first of all bullied me for being smart and I’m sure made other smart kids hide it too. Then I got to finally do work that was at my level among the other nerds. If you were once a nerd you’d get it. If they found a way to make nerds cool good for them. I’m sure my test scores stayed exactly the same but I was a happy kid. Who measures that?

Meh. Consider all the studies that show tests scores are driven by socioeconomic background. Those studies make you wonder if any school has impact. If that were true, we might as well all be ‘unschooling’ and quit bothering with all the education costs.

If you read the responses to the tweet you posted some people have some evidence — but you can’t control for the selection effect.

Parents believe that the cohorts will be better/more serious/less disruptive and choose schools with tracking, or magnets believing the education will be better. It isn’t clear that it is, but by then confirmation bias creeps in, people convince themselves and we go in circles endlessly.

I have never seen any. I also know that the area of educational academic research is usually not validated in the same way that other scientific research is (see link below).

So people rely on ‘what makes sense’ to them, which often means wanting their kid to have a variant of what they grew up with.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/14/almost-no-education-research-replicated-new-article-shows

A lot of DCUM commentary argues that DCPS needs more streaming. But how much evidence is there that streaming leads to better educational outcomes?This thread from May Yglesias cites two NYC studies that suggest no evidence of benefit to those in more selective schools. Seems counter intuitive. But where is the evidence to the contrary. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1166168412873220097?s=21