Currently, my firm and its allies are trying to push the government into forcing the schools to use a Bayesian prediction model, in which you feed an individual student’s test scores for the past 5 years and it spits out their probability of success in the advanced classes, and you keep putting the students with the highest probability of success in the top classes until you run out of teachers.
This is good, and I hope that such models are implemented. However, when I hear the phrase “problems in education,” these sorts of placement problems are not what comes to mind first.
Having personally taught at a massively failing inner city high school for several years (where only 2% of students were white, and only 10% met state goals for education), the few “advanced classes” that my school offered were, indeed, filled by students who had achieved top scores in a variety of metrics (top, as compared to the other students at the school). I taught such an advanced class, as well as several general placement classes. The administration assigned students to each class without using a Bayesian model, but I honestly don’t think the resulting student distributions would have changed much if they had used one.
The problem was never making sure that the students with the highest probability of success made it into the advanced classes; my administration, for whatever its other failings, had mostly solved that one. The consuming, stultifying problem was that in my advanced 10th grade classes, only a few of my students could read even at an 8th grade level. The situation was even worse in my general classes, where most students read at a 6th grade level.
This is good, and I hope that such models are implemented. However, when I hear the phrase “problems in education,” these sorts of placement problems are not what comes to mind first.
Having personally taught at a massively failing inner city high school for several years (where only 2% of students were white, and only 10% met state goals for education), the few “advanced classes” that my school offered were, indeed, filled by students who had achieved top scores in a variety of metrics (top, as compared to the other students at the school). I taught such an advanced class, as well as several general placement classes. The administration assigned students to each class without using a Bayesian model, but I honestly don’t think the resulting student distributions would have changed much if they had used one.
The problem was never making sure that the students with the highest probability of success made it into the advanced classes; my administration, for whatever its other failings, had mostly solved that one. The consuming, stultifying problem was that in my advanced 10th grade classes, only a few of my students could read even at an 8th grade level. The situation was even worse in my general classes, where most students read at a 6th grade level.