Virginia Sorts Kids' Scores By Race

I've heard of this in at least on local NPR affiliate news story in recent weeks. Several states are doing this in relation to the "no child left behind" act. Here are two more stories:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/e...-defend-racial-and-ethnic-learning-goals.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2947434/posts

The headline doesn't really explain it - at least to me, "sorting scores by race" doesn't tell me that the expectations are different for different races.

And what if someone's of mixed race....??
Would they average the requirements? Pick the lowest or the highest standard?

Here's what the Virginia state board of education actually did. It looked at students' test scores in reading and math and then proposed new passing rates. In math it set an acceptable passing rate at 82 percent for Asian students, 68 percent for whites, 52 percent for Latinos, 45 percent for blacks and 33 percent for kids with disabilities."

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That's crazy. INAL, but I'm also fairly certain it's illegal.

I pity those VA asians who aren't good at math.

Alpha Echo said:

Am I misunderstanding what they're trying to do with this? To me, this looks like, in order for the States to get the waiver, they are allowing kids to score lower in order to pass, depending on each child's race.

Is this what's happening, or am I misreading it?

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Cyia said:

That's crazy. INAL, but I'm also fairly certain it's illegal.

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It may well be illegal, but it won't stop until someone sues to stop it, AND a court declares it illegal and orders it stopped. It might take a separate case in each state where this is happening.

LJD said:

The headline doesn't really explain it - at least to me, "sorting scores by race" doesn't tell me that the expectations are different for different races.

And what if someone's of mixed race....??
Would they average the requirements? Pick the lowest or the highest standard?

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It looks like that is one of the controversies. Such a person would be have to be put into one of the four groups. It would be advantageous for the school system to put them in the lowest group they can, to give them a better chance of passing and having the school system meet this funky amended "No Child Left Behind" thing.

No f-ing way is this legal. Institutionalized racism is baaad, McKay?

So the Obama Administration thinks it's okay for only 45% of blacks to pass the math test?

what is this i don't even

It's pretty damn offensive, not the least of the reasons being that the "achievement gap" is really socioeconomic, and not race-related.

This is just wrong. This is a reversal of the effort to achieve "color blindness" in American educational policies and practices. It means we don't have to try as hard to educate one group of students according it their skin color --which translates into less money beng spentg on students of one skin color than students of another. This is a huge piece of why we had the 1960's law suits which eventually led to forced bussing.

Alpha Echo said:

I am pissed. This makes me so angry to be part of Virginia. This sounds more like something that you'd hear from Texas (no offense at all to those of you from there). Or Arizona.

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Heh. It sounds like exactly the opposite to me, something dreamed up by Northeast liberals (no offense to those Northeast liberals here).

Florida has something similar going on.

Hilary Shelton of the NAACP said this about such programs (different expectations for different "races"):

It's, what do they say? 'Soft bigotry of low expectations.' They're really letting the educators off the hook playing it this way. We have to challenge our educators to meet the standards of every child.

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(and yeah, that's from my blog; don't know where the orginal cite link is, but will post it when I find it)

This kind of stuff keeps racism alive, because it makes race a feature of actual policy. It's bad news, imo.

Um, what? There's no way this can be legit. One of my uncles is a lawyer here, and one of my cousins is a teacher. I'll see what I can find out...

I can see where the issue is something we need to look at, actually. I definitely don't agree with having it enshrined in any law, but bear with me.

If there are significant achievement gaps and some do correlate strongly to certain variables, we need to know this and address it. We need to find out why things like that are occurring. There used to be a huge gap between male and female. Attempts to address those have worked so well that in many cases the gap has actually reversed.

Also, if you were trying to make sure that someone is improving their performance, which yardstick would you use? A yardstick that includes everyone else, or a yardstick that measures out the achievement gaps? Would girls in 1964 be expected to meet the boys' math scores the next year? Or do we expect that changes may take some time and efforts to address the underlying problems?

It's a tricky thing to talk about, but I do agree with looking at all the various factors that go into high achievement. Then -- and this is key -- address any problems found. I don't agree with any stereotyping, and that's the problem I see with how this is being done. But I do agree with looking at it and taking the gaps into some consideration. The federal law really is screwy by not looking at them at all, imho.

eta: here's an easy example that we have here. We have a lot of kids who have moved here who don't speak much English. Their English scores are lower at first, as might be expected I don't think the teachers should lose federal money for having a diverse classroom like that. It doesn't make any logical sense to not address an obvious important factor in the situation. The teacher isn't failing, and neither are those kids.

RichardGarfinkle said:

I am offended actually. You're implying that racist programs created in Southern States to satisfy a law created by a conservative (No Child Left Behind) sounds like something created by Northeastern Liberals. Why do you say that?

ETA: It looks like Virginia is trying to weasel on what it told the Department of Education it would do. Here's an article on its application for a waiver. The terms discussed don't sound like what they're trying to get away with or what they told the DOE.

ETA: Sorry forgot the link. Here
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...land-dc-plans/2012/05/07/gIQAnTH77T_blog.html

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Alessandra Kelley said:

Um. Yeah. This is really offensive.

How, exactly, do you justify connecting this to Northeast liberals when it is in fact a product of Southern conservatives?

Virginia, Florida, and Texas conservative George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" law have exactly nothing to do with Northeastern liberalism.

Give blame where it is due, please.

And please be aware that this Northeast liberal is appalled by this Virginia policy.

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Lol! The offense train arrived early, it would seem.

This how these things work: there needs to be an overall improvement in testing scores. Education boards know what that number is. So they set a target for passing rates. But the also know that rates vary, if broken down by ethnicity. So in order to achieve the overall rate, they determine what kind of improvement is needed for each group. If each group reaches their target, the overall target is reached as well.

This isn't about thinking one kind of student is dumber than another, it's about expectations based on goals, but varying those expectations because of race. Because it could very well be the case that the most difficult target to reach--the most ambitious one in pure numbers sense--is that of the lower performing race or races.

So this is hardly the type of thing a bunch of good ol' boys came up with. It's actually supposed to be about helping the groups struggling the most, to the detriment of the ones at the top.

Is it really a "Northeast liberal" thing? No, of course not, but neither is it a Texas thing or a "Southern conservative" thing. For instance, here's the District of Columbia doing the same sort of thing.

This is all in response to the waivers granted by the Obama Administration for NCLB that stipulated improvement of the lowest perfomers/performing schools. This is how Boards of Education met that requirement.

The initial waivers were granted to these states: New Jersey, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

How many of them used race to craft their goals in the ways of DC, Va, and Florida? I'm not sure. Most, I'll wager. And it's all being done with the best of intentions. But that doesn't make it a good idea.

backslashbaby said:

I can see where the issue is something we need to look at, actually. I definitely don't agree with having it enshrined in any law, but bear with me.

If there are significant achievement gaps and some do correlate strongly to certain variables, we need to know this and address it. We need to find out why things like that are occurring. ...

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Furthermore, "we" need to remember that (all together now) correlation does not equal causation.

clintl said:

It's pretty damn offensive, not the least of the reasons being that the "achievement gap" is really may be socioeconomic, and not race-related.

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It might be interesting to get lots of info and statistics on these kids and do some regression analysis, much the way big corporations do so successfully with their customers. But then educators might not be too happy if they found, for example, a positive correlation between video game playing and test scores.

<insert random XKCD cartoon here>

backslashbaby said:

If there are significant achievement gaps and some do correlate strongly to certain variables, we need to know this and address it. We need to find out why things like that are occurring. There used to be a huge gap between male and female. Attempts to address those have worked so well that in many cases the gap has actually reversed.

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We actually know a lot about what variables are important. The problem is, in my opinion, that people don't want to deal with the actual causes. So what we get instead are ridiculous and racist policies like these.

Alessandra Kelley said:

How, exactly, do you justify connecting this to Northeast liberals when it is in fact a product of Southern conservatives?

Virginia, Florida, and Texas conservative George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" law have exactly nothing to do with Northeastern liberalism.

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as long as one can overlook the fact that it was coauthored by the prototypical northeastern liberal.

not that it's about "blame" or was exclusively kennedy's ideas.

but the ignorance of and/or attempt to rewrite history in some of these comments is amusing indeed.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1918873_1918869_1918857,00.html

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2008/02/bill-clinton-bl/

benbradley said:

It might be interesting to get lots of info and statistics on these kids and do some regression analysis, much the way big corporations do so successfully with their customers.

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It's been done repeatedly. The two most reliable predictors statistically for how a child will do in school are the socioeconomic status of the family and the education level of the parents. And the reasons are known, too. It's not a maybe. It's quite firmly established by research.