From Reason Magazine: Public Schools Experiencing ‘White Flight’
Six months before the COVID-19 pandemic prompted mass school closures nationwide, a K-12 district in Brooklyn became the vanguard of a citywide, nationally watched push to combat “desegregation” through scrapping selective admissions criteria and instituting the algorithmic lottery system of “controlled choice.” Meaning, families would rank their choices for middle school, and the Department of Education (DOE) would feed those preferences into a complicated sorting process through which government can better control the racial and socioeconomic distribution among the schools.
These admissions changes, which affected incoming middle schoolers the year my eldest daughter was entering sixth grade in that very same district, was prematurely declared a success upon arrival by the progressive Democrats who had pushed them through. It was “the white flight that wasn’t,” declared the Daily News headline on a 2019 op-ed co-bylined by the relevant city councilman (now comptroller for the whole city) Brad Lander, and equity activists Nyah Berg and David Tipson from the advocacy group New York Appleseed. “New data reveal that Brooklyn school integration is working.”
Well, about that.
The pandemic, an asteroid-level event that permanently altered the landscape for public education in the U.S., is the Big Bang when it comes to plummeting enrollment numbers and catastrophic learning loss in government-run K-12. And the big-city systems that were most likely to be closed or to impose onerous COVID-19 restrictions from the fall of 2020 onward were the ones that suffered the most bleed along both measures.
Public schools experience white flight in the 1970’s and 1980’s when federal courts desegregated them. This really shouldn’t surprise anyone.
It’s sad.
It’s in someways tragic.
But it shouldn’t be surprising.Report
“The pandemic, an asteroid-level event that permanently altered the landscape for public education in the U.S., is the Big Bang when it comes to plummeting enrollment numbers and catastrophic learning loss in government-run K-12.”
Wow, that’s a piece of bad writing.Report
Friedmanesque.Report
I feel like the quoted passage needs a little context. Is Reason going after NYC public schools’ new selection criteria, or COVID closures?Report
Racism is the prybar that allows libertarians to attack public schooling.Report
Yes. Libertarians.
(Kings County is Brooklyn, if you were curious.)Report
Yes, exactly.
Racism is common across all political parties in America, and in this instance racism works towards the ideological goals of the libertarians at Reason.
Works in almost all cases actually.Report
Is this a parody? Because seriously, if I started trolling under your name, I wouldn’t go this far.Report
The quoted passage is the opening four paragraphs to the story.
The whole thing is worth reading.Report
Based on the mishmash those 4 paragraphs is, I’m a bit reluctant. Cut to the chase for us: is it more of Reason’s clarion call for dismantling America’s public education system?Report
It’s not calling for dismantling anything. It is, instead, pointing out that the policies championed by the top-down types resulted in unintended consequences galore (and it wanders through some of those unintended consequences).
Like, remember when they got rid of TAG (Talented and Gifted) programs? Well, that resulted in students who some might call talented and/or gifted up and leaving.
Is that a call to dismantle the public education system? (Personally, I think that getting rid of TAG is closer to “dismantling” than “okay, we’ll go elsewhere” happens to be.)Report
The “unintended consequences” are, weirdly, only affecting people with Caucasian ancestry.
Perhaps we should study them to determine what mysterious malady afflicts them.Report
It seems like the unintended consequences are also hitting the people who have less proximity to white people than they had before the policies were implemented.Report
That’s not what the article says. It references a documented decline among all racial groups, white people are just the largest decline, as are children from affluent families. This should surprise no one, as it makes sense that people who can afford to go to a school that stays open would pick that one instead of the one that stays closed. And if the ones that stay open are actually still enforcing standards and discipline instead of trying to eliminate them in the name of some bizarre, and frankly kind of offensive, ideas about racial justice, well all the better, at least for those who think such things are important.Report
So the article is wrong, that there is no “White Flight”?
I wonder why Reason would call it that if it were merely “Affluent Flight”.Report
I’m just saying you should read the article, not just the headline.Report
It assumes that the reason for shifts is schools.
People fled the city when Covid hit not because of schools (they were closed everywhere) but because if you had the means to be locked down in the suburbs — especially if you had kids — it was preferable to being locked down in the city. Where would you rather spend 24 hours indoors with kids: a small apartment with no outdoor space or a single family house with yards and neighborhoods to walk/bike?
Some of those people returned and some of those people didn’t, especially if the parents retained the ability to work full or semi-remotely.
This was happening in private and public schools alike and naturally was happening more among the wealthy, which of course skewed white.Report
Case in point: I work in a private school. We started Zooming in March 2020 and I ended up remote teaching all of the following year as well. We had kids signing on from the Hamptons, upstate NY, Connecticut, NJ, Florida, Colorado, even Norway.
These people fled the city — almost all of them were white — and none of it had anything to do with public schools.Report
I think NYC as the biggest, densest jurisdiction in the country has some unique aspects to it, even among other big American cities. I’m also generally in agreement with your comment below about the narrative. Reason has a very specific ideological view on public schools. I think them and other conservative and libertarian outlets are engaging in some wishful thinking if they believe that parents are adopting the particulars of their stances en masse. But public schools have taken a real hit with this, and the reason for that isn’t racism. Anecdata obviously but my impression is that even people sticking with the public schools look at them differently than they used to.Report
Thing is, I don’t have a major issue with Reason. I often read it… Volokh in particular… because I at least find it interesting, even if disagreeable. So, yea, sure, they have their perspective and it is going to come through.
I just get annoyed here with all of the “banging my head against the wall trying to get people to just listen and learn about something they don’t really understand” but that’s as much if not more on me as anyone else.
To your main point, yes, there are issues large and small with public schools which I hope get addressed. Heck, I have my own issues with them.
I just don’t think enrollment trends over the last few years really tell us anything about what those issues are.Report
To add/clarify… me saying, “You’re drawing the wrong conclusions from this data,” is not me saying, “There’s nothing to be concerned about here.”Report
Oh yea. And I read Reason occasionally too. I think they do some good work. I just meant they have their priors, and like anyone else they tend to align data points with those priors to reach conclusions consistent with them.
I think you’re probably right that we won’t really know anything for another decade when we start seeing the choices of parents who didn’t experience this. It’s still completely possible this is just a natural blip from a really unique moment.Report
But this happened in the suburbs as well.
From the article:
Report
Wow.
Again, only wypipo?
What’s going on??Report
Maybe there’s a pattern of this happening. If there is, is that worth looking at?
I mean, if we’re in a situation where there are two options:
1. Make white people not want to leave
2. Make white people want to stay
Maybe we could look to see if our attempts at #1 are working. If they aren’t, we could either change tactics for making people not want to leave *OR* we could explore #2.Report
So was I right to begin with, that the operative variable is race, after all?Report
That certainly seems to be what Reason is arguing.
Kazzy seems to be arguing that it’s not thin-skinned wypipo leaving in droves but merely rich people. I’m willing to explore that, I suppose.
It’s probably more difficult to shame under those circumstances, though.Report
For at least a month now, it’s been why does Jaybird keep bringing up Baltimore schools? Why does he keep bringing up Jewish schools? Now he’s getting flack for bringing up white schools?Report
Yes, in cities and suburbs, many people who had the option shifted from public schools to private schools for reasons related to the pandemic. This could be because public schools were closed or had more restricted openings OR it was because the private schools felt “safer”; a good friend put his kid in the local Catholic school for the year because they were very anxious about Covid and they just felt like the Catholic school’s protocols were better. They are now back in the public school.
Some of them have returned to publics, some of them have not.
I’m not sure I’m understanding the argument here. Almost all of these trends seem connected to the pandemic one way or another. Trying to draw it back to public school policy independent of the pandemic doesn’t really work.
And the reason it is happening most among whites is because whites are a wealthier cohort and leaving public school requires lots of money.Report
So it’s not “white flight” but “capital flight”?
Almost all of these trends seem connected to the pandemic one way or another. Trying to draw it back to public school policy independent of the pandemic doesn’t really work.
My assumption is that the pandemic revealed weaknesses and that people at the margins have addressed these weaknesses via exit.
The kids who left are, presumably, doing better in the places that cost additional money than they were in the places that were “free”.Report
In many places, the options were public schools that were not open or barely open for in-person learning compared to private schools that were fully open.
Or public schools that couldn’t afford basic mitigation strategies compared to private schools that could afford them all.
Or both/and.
The extent to which these revealed weaknesses were weaknesses in things such as funding, staffing, unions, and regulations. Very real issues in public schools. Heck, I was a loud voice here arguing against public schools remaining partially/fulled closed and how that was often being done for all the wrong reasons.
I’m not defending public schools here. But I am pushing back against false narratives, which that article is dripping with.
None of that has anything to do with all the blah-blah-blah about some enrollment policy in Brooklyn.Report
So the people who left (and are staying gone) are not doing so because of various changes in curriculum but because of distance learning?
It seems to me that if the problem was distance learning, the pandemic being more-or-less over would result in more-or-less the same numbers as 2019.
The changes in the numbers seems significant enough to say that this is more than lagging returns given that… how many schools are back in person? Almost all of them?
Are there any in your district that are still distance learning? Colorado, for example, seems to be 100% back (as far as I can tell from googling about it).Report
No offense, but this really reveals how little you understand about parenting and children and schools.
The vast majority of parents aren’t going to just flip flop their kids between schools willy nilly. Changing schools is incredibly taxing on kids and parents. So if folks can afford it and they made the switch due to Covid but things are going well, most are not going to be very inclined to just u-turn because things have mostly returned to normal.
This isn’t “I prefer Burger King but they were closed during the pandemic so I went to McDs but now BK is open again so I’ll switch back.”
This is “School closures were immensely challenging for my family and getting my kids into a school that gave them a normal-ish experience was life saving and I’m not just going to undo that right now while life still feels so hard.”
Let’s look at the data in 5 or 10 years. I realize that is pretty unsatisfying.
But I think the number of parents who shifted schools due to curriculum is overwhelmingly dwarfed by those who did so because of the pandemic.
Especially if we’re looking at major metro areas.Report
Well, my assumption is that things must have been pretty bad to get them to change in the first place.
After two years, I could see a lot of parents saying “HOLY CRAP, IF WE SEND THE KIDS BACK TO PUBLIC SCHOOL, WE CAN FINALLY SPEND MONEY AGAIN”
This isn’t “I prefer Burger King but they were closed during the pandemic so I went to McDs but now BK is open again so I’ll switch back.”
I’m more thinking about something like “I prefer Free Burger King but they were closed during the pandemic so I went to Jersey Mikes but not one with the full menu but the one that only had the Big Kahuna Cheese Steak and that thing costs $20 but now Free BK is open again so I’ll switch back.”Report
Yea, see, it just isn’t like that.
Your kid made friends. You made friends. It took them 6 month to figure the layout of the building. They finally memorized their locker code. You learned all the teachers’ names. And their friends’ names. And their friends’ parents’ names.
If things are going well and you can afford it, you don’t just upset that apple cart.
Again, this is what I do. A major part of my job is supporting and advising parents as they navigate making school changes. So, no, you’re dead wrong that for the vast majority of people who are in position to decide between public and private school that they approach the decision in the same way someone might approach what to buy for dinner. It’s more akin to buying a house. Or taking a job. It is a major decision that ripples throughout so many areas of life.
So think what you want about it but also know that you’re thinking is wrong.Report
While I can appreciate that what I am thinking is wrong, I also see that the New York private school average tuition cost of $19,761.
And Twenty Grand strikes me as something that can be reasonably be weighed against a sixth grader saying “but I made a new best friend”.
I suppose that those higher up the income scale are more likely to say “it’s only $20k” in response… but do these parents remember the 4th grader saying “but I don’t want to leave my best friend!” two years earlier?
(This may be a GenX thing.)Report
“So the people who left (and are staying gone) are not doing so because of various changes in curriculum but because of distance learning?”
To put this as simply and directly as possible… they left because of Covid-related issues and they’re staying because things are going well and changing schools is a huge PITA.Report
So it sounds like during a pandemic which shut down free schools, many parents opted to pay more to get alternate sources of education.
And some of those parents are staying with the more expensive model, while some are returning to the free model.
And the racial balance tilted towards white people who were the cohort most able to exercise that choice.
Is that about right?Report
Yea… though it wasn’t JUST that public schools were more likely to be fully or partially remote. You also had folks who felt like private schools were “safer.”
But otherwise… yea… that’s more or less right.Report
If the numbers for the districts that made the curriculum changes are significantly higher than in the districts that didn’t make the curriculum changes, would that mean anything?Report
Yea, sure.
Do you have data on that?
Further, do you actually know which districts made curriculum changes and what they were?
But until that isn’t some vague hypothetical, are you willing to acknowledge you just really don’t know what you’re talking about?
For instance, did you know that in most NYC private schools, you need to let the school know if you plan to return more than 6 months in advance of the next school year? Meaning that for the 2022-23 school year, parents would have had to have given notice in winter of 21-22? And that winter 21-22 was when Covid cases were at their highest?
Did you know that? Because that is kind of something really important to know when considering enrollment data at private schools versus public schools amidst the pandemic.
And it’s okay if you didn’t know that. But when you’re talking with someone about enrollment in public/private schools who DOES know that (and all sorts of other things very relevant to the topic) maybe you should do a bit more listening and a bit less proposing unsubstantiated hypotheticals.
Just a thought.Report
Speaking of data:
“Contrary to some theories, there’s no evidence that families are fleeing public schools in droves or for charters and private schools. While the city’s enrollment dropped by about 100,000 students since 2019 — not counting 3K — overall enrollment in city charter schools has grown by just over 10,000 students, or by 7.8%, since the pandemic started. And over that same time period, the city’s private schools actually saw a 3.6% drop in pre-K-12 enrollment, according to state data.
Dee said it’s also possible that more families are home-schooling, and not all of them have registered with the state. Homeschooling nearly doubled, to 14,000 students in New York City, with the largest increases in districts with higher shares of students living in poverty.
Demographic changes, Dee noted, may also play a big role. New York State had some of the largest population declines last year, particularly among school-age children, he said.
“No social behavior has only one cause, and I think as more data become available, we are starting to realize the broader trends that influence the character of enrollment decline and flight from places like New York City,” he said.”
So… school enrollment data is messy and noisy and impacted by about a jillion things (Did you know the birth rate has been declining? And is lower among the wealthier?).
So the notion that parents are fleeing public schools for private schools does not seem supported by any data. Instead what we’re seeing are shifts in a variety of areas which has contributed to an overall decline in school attendance numbers.Report
Sorry, here is the link: https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2022/8/9/23298996/ny-enrollment-drops-budget-cuts-early-grades-prek-students-parentsReport
Yea, sure.
Do you have data on that?
Just what it says in the article.
Report
That’s… not curriculum.
And that’s… one school.
I think I saw 75% of city schools saw enrollment declines.
There’s grasping at straws and there’s… whatever this is. Oy.Report
District 15 is only one school?
As far as I can tell, it’s 26 elementary schools, 11 middle schools, and 14 high schools.
Oh, trailblazing equity policies don’t qualify as curriculum? Fair enough. That’s my mistake.
Does it still count as a change that parents might be concerned about?
If so, good news! The NYT is covering the change back. Parents are likely to feel better.
Well, unless the original change was something that would make them feel shaky about stuff happening in the future.Report
Sigh. No. It’s not curriculum. It’s not. You’re wrong.
Yes, I meant one district not one school. My mistake.
Keep drawing constellations in the sky and tell yourself monsters live there. The rest of us will continue to use telescopes to learn about reality.Report
I’m pretty sure that if the error is my use of “curriculum” rather than saying “policies”, then I can say “I used the wrong word to point to the phenomenon that I see.”
Is that okay?
Or are we going to say “A POLICY IS NOT A CURRICULUM! YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!!!!” for a few more comments?
(If so, can I just harp on how you don’t know the difference between a district and a school and conclude that you don’t know anything about the topic either?)Report
As someone who basically agrees with you on the merits re: the curriculum changes at issue I think it’s important to remember how little we know about how widespread they are. The big news stories are all from NY and NoVa and the west coast. I think it’s probably fair to assume they exist as things that are on the table in big, urban/close in suburban districts. It’s less clear to me how impactful they are or if they even exist outside of those places. Covid on the other hand was an issue everywhere, to at least some degree.Report
oh you’d be surprised. My tiny public school district on the Mississippi Coast is seeing a small explosion of “concerns” About Social Emotional Learning “infiltrating” the district because the kids are officially off all next week for a new fall break AND the school is offering free small group sessions of what amount to high intensity tutoring for kids falling behind. Because there’s no public statement by the district that SEL is NOT being taught, all sorts of people are getting up in a tizzy. Most of whom don’t have kids in the school system anymore and some of whom don’t even live here full time.
Its disgusting but entirely unsurprising in a town with almost as many Trump 2024 flags as Mississippi state flags.Report
Hey, I have no idea about how widespread they are. My two main datapoints that I’m running with are Brooklyn and the earlier San Francisco incident with the school board out there.
Maybe we need an example of this happening in Portland.Report
This may sound strange, but I’m actually kind of more interested in what is happening and/or if these issues are present in the big sea of mediocre American school districts. Not just the outlier rich and influential ones or the outlier perpetually troubled ones. And in that regard it is interesting to hear about what’s going on in Philip’s nameless, little district no one has ever heard of in the deep south (to Philip, no offense is meant by this, these are points in its favor as a place of interest, if it is in fact representative of other such places).
Living in one of the outlier rich ones I think I know the story. What I’m not sure of is how representative they are if everywhere else. Not sure if you subscribe to Matt Taibbi’s substack but if you do I strongly suggest reading his deep dive on Loudon County, VA, which has been the epicenter of the issues in greater Washington, DC, and made national news a few times for it. It’s a bit more complicated than ‘the narrative’ but is still IMO a really terrible development for those public school systems that are and have been historically successful. At the same time it’s hard to imagine these particulars arising in a lot of other places.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/loudoun-county-virginia-a-cultureReport
My suspicion is that stuff that fails in the districts that have the absolute most “good” people in them and that, therefore, cannot blame the hordes of Republicans and Libertarians undercutting everybody are going to change and those changes will ripple out from there.
Hey, if white flight happens in Gary, Indiana? Who cares? Of course it’ll happen there. Those people are racist. Remember when Mike Pence got booed at Hamilton? Good times.
Brooklyn? Well, while *OF COURSE* there are going to be a number of Republican types who are smart enough to pretend to be Democrats in public to their friends, they will still be Republicans at heart and they’re going to be acting as “wreckers”, if you will.
Resulting in them denying POCs access to their own children.Report
To me, it’s not so much about the white flight question as it is a quality of public education question. I agree with you that a lot of people will nod along with a lot of dumb things going on at their good public schools right up to the moment that those dumb things start making those public schools qualitatively less good. That can be ‘less good’ because they are insisting on remote learning when we know remote learning is way less effective than in person. It can also be less good because they’re ending blind testing admission standards for magnet schools that kids bust their butts to get into because the demographics of that school are embarrassing to some local bureaucrat or education official with more degrees and certifications than perspective as to what the mission actually is.
We know very well that these challenges exist in the areas that get media coverage. But is Gary, Indiana or wherever willing to kill their own public schools with those kinds of decisions? That’s what I can’t tell, but I do think that’s what needs to be going on for this to be a true national phenomenon as opposed to highly localized infighting.Report
To the extent that these policies (that include new and improved equity policies) ripple out, I suspect that we will see changes ripple out.
But is Gary, Indiana or wherever willing to kill their own public schools with those kinds of decisions?
I wonder if there’s a way to measure this with tools like google.
“Policy changes!” headlines from 2019 to “Policy changes back!” headlines would probably be good enough for me but I could see how someone would demand cold, hard numbers from the nea.org.Report
Dude, you literally have no idea what is happening in schools right now.
Just stop talking.
And maybe try listening.Report
We seem to agree that the phenomenon is happening, we are just disagreeing over why it is happening.
“This might be happening but it’s happening for reasons that are neutral” is an argument that I’ve seen before in other contexts and I am *VERY* skeptical of it.Report
Yea but your “why” is based on pretty much nothing and when confronted with facts that disprove it, you handwave them away.
Willful ignorance is not a virtue.Report
I haven’t seen it disproven.
I’ve seen evidence that the policies that were put in place a few years ago are now being reversed.
That, to me, is evidence (though not proof) that the policies are recognized by those in charge as part of the reason the shift occurred.
And I don’t know why I should see it as otherwise.Report
In any proxy war (e.g. Vietnam), the most common response to failure is to escalate and double down.
This is because while the immediate battle in question (a civil war in a small Southeast Asian country) is largely irrelevant, the bigger war (against Communism) is existential.Report
Chip, what’s the battle in question?
This is a serious question, by the way.
And who benefits from pointing out White Flight in this battle?
Who benefits from denying White Flight is occurring?
These are serious questions as well.Report
Wouldn’t it just be simpler if you wrote “I don’t like public schooling for reasons A, B, and C” ?
Or “I don’t like white liberals for reasons X, Y, and Z”?
Because right now you’re trying to argue about a subject where your entire body of information consists of a few frantic Google searches.
But you very obviously are deeply invested in the two points I listed above so why not just talk about them instead of napalming innocent villagers in upstate New York?Report
Well, it’s not that he doesn’t like it. Jaybird doesn’t have OPINIONS! He merely OBSERVES and SHARES facts about the world.
And the facts just so happen to obviously support positions that he might privately think are correct.
But he’s definitely not stating any opinions or offering any editorializing. No no no no no.
Me? I have lots of issues with public schools on micro and macro levels. Private schools, too. Some of them are popular opinions and some of them are not. And none of which have any bearing on what the actual data says or what is happening in real schools.Report
I’m done with this now. Unless or until you engage with any of the facts I’ve provided — done more than basically say “Yea but still” — you are not worth the time. Your contributions here are literally worthless.Report
The facts that you’ve provided include an article that says:
The biggest declines of any state!
And, of course, the section that says:
Your “proof” about why this is happening is something to the effect of “well, there are lots of reasons and not just those reasons”.
Which is all well and good… but it does also seem that there is “proof” that the administration is changing policies that they enacted a few short years ago. They bragged about changing these policies at the time… and now they are noisily changing them back.
Are we going to end up at “okay, maybe it’s *SOME* of what you’re saying happened… BUT NOT ALL!!!”?Report
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_203.20.asp
This data says otherwise.
I never said none. I said it’s messy and complicated and there are many bigger factors driving the.
You want to hang your hat on one explanation that just so happens to align with your priors and you’lk cherry pick as much as you need to to get there.Report
My picked cherries include NYT articles about politicians announcing that the policies are changing back to what they were before.
I’m not sure what to do with your evidence in the articles that you’ve provided contradicting each other.Report
So your argument is that a particular plan did not meet expectations and has been reversed.
Okay.
What’s that got to do with the cost of tea in China?
You really really really want it to be true that parents are revolting against wokeism in schools.
I’m sorry that it’s not true.Report
So your argument is that a particular plan did not meet expectations and has been reversed.
What was the plan?
The plan was to decrease segregation in these schools. (I base that on this article, by the way.)
Were the expectations met?
Let’s hammer this out: WHAT WERE THE EXPECTATIONS?
If we know what the expectations were, we can know whether the expectations were met.
I’m assuming that the expectations included “capital flight” (to use the nice terminology for the phenomenon).
You really really really want it to be true that parents are revolting against wokeism in schools.
I’m sure that they’re not “revolting” against “wokeism”.
They’re merely exiting when changes in policies negatively impact them.Report
Except for all the other schools in all the other places that are also seeing declines.
From the link, nationwide there was a decline of over 1M students from Fall 2019 to Fall 2022. So this is prepandemic to now.
Interesting nuggets:
36 states saw a decline.
27 states saw a decline of 1% or more.
10 saw an increase of 1% of more. All but Washington DC saw gains between 1% and 3.8%; DC is a bit of an outlier with gains of 8%+ though that is consistent with major demographic shifts there.
Mississippi saw the biggest declines (8.4%).
So is all of that because of policies? Are so many states enacting so many policies that make parents feel so negatively impacted that they’re all seeing declines? Or is there more going on?
Also, while it is hard to get data on private schools (there isn’t any one singular place that has all data on all schools), enrollment in privates seems to be flat or slightly declining.
NAIS shows a decline from 2019 to 2020 of approximately 4%.
So while the Brooklyn district may indeed have failed in their effort to desegregate their schools, there is nothing in the data to suggest that parents are leaving public schools for private schools due to upset with the former.Report
So is all of that because of policies?
I’d have to look at the policies of each, whether there were articles talking about how “people might predict that these policies would result in X, but X isn’t happening!”, and whether there were loud noises about the policies being reversed in each place after X starts happening at numbers that surprise even the authorities in charge of predicting things.
If that sort of thing only happened in a couple of major cities, we could probably say “well, this is only happening in those major cities and we can’t extrapolate out to the rest of the country based on this.”
Well, beyond the obvious “this failed in those somewhat decently funded districts. It’s not likely to succeed here” that sometimes trickles out.Report
“If that sort of thing only happened in a couple of major cities, we could probably say “well, this is only happening in those major cities and we can’t extrapolate out to the rest of the country based on this.””
And yet because of one district in NYC, you want to extrapolate to the entire city? And then also to other cities and suburbs?Report
I’ve said above that I’m also taking San Francisco’s recent school board recalls into account.
(Additionally there’s the whole thing about whether there were articles talking about how “people might predict that these policies would result in X, but X isn’t happening!”, and whether there were loud noises about the policies being reversed in each place after X starts happening at numbers that surprise even the authorities in charge of predicting things.)Report
And yet because of one district in NYC, you want to extrapolate to the entire city? And then also to other cities and suburbs?
I’ve been thinking about this some more.
Let’s say that you’ve got several districts next to each other.
You change policies in one of the districts but you don’t change the policies in the others.
In all of the “control” districts, you have a change of X.
In the district that you changed the policy, you have a change of 2X.
I’m willing to reach some tentative conclusions based on the policies, yes.
“You’re just basing that one *ONE* district?!?”
I’m basing it on how we changed it in one and got a larger result than the places that didn’t change it got.
Changing a variable and then the outcome having a significant change compared to the other places that didn’t change the variable *IS* interesting.
Seriously.Report
Your analysis is just piss poor.
Have you looked at the neighboring districts?
The system has a whole saw X decline and yes this district saw 2X decline but some schools saw 3X or 4X or 5X decline.
Are you looking at any of that? No. You’re not. Because it would show you how such a such a facile analysis as the one you are applying just doesn’t muster up much of an argument.
https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2022/1/28/22907058/nyc-school-level-enrollment-decline-search
As I pointed out elsewhere, Mississippi saw state-wide declines on par with NYC declines… over 8%. Those are worse than the national average. Should we just conclude that whatever policies Mississippi has are terrible and that is the sole reason for their decline?
Seriously, man… I will repeat: willful ignorance is not a virtue. It merely amounts to you being a dick.Report
I think that comparing districts to neighboring districts is more useful than comparing Brooklyn to Mississippi.
But it might be interesting to see where Brooklyn and Mississippi overlap when it comes to why parents who exited did so. Is it “Capital Flight” everywhere?Report
OK, I read it. White enrollment is down. I’d be more concerned if the article also cited evidence of lower performance by the kids that are currently enrolled.
I’m not sure what the point of this article is. It was the stated goal of NYC schools officials to increase minority enrollment at its better schools. Mission accomplished, I guess. If white parents want to check out, that’s on them.Report
In the thread about the Hasidic schools, I mentioned how often an issue in some institution becomes used as cannon fodder by proxy for outside interests.Report
The point of the article was for Reason (which has become more and more Trumpist) to own the libs. The libs they wish to especially own are college-educated professionals especially winemomsReport
Who is “owned” by “white flight” from school districts?Report
To put the article in context:
There is a civil war in the libertarian world, with MAGA rightwingers taking over the party and driving the older moderates out.
Reason is mostly staffed by staid moderates who typically offer platitudes about women’s rights and racial equality.
But, and this is just my suspicion, they are sensing that a more trolling approach is needed to keep clicks, so “White liberals behaving badly”+”Public schools failing” is like irresistible catnip for them.Report
So the conclusion we’ve reached is “White Flight is not happening” leavened with “the people who say it is happening are trolling”?Report
My conclusion is you really want to assert that public schools are bad and white liberals (who are also bad) are leaving them.
Hasty Google searches seem to be inconclusive though and the people who know what they’re talking about won’t offer your point aid and comfort.
So I’m like Switzerland here watching Americans carpet bombing Cambodia when their real target is Moscow.Report
I appreciate that that might be what you want to argue against…
But I don’t think that public schools are bad.
I went to public schools! I went to some of the best imaginable. Seriously, I went to school in Westchester County in New York and District 20 here in Colorado Springs.
Very, very good public schools. High proficiency rates, high graduation rates, high rates of students who went on to graduate from college.
Whatever my criticisms are here, they are *NOT* that public schools are bad.
Whether or not “white liberals” are bad is still up in the air, from what I understand.
I’m pleased to say that my “hasty google searches” are giving me articles in the New York Times.
“the people who know what they’re talking about won’t offer your point aid and comfort”
We don’t seem to be in disagreement over what’s happening.
We don’t seem to be in disagreement over whether what’s happening is even bad.
We just seem to be in disagreement over whether what’s happening is significant enough to say that it is the result of changes in policies that were not applied in neighboring districts (ones that did not see similar outcomes).Report
Ah so it’s really about ethics in elementary school pedagogy..Report
Chip, I’m not certain that “White Flight” is unethical.
It makes 100% sense to me to want what’s best for one’s own children.
But I say that as someone who is not a parent and doesn’t have children of his own.Report
We just spent the Thursday thread coming to the consensus that public knowledge of technical issues like nuclear power is woefully bad, leading to the conclusion that anyone who gets their information about technical matters from hasty internet searches is basically ignorant.
Here, you’re trying to argue that curricula changes are causing parents to abandon public schools. And your argument is entirely supported by hasty internet searches.
Your theory could be correct for all I know.
But your argument is crippled by your insistence that you have no agenda or priors, that you are merely a detached indifferent observer.
Like I said, you would be a lot more persuasive if you just made the ideological argument that you obviously want to make.Report
Here, you’re trying to argue that curricula changes are causing parents to abandon public schools. And your argument is entirely supported by hasty internet searches.
That’s *NOT* my argument.
We have the following premises that I believe are all uncontroversial:
These policies were changed in this district.
Nearby districts did not changes these policies.
Most districts lost students following the covid distance learning.
This particular district lost greater numbers of students, as a percentage, than the nearby districts that did not change these policies.
The government is loudly announcing that these policies are being reversed.
Are we in agreement on all of those?
(Would any disagreement be on use of words like “loudly” when, really, they’re only in the NYT?)
My argument is that these policies are the reason that the numbers of exiting students were greater.
Is that particularly controversial?
But your argument is crippled by your insistence that you have no agenda or priors, that you are merely a detached indifferent observer.
I prefer to see my argument as handicapable.Report
Here, you’re trying to argue that these policies are the reason the numbers of exiting students were greater.
And your argument is still entirely supported by hasty internet searches.
Why should anyone accept your arguments, since we all see how amateur internet searches most commonly result in erroneous conclusions, ESPECIALLY when combined with motivated reasoning and confirmation bias?
Again, you could be right. But so far your argument just seems like a proxy battle in service to a larger ideological prior.Report
Well, the original “argument”, such as it was, was pointing out the original article in Reason that talked about the White Flight happening in Brooklyn schools following the policies being implemented.
Like, the original argument was “this is happening”.
As it turns out, the counter-argument is “this is not happening, at least not like that”.
And my amateur internet searches show news articles from 2019 praising these policies and news articles from 2022 talking about politicians saying that these policies are now going away.
The arguments against are saying “yes, but this is happening everywhere, to a lesser extent than it’s happening here”.
Now if we want to come to conclusions about what’s happening, what is on the table?
Is something like “the politicians who thought these policies were a good idea 3 years ago are now asking people to come back following revoking the policies?”
Could we leap to “they are doing this because they think that the policies have bad unintended consequences that only became apparent in the last year or two?”
Or can we rest on “no, I don’t have to acknowledge that the politicians are doing that because I know, deep down, that you’re going to go down a slippery slope that ends with getting me to agree that teacher unions are bad”?Report
So you’re going with “amateur internet searches are a good foundation for discussion about topics we know nothing about even to the point of refuting people who actually work in the field, and no, my vision is not clouded by my own ideological blinders why do you ask?”Report
I would say that it would depend on what the amateur internet searches happen to find.
If they find “American Schools Propaganda! Read About!” from IvansHouseOfRealNews.ru, then I’d say that’s one thing.
If they find something from the New York Times, I’d say it’s another.
I mean, I’m not doing something as complex as writing a paper about whether police unions are correlated with increased police violence.
I’m just doing a search on “new york school district 15” and pressing the “news” tab and seeing that there is a New York Times article at the top of the search results and that NYT story is ONE. FREAKING. DAY. OLD.
I mean, that’s a search that would be easy for *ANYBODY* to do.Report
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to Babe RuthReport
Would an argument for not relaxing standards for magnet schools be an anti-intellectualism argument?Report
When somebody makes one, we can see.Report
There are links to a handful of articles that discuss politicians rolling back policies.
Should not be thrown into a lottery with just everybody.
Huh.
And get this: “a system that has been labeled one of the most segregated in the nation.”
In BROOKLYN?!?!?
That’s crazy.Report
When you did your internet search, did you find a handful of articles critical of your thesis, or just ones that confirmed it?Report
The NYT article talked about politicians who were opposed to changing things back to the old way, if that’s what you’re asking.
I admit that I stopped scrolling halfway down the page when I hit stuff that was talking about school districts in Washington getting a 15 million dollar budget or busing shortages in Western New York (upstate!).
Is there an article that refutes my thesis that you’ve got hidden up your sleeve and that you’ll show me triumphantly and ask me why I haven’t cited *THIS*?Report
So, you spent 5 minutes googling, and only read halfway down the page and came back announcing that the internet agrees with you.
See, there are probably some good arguments out there for why the new curriculum is bad and should be abandoned.
You aren’t making any of them, and instead seem determined to make those arguments look ridiculous.
You don’t understand the curriculum, new or old;
You don’t know much at all about the particular district or its dynamics;
You don’t seem to know much about the real life experience of parents of school age children or why they make the decisions they do;
You have no knowledge of why the changes are happening, but instead try to deduce the reasons by second hand abstract indicators;
You refuse to admit your own biases may be blinding you to alternate theories;
The strongest refutation of your theory is the collection of your own comments.Report
What I was looking for was a credible source discussing the recent about-face in policy. The NYT had an article about it.
If you are saying that I should have found an article explaining that the NYT was wrong, that’s all well and good… how much time have I spent looking for that?
I mean, do you have an article that you’re thinking about?
Or are you just saying that I shouldn’t have stopped at the NYT and should, instead, have provided an additional article from Reason or some other non-aligned source?
See, there are probably some good arguments out there for why the new curriculum is bad and should be abandoned.
Chip, I’m not arguing that the new curriculum is bad and should be abandoned.
I’m arguing that the politicians are saying that they’ve reversed course on their policies.
And I have an article in the NYT discussing that.
I’m not sure you could restate my theory if pressed.
You keep referring to my talking about “changes in curriculum” instead of my discussing changes in policy, for one.Report
You’ve already told us what your argument is: “these policies are the reason the numbers of exiting students were greater.”
And you may be right!
My argument is that you’re undermining your credibility by not acknowledging your own bias and lack of knowledge. Five minute Google searches gives you facts, not explanations.
Others here have already demonstrated that there are other, equally plausible explanations, which haven’t been explored or refuted. But since they don’t turn up in five minute Google searches, you wouldn’t be aware of them.
So now you’re trying a different angle, by shifting to assert that the officials are talking reversing the policy.
But again, all you have is a fact, without any understanding of what the fact means.Report
The equally plausible explanations cover why the districts that did not institute these policies also had people leave.
The variable that changed for this particular district was the change in policy and it resulted in greater change than in the districts nearby.
What are the equally plausible explanations for the *DELTA*?
You’d think that the authorities would jump on that explanation above and beyond the one involving the policies that they championed a mere handful of years prior.
Instead of telling me what those arguments are, you’re telling me that I should research them myself.
Which isn’t particularly persuasive.Report
“The equally plausible explanations cover why the districts that did not institute these policies also had people leave.
The variable that changed for this particular district was the change in policy and it resulted in greater change than in the districts nearby.
What are the equally plausible explanations for the *DELTA*?”
The district in question was saw greater declines than the city wide average but it is far from an outlier.
Citywide was 9.6%. The district in question was at 17.6%, per the Reason article (though those are only specific to 6th grade enrollment). It’s hard to source that data further because their cite is a Tweet which includes a screenshot of a chart. I have no reason to doubt the accuracy… just can’t dig deeper into the chart for comparative purposes.
But this article shows that dozens of schools (including some from D15) had overall enrollment declines (not just 6th grade) greater than 18%.
So, yes D15 with its new policy was worse than average but so were, well, half the schools in the city — by definition. And many were worse than D15. You’re acting as if D15 is a unique outlier. It isn’t.Report
I believe that the study that Yiatin Chu is referring to can be found here (warning: PDF).
Here’s from the Abstract:
And here’s from the conclusion:
I don’t know if Ms. Idoux has children.Report
There’s another part of the article that is eating at me:
Is it so simple to build such institutions?
Why haven’t more places done so?Report
“Is it so simple to build such institutions?
Why haven’t more places done so?”
Is… is this serious? They’re saying in TWO YEARS (from today… no idea when the initial plans were drawn up) they’ll be opening up three such programs. It is a huge undertaking. Hence the longer timeline.
Why are you choosing to be so stupid?Report
They’re saying in TWO YEARS (from today… no idea when the initial plans were drawn up) they’ll be opening up three such programs. It is a huge undertaking. Hence the longer timeline.
Sounds like this is something that, say, Baltimore could have done a decade ago.
The best time to do this was twenty years ago but the second best time is now.
They should get cracking.Report
If as a white parent your answer is to take your kids out of public schools and then keep your mouth shut – maybe. I’d still be troubled by that decision, as you are removing yourself from a place of moral persuasion about how your tax dollars are executed in public education.
But what generally happens when there is significant white flight is that the leaving parents then seek to defund the schools after they have secured an alternative for their kids. Which in turn creates educational hazards for other people’s kids. I do not agree that in protecting your kids you have a right to actively disadvantage others in this particular arena.Report
Is that what’s happening here in Brooklyn?
Are the parents who are leaving seeking to defund the schools?
Because I was merely using the term “White Flight” to mean “exiting”.
(Though I will grant that the people who are moving from this location to that location over there will be taking their incomes and taxes with them. I don’t hold that against them, though.)Report
Kazzy is pretty much spot on in this subthreadReport
That it’s capital flight, it’s something to be concerned about, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the policies that recently got implemented?
(Or just that we can’t know that it’s due to the policies until we have more information in 2025-2026?)Report
Well, not super-available to post a whole supporting argument, but to lay out some points:
(a) Overwhelmingly the most common category of reasons for a kid to change schools is parent life events (changing jobs, needing child care at certain hours, moving, etc)
(b) A far second but second most common category of reasons is child needs (typically these are either (i) SPED-related – kids either exiting private to go public or NPS for support reasons, or kids changing from one public to another for support reasons, (ii) peer group changes like friends leave for another school site or a friend circle disintegrates and the kid’s not adapting socially, and then (iii) site issues like bullying that aren’t being addressed to the parent’s satisfaction for other reasons.
(c) The number of changes after that (curricular/programmatic reasons) are minuscule in comparison to the other two. Even parents choosing to move kids because they think “they’ll have a better chance at getting into” usually aren’t school-change decisions, they’re school-choice decisions.
Meaning folks might jump from public to private or from public to a different public at a grade break for curricular reasons but usually not otherwise (the first two categories, inverted, are both big barriers to that, too, actually).
(d) Pretty consistently, opinions of schools are like opinions of politicians: everybody else’s sucks, but I like mine. This even applies when folks are carrying the default opinion that “the district is making bad decisions”. In my experience (which admittedly doesn’t necessarily generalize, but I talk to a *lot* of school board members in a *lot* of different types of districts, red and blue and everything in-between) the vast majority of the public debate about things like CRT or mask mandates or whatever isn’t people complaining about their site, or leaving their site, it’s people – often not folks that actually have kids in the schools – kvetching at public comment because they can. This is very astroturfy.
(e) The vast bulk of the recent drop in enrollment, nationwide, is directly related to pandemic factors, but how that plays out in the cases of (a) and (b) above has a very big Goodhart’s Law component.
What I mean by that is that when schools closed, folks that moved for parent-life reasons and student-life reasons aren’t remotely the same.
Our district, for example, didn’t lose hardly any white middle class kids (we have a small percentage of them to begin with, due to reasons that require another 15,000 words or so). The ones we lost were due mostly to perception issues, not service issues. I had one parent angrily inform me that he was moving from a closed district school because it was closed… to a closed *private* school. Which… okay? He never seemed like the most together cat in the neighborhood, whatever.
We lost a *ton* of lower income kids, though… a chunk of them because adults needed daycare (but… we actually provided a bunch of daycare so fewer than some districts) but more because folks were actually forced *out of town entirely* because they couldn’t make rent without their job, which they were laid off of, and the pandemic unemployment increase came too late, they’d already moved.
While this is going on all of our neighboring districts (including the virtually all-white district that has had a serious history of some race issues) have had DEI initiatives going on which… have generated some conversations at the mic and public comment but no indications at all that it’s making folks leave those districts outside of any proportions that aren’t readily explainable by the reasons why we lost kids.
Anyway.
The one thing that article gets right is that the last two years have basically been a ground-clearance re-write of public education history. Everything from attendance trends to test scores is going to have this huge data change from 2020-2025, probably, if not longer (including the fact that we’re liable to see things like suspensions and expulsions nationwide skyrocket after a few years of declines because there are kids at various levels of every district/school who have the social development skills that kids two grades below them usually have, which is going to have a long term impact on schools while all of that works itself out).
During that time we’re probably going to see a lot of articles that claim that some howler monkey is the reason for some problem, but it’s going to be the 900lb gorilla of the pandemic, for a while.Report
So some school districts will have white flight, some will have Black flight, and some will have LatinX flight and we’re a big enough country that we’re going to see clusters?
That makes sense, I guess.
I do think that the bragging about the policies in 2019 and the policies being loudly revoked in 2022 creates one heck of an opportunity for a post hoc ergo propter hoc error (indeed, the same one being made by the politicians who made the original policies presumably on the behalf of experts and are now revoking them presumably on behalf of experts).
I’ll hold off on concluding that distance learning brought unsavory stuff to light.Report
Oh, distance learning brought some unsavory stuff to light, all right, but that’s a much more complicated conversation.
One way you can tell that the anti-CRT, anti-DEI stuff is not really the big winner is that it’s typically not actually on folks’ campaign pages.
There’s elections going on all over the place right now, red districts and blue. Lots of anti-CRT folks are campaigning, and they’re fine and happy to talk about CRT-is-terrible issues with supporters, but in most cases that’s… not showing up in their normal campaign mailers or on their web pages.
There they’ve got entirely different language about why they’re running and what they want to see out of their school district (you can check out who is running in your local districts and what they’re saying and then work backwards and find out that the guy who is marketing himself as a school reformer to the normies is an ex-cop who is a member of Blue Lives Matter and anti-wokeness Facebook groups, but you have to know where to look). I see this in local neighboring districts a lot.
Mostly normies don’t care about this stuff.
That doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s not a problem.
And also, it doesn’t mean that – whether or not “I think it’s a problem” – that the alt-righty sorts of folks aren’t going to make big gains nationwide in school board elections, but that’s mostly because (a) normies don’t actually pay attention to school board elections and (b) lots of right-wing folks are specifically activated right now to run, so just on the numbers they’re going to make gains.Report
Eh, it’s not that it’s anti-CRT, anti-DEI.
It’s that, holy cow, this “inclusion” stuff appears to be goring *MY* ox!!!
See, for example, the statements made by the politicians rolling back the policies that they were bragging about instituting in 2019.Report
So now you’ve got TWO people from deep inside the education world telling you you’re wrong and yet you’re still going to “Yea but still…”
Are you this stupid or just this much of an asshole?Report
Kazzy, where I’m wrong is in the distance between “White Flight” and “Capital Flight”.
The disagreement isn’t whether the phenomenon is happening.
The disagreement isn’t whether there were more people leaving in the district that changed policies than in the districts that didn’t.
The disagreement seems to be whether this is happening because of reasons other than exactly the overlap between “Capital Flight” and “White Flight” and I’m still, apparently, paying too much attention to what the politicians are saying as they’re loudly announcing that they’re changing course.
I think that where most of the disagreement seems to be is in assumed arguments on my part that this has to do with something like the 1619 Project versus the 1776 Project or something like that.
And I don’t think that it’s that stuff.
But the stuff in the article interviewing parents that are talking about the lottery to get into the good schools?
I’m sure that every single parent would talk about the importance of DEI programs…
Until, maybe, their own kids might be bumped out of the running by the widening of admissions standards… at which point you’d see articles like the ones that I’ve linked (that include quotations from the people in the articles that I’ve linked to).
An argument that “the politicians are wrong, this is just a data cluster!” seems like something that you’d get someone on the leftier side of the politicians to argue quite loudly. “This is racism, plain and simple!”, they could say. “These guys need to learn statistics, which they obviously never did in their useless ‘Talented and Gifted’ courses that did nothing but promote segregation!”Report
It isn’t stupidity.
Its motivated reasoning on par with Creationism or 9-11 truthers, where the goal isn’t to persuade or prove anything with a logical testable argument, but to create clouds of uncertainty and doubt.
Its all here, the desperate assault on a seemingly minor issue, which is obviously a proxy for a much larger point, the way creationists will furiously attack a minor paper on biology;
The autodidact approach of assuming an authority in a technical field way beyond one’s expertise but quoting them confidently as if he does, the way 9-11 truthers suddenly start quoting studies on metallurgy and structural engineering;
And the fallback to the “just asking questions” which has the convenient aspect of avoiding making a testable falsifiable argument, and demanding that everyone else create a rebuttal.
Here, the asserted thesis: “these policies are the reason the numbers of exiting students were greater” can’t really be proven because there just isn’t enough data, and no one here really knows the reasons the parents switched.
But the goal appears to be doubt- doubt in the school administrators (Look! They are changing their policies!), doubt in the policies themselves (They must be bad! Why else would parents switch?)
Doubt doesn’t need proof, merely allegation.
Like I said in my very first comment, this minor data point is meant to be a prybar, a proxy battle to confirm his priors.Report
which is obviously a proxy for a much larger point
See? Chip is arguing that this isn’t an argument about the stuff I’ve written, it’s about hidden arguments that have yet to be made.
I can provide articles from the New York Times and scientific studies. But that doesn’t matter.
And the fallback to the “just asking questions” which has the convenient aspect of avoiding making a testable falsifiable argument, and demanding that everyone else create a rebuttal.
I’m *NOT* “just asking questions”.
I’m actually making assertions. And, yes, using the NYT and scientific studies to do so.
Here, the asserted thesis: “these policies are the reason the numbers of exiting students were greater” can’t really be proven because there just isn’t enough data, and no one here really knows the reasons the parents switched.
And any studies that I happen to provide can therefore be dismissed out of hand.
Doubt doesn’t need proof, merely allegation.
Evidence doesn’t seem to matter much either.
this minor data point is meant to be a prybar
See? Like I said. “I think that where most of the disagreement seems to be is in assumed arguments on my part that this has to do with something like the 1619 Project versus the 1776 Project or something like that.”Report
Did you just conflate opposition to DEI and CRT ideology with alt-right ideology?Report
Do childless taxpayers have a right to address school funding?Report
Usually. Depends on local law.Report
In what if any jurisdictions would local law prohibit childless taxpayers from addressing school funding? (if you know)Report
I don’t pretend to know the local laws of lots of localities. I’m not aware of any that do that, but I know the difference between not knowing X and knowing not-X.Report
It is just hard for me to believe that there are any jurisdictions (in the USA at least) that would limit free speech in so far as questioning public expenditures concerning public school funding to ONLY those with children (or school age children – even worse).
Can we at least agree that any such law would be contrary to public good?Report
Maybe I’m just old and parochial, but… I see an article that talks about the New York City schools and my immediate thought is, “Chances are vanishingly small that any of this applies to my city, state, or even region.”Report
That’s an interesting point. I will research some more later to see if what happened in Brooklyn is limited to Brooklyn.
Edit: Two minutes of googling shows me a lot of Denver stuff from 2019 and before, but only a thing or two from after the pandemic kicked off.Report
The public schools where I live were closed for a year to a little over for the youngest students, and even longer for the older. My boss’ son who was on the middle school/high school cusp when it started lost nearly 2 years of in person.Report
I’ll repeat my take from August 2020:
And then, after Trumwill pointed out:
I realized:
Report
I’m not sure what’s going on in the green line of the chart you’re referring to, because it’s not clear what the Y axis is. I see two possible interpretations:
1. Expected progress is factored into the Y axis, and 0 indicates that kids are on track relative to expectations. Under this interpretation, high-income kids did much better via remote learning, middle-income kids did about the same as they would have in class, and low-income kids did worse.
2. Expected progress is not factored in. Under this interpretation, high-income kids did about as well as they would have with in-person school, middle-income kids were basically just treading water (didn’t learn anything new, but retained what they’d learned so far), and low-income kids’ skills actually degraded, i.e. they were much worse at math in May than in January.Report
I did some digging into the documentation here. Key takeaways:
1. Low-, middle-, and high-income describe schools, not individuals. It’s based on the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. High-income is less than 35.7% eligible, so they’re high-income in a very loose sense of the term.
2. Progress is defined as the number of Zearn math lessons completed each week. I didn’t really look into the details, but Zearn seems to be a system for computerized math exercises. So students from middle-income schools basically continued performing as they had in class, while students from high-income schools did better and students from low-income schools did worse.
I don’t know whether the increase in performance in high-income schools indicated students working ahead of schedule, or just that students had not been completing all the assigned lessons in class, and started completing more of them under remote learning. I’m also not sure whether these had been classroom exercises or exercises assigned as homework prior to remote learning.Report
In this particular case, I think that the positional properties of the various lines are important rather than what the Y axis actually is.
What matters is who goes up compared to whom.Report
“Whether in response to pandemic closures or policy changes made in the name of “equity,” people classified as white are fleeing government-run K-12 in startling numbers.”
The subheading.
So… these trends… which I will not doubt are real… are either due to a global pandemic that upended every aspect of life and in particular the entire world of education -OR- they’re’ due to some Brooklyn school’s woke-ass policy.
I know what I’m betting on as the most likely cause of the vast majority of the trend.Report
This post is rather predictable.Report
Though the events depicted seem to be taking officials by surprise (if their quotations are accurate).Report
I think what’s taking the officials by surprise is that the events are happening hard enough for normies to notice.Report
On the next Thursday thruput from Professor Siegel – the Top 7 astrophysics mixed metaphors, and a breakdown of their flaws.Report
But really, I like Welch, (much more than Gillespie), but man, he needed a copy editor to take another pass at this. I’m literally at the very first sentence
Even with (especially with) the scare quotes, it should have been ‘a city wide nationally watched push to combat “segregation” ‘ , not ‘combat “desegregation” ‘Report
This is self-limiting, because private school is expensive. Not many parents are willing and able to spend $10k+ per year to send their kids to private school on top of paying taxes for public school. Sure enough:
The longer-term 14% decrease is probably due more to demographic shifts in the regional population and differential fertility rates, and while a 5% decline since 2020 certainly isn’t negligible, it also isn’t a mass exodus. Fortunately for DEI cultists, most parents don’t have the resources to take their kids away, even with the awesome power of white privilege.Report