Greg Forster has nice things to say on Jaypgreene.com about our Friday Fun Fact video series. (See the most recent??video here.) Namely: "The creators have been pretty consistently clever in coming up with ways to make obscure facts visually intuitive." He's right; kudos to our interns Shelley, Jack, Will, and Alex, who, along with our New Media Manager Laura Pohl, have turned boring statistics into entertaining tidbits.
But then he goes on to complain that last Friday's installment repeats the same "bogus 'excellence' complaint" that we made in last year's High Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB. Greg writes:
They decided to resurrect Fordham's complaint from last year (dissected here and here) claiming that accountability systems make our schools more "equal" but less "excellent" because they create incentives for schools to increase the amount of attention they pay to low achievers, reducing the amount of attention they pay to high achievers. Never mind the fact that - according to Fordham in the very same report -??the low achievers are benefiting from this diversion and the high achievers don't seem to be losing any ground.That would seem to me to be pretty clear evidence that schools were devoting too much attention to high achievers - perhaps because their parents are more likely to be influential - and that the incentives created by accountability were educationally healthy because they forced schools to focus their attention where they could create more improvement.
It's obviously possible that in the long run accountability could push this too far and become counterproductive by focusing too much attention on low achievers at the expense of high achievers. That's an argument for improving the design of accountability systems to preclude that result. But so far, on Fordham's own evidence, we don't seem to be having that problem.
Wow, where to begin? Greg's right that the "high achievers don't seem to be losing any ground," but they aren't gaining much ground, either. According to our report (by Tom Loveless), their progress has been "languid" since 2000. (Actually, for decades.) Meanwhile, low performing students have taken off like a rocket. That's great news, and yes, one can interpret this as a happy "gap closing" story. But another view is that our education system should be helping all groups of students make strong and steady progress, including the high achievers. That's not happening. Maybe a different kind of accountability system would change that.
And what about Greg's contention that NCLB-style accountability is evening the playing field for low-achievers? I would argue that it's gone rather far in the other extreme. Take a look at this pie chart (which our Fun Fact video was based on):
If the playing field had just been evened, then the biggest piece of the pie would go for teachers who say "it's equal" in terms of the attention they provide to different types of students. Alas, that's not the case.
And is this good, because the parents of high achievers are "more likely to be influential"? Here I assume Greg is referring to the oft-made assertion that high-achievers are mostly white and rich. But let's face it: there aren't a lot of classrooms in America today where rich high-achieving kids are fighting with poor low-achieving kids for their teacher's attention. Either you have a classroom of mostly poor kids, some of whom are high-achieving and some of whom are not, or you have a classroom of mostly affluent kids. So it's especially high-achieving poor kids who are most likely to be losing out because of NCLB's focus on basic skills and low levels of proficiency. And I have no reason to believe that their parents are particularly influential.
Greg's a smart guy, and I know he thinks deeply about trade-offs and cost/benefit analyses in other domains.??But why??is it so hard to believe that a teacher's attention is a limited resource, and as incentives shift to elevate the needs of one group of students, the needs of another might suffer? Maybe as a society we're comfortable with this shift (Lord knows our lowest achieving kids need help). But we should be honest about such a policy, and about the kids who stand to lose because of it.
