... which means I ended that title with a preposition, hence this suffix.
Dig this.
Picking the bottom feeder, Decatur, I went to Great Schools and checked in on their stats. They have two major high schools, Eisenhower and MacArthur, both of which are cellar-dwellers, scoring the lowest possible points, 1 out of 10. Checking in on their equity stats, we see that standardized test score data is not available, but we do have "College Readiness" and "Discipline and Attendance."
Eisenhower
College-ready: blacks 7/10, whites 8/10. Not bad!
Chronically absent: blacks 50%, whites 36%. Hmm. I'm guessing those college readiness scores are juiced. These kids aren't even bothering to show up for class. Do you think that might have something to do with the fact that almost none of them can read at grade level? Maybe.
MacArthur
College-ready: blacks 6/10, whites 8/10. Again, not bad!
Chronically absent: blacks 45%, whites 36%. Again, a whole bunch of them aren't bothering to go to school. They must be prodigies to get those college readiness rankings.
Or maybe it's all smoke and mirrors.
This is in line with other random sampling I've done on Great Schools. People can prattle all they want about racial justice, structural racism, school funding and discipline, but if the kids aren't showing up to school, you're just pushing on a rope.
I should put half of this as a comment on your post yesterday, but I’m too tired from driving back from Texas and the Eclipse so here goes…
ReplyDeleteIn fact there was a study ages ago (like when dinosaurs walked the earth and I was in college) that concluded that for college students the best indicator of whether or not they will graduate was whether or not they were physically present during the class (I.e., if they showed up).
Just before CoViD the esteemed University of California was trying to get their diversity numbers up, so they paid a company to investigate what scores/tests/etc were the best predictors of success in college. When the answer came back ‘The SAT’ scores they promptly ignored it and used CoViD as an excuse to drop the requirement in the furtherance of ‘equity’. (Aside: who would have thunk it… a test called the Scholastic Aptitude Test was good at measuring the test taker’s scholastic aptitude. Duh!).
Anyways, we seem to be in a recurring loop where people keep trying to change to do better than the old ways and yet end up doing something worse. It is almost like the people before us weren’t stupid, and maybe, just maybe, we aren’t all that brilliant.