Re: People Without Meaningful Lives Seek Power Over Others

Am 27.01.2025 um 16:16 schrieb Frank Krygowski:

On 1/27/2025 9:14 AM, AMuzi wrote:

On 1/27/2025 6:29 AM, John B. wrote:

On Mon, 27 Jan 2025 06:02:55 -0500, Catrike Ryder
<Soloman@old.bikers.org> wrote:
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On Sat, 25 Jan 2025 13:54:16 -0600, AMuzi <am@yellowjersey.org> wrote:
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Right. The general trends are national, but specific States
and school districts do vary wildly.
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And yes, definition of 'charter school' and corrosive
funding, regulation, testing vary as much. Nothing
inherently holy about 'charters' per se, although some are
very good.
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(see also electricity which has risen in price dramatically
but only a few States such as Ohio and Illinois bothered to
indict their corrupt officials. The others get a pass)
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And although I'm more familiar with CPS, Baltimore is
generally considered the nation's worst among medium/large
cities.
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-- Andrew Muzi

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for those who believe in "studies."
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https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/charter-schools-are- outperforming-traditional-public-schools-6-takeaways-from-a-new- study/2023/06

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I read the study and, to me at least, it is rather confusing in that
it refers to"days" to value the schools. Does that mean that  one
school  is open for more days then the other? One school assigns more
home work then another? ????
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Saw that. One of those metrics only a myopic factotum in some insular subset of an industry would dream up.
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SAT scores, anyone?
Earnings five years out?

 Charter schools are mostly elementary schools. SAT scores won't be available for maybe a decade. Earnings five years out will take even longer. So to do any good now, you need a metric that evaluates current data - such as "A kid in 3rd grade should know this much by this date."
 

There are many other metrics which would be useful to parents and taxpayers for meaningful evaluation.

 "Ohio charter schools saw the largest drop in learning days in math, losing 37 [school] days compared with traditional public schools." IOW, kids in Ohio charter schools were almost two months behind.
 I'm sure that some charter schools are good. One problem with studies like this is the self-selection effect. Remember that in _Freakonomics_ Levitt found that it didn't matter whether kids were lucky enough to get into under-capacity "magnet" schools by lottery. What mattered was whether the parents cared enough about the kids' education to _try_ to get them into those schools. Kids whose parents applied, but lost the lottery, did as well as kids in the fancy schools.

This is why UK uses "value-added progress" metric to compare schools, offsetting school progress by comparison with a younger age.  A school that takes somebody who was a year ahead of average at age 10 and returns him 6 months ahead of averae at age 16 has done a lousy job.