A convenient cherry-pick: charter schools can only be compared to the worst public schools in order to evaluate their overall success!
Another characteristic that tends to obscure poor performance in charter schools is the fact that they fail and shut down so much.
Market fundamentalists may try to claim that high failure rates among charter schools is a positive thing because it shows that market competition is working to weed out the less successful competitors and provide better education by the survivors. In real life, though, having schools going out of business all the time is bad for education. It’s destabilizing and disruptive for students, parents and teachers alike, who have to scramble around to find new institutions, and it’s destabilizing and disruptive for the surviving schools, which never know from one year to the next which failing competitor’s former students they’re going to have to absorb. (And students who just got dumped from a charter school that was struggling so badly that it had to close are likely to have some serious gaps in their recent instruction, at the very least.)
Students need institutional continuity in schooling for the sake of their curricula, their learning, their home lives and their social development. Of course having some fatally underperforming public schools systematically failing to educate students is catastrophically bad, and nobody’s saying that we shouldn’t be working to fix those schools. But throwing students into a shark frenzy of struggling charter schools constantly popping up and shutting down is catastrophically bad too.
Sure, but nobody said that a 1-in-11 poverty rate is “fine”. I was just bringing it up to illustrate the problem with Alessan’s claim that a 1-in-7 poverty rate is “the best rate in human history”.
Yes, if we’re now specifying a modified interpretation to the effect that a 1-in-7 poverty rate is “one of many modern poverty rates that are far better than the average in premodern societies”, I have no quarrel with that claim.
But since the current discussion is talking about education achievement in modern societies, I think that claim is fairly irrelevant and meaningless. Hell, if we’re using premodern empires and feudalism as our baseline, then Sam’s example of a graduating student with a 0.13 GPA would qualify as a prodigy of learning.
And that’s probably good evidence that we should adjust our education system so that it better serves everyone rather than toss out the whole concept in favor of apprenticeships or something. Just like Alessan’s point that we should tweak capitalist/socialist systems to accomplish desired economic goals rather than throw out the system entirely.
It’s been a long time since I took an SAT, but the link you posted is nothing but dumbed down click bait designed to make stupid people feel smart.
I ran through that entire quiz in less than 30 seconds, there was not one question that even required a pause to think and I scored 15 out of 15, of course. It’s just a stupid internet trick……would people on your side of the pond find this challenging? That would explain a lot.
TBH I have no idea. I also found the test trivial, but I’ve never given a vocabulary test to a representative sample of the UK population. I don’t even know a representative sample of the UK population. I tried a couple of other tests that seemed to be from slightly more serious sites, and they were no harder.
You can find practice tests that I assume are essentially equivalent to the real thing online.
There aren’t really “vocab questions” where they just ask you to define words, they just bury it in the reading comprehension questions. Sidenote: I was trying to remember what it was like for me in the mid-2000’s and we had definitely got rid of analogies which were essentially just vocab but I don’t remember if there were separate vocab questions for me.
The analogies were annoying to those of us with a tendency to overthink. Sometimes multiple choices would be correct in different ways, or none of them. Glad to hear they got rid of them.
According to the report @IvoryTowerDenizen linked, they have got rid of biased questions like the regatta one, too:
The tendency of test scores to magnify racial and ethnic differences stems in part from the way norm-referenced assessments like the SAT and ACT are designed. Before going further, it should be emphasized that test publishers such as the College Board and ACT take strenuous measures to eliminate test bias, so that any such effect is unintentional. Gone are the days when test items such as “runner is to marathon as oarsman is to regatta” would survive the rigorous, multi-step review process that test publishers now follow.
They have put effort into getting rid of questions like that and things improve over time, but I think there’s just an intractable problem with reading tests unless you know everyone’s been studying the same thing.
Obviously the vocab-in-context is way more fail-safe because it always gives you a way to solve the problem with reading comprehension instead of just memorizing words.