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.
This sounds a lot like the way admissions are done in the UK. Each university publicizes the minimum score on the GSCEs or IB that a student needs to apply. Students are allowed to apply to only five universities, and they write a single personal statement, which is supposed to be at least 80 percent about their academic research and interests. They submit one recommendation, from their school counselor, which again focuses on academics only. There are no extracurriculars or additional essays.
Oxford and Cambridge have developed their own three-hour exams for each subject, and applicants take the exams early in the process. Then, based on the students’ performance on the exam, the universities invite some students for a personal interview. The tutors choose the students they want to work with based on the interviews.
Admissions is much more straightforward and transparent in the UK than it is in the US, and much more focused on the actual subject the student will study, rather than a penumbra of extra accomplishments. My son went to Oxford, and my daughter is currently a student at an elite US college, so I’m familiar with both admissions systems. The UK way is by far the more rational and humane way to go about it, in my opinion.
That is generally how it works in most places in the world, notably the UK system , where folks start to specialize beginning in high school. That's not how it work in the US. Different state school systems work in different ways...even local school systems work in different ways. A system where folks specialize early depends on a degree of curricular standardization across the country. People in the US want their "freedom" to dictate local curricular decisions, for better or for worse.
In practical terms, this means that students have a fairly wide ranging abilities and skills by the time they enter college, relative to other countries' education systems. Therefore, college curriculum in those first years is meant to get folks on the same page and moreover, it gives students time to think about their majors and not decide until their sophomore year. This is what American style "liberal arts" is partly about, and I'd argue is one reason why the US education system is arguably the best in the world, but that's another subject.
All said, this has nothing to do with what tenured professors are willing or not willing to do. And btw, as of 2019, about 27% of faculty teaching in American universities have tenured status. They are generally not involved in admission decisions and outside of small liberal arts schools, most are not involved in undergraduate advising. Their jobs are to teach, research, and do service. It's simply not feasible to do these jobs and oversee, in the case of large public institutions, thousands of undergraduate applications.
While systems like the one you describe has advantages there are draw backs too. In my opinion, systems that specialize earlier produce less interesting research and less creative thinking on account of the fact that folks are exposed to less kinds of varied knowledges. On the other hand, in the American system many more people fail out or graduate not able to do things that outside stakeholders think they should know how to do.
That's definitely true about music schools. The teachers do what they can to pick their students. Students also do trial lessons with teachers before applying. But music is very specific.
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.
Education journalism isn't popular, especially when it's research-based. Everybodys priors are already deeply reinforced (schools are too woke, schools are too racist), the data tend to be depressing, and there are very few pathways toward large, meaningful change, so advocacy feels pointless for too many people to reach any critical mass.
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"
I would speculate that the story that Freddie wants reported on won't be the story that gets reported on. It'll be a hack and leak story, where the outrage will be political outrage, whether it's about Malia Obama's underwhelming SAT scores, or some corrupt DoE bureaucrat getting their kid into an improbable school or some similar scandal (I'm not sure it even is a scandal in the public's mind for a wealthy donor, or an athlete in some no revenue sport, to be shown similar favor). It won't be a story by a careful social scientist about flaws and gaming of the GPA adjustment methodology and its impacts (intended and otherwise).
I dunno, a lot of the likely candidates for "the story that gets reported on" would require skewering one or more PMC sacred cows, and therefore no reputable outfit will want to touch them.
Too bad, for sacred cows make good steaks and cats like steak!
That's the thing about hack and leak stories - the first place reporting it won't be reputable. But once it's out, they'll all eventually have to cover it.
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.
because police and education are not the same thing so your equivalence is misleading.
By the way, I would also say that we should have more influence on how the police proceeds, and the whole Defund the police movement (which I basically disagree with) is all about that. I maintain eduation is not a regalian matter whereas public security is. In a civiLized society, public security is an undividable good whereas eduction is not. Charter schools are one way to give parents more influence on and in schooling, and I do not know any other way to let public school teachers and their unions know that you feeel that they are doing a lousy job, which is certainly the case in France where I live and which increasingly also seems to be the case in your country.
You must be a high school/middle school teacher. When I had questions of teachers at that level I contacted them directly when the concerns arose. I don't remember parent/teacher conferences in those grades.
A lot of my kids parents didn't show up for conferences. At least they didn't show up on time. I talked to them when they were available.
However, when I took over a totally out of control 2nd grade class, I contacted every parent by phone within a week. It was so bad that there were three parents lined up in the back of the room on my first day. That was the most intense day I had as a teacher. Small pieces of crayon flew around the room, one kid walked by and stabbed another with a pair of scissors, one girl lay down on the floor kicking and screaming in a full blown tantrum.
Literally everything you list under a contingent service can and is provided privately and is subsequently very limited in whom they serve. Just as private education is based upon the idea that those should be privileges of a certain socio-economic class that can transactionally participate . Public schools, like the public roads and other publicly funded services are intended to be utilized and benefited equally by everyone.
In the United States every school board has public meetings. Lots of parents make their concerns known. If enough parents have enough concerns they can vote to change the school board and be a burr in the school board’s butt. But wealthy parents do not, because they view school as a consumer service they can opt in and out of. And that hurts everyone, particularly the kids with fewer options.
The essential problem with the charter movement in the US is the corporatization of schooling. This is manifest in the actions of charter ‘operators’ - which should be considered corporate entities, since they fit all the most significant criteria that define them except shareholder control. For example, the largest charter org. in Los Angeles has simply closed schools - often on short notice- that fail to reach pre-determined enrollment levels. Meanwhile they absorb lots of tax money, despite not treating their activities as anything other than a for-profit enterprise. I hope they’re better behaved in France.
Explain to me: how can they absorb lots of taxpayer money, when they close a school ? Ihas the impression that they get resources based on their level of activity and enrolement levels ?
Their only motive for closing a school is the elimination of an under-performing asset, hence the clear evidence that they are acting in their organizational interests, not those of the public. The equation is simple. If the overhead/ costs exceed the return they cut their losses and move on. They still have several dozen profitable sites, so it’s purely a business decision. Except for the students attending the schools they close.
Well, you don't get to withdraw your funds from education, as everyone pays taxes. This money, fungible as it always is, pays for roads, schools, cops, etc.
What you do after paying that tax bill is up to you. So, in the same way that if you live in a gated community with private security you still pay taxes for public services that include police, and if you enroll your children in a private school you will still pay property tax.
Charters are still in the education ecosystem, albeit at a remove. But, this remove is no different that of any elite, selective public school, of which there are many. What they do best is provide alternatives in pedagogy.
School budgets are basically admin and teacher salaries and benefits, facilities costs and unfunded pension costs. While the withdrawal of one student from the regular public school probably has no impact on the public school's costs, the withdrawal of 25% of them probably does come close to reducing the regular public school's teacher costs by 25% (there's some stickiness, particularly around language, music teachers, school nurses etc. where you can't go below 1). Many charter schools also are inside the regular public school or one of their (now) former school buildings and thus they pay their share of facilities costs as well. It's the stranded, unfunded pension costs that are the real problem (at least in the northeast). Some people have very limited sympathy about those unfunded pension costs.
Parents ought not to be users of schools. Schools are for kids. Parents introduce status games into the schooling process when in reality the best thing they can do is send their kids to their community schools and contribute their social and financial capital to raising the quality of the school environment.
Agree entirely that schools are for kids, and would point out that those kids' parents are best positioned to choose which professionals meet their kids' needs. As it stands now, schools are for educrats, which is why parents turn away from them. Many many many parents do not accept your statement that 'the best thing they can do is send their kids to their community schools' and that number is growing every year.
I understand that many parents don’t accept that statement. I disagree with them. I view public school as an extension of the community I live in, and thus feel an obligation to invest in it. I don’t treat school from a consumer standpoint.
If every school was equal, I would see your point. But they aren't. And not every parent wants their children to go to a school that is an extension of the community they live in. Many people want better for their offspring, and are looking for a ladder up.
Is the problem social mobility or the lack thereof? I tend towards the school of thought that believes that the top 20% of the country in terms of income is doing everything it can to raise the draw bridge on the rest of the country.
I’ll reluctantly choose atomization and balkanization if that is the only route to the freedom to choose a community and educational environment that meets my family’s needs, over forced inclusion into an educational approach that is interested in nothing but conformity.
I have had multiple kids in public schools for 15+ years and every year I have seen more and more bureaucratic sclerosis and less and less flexibility and openness to genuine partnership with parents and the community at large. I’m not interested in dropping my kids off behind a drawbridge anymore. I’m done.
I understand. But a good student with support at home can succeed in virtually any school. The only way struggling schools will improve is if the good students with healthy families stop leaving them.
If schools in a school are getting recognizably different funding amounts, its often because of socio-economic stratification where the wealthier parents demand and get better funding than the poorer schools in the same district.
I don’t treat school from a consumer standpoint either; I treat school as a partner in educating my children. My local community school does not offer the expertise, attitude, standards or philosophy I require in this endeavor of educating my children, so I choose not to partner with them. Choosing educational resources and supports thoughtfully is a basic right and responsibility of all parents.
It is. I just don’t think it’s up to the state to support divestment from community institutions and investment in private ones. Part of our responsibility as citizens is to invest in our communities, relationally as well as financially.
Should the state support and invest in alternatives in pedagogy?
Or should the state be locked into one method of learning, no matter the outcomes?
Charter schools are part of the education ecosystem, part of the community, in that any group of people has differences within its borders. Not everyone wants a yellow house, not everyone wants the local education standards.
FdB invokes a baseball metaphor and here’s one that fits: you’re called out looking at strike 3, a soft change-up down the middle of the plate. His objection is clear: the problem is that the admissions process is likely gamed. Those same parents you mentioned are therefore making themselves vulnerable to dishonest players: the charter admins who run the game. Admission of a student doesn’t end the scam, it perpetuates it.
In theory charters offer a viable alternative to public schools that suffer from their various well-noted handicaps. Even the great teachers union leader Al Shanker was a supporter of the initial concept. But education is a field prone to bureaucratic meddling, and the history of the charter movement, all 30-40 years of it now, offers a wealth of examples. What it has most reliably offered is hype and fraud. Individual charter schools may be good, but the collective track record is dreary at best. How that stacks up against public schools is a separate issue that should be weighed on the state and local level.
Do you live in a cave by yourself or do you consider yourself part of the society you live in?
Do you think it's the collective responsibility of the society you live in to provide basic, fundamental public services that all members can enjoy or should such services only be available to the selected few who earned the privilege?
Charter schools are designed to siphon public education funds with the promise of choice and overwhelmingly outperforming their public school counterparts. What we find is they marginally perform better while draining critical funds to make existing public schools better. Private schools are black boxes when it comes to determining pedagogy and having a 'say' as a parent as well.
"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." Gate keepers are required when you have the idiot brigade pounding the doors demanding to be taken seriously without actually understanding how to teach education.
you should not let yourself get carried away like this. The problem with public schools is that they do not like competition, i.e. other schools that can demonstrate that they do not function as they pretend to. Charter schools are useful for that reason.
Too many parents have been frustrated in their efforts to get heard, that is why they want to withdraw their children from the system. What is wrong with that?
Having navigated the private, charter and public schools systems in a short amount of time over the last 6 years, I've seen the good and bad side to all of them. What I find frustrating is the loudest critics of education in the U.S. focus solely on public education and yet their only tool for fixing it is treating it like a nail to be hammered into submission. They have no interest in making the system work better but instead make it worse.
I want teachers who are qualified and able to herd cats, not some Joe Plumber coming in off the street trying to teach history he gleaned from youtube videos.
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.
I think people care because social prestige and future earnings are different things (related, certainly, but different). A prestigious college confers social status, even if it doesn't confer any extra wealth.
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.
Why people think school closures only happened in public schools is because they get the most attention. Private schools in my area shut down for a period of time, until mandates were lifted and then they slowly opened up but with protocols similar to or stricter (depending on which school) than the public schools.
It's the duration. IIRC public schools in some locations stayed closed a lot longer than the private ones. In fact that's what drove a lot of the anger on the part of public school parents.
Yes, I think NYC and LA schools were probably the most egregious examples. The unfortunate aspect of the Covid lockdowns is that it then led to complete and open hostility towards teachers as time went on. Covid brought out the absolute worst behavior in a lot of people. It seems to have settled down somewhat but honestly, there are still a small cohort of folks out there that are just still livid about it and need to just go find a quiet place by themselves and deescalate their brains.
They reopened the public schools in Aug/Sep 2000 in our area. they had the silly mask rules. Was sad to drive by a playground with kids running around outside with little cloth face coverings that accomplish nothing, but what are you going to do? They had football games with people in stands. But, we are in flyover country.
"Covid brought out the absolute worst behavior in a lot of people."
Yes. It wrecked friendships and families. People lost jobs/careers. Amplified-Accelerated the cultural and political divide that may break this country. Sad.
The pendulum may be swinging back in reaction to an insane overreach. The New York state supreme court just rules that firing workers who refused vaccinations was illegal. In its decision the court specifically pointed out that vaccines do not prevent transmission.
Maybe, but a lot of damage was done that cannot be repaired. The CEO of Pfizer stating publicly that unvaccinated people were murderers. I must have missed his apology. Ads aimed at children in which some precious little tyke explains he cannot wait to get his shot so he can "protect" his baby sister. We have a friend who is still (in October 2022!) not allowed to visit her grandkids without two weeks quarantine and a negative test. At first it was because the kids were not vaccinated. Now its because the vaccines don't prevent transmission. I assume the kids will be homeschooled in masks.
Covid peeled back the thin veneer of civility that most Americans have for their fellow citizens. Many people let slip that they loathed having to be courteous to other people (for all sorts of reasons) once Covid lockdowns ended. Then it became weaponized by politicians and pundit/grifters and anyone hawking alternative medicines which further fed into psychological toll the epidemic had.
I agree completely. School closures were not just public. The reckoning, if it ever happens, will be multilateral and comprehensive of our entire educational system.
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.
My kids went to state college. I told them I would consider funding private college if they could present some business case as to why a particular school would pay off over the state college. They did not bother, as neither was all that interested. There was no financial "numb terror". They have jobs and no student loans (now in their early 30s).
I have no "numb terror" about climate change. However, I numb terror over people who have numb terror over climate change.
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.
This x100. I work at an urban charter HS and it's the opposite: when my seniors apply to colleges, they have no extracurriculars to brag about because, well, they have to work nights, weekends, and summers just to stay fed. They can't get help at home with applications or scholarships. Teachers can't emphasize college prep in classes where three quarters of students aren't planning for college at all. No, holistic admissions are even more racist and classiest than GPA or SAT.
It's really astonishing the different worlds we live in despite whatever similarities might appear on paper. I went to an elite public high school where a large percentage of the students were from low income immigrant families. It was clear from day one that our one college guidance counselor only had time for a handful of students. They weren't academic stars nor were they failing classes, so I couldn't understand why they were regularly visiting her*.
Meanwhile, the rest of us had exactly one session with the guidance counselor on which colleges to apply to during the pre-internet era. It was a session shared with another student from the same homeroom. When I saw the other student in my session and realized she hadn't been in any of the advanced classes I took, I knew the whole thing was a farce and a waste of my time.
On the otherhand, my school did offer one after school session on SAT tips. And, I believe we were told to be evocative on our personal essays. 🤷🏻♀️
*In fact, despite multiple degrees, I didn't understand why students would visit any of their teachers *at all* until after I was no longer in school. If there was an issue, I thought the place to bring it up was during class. Similarly, it shouldn't be a surprise that I was in my 30s before I learned parents proof read their children's papers, including college admissions essays. It never occurred to me that this was a thing since everyone in the high school was highly fluent in English. I was blinkered because my English skills far surpassed those of my parents.
I was similar, but in the early-ish internet days. I had my parents read over my essays, but just took the generic advice I was given from whatever site I found talking about college essays. I did a bunch of extra curriculars and was in AP classes, so I thought I was at the top of the pile. And I got into a few small, liberal arts colleges and the flagship state schools I applied to. But now I'm a grad student at an elite university and I teach 18 year olds who will talk about the public policy internship they had a couple years back and I realize that it's best that I didn't apply to the Ivies for college.
In retrospect, I was top of the pile, but I underestimated myself because I thought I was competing against nationally ranked students and I knew I fell short. By senior year, I was tired of elite admissions race. I also very much wanted to disappoint my mom. 😅 I overheard some guys in gym class talking about the BA/MD program at Brooklyn College. That was my one real college application - I don't count the postcard with my GPA and SAT score which was all that SUNY Binghamton required. I got a great education at Brooklyn College, but it was a poor fit. I would have been much happier at Binghamton or going Ivy. Back in the early 90s, the students at elite colleges weren't quite as overwhelmingly posh as they are now, at least based on my high school classmates who ended up there.
Riffing a bit off the challenges of the pre-internet college application process: I graduated high school in 1992, and one of the more challenging things for me was figuring out how to get an actual application to fill out for college. Instead, I took the applications that were available from college fairs or that were mailed to me unsolicited. The guidance counselor at the high school had some apps from local colleges, too. I hoped I didn't lose them before I filled them out. I also hoped I didn't make too many errors as I typed the information into the apps so that the app would covered in whiteout. (Also: sometimes it's very hard to align a typewriter with the in which the information is supposed to go.)
I know that seems ridiculous, especially in retrospect. I probably could have written or even phoned (though probably at long distance rates) whatever institution(s) I was interested in and they would have been happy to mail me apps or even several copies of an app.
I was class of 90! One of the jobs I had was part time at an attorney's office. I "inherited" the job from another girl on the track team. Never would have found it on my own. I was god awful at it because it involved typing up invoices and letters on the typewriter. The machine was somewhat advanced because you could edit a few lines, but, ugh, the struggles I had adjusting the paper to line up correctly again after pulling it out to review.
I don't remember much about my college application because I really only applied to one, so it wasn't too bad. I do recall struggling with my FAFSA and Pell grant forms but at least those I could fill out with a pen.
It wasn't great having to handle everything on my own without adult guidance, but honestly, there are many days when I look at my hapless children and think I was well served with my negligent and English deficient parents.
You might be over-estimating the impact of any of these things. My kids attended a fancy Westchester private school which provided the parents with a database that included information about every student (anonymized, of course) that had graduated from the school for the last 10 years, their SAT/ACT score, their GPA, the schools they applied, whether the school accepted, rejected or waitlisted them and whether they had an AA, athletic or legacy hook. My big takeaways from that dataset are as follows:
1. Students with an athletic or AA hook had wildly elevated admissions prospects at schools they were within the 25/75 test range;
2. Students with an athletic or AA hook achieved meaningful numbers of admissions at schools where they were below (sometimes well below) the school's 25th percentile;
3. Students with a legacy hook had significantly elevated odds of gaining admission to schools for which they were within the 25/75 range versus students with no hooks;
4. Students with a legacy hook appeared to have no meaningful advantage in gaining admission to schools where they were below the 25% mark.
5. Students without a legacy, athletic or AA hook almost never get admitted to schools where they are below the 25% mark. For the elite universities, there were something like 5 of them from this private school in 10 years. They may have been children of significant donors, that wasn't data that was provided. Or they may have had some special talent not covered in the recruited athlete category (e.g., violin prodigy, award-winning junior computer designer, who knows). But my point is, it basically didn't happen. So your letters of recommendation, your students' internships and extracurriculars etc., probably had very little meaningful impact.
The real problem is that the focus is on elite, (Top50 or greater, and usually Top10) colleges.
"athletic or AA hook" is a way of saying "AA and legacy" over again. Most student athletes are either a way to advantage AA candidates (football, basketball, etc) or a way to advantage legacy or "class" admissions for the alumni donations later (more expensive sports like lacrosse etc, or Women because there's more need for female athletes due to Title IX).
The exception here does seem to be the elite STEM and engineering programs (with Stanford following Harvard's AA and Legacy scheme more closely than the MA schools). Where the answer to "I have a congressperson's student who only has an ACT of 31 (which is well above average, but nowhere near what you'd need for MIT)" is "fuck off, go away".
I think this is because the MITs of the world view competitive and meritocratic engineering as a good *in itself* and try to prevent these concerns from overriding keeping the field high-quality.
When you say "athletic or AA hook is a way of saying AA and legacy over again," you appear to be saying athlete = legacy. I am sorry, but I just don't follow that. They are absolutely different. I think reasonable people can question why in god's name UPenn cares whether it's women's tennis team is amazing (it is), but reasonable people cannot argue that UPenn's women's tennis team is a backdoor way of admitting legacy students. It's not. It's a backdoor way of taking semi-pro eastern europeans that speak serviceable English and Americans that have lived at tennis academies since they were 6 and are not what we would call "readers". Again, I am not entirely clear why these schools care about being good at non-revenue sports, but it's clear that they do. This is not some opaque bid for rich kids.
The reason I bring in women here is that title IX requires equal funding for men's sports and women's sports - but men's basketball, football produce almost all of the revenue of the sports program overall and thus gets *almost all* men's funding. Meaning - if you want women's funding you need female athletes to fill out female athletic programs. How does one do that? Athletic admissions.
For the revenue sports like basketball and football, they have no problem with that because tons of those players are also minorities and it feels more "metirocratic" that those students have something than just having to lower the admissions bar for "no reason".
So you are talking about something that I know rather a lot about and I have to tell you that you are way, way off. The top players at these academies are generally not "rich," and the good ones aren't paying what you think. The best ones are disproportionately the children of immigrants and parents in the tennis business, one way or another. The best kid I can remember coming from McEnroe's academy was Noah Rubin, a middle class jewish kid from Long Island. I think his father was a middle manager at a bank and his mother was a teacher. He went to public school before being "home schooled" so that he could play tennis all day.
Your general point also doesn't make sense. If the school wanted to admit more rich kids (as distinct from true donor class kids), they could just do it. Every one of these elite schools reject rich kid applicants that have scores within their 25/75 range. Instead, they actively seek out the best athletes, accepting them even when their scores are below that 25th percentile mark.
The best kid you can remember coming from McEnroe was Noah Rubin, a middle class jewish kid from Long Island. So, looking at median household income of Long Island - that is one hundred twenty thousand dollars per year.
This is twice the median income of the United States.
The whole purpose of the scheme is to launder the fact that the people they're admitting are *much* richer than the people they aren't behind "athletics".
Tennis Academies - you can afford 28k/yr tuition, maybe 13k "on scholarship" - which is more than *my parents entire annual income* when I was in high school.
Not to mention the fact that tennis itself requires all kinds of equipment, rackets, specialized courts to play on, and on and on and on and on.
It might not be the *categorical* example, because the categorical example in my mind is *rowing*, but it's a clear case of the entire scheme existing to launder *wealth*, or more accurately, *social class* filters behind something that pretends to be meritocratic.
Perhaps. Every competitive student I knew outside the elite few who were ranked nationally in their areas, did athletics on top of everything else. It was a given. We may not have been very good, nonetheless, we knew colleges wanted students who could handle the endless practices and weekend meets on top of everything else. It was part of being "well rounded".
I've edited two admission essays. One was for a much younger cousin who was applying to med school. The other was for a law classmate who was applying to business school. I'm not going to say my revisions got them their acceptances, but I will say I was shocked at the poor quality of the originals.
Aside from whatever effect parental and school support has on admissions to elite schools, it doesn't change my assessment that there is a very big difference between students who by necessity end up navigating the system on their own vs the ones who are buttressed, however similar their grades and resumes.
If you are not a recruited athlete that the coach has requested the school admit after they school gave a pre-read of the application, I don't believe the school cares at all whether you played a sport in high school. I feel very confident in saying this.
Affirmative action/favored minority applicant. I'm not 100% sure how the school attributed AA status to the applicant, but it's clear from the numbers of students denoted as having an AA hook (ballpark around 10%) they did not count Asian applicants as having an AA hook.
I wonder how colleges evaluate "having a job"? In my mind, there is *no* better extra-curricular than having a job. It teaches lessons you never learn in school, never learn in school-related extra-curricular activities.
They probably focus more on factors that correlate to academic achievement rather than post-college achievement. On that record, the results are more mixed than you might expect.
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.
And we are once again confronted with the basic question: does zoning keep underperforming kids from attending the best schools? Or are schools that are perceived to be the best so perceived precisely because they exclude the underperforming students?
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.
An import constituency for charters is inner city parents, who have to deal with schools where the issue isn't just disruption so much as crime and chaos.
The irony of having attended private high school for 2yr before transferring to public HS in the late 80s is that there were a few kids there because they were expelled from public school and parents weren't ready to send them off to military academy or the parents hadn't moved to another school district yet. Plenty of high-quality explicit drugs were available from the wealthy kids and I learned out to pick locks from another truant-leaning kid. I realized that the big difference between public and private HS was money. Facilities were similar in many respects for schools the same age, the quality of teaching about the same topic wise. There were plenty of fail-sons at the private school who went on to fail-son at college and live mostly consequence free lives.
Charter schools have the advantage of being free though, which is critical when taking into consideration that a key constituency for charters has been poor inner city families who are desperate to get their kids away from public schools that are crime ridden disaster zones. For those individuals private schooling is probably not an option.
That's all well and good if the charter schools are performing better but in the case of New Orleans, all they did was knock down an existing school, build new ones a few blocks away, slap a charter name on and then told neighborhood parents to apply and hope your kid gets in. If not, then you have to get bussed/drive across town to a different underperforming charter school that may not be open the follow year for various reasons.
I also find it very fascinating that everyone's first operational assumption is that ALL public schools are located in poor inner city, crime ridden disaster zones. There are plenty of under-performing public schools in suburbs and rural areas across America but you'd never hear pro-charter/school choice folks suggest those be turned into charter schools.
There are underperforming suburban schools but for decades the most visible low income advocates for charters have been minority residents living in urban cores. There are certainly poor suburbs and poor rural towns in the US but the combination of poverty and crime is especially fierce in the cities. In the context of schools a lot of that crime is going to be committed by students. Given that I can understand why a lot of desperate parents would be interested in segregation. It may well be that a bright kid will do well wherever he or she attends school. But if the opportunity is there to be schooled in an environment (relatively) free of graffiti, drugs and violence--why not?
That reminds me. When I was teaching in a low income public elementary school, I soon learned it was best to have a full class (at that time it was 28 or 29 students) in the beginning of the year. If you weren't full, all the late kids ended up in your class. They were inevitably the ones whose parents finally realized a few weeks late, it was time to get rid of the kids. Sort of the opposite of charter schools.
The biggest distractions were the few students who made it their mission to disrupt the class. There weren't very many of them, but one year I had a student who took at least twenty percent of my time.
I routinely had several kids that would have been in Special Ed programs if our school had been affluent. Those I could handle. It was the ones on a mission to disrupt. In our 500 student school, there were about 5 that needed to be expelled.
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
Are you sure about Yu Ming’s Mandarin-language admission requirement? I recall a recent WSJ article that mentions the opposite and highlights AA, Hispanic, and Anglo kids starting school with no Chinese ability at all.
Yes, I am. Their own FAQs clarify it, and I heard as much from a parent there (the need to take an assessment test to enter the school after kindergarten because "the student would not be able to follow class instruction since it is in Mandarin"), I dont argue that that doesnt make sense; I just argue that the "public" they are serving is quite a small one.
And dont even ask how many of their kids have IEPs.
This sounds a lot like the way admissions are done in the UK. Each university publicizes the minimum score on the GSCEs or IB that a student needs to apply. Students are allowed to apply to only five universities, and they write a single personal statement, which is supposed to be at least 80 percent about their academic research and interests. They submit one recommendation, from their school counselor, which again focuses on academics only. There are no extracurriculars or additional essays.
Oxford and Cambridge have developed their own three-hour exams for each subject, and applicants take the exams early in the process. Then, based on the students’ performance on the exam, the universities invite some students for a personal interview. The tutors choose the students they want to work with based on the interviews.
Admissions is much more straightforward and transparent in the UK than it is in the US, and much more focused on the actual subject the student will study, rather than a penumbra of extra accomplishments. My son went to Oxford, and my daughter is currently a student at an elite US college, so I’m familiar with both admissions systems. The UK way is by far the more rational and humane way to go about it, in my opinion.
That is generally how it works in most places in the world, notably the UK system , where folks start to specialize beginning in high school. That's not how it work in the US. Different state school systems work in different ways...even local school systems work in different ways. A system where folks specialize early depends on a degree of curricular standardization across the country. People in the US want their "freedom" to dictate local curricular decisions, for better or for worse.
In practical terms, this means that students have a fairly wide ranging abilities and skills by the time they enter college, relative to other countries' education systems. Therefore, college curriculum in those first years is meant to get folks on the same page and moreover, it gives students time to think about their majors and not decide until their sophomore year. This is what American style "liberal arts" is partly about, and I'd argue is one reason why the US education system is arguably the best in the world, but that's another subject.
All said, this has nothing to do with what tenured professors are willing or not willing to do. And btw, as of 2019, about 27% of faculty teaching in American universities have tenured status. They are generally not involved in admission decisions and outside of small liberal arts schools, most are not involved in undergraduate advising. Their jobs are to teach, research, and do service. It's simply not feasible to do these jobs and oversee, in the case of large public institutions, thousands of undergraduate applications.
While systems like the one you describe has advantages there are draw backs too. In my opinion, systems that specialize earlier produce less interesting research and less creative thinking on account of the fact that folks are exposed to less kinds of varied knowledges. On the other hand, in the American system many more people fail out or graduate not able to do things that outside stakeholders think they should know how to do.
Interesting idea.
That's definitely true about music schools. The teachers do what they can to pick their students. Students also do trial lessons with teachers before applying. But music is very specific.
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.
Education journalism isn't popular, especially when it's research-based. Everybodys priors are already deeply reinforced (schools are too woke, schools are too racist), the data tend to be depressing, and there are very few pathways toward large, meaningful change, so advocacy feels pointless for too many people to reach any critical mass.
Also, these particular topics involve math. Journalists avoid math whenever they can -- that's why they became journalists in the first place.
Burn
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?
Sounds legit.
I would speculate that the story that Freddie wants reported on won't be the story that gets reported on. It'll be a hack and leak story, where the outrage will be political outrage, whether it's about Malia Obama's underwhelming SAT scores, or some corrupt DoE bureaucrat getting their kid into an improbable school or some similar scandal (I'm not sure it even is a scandal in the public's mind for a wealthy donor, or an athlete in some no revenue sport, to be shown similar favor). It won't be a story by a careful social scientist about flaws and gaming of the GPA adjustment methodology and its impacts (intended and otherwise).
I dunno, a lot of the likely candidates for "the story that gets reported on" would require skewering one or more PMC sacred cows, and therefore no reputable outfit will want to touch them.
Too bad, for sacred cows make good steaks and cats like steak!
That's the thing about hack and leak stories - the first place reporting it won't be reputable. But once it's out, they'll all eventually have to cover it.
I dunno, the MSM seems pretty good at ignoring anything it wishes to ignore.
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.
Why are you not allowed to withdraw your tax funds for the police and use them instead to hire a private security force?
because police and education are not the same thing so your equivalence is misleading.
By the way, I would also say that we should have more influence on how the police proceeds, and the whole Defund the police movement (which I basically disagree with) is all about that. I maintain eduation is not a regalian matter whereas public security is. In a civiLized society, public security is an undividable good whereas eduction is not. Charter schools are one way to give parents more influence on and in schooling, and I do not know any other way to let public school teachers and their unions know that you feeel that they are doing a lousy job, which is certainly the case in France where I live and which increasingly also seems to be the case in your country.
You must be a high school/middle school teacher. When I had questions of teachers at that level I contacted them directly when the concerns arose. I don't remember parent/teacher conferences in those grades.
A lot of my kids parents didn't show up for conferences. At least they didn't show up on time. I talked to them when they were available.
However, when I took over a totally out of control 2nd grade class, I contacted every parent by phone within a week. It was so bad that there were three parents lined up in the back of the room on my first day. That was the most intense day I had as a teacher. Small pieces of crayon flew around the room, one kid walked by and stabbed another with a pair of scissors, one girl lay down on the floor kicking and screaming in a full blown tantrum.
Literally everything you list under a contingent service can and is provided privately and is subsequently very limited in whom they serve. Just as private education is based upon the idea that those should be privileges of a certain socio-economic class that can transactionally participate . Public schools, like the public roads and other publicly funded services are intended to be utilized and benefited equally by everyone.
In the United States every school board has public meetings. Lots of parents make their concerns known. If enough parents have enough concerns they can vote to change the school board and be a burr in the school board’s butt. But wealthy parents do not, because they view school as a consumer service they can opt in and out of. And that hurts everyone, particularly the kids with fewer options.
The essential problem with the charter movement in the US is the corporatization of schooling. This is manifest in the actions of charter ‘operators’ - which should be considered corporate entities, since they fit all the most significant criteria that define them except shareholder control. For example, the largest charter org. in Los Angeles has simply closed schools - often on short notice- that fail to reach pre-determined enrollment levels. Meanwhile they absorb lots of tax money, despite not treating their activities as anything other than a for-profit enterprise. I hope they’re better behaved in France.
Explain to me: how can they absorb lots of taxpayer money, when they close a school ? Ihas the impression that they get resources based on their level of activity and enrolement levels ?
Their only motive for closing a school is the elimination of an under-performing asset, hence the clear evidence that they are acting in their organizational interests, not those of the public. The equation is simple. If the overhead/ costs exceed the return they cut their losses and move on. They still have several dozen profitable sites, so it’s purely a business decision. Except for the students attending the schools they close.
Well, you don't get to withdraw your funds from education, as everyone pays taxes. This money, fungible as it always is, pays for roads, schools, cops, etc.
What you do after paying that tax bill is up to you. So, in the same way that if you live in a gated community with private security you still pay taxes for public services that include police, and if you enroll your children in a private school you will still pay property tax.
Charters are still in the education ecosystem, albeit at a remove. But, this remove is no different that of any elite, selective public school, of which there are many. What they do best is provide alternatives in pedagogy.
School budgets are basically admin and teacher salaries and benefits, facilities costs and unfunded pension costs. While the withdrawal of one student from the regular public school probably has no impact on the public school's costs, the withdrawal of 25% of them probably does come close to reducing the regular public school's teacher costs by 25% (there's some stickiness, particularly around language, music teachers, school nurses etc. where you can't go below 1). Many charter schools also are inside the regular public school or one of their (now) former school buildings and thus they pay their share of facilities costs as well. It's the stranded, unfunded pension costs that are the real problem (at least in the northeast). Some people have very limited sympathy about those unfunded pension costs.
That’s a poor equivalence. Are families and their educational needs more or less individualized than a community’s policing needs?
Parents ought not to be users of schools. Schools are for kids. Parents introduce status games into the schooling process when in reality the best thing they can do is send their kids to their community schools and contribute their social and financial capital to raising the quality of the school environment.
Agree entirely that schools are for kids, and would point out that those kids' parents are best positioned to choose which professionals meet their kids' needs. As it stands now, schools are for educrats, which is why parents turn away from them. Many many many parents do not accept your statement that 'the best thing they can do is send their kids to their community schools' and that number is growing every year.
I understand that many parents don’t accept that statement. I disagree with them. I view public school as an extension of the community I live in, and thus feel an obligation to invest in it. I don’t treat school from a consumer standpoint.
If every school was equal, I would see your point. But they aren't. And not every parent wants their children to go to a school that is an extension of the community they live in. Many people want better for their offspring, and are looking for a ladder up.
Oh, Kimmie.
Is the problem social mobility or the lack thereof? I tend towards the school of thought that believes that the top 20% of the country in terms of income is doing everything it can to raise the draw bridge on the rest of the country.
I’ll reluctantly choose atomization and balkanization if that is the only route to the freedom to choose a community and educational environment that meets my family’s needs, over forced inclusion into an educational approach that is interested in nothing but conformity.
I have had multiple kids in public schools for 15+ years and every year I have seen more and more bureaucratic sclerosis and less and less flexibility and openness to genuine partnership with parents and the community at large. I’m not interested in dropping my kids off behind a drawbridge anymore. I’m done.
I understand. But a good student with support at home can succeed in virtually any school. The only way struggling schools will improve is if the good students with healthy families stop leaving them.
If schools in a school are getting recognizably different funding amounts, its often because of socio-economic stratification where the wealthier parents demand and get better funding than the poorer schools in the same district.
That's been going on for decades.
Or, it's because of tax differences between two catchment areas.
Look at the tax base difference between, say, Beverly Hills and Compton. Same county, same state, but no flat tax. Progressive taxation for the fail.
I don’t treat school from a consumer standpoint either; I treat school as a partner in educating my children. My local community school does not offer the expertise, attitude, standards or philosophy I require in this endeavor of educating my children, so I choose not to partner with them. Choosing educational resources and supports thoughtfully is a basic right and responsibility of all parents.
It is. I just don’t think it’s up to the state to support divestment from community institutions and investment in private ones. Part of our responsibility as citizens is to invest in our communities, relationally as well as financially.
Should the state support and invest in alternatives in pedagogy?
Or should the state be locked into one method of learning, no matter the outcomes?
Charter schools are part of the education ecosystem, part of the community, in that any group of people has differences within its borders. Not everyone wants a yellow house, not everyone wants the local education standards.
FdB invokes a baseball metaphor and here’s one that fits: you’re called out looking at strike 3, a soft change-up down the middle of the plate. His objection is clear: the problem is that the admissions process is likely gamed. Those same parents you mentioned are therefore making themselves vulnerable to dishonest players: the charter admins who run the game. Admission of a student doesn’t end the scam, it perpetuates it.
In theory charters offer a viable alternative to public schools that suffer from their various well-noted handicaps. Even the great teachers union leader Al Shanker was a supporter of the initial concept. But education is a field prone to bureaucratic meddling, and the history of the charter movement, all 30-40 years of it now, offers a wealth of examples. What it has most reliably offered is hype and fraud. Individual charter schools may be good, but the collective track record is dreary at best. How that stacks up against public schools is a separate issue that should be weighed on the state and local level.
Do you live in a cave by yourself or do you consider yourself part of the society you live in?
Do you think it's the collective responsibility of the society you live in to provide basic, fundamental public services that all members can enjoy or should such services only be available to the selected few who earned the privilege?
Charter schools are designed to siphon public education funds with the promise of choice and overwhelmingly outperforming their public school counterparts. What we find is they marginally perform better while draining critical funds to make existing public schools better. Private schools are black boxes when it comes to determining pedagogy and having a 'say' as a parent as well.
"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." Gate keepers are required when you have the idiot brigade pounding the doors demanding to be taken seriously without actually understanding how to teach education.
you should not let yourself get carried away like this. The problem with public schools is that they do not like competition, i.e. other schools that can demonstrate that they do not function as they pretend to. Charter schools are useful for that reason.
Too many parents have been frustrated in their efforts to get heard, that is why they want to withdraw their children from the system. What is wrong with that?
Having navigated the private, charter and public schools systems in a short amount of time over the last 6 years, I've seen the good and bad side to all of them. What I find frustrating is the loudest critics of education in the U.S. focus solely on public education and yet their only tool for fixing it is treating it like a nail to be hammered into submission. They have no interest in making the system work better but instead make it worse.
I want teachers who are qualified and able to herd cats, not some Joe Plumber coming in off the street trying to teach history he gleaned from youtube videos.
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.
I think people care because social prestige and future earnings are different things (related, certainly, but different). A prestigious college confers social status, even if it doesn't confer any extra wealth.
It only confers social status to insecure people who crave the exact same "prestigious college" social status.
Well sure, but those are the exact people whose opinions matter to these people isn't it?
Yep. Shallow is as shallow does.
Yes. I read a similar article about return on investment and that subject matter was more important than the school.
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.
Why people think school closures only happened in public schools is because they get the most attention. Private schools in my area shut down for a period of time, until mandates were lifted and then they slowly opened up but with protocols similar to or stricter (depending on which school) than the public schools.
It's the duration. IIRC public schools in some locations stayed closed a lot longer than the private ones. In fact that's what drove a lot of the anger on the part of public school parents.
Yes, I think NYC and LA schools were probably the most egregious examples. The unfortunate aspect of the Covid lockdowns is that it then led to complete and open hostility towards teachers as time went on. Covid brought out the absolute worst behavior in a lot of people. It seems to have settled down somewhat but honestly, there are still a small cohort of folks out there that are just still livid about it and need to just go find a quiet place by themselves and deescalate their brains.
They reopened the public schools in Aug/Sep 2000 in our area. they had the silly mask rules. Was sad to drive by a playground with kids running around outside with little cloth face coverings that accomplish nothing, but what are you going to do? They had football games with people in stands. But, we are in flyover country.
"Covid brought out the absolute worst behavior in a lot of people."
Yes. It wrecked friendships and families. People lost jobs/careers. Amplified-Accelerated the cultural and political divide that may break this country. Sad.
The pendulum may be swinging back in reaction to an insane overreach. The New York state supreme court just rules that firing workers who refused vaccinations was illegal. In its decision the court specifically pointed out that vaccines do not prevent transmission.
Maybe, but a lot of damage was done that cannot be repaired. The CEO of Pfizer stating publicly that unvaccinated people were murderers. I must have missed his apology. Ads aimed at children in which some precious little tyke explains he cannot wait to get his shot so he can "protect" his baby sister. We have a friend who is still (in October 2022!) not allowed to visit her grandkids without two weeks quarantine and a negative test. At first it was because the kids were not vaccinated. Now its because the vaccines don't prevent transmission. I assume the kids will be homeschooled in masks.
Covid peeled back the thin veneer of civility that most Americans have for their fellow citizens. Many people let slip that they loathed having to be courteous to other people (for all sorts of reasons) once Covid lockdowns ended. Then it became weaponized by politicians and pundit/grifters and anyone hawking alternative medicines which further fed into psychological toll the epidemic had.
Devouts and Atheists don't always mix well.
I agree completely. School closures were not just public. The reckoning, if it ever happens, will be multilateral and comprehensive of our entire educational system.
Freddie’s point would be that the long term impact of those closures is likely to be nil.
Book learning isn't for everyone. Some folks are just self-smarted
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=So9LshyaHd0
It's looking like school closures resulted in a significant drop in test scores. I'm not sure anybody really has a handle on the long term effects.
In the long term, we're all dead.
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.
My kids went to state college. I told them I would consider funding private college if they could present some business case as to why a particular school would pay off over the state college. They did not bother, as neither was all that interested. There was no financial "numb terror". They have jobs and no student loans (now in their early 30s).
I have no "numb terror" about climate change. However, I numb terror over people who have numb terror over climate change.
But, that's just me.
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.
This x100. I work at an urban charter HS and it's the opposite: when my seniors apply to colleges, they have no extracurriculars to brag about because, well, they have to work nights, weekends, and summers just to stay fed. They can't get help at home with applications or scholarships. Teachers can't emphasize college prep in classes where three quarters of students aren't planning for college at all. No, holistic admissions are even more racist and classiest than GPA or SAT.
It's really astonishing the different worlds we live in despite whatever similarities might appear on paper. I went to an elite public high school where a large percentage of the students were from low income immigrant families. It was clear from day one that our one college guidance counselor only had time for a handful of students. They weren't academic stars nor were they failing classes, so I couldn't understand why they were regularly visiting her*.
Meanwhile, the rest of us had exactly one session with the guidance counselor on which colleges to apply to during the pre-internet era. It was a session shared with another student from the same homeroom. When I saw the other student in my session and realized she hadn't been in any of the advanced classes I took, I knew the whole thing was a farce and a waste of my time.
On the otherhand, my school did offer one after school session on SAT tips. And, I believe we were told to be evocative on our personal essays. 🤷🏻♀️
*In fact, despite multiple degrees, I didn't understand why students would visit any of their teachers *at all* until after I was no longer in school. If there was an issue, I thought the place to bring it up was during class. Similarly, it shouldn't be a surprise that I was in my 30s before I learned parents proof read their children's papers, including college admissions essays. It never occurred to me that this was a thing since everyone in the high school was highly fluent in English. I was blinkered because my English skills far surpassed those of my parents.
I was similar, but in the early-ish internet days. I had my parents read over my essays, but just took the generic advice I was given from whatever site I found talking about college essays. I did a bunch of extra curriculars and was in AP classes, so I thought I was at the top of the pile. And I got into a few small, liberal arts colleges and the flagship state schools I applied to. But now I'm a grad student at an elite university and I teach 18 year olds who will talk about the public policy internship they had a couple years back and I realize that it's best that I didn't apply to the Ivies for college.
In retrospect, I was top of the pile, but I underestimated myself because I thought I was competing against nationally ranked students and I knew I fell short. By senior year, I was tired of elite admissions race. I also very much wanted to disappoint my mom. 😅 I overheard some guys in gym class talking about the BA/MD program at Brooklyn College. That was my one real college application - I don't count the postcard with my GPA and SAT score which was all that SUNY Binghamton required. I got a great education at Brooklyn College, but it was a poor fit. I would have been much happier at Binghamton or going Ivy. Back in the early 90s, the students at elite colleges weren't quite as overwhelmingly posh as they are now, at least based on my high school classmates who ended up there.
Riffing a bit off the challenges of the pre-internet college application process: I graduated high school in 1992, and one of the more challenging things for me was figuring out how to get an actual application to fill out for college. Instead, I took the applications that were available from college fairs or that were mailed to me unsolicited. The guidance counselor at the high school had some apps from local colleges, too. I hoped I didn't lose them before I filled them out. I also hoped I didn't make too many errors as I typed the information into the apps so that the app would covered in whiteout. (Also: sometimes it's very hard to align a typewriter with the in which the information is supposed to go.)
I know that seems ridiculous, especially in retrospect. I probably could have written or even phoned (though probably at long distance rates) whatever institution(s) I was interested in and they would have been happy to mail me apps or even several copies of an app.
I was class of 90! One of the jobs I had was part time at an attorney's office. I "inherited" the job from another girl on the track team. Never would have found it on my own. I was god awful at it because it involved typing up invoices and letters on the typewriter. The machine was somewhat advanced because you could edit a few lines, but, ugh, the struggles I had adjusting the paper to line up correctly again after pulling it out to review.
I don't remember much about my college application because I really only applied to one, so it wasn't too bad. I do recall struggling with my FAFSA and Pell grant forms but at least those I could fill out with a pen.
It wasn't great having to handle everything on my own without adult guidance, but honestly, there are many days when I look at my hapless children and think I was well served with my negligent and English deficient parents.
You might be over-estimating the impact of any of these things. My kids attended a fancy Westchester private school which provided the parents with a database that included information about every student (anonymized, of course) that had graduated from the school for the last 10 years, their SAT/ACT score, their GPA, the schools they applied, whether the school accepted, rejected or waitlisted them and whether they had an AA, athletic or legacy hook. My big takeaways from that dataset are as follows:
1. Students with an athletic or AA hook had wildly elevated admissions prospects at schools they were within the 25/75 test range;
2. Students with an athletic or AA hook achieved meaningful numbers of admissions at schools where they were below (sometimes well below) the school's 25th percentile;
3. Students with a legacy hook had significantly elevated odds of gaining admission to schools for which they were within the 25/75 range versus students with no hooks;
4. Students with a legacy hook appeared to have no meaningful advantage in gaining admission to schools where they were below the 25% mark.
5. Students without a legacy, athletic or AA hook almost never get admitted to schools where they are below the 25% mark. For the elite universities, there were something like 5 of them from this private school in 10 years. They may have been children of significant donors, that wasn't data that was provided. Or they may have had some special talent not covered in the recruited athlete category (e.g., violin prodigy, award-winning junior computer designer, who knows). But my point is, it basically didn't happen. So your letters of recommendation, your students' internships and extracurriculars etc., probably had very little meaningful impact.
The real problem is that the focus is on elite, (Top50 or greater, and usually Top10) colleges.
"athletic or AA hook" is a way of saying "AA and legacy" over again. Most student athletes are either a way to advantage AA candidates (football, basketball, etc) or a way to advantage legacy or "class" admissions for the alumni donations later (more expensive sports like lacrosse etc, or Women because there's more need for female athletes due to Title IX).
The exception here does seem to be the elite STEM and engineering programs (with Stanford following Harvard's AA and Legacy scheme more closely than the MA schools). Where the answer to "I have a congressperson's student who only has an ACT of 31 (which is well above average, but nowhere near what you'd need for MIT)" is "fuck off, go away".
I think this is because the MITs of the world view competitive and meritocratic engineering as a good *in itself* and try to prevent these concerns from overriding keeping the field high-quality.
When you say "athletic or AA hook is a way of saying AA and legacy over again," you appear to be saying athlete = legacy. I am sorry, but I just don't follow that. They are absolutely different. I think reasonable people can question why in god's name UPenn cares whether it's women's tennis team is amazing (it is), but reasonable people cannot argue that UPenn's women's tennis team is a backdoor way of admitting legacy students. It's not. It's a backdoor way of taking semi-pro eastern europeans that speak serviceable English and Americans that have lived at tennis academies since they were 6 and are not what we would call "readers". Again, I am not entirely clear why these schools care about being good at non-revenue sports, but it's clear that they do. This is not some opaque bid for rich kids.
https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=John+McEnroe+tennis+academy+tuition
This is clearly a rich kids thing.
So are LaCrosse, winter sports, etc.
The reason I bring in women here is that title IX requires equal funding for men's sports and women's sports - but men's basketball, football produce almost all of the revenue of the sports program overall and thus gets *almost all* men's funding. Meaning - if you want women's funding you need female athletes to fill out female athletic programs. How does one do that? Athletic admissions.
For the revenue sports like basketball and football, they have no problem with that because tons of those players are also minorities and it feels more "metirocratic" that those students have something than just having to lower the admissions bar for "no reason".
So you are talking about something that I know rather a lot about and I have to tell you that you are way, way off. The top players at these academies are generally not "rich," and the good ones aren't paying what you think. The best ones are disproportionately the children of immigrants and parents in the tennis business, one way or another. The best kid I can remember coming from McEnroe's academy was Noah Rubin, a middle class jewish kid from Long Island. I think his father was a middle manager at a bank and his mother was a teacher. He went to public school before being "home schooled" so that he could play tennis all day.
Your general point also doesn't make sense. If the school wanted to admit more rich kids (as distinct from true donor class kids), they could just do it. Every one of these elite schools reject rich kid applicants that have scores within their 25/75 range. Instead, they actively seek out the best athletes, accepting them even when their scores are below that 25th percentile mark.
The best kid you can remember coming from McEnroe was Noah Rubin, a middle class jewish kid from Long Island. So, looking at median household income of Long Island - that is one hundred twenty thousand dollars per year.
This is twice the median income of the United States.
The whole purpose of the scheme is to launder the fact that the people they're admitting are *much* richer than the people they aren't behind "athletics".
Tennis Academies - you can afford 28k/yr tuition, maybe 13k "on scholarship" - which is more than *my parents entire annual income* when I was in high school.
Not to mention the fact that tennis itself requires all kinds of equipment, rackets, specialized courts to play on, and on and on and on and on.
It might not be the *categorical* example, because the categorical example in my mind is *rowing*, but it's a clear case of the entire scheme existing to launder *wealth*, or more accurately, *social class* filters behind something that pretends to be meritocratic.
Perhaps. Every competitive student I knew outside the elite few who were ranked nationally in their areas, did athletics on top of everything else. It was a given. We may not have been very good, nonetheless, we knew colleges wanted students who could handle the endless practices and weekend meets on top of everything else. It was part of being "well rounded".
I've edited two admission essays. One was for a much younger cousin who was applying to med school. The other was for a law classmate who was applying to business school. I'm not going to say my revisions got them their acceptances, but I will say I was shocked at the poor quality of the originals.
Aside from whatever effect parental and school support has on admissions to elite schools, it doesn't change my assessment that there is a very big difference between students who by necessity end up navigating the system on their own vs the ones who are buttressed, however similar their grades and resumes.
If you are not a recruited athlete that the coach has requested the school admit after they school gave a pre-read of the application, I don't believe the school cares at all whether you played a sport in high school. I feel very confident in saying this.
Help! I'm having trouble following this conversation because I don't know what AA means in this context!
Affirmative action/favored minority applicant. I'm not 100% sure how the school attributed AA status to the applicant, but it's clear from the numbers of students denoted as having an AA hook (ballpark around 10%) they did not count Asian applicants as having an AA hook.
Thanks! That makes more sense than any AA I was able to brainstorm up.
I was not suggesting that the drunk high school students were just crushing it.
I wonder how colleges evaluate "having a job"? In my mind, there is *no* better extra-curricular than having a job. It teaches lessons you never learn in school, never learn in school-related extra-curricular activities.
They probably focus more on factors that correlate to academic achievement rather than post-college achievement. On that record, the results are more mixed than you might expect.
https://hrs.byu.edu/00000173-96c6-d29f-a3f7-f6c7783a0000/effects-of-student-employment
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.
I would potentially trust the Guardian, Al Jazeera, or maybe the Intercept with an investigation into these two topics.
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.
And we are once again confronted with the basic question: does zoning keep underperforming kids from attending the best schools? Or are schools that are perceived to be the best so perceived precisely because they exclude the underperforming students?
Is that a bug or a feature?
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.
An import constituency for charters is inner city parents, who have to deal with schools where the issue isn't just disruption so much as crime and chaos.
That may be the number one real reason but it is very much not the number one professed reason.
The irony of having attended private high school for 2yr before transferring to public HS in the late 80s is that there were a few kids there because they were expelled from public school and parents weren't ready to send them off to military academy or the parents hadn't moved to another school district yet. Plenty of high-quality explicit drugs were available from the wealthy kids and I learned out to pick locks from another truant-leaning kid. I realized that the big difference between public and private HS was money. Facilities were similar in many respects for schools the same age, the quality of teaching about the same topic wise. There were plenty of fail-sons at the private school who went on to fail-son at college and live mostly consequence free lives.
Charter schools have the advantage of being free though, which is critical when taking into consideration that a key constituency for charters has been poor inner city families who are desperate to get their kids away from public schools that are crime ridden disaster zones. For those individuals private schooling is probably not an option.
That's all well and good if the charter schools are performing better but in the case of New Orleans, all they did was knock down an existing school, build new ones a few blocks away, slap a charter name on and then told neighborhood parents to apply and hope your kid gets in. If not, then you have to get bussed/drive across town to a different underperforming charter school that may not be open the follow year for various reasons.
I also find it very fascinating that everyone's first operational assumption is that ALL public schools are located in poor inner city, crime ridden disaster zones. There are plenty of under-performing public schools in suburbs and rural areas across America but you'd never hear pro-charter/school choice folks suggest those be turned into charter schools.
There are underperforming suburban schools but for decades the most visible low income advocates for charters have been minority residents living in urban cores. There are certainly poor suburbs and poor rural towns in the US but the combination of poverty and crime is especially fierce in the cities. In the context of schools a lot of that crime is going to be committed by students. Given that I can understand why a lot of desperate parents would be interested in segregation. It may well be that a bright kid will do well wherever he or she attends school. But if the opportunity is there to be schooled in an environment (relatively) free of graffiti, drugs and violence--why not?
That is only 80% of the reason. The other 50% is bragging rights. I'm not great with statistics.
That reminds me. When I was teaching in a low income public elementary school, I soon learned it was best to have a full class (at that time it was 28 or 29 students) in the beginning of the year. If you weren't full, all the late kids ended up in your class. They were inevitably the ones whose parents finally realized a few weeks late, it was time to get rid of the kids. Sort of the opposite of charter schools.
The biggest distractions were the few students who made it their mission to disrupt the class. There weren't very many of them, but one year I had a student who took at least twenty percent of my time.
I routinely had several kids that would have been in Special Ed programs if our school had been affluent. Those I could handle. It was the ones on a mission to disrupt. In our 500 student school, there were about 5 that needed to be expelled.
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
Are you sure about Yu Ming’s Mandarin-language admission requirement? I recall a recent WSJ article that mentions the opposite and highlights AA, Hispanic, and Anglo kids starting school with no Chinese ability at all.
Yes, I am. Their own FAQs clarify it, and I heard as much from a parent there (the need to take an assessment test to enter the school after kindergarten because "the student would not be able to follow class instruction since it is in Mandarin"), I dont argue that that doesnt make sense; I just argue that the "public" they are serving is quite a small one.
And dont even ask how many of their kids have IEPs.
Thanks for the clarification. My 76-year-old memory must have failed me again.