Ahh, pet peeve of mine. There is actually a big heap of research about the fact that school quality is directly correlated to the human factor - teachers, students, and to the extent they can be considered separately from students, parents.
The one thing that administrations can control is teachers. Apparently they are making a fairly poor job if it, but there are some system wide problems with that, which I will get to later.
The one biggest determining factor in how a student will do, though, is parental SES level if the student. The one biggest factor in how a school will do, on aggregate, is student SES level on aggregate.
If poverty levels in a school, on aggregate, go up, outcome goes down. Inexorably. Researchers have tried to determine a tipping point, somewhere between 20 and 40%, and the downturn accelerates. Someone's got the statistics for Detroit schools?
(I offer no citations, btw, I'm on a train, feel free anyone to offer up alternative facts).
There is also a huge heap of research on why private schools tend to do better than public schools. Turns out again that if you control for parental SES levels, they don't do better at all. Only they just tend to happen to have higher parental SES, duh.
Privatization as such means NOTHING.
Choosing a good school means, first and foremost, choosing a school with high parental SES levels on aggregate. By residential selection, testing into magnets, going private, whatever you do, that's what you are doing she trying to find a good school.
So if you have a lot of residential segregation, lots of school choice with the attendant power given to high SES parents, high SES families will cluster I one set of schools and low SES levels families will cluster in another. Which is what has been happening for decades in most industrialized countries and which accelerates when power is given to parents who can actually wield that power. Not sure what school exactly a poor family in Detroit should choose, if they are trying to find a school which is not majority low SES. As long as you have a system that creates high poverty schools, you will have poor schools.
There is one systematic factor that researchers have found that high performing national school systems have in common, which is a seamless system aligning content taught in schools, content tested in schools, content tested and or expected in higher education access, content (and the teaching of that content) taught in teacher training. So, for complete local control, every single district needs to design their own curricula, run their own teacher training college, create their own testing, and somehow aligns that for ease of access with the expectations of higher education institutions across the country.
Sounds reasonable? Not to me.
Maybe there IS a place for higher centralized control of intakes, content, testing and teacher training,
Last edited by Tigerle; 01/30/17 07:21 AM.
