蜜桃影视

Years ago, I asked an older friend, Dave, to name the best school district in my home state of Massachusetts. Dave is a former teacher who now works as a consultant helping hundreds of districts improve their operations and staffing. I figured he would start listing communities like : affluent, lily-white suburbs with sterling test results and college attendance rates.

But Dave鈥檚 answer surprised me. Those top students, he said, were like masterpieces that had been labored over for years. Their parents had read to them at bedtime, paid for math tutors, taken them to museums on the weekends. A painting by Picasso or Rembrandt looks great in the galleries of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, sure, but it will also shine in a parking lot. You can learn only so much about the actual work of a museum or its staff simply by marveling at its collection.

As for Massachusetts鈥檚 best districts, Dave named a few cities in the South Shore and Western Massachusetts, areas that mainly served low-income kids. The schools in those places didn鈥檛 matriculate as many students to the Ivy League, but they helped them catch up to children in more affluent areas with far greater advantages. Through skill and dedication, they improved upon the raw materials they鈥檇 been given.

I hadn鈥檛 previously thought about education that way, and neither do a lot of people outside the field. There鈥檚 a prevalent assumption that schools located in upscale ZIP codes, often with spiffy facilities and extracurricular opportunities, are just better 鈥� that they hold the secret to higher graduation rates and SAT scores. But what if the truly great schools and districts are the ones that don鈥檛 benefit from enrolling the most fortunate students, and instead move mountains to improve the lives of kids who鈥檇 founder elsewhere?

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It鈥檚 an old question in the education world, and one that鈥檚 received renewed attention since by noted researcher . A Stanford professor who focuses on poverty and inequality in education, Reardon burrowed down into testing data for 11,000 school districts to determine which ones helped students achieve the most growth between third and eighth grade. He found that the richest, whitest areas actually weren鈥檛 the best. The highest-flying district, in fact, was the , where pupils鈥� test scores rose at four times the average rate (two-thirds of a grade level per year, compared with one-sixth) of schools across the country.

Chicago is not often listed among the Westons and Wellesleys of the world. Thirty years ago, then鈥揈ducation Secretary Bill Bennett dubbed its school system . Unsurprisingly, Reardon鈥檚 study was by local . Tennessee, which also received praise, won as well, and a few outlets for with the top performers.

Nationally, however, the commentary around Reardon鈥檚 research focused on his central premise: Rich communities that produce well-prepared third-graders don鈥檛 necessarily shepherd them to greater progress in the years that follow.

The New York Times鈥檚 data journalism division, The Upshot, ran the most celebrated analysis, that allowed readers to search for academic growth in any district in the country. Reardon鈥檚 conclusion, authors Emily Badger and Kevin Quealy wrote, 鈥渢weaked conventional wisdom鈥�: 鈥淪ome urban and Southern districts are doing better than data typically suggests. Some wealthy ones don鈥檛 look that effective. Many poor school systems do.鈥�

Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum emphasized that point in , observing that 鈥渓ots of poor school districts do pretty well.鈥� In , Slate staff writer Isaac Chotiner called his findings 鈥渇ascinating and surprising.鈥�

Well, that all depends on your audience. Very few experts were likely surprised to read the study, and its conclusions seemed to escape the notice of much of the education community (to the extent that education media commentator Alexander Russo why the research hadn鈥檛 gotten more coverage).

Those experts may not all agree that Chicago is the highest-achieving urban district in the United States (some, like David Osborne in 蜜桃影视, differ strongly on this point) but any graduate student in education could observe that schools tend to reflect the demographics of the communities they serve. Because of this, metrics like academic growth 鈥� tracking year-over-year jumps in standardized test scores, rather than simply looking at the scores themselves 鈥� give a fuller sense of school quality.

Perhaps the biggest moment in education this year occurred at Betsy DeVos鈥檚 Senate confirmation hearing, when Al Franken questioned the then-nominee 鈥� and who would have expected they鈥檇 be in their respective positions a year later? 鈥� about using student growth as an analytic measure rather than proficiency on tests. Matt Barnum鈥檚 analysis of that exchange was one of 蜜桃影视鈥檚 most-read pieces of 2017!

You can鈥檛 understand current debates around education, which burn pretty hot, without understanding this phenomenon. Progressives sometimes look at the lamentable state of many high-poverty schools and that in the absence of a comprehensive anti-poverty agenda. Education reformers reply that there鈥檚 no sense waiting for a world without poor families, and that can be taken to the schools that serve them.

Those arguments don鈥檛 always filter down to the public, though. Many reporters still point to school 鈥渙utputs鈥� (the number of students who do well in class, graduate high school, and attend college) without considering 鈥渋nputs鈥� (family wealth, English proficiency, special education status). The same Upshot division that publicized Reardon鈥檚 findings on Chicago actually made this very mistake earlier this year, when on real-estate markets and education that (perhaps unconsciously) conflated high standardized test scores with school quality overall.

Embarrassingly, one of the researchers cited by the authors of that piece complained in the comments section that they hadn鈥檛 given full weight to socioeconomic circumstances when describing the effectiveness of schools. 鈥淭o attribute test scores solely to 鈥榮chool quality鈥� ignores the powerful role that family background plays in shaping opportunity,鈥� he wrote.

That researcher was Sean Reardon.

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There is every reason to think that the biggest education research questions in 2018 will be the same ones we we pondered in 2017: school choice, accountability, equity, and racial/socioeconomic integration. Reardon, one of in the world, will play a big role in guiding the conversation.

His work in this project would seem to bolster the reformers鈥� case: that major academic progress is possible, even in exceptionally deprived communities, with enough sweat and brainpower. Chicago has made such strides over the past few decades, though it has been a playground for reformers (like its former superintendent and later U.S. education secretary, Arne Duncan) since the 1990s.

Representatives from different camps will draw different lessons from Reardon鈥檚 analysis, and some will disagree with it altogether.

But those lessons can be of only limited use if news providers, and their customers, continue mistaking the paintings for the museum.

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