Education and educational measurement are the subjects where I come closest to offering expertise; I studied educational assessment in grad school, wrote my dissertation on standardized tests of college learning, and worked in assessment for CUNY for four years.
I'm also not a journalist and have never been in a newsroom or anything like that, but what might explain the lack of journalism on these topics?
Charter schools have been a big topic for at least fifteen years (or whenever that Waiting for Superman movie came out) in the public consciousness and the national discourse, so this seems like an obvious topic to tackle.
As for GPA, I had never heard this before, but I also don't do anything related to education. Seems like someone whose beat is education, and especially higher education, would see this as worth investigating.
Considering most people don't have a basic understanding of statistics (as in lies, damn lies, and statistics), I am sure there are very few people that are even aware that either of these things are a problem.
I'd definitely like to see some serious reporting done on both topics. But, I'm afraid after something like this is published, by the time it gets distilled by the various other news organizations and headline writers, people won't really learn much about either topic. The original report would be thousands and thousands of words, with charts and graphics. The article most people would read will be a couple of hundred words, if we are lucky.
The only thing people will remember are the headlines:
"Rich people and elite colleges manipulate the admissions process"
"Administrators rig the lottery to divert the best students (and the money that goes with them) to Charter schools"
Alright: so you are against charter schools and it is honest for you to say so, which might explain why you use arguuments that smell a lot like collectivist bias. Why would the motivation of parents to get their child into a charter school (or what they consider a better school than the public school available in thir distsrict) be penalized.
Individual effort is what drives meritocarcy, and yes, efforts of parents to promote good education for their child shoud be encouraged and not considered to introduce a bias in the evaluation of school results. Parents (users of schools) are firstgrade stakeholders in the educational system and should be able to weigh in on curricula. No reason why in this particular field experts should go unchallenged and should be considered to have superior knowledge and competence in dertermining what and how children should learn.
I'm not so sure that elite schools will really get rid of SATs all the way. Maybe they'll make them optional, but I think high scores will always be advantage there. As Freddie documented here and I believe in his book (which is good and folks should read), SATs are reasonably predictive of college performance as these things go.
Interesting though these are, I feel like the only education story worth reporting on right now is the ruinous, deleterious COVID school closures that were driven by fear and hysteria and lazy teacher's unions and feckless governors/mayors/etc. I would imagine that all other education matters are going to be distantly secondary to those in the coming years. Those policies are, I think, basically going to define our education system for many years.
Of course, reporting on that honestly is going to require a reckoning of basically every level of society—media, government, civic institutions, educational organizations—that helped facilitate this disaster. That's not going to be easy to do; nobody wants to admit what they participated in.
People hate math. Also, I think the biggest idea about college right now is that it's insanely expensive and will lead to a life of debt servitude without the guarantee of a job that could pay for it before you die. People with kids, and the kids, seem to contemplate this topic with the numb terror we all seem to have toward climate change; we're fucked and there's nothing we can do about it.
In addition to your excellent point about weighted GPAs, I would love to see an exposé on the entire “holistic admissions” racket, because it’s not just GPA that is opaque to public scrutiny. I used to teach at an elite private high school in DC, and our students had multiple advantages in holistic admissions that public school kids don’t have.
1. We had a full-time admissions counselor whose job it was to cultivate relationships with deans of admissions at all the top colleges at the country so she could negotiate which students from our school would get in at which colleges every year.
2. I taught nearly the entire junior class, and part of my job was writing letters of recommendation for my students that would get them into elite colleges. I kept detailed files on all my students and spent an average of four hours per letter. I wrote my letters with the goal not only of drawing a vivid portrait of each student, but also of catching the attention of and even entertaining admissions officers who were having to slog through thousands of the things. In one case I know for a fact that an extra letter I sent in got a student off the wait list and into Harvard.
3. We offered a class, called Writing Seminar, which existed to give the students an opportunity to craft their personal statements with the help of extensive feedback from teachers like me.
4. None of the students in the school needed to have a job, so they were free to participate in extracurricular activities. Through the parent and alumni networks, they had access to extremely impressive internships and volunteer positions that would boost their applications.
I really loved my students and was happy to do whatever I could to help them, but I was under no illusion that the system was fair. This is why I reject holistic admissions and think that elite college admissions should be done by a lottery of all applicants who meet SAT and GPA cutoffs set by the schools.
I would not trust an expose on either topic from any of the sources you listed at the end, and for good reason. They're all completely captured by the entities you want them to investigate.
New Orleans charter school system is farcical as is the One-App lottery system they implemented in an attempt to be fair. Charters have their own enrollment preferences which goes something like this. A charter has a kindergarten class of 50 seat (2 classes of 25 each). So a 12:1 student to teacher ratio.
Of those 50 open seats 25 are automatically set aside for income-qualifying applicants, 10 more are set aside for the children of staff & faculty, and 10 more are set-asides for siblings & special needs students. So that leaves 5 spots open for the general public. If it's a well regarded charter school, the middle class parents who can't afford private school, flood the highest ranked schools w/ applications. So for those remaining 5 spots you might have 500+ applications. If you don't get in to any of your chosen schools, you're only choice then is private school. Which isn't really a choice at that point because that's another level of self-selecting, screening and affordability.
This is a result of pro-charter people convincing the state that dismantling the public schools and going full charter would result in better schools and more choice but what it ended up doing was setting up a system that fails spectacularly at all levels. Neighborhood schools were closed, demolished or turned into housing, and sent parents and children commuting all over the city in hopes of getting into one of the few high-performing charters or pushing them into private schools where some perform marginally better than the public schools.
FWIW, since 2014, Washington DC has used a common lottery for charter and out-of-boundary public school admissions. Charters aren't required to participate but most do. Parents rank up to 10 choices.
DC education has been a complicated story for a long time, even before charters were as ubiquitous as they are now. Prior to the charters, middle class families (of all races), whose inbound school was largely at-risk students, consistently found ways to enroll at out-of-boundary schools with predominantly middle class students. It's clear in the historical percentage of kids in mostly middle class schools who are out-of-boundary, or in the racial makeup of schools that are situated in predominantly white neighborhoods. As in-boundary enrollment at public schools in wealthy neighborhoods grew, there were fewer spots for out-of-bounds kids, which was one of the drivers of the increased demand for charters.
To be honest isn't the number one advantage of charter schools self segregation? It allows parents who prioritize education to place their kids in schools with the like minded, eliminating distractions from other kids who range from the academically disinclined to outright criminals.
I am deeply skeptical about universities' ability to reliably norm high school grades around the country, even though I believe they probably can reliably norm certain large public schools with elite prep schools. I also believe - based solely on logic and two pieces of anecdotal evidence - that universities are aware that their proprietary GPA adjustments are less reliable than standardized tests, but have actively encouraged the abandonment of standardized tests for two, related reasons, the first competitive and the second transparency/flexibility.
Regarding the competitive consideration, a number of elite universities have higher name recognition and perceived prestige than other (also elite, but often newer, often regionally distinct) schools that objectively appear to be able to fill their admissions with students that achieve higher average standardized test scores. It was one thing when schools like Stanford, MIT and CalTech posted higher average scores than Harvard, Yale and Princeton, but when schools like Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt and Wash U began routinely posting median and 25/75 SAT ranges equal to Harvard, Yale and Princeton and higher than schools like Cornell, Dartmouth and Brown, I believe elite universities came to see published standardized test scores as a threat to their ability to market prestige and exclusivity without facing competition from below.
Very relatedly, and in part because of competition from these schools, elite universities felt that they were constrained in their ability to admit who they wanted to admit because of the impact on these published scores. People they want to admit with below average scores are a large and heterodox group. Minorities, athletes, children of the donor class, children of staff/administrators/friends (bigger group than you think), children of politicians, celebrities and children of celebrities. The published nature of standardized test scores constrained schools' ability to admit the students they wanted to admit. The constraint goes away if students can be told simply not to report their scores.
The chief benefit of proprietary GPA matrices over standardized tests is not accuracy, it's non-transparency, non-comparability. They aren't published. SAT scores and what they reveal about the students attending schools is a threat to elite universities ability to preserve - in perpetuity - unique name recognition.
Another, probably much smaller, charter issue is the gaming of charters themselves. Jay Kang's recent article on Yu Ming mandarin immersion charter school in Oakland purports to upend traditional narratives about diversity, but really ends of burying the lede. Yu Ming (and a similar Francophone school in Oakland) is not a charter "open to all California students," as Kang states, since you cannot enter the school after Kindergarten without speaking Mandarin (French fluency is requried for 1st graders at the Francophone school, too). "How well-resources parents created a private school on the public dime" could be just as compelling of story line
I'm also not a journalist and have never been in a newsroom or anything like that, but what might explain the lack of journalism on these topics?
Charter schools have been a big topic for at least fifteen years (or whenever that Waiting for Superman movie came out) in the public consciousness and the national discourse, so this seems like an obvious topic to tackle.
As for GPA, I had never heard this before, but I also don't do anything related to education. Seems like someone whose beat is education, and especially higher education, would see this as worth investigating.
Considering most people don't have a basic understanding of statistics (as in lies, damn lies, and statistics), I am sure there are very few people that are even aware that either of these things are a problem.
I'd definitely like to see some serious reporting done on both topics. But, I'm afraid after something like this is published, by the time it gets distilled by the various other news organizations and headline writers, people won't really learn much about either topic. The original report would be thousands and thousands of words, with charts and graphics. The article most people would read will be a couple of hundred words, if we are lucky.
The only thing people will remember are the headlines:
"Rich people and elite colleges manipulate the admissions process"
"Administrators rig the lottery to divert the best students (and the money that goes with them) to Charter schools"
Was it not taught to the masses that as soon as any algorithm is used for scoring, that algorithm will be gamed?
And why on earth do you think that journalists are interested in juicy exposes, at the expense of looking good in front of their peer group?
Alright: so you are against charter schools and it is honest for you to say so, which might explain why you use arguuments that smell a lot like collectivist bias. Why would the motivation of parents to get their child into a charter school (or what they consider a better school than the public school available in thir distsrict) be penalized.
Individual effort is what drives meritocarcy, and yes, efforts of parents to promote good education for their child shoud be encouraged and not considered to introduce a bias in the evaluation of school results. Parents (users of schools) are firstgrade stakeholders in the educational system and should be able to weigh in on curricula. No reason why in this particular field experts should go unchallenged and should be considered to have superior knowledge and competence in dertermining what and how children should learn.
I'm not so sure that elite schools will really get rid of SATs all the way. Maybe they'll make them optional, but I think high scores will always be advantage there. As Freddie documented here and I believe in his book (which is good and folks should read), SATs are reasonably predictive of college performance as these things go.
It's always been strange to me that people get so riled up about where they (their kids) attend college. I mean, I get it, I certainly played that game 20 years ago. But if you look at the data, at least far as future earnings are concerned, it matters far more what you major in there where you go. Some quick and dirty data: https://campustechnology.com/articles/2021/11/02/when-it-comes-to-roi-college-major-matters-more-than-school-attended.aspx?admgarea=news.
Interesting though these are, I feel like the only education story worth reporting on right now is the ruinous, deleterious COVID school closures that were driven by fear and hysteria and lazy teacher's unions and feckless governors/mayors/etc. I would imagine that all other education matters are going to be distantly secondary to those in the coming years. Those policies are, I think, basically going to define our education system for many years.
Of course, reporting on that honestly is going to require a reckoning of basically every level of society—media, government, civic institutions, educational organizations—that helped facilitate this disaster. That's not going to be easy to do; nobody wants to admit what they participated in.
People hate math. Also, I think the biggest idea about college right now is that it's insanely expensive and will lead to a life of debt servitude without the guarantee of a job that could pay for it before you die. People with kids, and the kids, seem to contemplate this topic with the numb terror we all seem to have toward climate change; we're fucked and there's nothing we can do about it.
In addition to your excellent point about weighted GPAs, I would love to see an exposé on the entire “holistic admissions” racket, because it’s not just GPA that is opaque to public scrutiny. I used to teach at an elite private high school in DC, and our students had multiple advantages in holistic admissions that public school kids don’t have.
1. We had a full-time admissions counselor whose job it was to cultivate relationships with deans of admissions at all the top colleges at the country so she could negotiate which students from our school would get in at which colleges every year.
2. I taught nearly the entire junior class, and part of my job was writing letters of recommendation for my students that would get them into elite colleges. I kept detailed files on all my students and spent an average of four hours per letter. I wrote my letters with the goal not only of drawing a vivid portrait of each student, but also of catching the attention of and even entertaining admissions officers who were having to slog through thousands of the things. In one case I know for a fact that an extra letter I sent in got a student off the wait list and into Harvard.
3. We offered a class, called Writing Seminar, which existed to give the students an opportunity to craft their personal statements with the help of extensive feedback from teachers like me.
4. None of the students in the school needed to have a job, so they were free to participate in extracurricular activities. Through the parent and alumni networks, they had access to extremely impressive internships and volunteer positions that would boost their applications.
I really loved my students and was happy to do whatever I could to help them, but I was under no illusion that the system was fair. This is why I reject holistic admissions and think that elite college admissions should be done by a lottery of all applicants who meet SAT and GPA cutoffs set by the schools.
I would not trust an expose on either topic from any of the sources you listed at the end, and for good reason. They're all completely captured by the entities you want them to investigate.
New Orleans charter school system is farcical as is the One-App lottery system they implemented in an attempt to be fair. Charters have their own enrollment preferences which goes something like this. A charter has a kindergarten class of 50 seat (2 classes of 25 each). So a 12:1 student to teacher ratio.
Of those 50 open seats 25 are automatically set aside for income-qualifying applicants, 10 more are set aside for the children of staff & faculty, and 10 more are set-asides for siblings & special needs students. So that leaves 5 spots open for the general public. If it's a well regarded charter school, the middle class parents who can't afford private school, flood the highest ranked schools w/ applications. So for those remaining 5 spots you might have 500+ applications. If you don't get in to any of your chosen schools, you're only choice then is private school. Which isn't really a choice at that point because that's another level of self-selecting, screening and affordability.
This is a result of pro-charter people convincing the state that dismantling the public schools and going full charter would result in better schools and more choice but what it ended up doing was setting up a system that fails spectacularly at all levels. Neighborhood schools were closed, demolished or turned into housing, and sent parents and children commuting all over the city in hopes of getting into one of the few high-performing charters or pushing them into private schools where some perform marginally better than the public schools.
FWIW, since 2014, Washington DC has used a common lottery for charter and out-of-boundary public school admissions. Charters aren't required to participate but most do. Parents rank up to 10 choices.
DC education has been a complicated story for a long time, even before charters were as ubiquitous as they are now. Prior to the charters, middle class families (of all races), whose inbound school was largely at-risk students, consistently found ways to enroll at out-of-boundary schools with predominantly middle class students. It's clear in the historical percentage of kids in mostly middle class schools who are out-of-boundary, or in the racial makeup of schools that are situated in predominantly white neighborhoods. As in-boundary enrollment at public schools in wealthy neighborhoods grew, there were fewer spots for out-of-bounds kids, which was one of the drivers of the increased demand for charters.
To be honest isn't the number one advantage of charter schools self segregation? It allows parents who prioritize education to place their kids in schools with the like minded, eliminating distractions from other kids who range from the academically disinclined to outright criminals.
You had me at Bernie packing heat....
I am deeply skeptical about universities' ability to reliably norm high school grades around the country, even though I believe they probably can reliably norm certain large public schools with elite prep schools. I also believe - based solely on logic and two pieces of anecdotal evidence - that universities are aware that their proprietary GPA adjustments are less reliable than standardized tests, but have actively encouraged the abandonment of standardized tests for two, related reasons, the first competitive and the second transparency/flexibility.
Regarding the competitive consideration, a number of elite universities have higher name recognition and perceived prestige than other (also elite, but often newer, often regionally distinct) schools that objectively appear to be able to fill their admissions with students that achieve higher average standardized test scores. It was one thing when schools like Stanford, MIT and CalTech posted higher average scores than Harvard, Yale and Princeton, but when schools like Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt and Wash U began routinely posting median and 25/75 SAT ranges equal to Harvard, Yale and Princeton and higher than schools like Cornell, Dartmouth and Brown, I believe elite universities came to see published standardized test scores as a threat to their ability to market prestige and exclusivity without facing competition from below.
Very relatedly, and in part because of competition from these schools, elite universities felt that they were constrained in their ability to admit who they wanted to admit because of the impact on these published scores. People they want to admit with below average scores are a large and heterodox group. Minorities, athletes, children of the donor class, children of staff/administrators/friends (bigger group than you think), children of politicians, celebrities and children of celebrities. The published nature of standardized test scores constrained schools' ability to admit the students they wanted to admit. The constraint goes away if students can be told simply not to report their scores.
The chief benefit of proprietary GPA matrices over standardized tests is not accuracy, it's non-transparency, non-comparability. They aren't published. SAT scores and what they reveal about the students attending schools is a threat to elite universities ability to preserve - in perpetuity - unique name recognition.
Another, probably much smaller, charter issue is the gaming of charters themselves. Jay Kang's recent article on Yu Ming mandarin immersion charter school in Oakland purports to upend traditional narratives about diversity, but really ends of burying the lede. Yu Ming (and a similar Francophone school in Oakland) is not a charter "open to all California students," as Kang states, since you cannot enter the school after Kindergarten without speaking Mandarin (French fluency is requried for 1st graders at the Francophone school, too). "How well-resources parents created a private school on the public dime" could be just as compelling of story line