More attacks on education for advanced students

In My Humble Opinion
81

That’s pretty interesting, and brings up a couple of things that should be obvious but tend to get lost in these discussions:

  1. Selective schools that only take the smartest kids are almost guaranteed to get great results. Are they better schools in terms of teaching quality etc than the non-selective ones? Who knows. Do kids who wouldn’t have passed the test benefit from attending? We should soon have an opportunity to study that, but I’m not optimistic that anyone will.

  2. Poor kids are known to do worse in school, but when they do less well on the sort of tests referenced above, are less likely to be selected for G&T programs, etc, we tend to assume there is something wrong with the test, or with the teachers doing the selecting. Why is that?

At any rate, it looks like your district is doing a good job, even if that’s not apparent in the raw test results. We could do with more of this sort of comparison of the ‘value-added’ by different schools (and universities, too).

82

A new lawsuit has been filed in federal court in Virginia against the TJ admissions changes.

83

Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp v. The School Committee of the City of Boston et al will get its first hearing today. The suit alleges that the zip code quotas instituted for selective schools in the Boston public school system are illegal as their purpose is to target Asians on a racial basis. The fact that the people in government who set up the system have repeatedly said in public that its purpose is to reduce the number of Asians at selective schools will probably not help their defense.