GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

1. 

   Gideon

   October 13th, 2009 8:41 am

   Actually, people DO have the stomach for high failure rates, as evidenced by the hundreds of poorly performing schools and the unconscionably high dropout rates. They just don’t want to know about it. And to contradict your argument that politics will not allow high standards, consider the outrage at how easy last year’s NY state exams seemed. Obviously there has been tremendous gaming of the system so that some states appear to have highly skilled students, when in fact the bar is set so low as to make their performance meaningless. But that’s the argument for one set of high standards. The other point, which seems relevant to every post so far, is that it’s not the standards that are problematic, but how they’re measured.

2. 

   Gideon

   October 13th, 2009 8:44 am

   And since when should political fear of failure dictate our policies. If that were the case, we’d have no social security and Medicare (which has nearly wiped out elderly poverty), we’d never have entered World War II, we’d never have gone to the moon. It’s critically important that we know which students are struggling and devote the resources necessary to meeting their needs.

3. 

   Alexander Hoffman

   October 13th, 2009 1:51 pm

   Gideon,

   I do not agree that people accept responsibility for high failure rates. When it falls on THEIR desk, when the buck stops with THEM, they undermine such measures. Accepting high failure rates elsewhere is different than accepting responsibility for them locally. Notice the ways that high school graduation rate have been rigged for years, from drop out being counted as transfers in TX to to “credit recovery” being used to artificially boost graduation rates in NYC. Notice the uneven even ways that graduation rates have been measure, in some places counting only the number of seniors attending school in may/june in the denominator.

   However, I do not suggest that we ought to allow fear dictate our policies. Rather, I mean to point out that fear already does, and we need to take that into account. Pressing for the adoption of policies that we already know will be undermined rather than allowed to make the positive difference we are looking for doesn’t do anyone any good.

   The question at hand is *not* what standards could do, in a perfect world with strong leaders ruled by integrity. Rather, the question at hand is what these sorts of standards actually mean or signify in our very real world, with the leaders we have, the schools we have and students we have.

4. 

   Gideon

   October 14th, 2009 9:25 am

   I did not say people accept responsibility for high failure rates, I said they stomach failure, mostly through willful ignorance. In my opinion, the main benefit of NCLB has been the requirement to disaggregate student performance results to shine a light on how students of color or poor or ESL students are doing, making it harder for people to ignore the needs of these subgroups. And I readily acknowledged that there has been tremendous gaming of the system to avoid the appearance of failing to serve students well. Asking people to do anything different or difficult will always lead to some undermining, but failing to aim high enough because of it makes no sense.

   As for what standards signify in our very real world, I believe they represent our aspirations for what we as a society want our children to know and be able to do as a result of a public education system that we require most students to attend for 16 years. Have you looked at the proposed core standards. Here are a few for English language arts:

   1. Determine both what the text says explicitly and what can be inferred logically from the text.
   2. Support or challenge assertions about the text by citing evidence in the text explicitly and accurately.
   3. Discern the most important ideas, events, or information, and summarize them accurately and concisely.

   I find it hard to believe these are the problem you’re devoting so much time and space to opposing. The real debate is how we use them, how we benchmark individual grades, how we measure progress, the implications for policymakers, school leaders, teachers, parents and students. I think its advantageous to have a set of clear standards to focus these debates, to provide common language for discourse, and to build our policies and practices around.

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