Thanks to the pandemic, Washington DC has temporarily eliminated the achievement test normally required for admission to its most elite high school, School Without Walls. But it still didn't enroll any, um, diverse kids:
Data obtained through a public records request show that eliminating the test did not make the Walls freshman class any more socioeconomically or geographically diverse.
Five of the school system’s 15 neighborhood middle schools are located in Wards 7 and 8 — the wards with the highest concentrations of poverty and many of the city’s lowest performing schools based on standardized test scores. None of the 132 students in the incoming freshman class at School Without Walls attended one of those five middle schools.
....Walls administrators offered interviews to the 500 students with the highest grade-point average....Just three eighth graders at middle schools in Wards 7 and 8 — Hart, Johnson, Kelly Miller, Kramer and Sousa middle schools — made the cut of 500 students and accepted interviews, according to city data. Two of those students matched at other high schools and one is currently on the Walls wait list.
This piece was written by Perry Stein in the Washington Post, which means she's not allowed to simply tell you what's going on. But I can:
As we all know, we're not really talking about "geographic" or "socioeconomic" diversity. We're talking about Black kids. And as you can see, Black eighth graders in Washington DC's public schools score a stunning 61 points lower than white kids in the NAEP reading test.
This gap is so gigantic that I'm not even sure how to interpret it. Based on the standard deviation for this test (roughly 34 points) and a little bit of handwaving, my best guess is that the average Black eighth grader in a DC public school reads at about the fourth grade level. The number who read at an "advanced" level is close to zero.
I don't care what administrators do or how they decide who gets into this high school. With reading achievement this low, there's just no way that more than a tiny handful of Black kids from public schools will ever get in. The only source of Black students for an elite high school like School Without Walls is DC's charter schools.
If we're ever going to take this seriously, interventions need to start at kindergarten or earlier and need to be continuous all the way through high school. Is that expensive? It is. But it's the only thing that has the slightest chance of closing the Black-white achievement gap. Anything else is just performative play-acting.
Spend money? To address the current costs of legacy racial discrimination? Impossible! John Roberts said that would be "taking account of race!" And we mustn't do that!
See, that's why you libruls are the real racists!
The Chief Supreme is literally shaking at the thought.
Nothing will ever happen, because conservatives are committed to oppose anything that will truly help anyone and anything that will take decades to achieve, the end result of which would only be something that would merely help people and that at the same time would have the actually intended outcome of lowering the available body of people they can most readily hate and victimize.
So, no, not the slightest chance of anything happening.
They're more likely to try and make Israel the 51st state whether Israel likes it or not than allow anything like that to happen.
Israel the 51st state? Hardly. Israel is destined to absorb the US. After all, wasn't North America settled by one of the innumerable "Lost Tribes"?
The government in Tel Aviv/Jerusalem is laser-focused on this.
"... Is that expensive? It is. .."
So how about you demonstrate it works in a pilot program before spending a fortune. But this is just posturing, you know it isn't going to happen and wouldn't make much difference if it did.
Teach for America oughta be Tutor for America.
Teach for America is the Theranos for the educational sector.
Kind of surprised Elizabeth Holmes didn't try to rehabilitate her image by doing something community servicy like that.
or maybe those schools are just globalist con jobs which train the next gen of globalists. I say destroy them. Most negros dislike school anyways. Why even bother attending?
Does anybody really think even quite massive interventions starting at kindergarten age will make a huge difference? Color me maximally skeptical.
If we want better outcomes for poor Black children, or for poor American children in general, we need to mount a serious effort to reduce poverty and economic inequality. The gap is especially jaw-dropping in a place like DC given that the White population tends to be especially affluent and highly-educated, and the Black population just the opposite: many (vast majority of?) Black families who had the means to get out of violence-plagued neighborhoods did so, many of them years ago. And white families who have moved into DC in recent years in conjunction with that city's turbo-charged gentrification are probably better educated and higher earning than the white residents of any state.
This reminds me of the gun control debate: outlier America can't eschew standard issue, high-income country poverty amelioration methods and expert standard, high income country results. We know what works! Looks at Finland and Canada.
(The near-universal child benefit introduced by Biden, of course, will help, maybe tremendously; but obviously not enough time has elapsed to see results; and in any event the program is temporary unless Democrats manage to pass their big reconciliation bill).
No, you need more black people(families) giving a shit. Inequality has been reduced for Latinos for 25 years while white vs white has stagnated.
Of course when the debt bubble pops, everybody is screwed.
expect standard, high income country results
Christ almighty they just need to randomly select 20% (or 50%?) Black kids. The kids will do great. Jesus.
That would be massively unfair to the kids above all. You can’t take someone who performs 2, 3, 4 grade levels behind and plop them in a classroom and expect them to perform adequately. They lose, you lose, the other kids lose — no no no.
It’s as Kevin says, it’s a bigger problem than just a few classrooms for a few years, and the solution needs to be correspondingly big. Otherwise it’s a waste, and worse.
I rarely see eye-to-eye with bbleh but must agree with them here. You don't just plop kids at random into the school.
Drifting ever so slightly, DC's School Without Walls has a student body which is already something like 31% "Black kids" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_Without_Walls_(Washington,_D.C.)#Student_body
Why were kids who UNDER performed passed on to the next grade during elementary and middle school years?
What, realistically, is the alternative? 13-year-olds in 4th grade? Until an entire school can be improved, simply delaying kids’ progress indefinitely is a recipe for stagnation and failure.
Throw lots of money at it. A couple carrier groups’ worth.
So, somewhere between $40 and $60 billion dollars, give or take. I believe that is a one-time figure with the "lifetime" of a carrier group somewhere in 20 or so years. Going by what I found at: https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-a-carrier-strike-group-cost So amortizing the acquisition cost at the high end over 20 years (perhaps 25 or 30) brings us to $3 billion a year for two strike groups. Add-in maintenance and other things, and pad it a bit for fun and perhaps $10 billion a year to obtain and maintain a pair of carrier strike groups?
There are a myriad ways to slice and dice what one finds at https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/tables.html but the (almost literally) bottom line is for FY 2020 Congress appropriated something like $180 billion to the Education Department. I've not tried to sum the current expenditures of the fifty states. The figures likely would cut both ways - either making it look like we already spend far far in excess of a couple carrier groups' worth on education or that adding another couple carrier groups' worth each year for however many years isn't all that much.
bbleh-
Where's the personal responsibility?
Where's the parental responsibility?
One of the things I thought of - which I posted many months ago was to give all blacks a free college education as a form of reparation for slavery and Jim Crow from past generations. WE could include an "interim year" of study in that to include math and reading skill improvement.
Then, when the initial group graduates with a degree and no debt see what they do with that? We could do this for say 10 years
I think education, instead of money is far better and would reach more people. It also provides for long term earning power versus a one time here's your check sort of thing
Why do people presume that underperforming kids don’t want to succeed, or tha5btheir parents don’t want them to? It seems like a close cousin
… to the attitude that people living in poverty must be lazy, or they somehow would have “pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps” or some such homey-sounding BS.
And to please let’s not hear anything about an “inner-city culture” or something comparably transparently racist. Tell me, please, how eager the average suburban teenager is to get up and go to school, how much they see it as crucial to lives and to the benefit of society.
The point is that many of these schools and kids are in a huge hole created by decades upon decades of neglect — benign at best, malign in some cases — and that it is in EVERYONE’s interest to toss them a rope and help them climb out.
I rather suspect that, if a few neglected school districts received the same levels of funding and staffing as a nice suburban district for, say, 10 years, you’d see a lot of “personal responsibility” and a lot of improvement.
There's a difference between desire and ability. I think they have the desire.
But if you are going thgough grades K through 8 and being socially promoted and you enter high school as a freshman that cannot read you are so far behind that it becomes discouraging
I don't fault the parents because they themselves have been though the same thing, or worse. THIS is why I suggest free college for them. This takes the financial pressure off both parent and child, to leave the kid free to learn. If we accept that many of them have been socially promoted as KD alludes to then give them the extra year at the start to re-group. Concentrate in Math and reading.
If it's free - why not?
I don't believe any of them are lazy. But they are in a "fix" through no fault of their own. To get a generation of them upgraded to college degreed would lead to as much as $1M in lifetime earnings over NON degree'd folks by some accounts. You couple that with decreasing population of whites they you can easily see a minority dominated government in the not too distant future
I agree that urban city schools need and infusion of dollars - a LOT of dollars. But just because you put something new and shiny in downtown DC doesn't mean it will attract the teachers these kids need
Social promotion is a thing. Even for white kids.
Still remember an idiot in my 8th grade house at F.L. Wright in the Dirty Stallis who moved on to 9th grade -- fortunately for me, at Nathan Hale (QUE SE JODAN LOS HUSKIES -- BULLDOG POR VIDA) -- with at least two F marks on his 2nd semester report card.
It's not expensive, in my opinion, it is impossible. Who would make these interventions? No one is available for this work and the so called parents of these illiterate kids aren't, for the most part, even interested in the interventions.
There are limits to what can be achieved and we have run up against them. The gangs of DC are like the taliban in afghanistan. They destroy the lives of everyone around them. Should have sent those 5000 troops to rescue black folks in DC.
Kevin, I couldn't agree with this more strongly. It is a national disgrace, nay, one of blackest blights on the Republic. These kids need early intervention and love. They need to know that society as a whole is looking out for them, and has their best interests at heart.
Instead ... well, we can't even guarantee that they have textbooks, air conditioning, etc. Teaching may not be the most highly paid job. It may not be the most prestigious job. But it is certainly one of the most important jobs.
A lot of folks commenting who don't really know the DC area it seems. Middle and upper class Black families fled to the 'burbs in the 1980s and to this day mostly live in the surrounding majority minority 'burbs. The 2020 census shows this clearly. DC now has fewer Black residents and increased Hispanic and Asian residents as well as White residents.
DC has a smaller middle class than the suburbs, lots of rich and poor instead. The best and brightest Black kids are living in Prince Georges, Montgomery and Charles Counties in Maryland and in Fairfax, Prince William and Stafford Counties in Virginia.
MOUNT PLEASANT IS THE FUTURE
I grew up just outside of DC in Montgomery County. I had many friends that lived in the District. (I'm white and these friends were all white.) I didn't know a single person that went to a DC public school. They were all at private schools.
I agree that there's not much of a middle class in DC. It's basically either upper or upper-middles class white people or lower/lower-middle class black people. I have experiences the transition from black to Hispanic/Asian but I haven't spent much time there for the last several years.
Just to be clear/certain, the chart provided is comparing students in the same public school system yes? Kevin mentioned a couple of the Wards of the District. Does the data get broken down by Ward or perhaps even school within the system?
It is also important to remember that these schools are looking for top students, not average ones. A chart that shows the means for two groups says nothing about the tails of the distribution of scores. Even if the means are very different, the distributions are still bell shaped, which implies that there are a few black students who could do well at these selective schools.
Kevin Drum and Bob Somerby love to present charts showing means while talking about the kids at the extremes. They never report standard deviations or ranges of scores and they don't seem to understand that the means are irrelevant to answering this kind of question.
Further, they assume that such tests accurately measure performance for black students, ignoring phenomena such as stereotype threat (see Claude Steele) and testing bias and motivational issues. Schools are abandoning such tests for selection purposes because their results correlate largely with income and do not predict later performance well for black students. But Drum acts as if these scores are all you need to know about the ability of black kids.
It is frustrating to see this discussion framed this way.
In this case, we are not told how many of that 500 identified students (based on gpa) refused the interview because they had transportation issues or logistical problems or didn't see the value of getting their kids into such a program, or wanted to keep their kids with their friends or not subject them to a largely white school -- all valid concerns that white middle class parents would dismiss in favor of the long-term career value of such an educational experience. Drum doesn't mention how many kids were initially selected, just how many accepted the interview and made the cut (1 on a waiting list doesn't suggest that the school is very motivated to include black students).
Interviews are a highly subjective way of selecting anyone. In job hiring, interviews are worthless for identifying who can do a job and only result in people selecting applicants who are like themselves (who the interviewer "feels comfortable" working with). It doesn't surprise me that few black students would pass an interview process. But again, Drum accepts this as if there is no reason to look behind the reporting to see what may actually be happening.
Can he not imagine how different a black child might feel being interviewed for admission into a largely white school where he or she is not expected to do well, compared to a white child going through the same process with a different expectation of success? Poor kids, white or black, feel intensely uncomfortable in new situations where others appear to be more privileged.
Instead of assuming that the problem is that black kids are all poor performers and need more tutoring, how about some empathy about how they may be experiencing this selection process?
Definitely agree with your comment. And don't think for one second that powers that be don't know this as well. Yes, there should be guaranteed free transportation, etc.
But this program was designed to fail from the get-go. I saw this sort of thing a lot back when I was teaching.
Are the bolded concerns actually valid? The first one seems right out. The second one seems questionable*. I'm waffling on the third unless the idea is to keep one's kids segregated. They all seem to speak towards the lower value being placed on education by those families. If the goal is to enable Black students to achieve the same socio-economic success as White students, given educational opportunity is a big part of achieving it, doesn't that call for greater emphasis being put on the long-term career value of such educational experiences?
* Between third and fourth grades I was shifted by my parents from one school to a better one. My Mother did lament the effect it had on my friendships with students at the first school, but looking back I have to say it was a big part of my being able to be where I am today.
Is DC's School Without Walls indeed "largely white?" I suppose that depends on one's definition of "largely" ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_Without_Walls_(Washington,_D.C.)#Student_body
The "whiteness" or not of the school's student body doesn't seem all that much different from the District's as a whole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Washington,_D.C.#Ethnic_composition
using non-Hispanic White at 36.8% compared to the 43% Caucasian of the student body.
And where do you get the idea the people conducting the interviews (which seems to be a mix of teachers and students) were expecting the Black applicants to not do well?
I tried to find demographics for the school's teachers/staff but was unsuccessful. Best I could do was find the Faculty/Staff listing: https://www.swwhs.org/faculty but it does not include faces or demographic information. I have to wonder though if it is indeed "largely white" either.
I don't know what I have to do with this, but some of the data look like this:
First, quite a few black kids attend School Without Walls. It lists its student population as 49% white, 25% black. The point of the WP report seemed to be that few or none of those kids come from non-charter middle schools in the District's lowest-income areas.
RE "the tails of the distribution of scores:"
Across the entire DC system, charter as well as non-charter, the high-end scores look like this:
In Grade 8 math (2019 Naep), the 90th percentile score for black kids was 308.4. The 90th percentile score for white kids was 363.9. That is a very large difference. We can all go looking for ways to insist that it must be illusory, that black kids in our most disadvantaged neighborhoods are doing just as well in school as everybody else, but that would be quite a stretch.
In part, that large gap reflects the fact that DC's white kids, on average, come from unusually high-income homes with unusually high-education parents. The 90th percentile for white kids nationwide was 338.0.
None of those statistics can tell you any more than they do. But the gaps are very, very large, and it's long been an unattractive and weird bit of liberal performance to insist that data like these don't mean something like what they seem to mean.
Those gaps are one of the fruits of our brutal history. Pretending doesn't much help.
"The point of the WP report seemed to be that few or none of those kids come from non-charter middle schools in the District's lowest-income areas."
For what it's worth, Kevin wasn't as clear about this as he might have been.
Well, yeah. Of course. Duh. Can you say, "meaningful reparations?"
Or are you saying something else, that these particular African-Americans are of below-average intelligence?
Your comments are not clarifying on this point.
Sad, but sadly typical.
Also compare "scores" of lower class whites with blacks, they intermingle. The education system is a con of debt, with the "private" educational system the council of foreign relations invention. It's why I laugh at Southern peckers. Most of their religious and secular private schools are run by the globalist elite themselves.
Having groused about the topic elsewhere, I should do so here:
Zero-based y-axis?
Normally I'd agree with you on this point, but this is one of those instances where the quantitative becomes the qualitative.
Kevin presents reading scores which seem basically flat going back to 2005. Looking at https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/publications/stt2019/pdf/2020014DC8.pdf for the District seems to show scores steadily increasing since 1998. Including since 2005. Is there more than one NAEP score? Or does that chart showing increases reflect a change in the demographics of the District?