A study by Julie Berry Cullen et al. (2011) found that the law created a perverse incentive for students to transfer to a high school with lower-achieving peers
Why is that incentive perverse?
When I was a teenager my father semi-jokingly talked about moving over the border to West Virginia so that I'd be a better "diversity" candidate, in the eyes of the colleges I was applying to.
1: agreed. Doesn't it improve the prospects of the low-achievers to have some high-achieving peers?
Why is that incentive perverse?
Because the South still considers integrated schools a perversion.
Doesn't it improve the prospects of the low-achievers to have some high-achieving peers?
Not if the higher-achieving transfer students displace them from the top 10% pool.
5: I think that's using the wrong baseline for comparison. Conditioned on the existence of a top 10% scholarship, of course they're worse off when displaced by higher-performing students. But if they benefit even a little bit from having more high-performing peers, then they're better off than if the scholarship for the top 10% hadn't existed at all.
And motivated students with motivated parents moving into the district could put pressure on the school to offer more college prep classes, could increase property values. If the end result of the policy is that there is no real benefit (from a college admissions perspective) incurred by moving to rich suburban school districts, isn't that positive for the public school system as a whole?
I kind of agree with 7, but I'd like to see some serious procedural safeguards on gaming the system. You should have to be in the top 10% of the school you spent most of your high school career in, not the school you graduated from: moving for the last term of your senior year shouldn't affect anything. (This is a minor issue, of course.)
8: oh, sure. That makes good sense.
The people who are going to transfer to take advantage are going to be marginal, academically. 5 is going to trump 6 and 7, is my guess. For the people actually displaced. No effect on anyone else.
It also creates an incentive for smart kids at a low performing school not to leave, which is a good thing.
I don't get 10. Marginal meaning "Not likely to make top 10% in a good school, but with committed, involved enough parents that they're screwing around with the system to get their kid into college"? I think that if low functioning schools got an infusion of kids and parents like that (and a meaningful infusion: four years, not a couple of months), it could make a difference.
The constitution of the State of Minnesota guarantees everybody access to state-provided higher education. In practice, this has now been determined to mean that anyone can go to community college, which, frankly, doesn't seem like that bad an outcome. If you've been failed by the secondary education system, perhaps spending a couple of years in CC, where there is more access and support for remedial classes and non-traditional student lifestyles, before transferring to a "real" university, is probably a really good outcome for most people.
That said, I still maintain that there are a lot of people who go to college for a 4 year degree, based on their wealth and class position, who would be much better served by doing at most a 2 year degree and spending the rest of the time getting on the job training. Especially in business/finance/etc.
I agree with 10. Motivated students with motivated parents aren't the typical candidates for gaming the system trying to gain admission to any college at all. We're not talking about competing for a limited number of ivy-league spots, here.
40 kids, with pushy parents who don't live in the district, come to the school and displace 40 kids who live there, went to elementary school with other kids in the class. And the 40 kids come because they know they're 'better' than the 800 kids already in the school. (Let's just hold class and race constant, to avoid variables). No way that could go wrong.
(Obviously, my concerns are not valid for NYC, which is already sui generis in this, as in so many other things.)
If they're really such evil brats, the local kids can kill them and eat them.
If they're just children with concerned parents, concerned parents are likely to have some effect on the environment their kids are going to spend the next four years in. Also, if the education in the presumably lesser school is that fucked up, then who's to say the transferring students are going to come out on top?
You should have to be in the top 10% of the school you spent most of your high school career in, not the school you graduated from: moving for the last term of your senior year shouldn't affect anything. (This is a minor issue, of course.)
I think this is a major issue, actually. How do you distinguish Kid A, who transfers in December of his senior year, and Kid B, son of migrant workers who moves erratically his whole life? There are a ton of kids of migrant workers, and a huge amount of turnover at low-performing schools.
17: List the schools the kid attended, and see how many of them, representing what fraction of her high school career, she would have been 10% in. And then mess around with the formula not to punish frequent movers, but to put people who spent most of their high school time in one school competing with that school.
I will say that there's a good shot that if parents start transferring their kids to 'bad' schools to try to take advantage of the top 10% admissions rule, that it will destroy the diversity function of the rule -- that you'd end up with middle/upper-middle class, largely white kids, taking the majority the top 10% seats, which would suck. But I do think that it would have an effect on desegregating the schools, which would be an independently good thing.
Speaking of the yout', did anyone link to this HuffPo piece about the decline of homophobia among English straight boys? I'm somewhat skeptical, and of course, I don't think it translates across the Atlantic very well.
I live in a liberal bubble, and my kids know how I feel about things, so they may be sheltering me. But at 12 for Sally and 10 for Newt, they ask questions about homophobia suggesting that they haven't encountered it firsthand -- it's not standard pre-teen taunting vocabulary in their experience. Sally was doing something on gay marriage for social studies, and was asking me what the serious arguments against were because she'd never run into anyone who she knew not to support it.
Again, NYC, liberal bubble, but take it for what it's worth.
Remember when everyone assumed America was too racist to elect Obama? There's a similar thing going on with homophobia.
For example, Heebie U had an openly gay president a few years ago. He is super charismatic and likable. Being charismatic and likable trumps being gay. On the other hand, if kids are looking for reasons to torment a kid, I'm sure being gay still shows up quite often.
There are out kids at Heebie U, and kids who would be terrified to be out. It doesn't take many violent bullies to create a hostile environment, and it's not always consistent who feels like there is a hostile environment, but most kids are here really not homophobic. And that's semi-rural Texas for you.
Mmm. The problem with homophobia is that kids are such a non-mobile, captive audience: even if there's much less of it than there used to be, if you're stuck with your own family, or teachers, or classmates making your life miserable, it doesn't help that they're out of step with the majority.
America wasn't too racist to elect Obama, but large portions of it were just racist enough to freak the fuck out when he got elected.
I'm not sure how that part of the analogy extends to homophobia, which is why its a good thing analogies are banned.
Well, the claim is only that amongst the kids, there's much less of it. I think it's still pretty horrendous among their parents.
I'm not sure how that part of the analogy extends to homophobia, which is why its a good thing analogies are banned.
It wasn't an analogy. It was a refresher. It said "Remember, these things are not uniform across demopgraghics, my son."
Oh, I guess I'm just hopelessly behind the times, because I hate that "that's so gay" phrase and my kids do not say it in my hearing. My kids - especially the two teenagers - are internet-reared equal-rights-for-everyone types, but I will ask them if that coincides with what they see.
Relatedly, in the window of a cake shop in Oxford today I saw a wedding cake that was a model of someone's wedding top table, with another tiny wedding cake on it, and 2 men cutting it. The 9 year old asked who those 2 men were, and I just said they were the men getting married. It was a cute cake. They also had a cake version of the Radcliffe Camera, which was amazing - I am going to bribe Newt or Sally to ask for it next birthday.
19 -- Actually, I think Cal has (or had) something like this 10% rule. In the 80s if not still?
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/admissions/freshman/california-residents/local-path/index.html
9%
Participating schools only.
Ooh, there's a picture of it online.
If I were committed and insane enough, I could do that in gingerbread, with fondant to smooth the roof. The details would take forever, but gingerbread keeps -- if it took a week to assemble the thing, it'd take a week. But thinking about doing it in cake, I think getting it done fast enough that it wouldn't go stale or collapse or something would be way beyond me.
29: I wasn't meaning so much to accuse you of analogizing as to point out that what I had to say about it wasn't actually very relevant.
Oh, looks who's backpedalling now! Backpeddler.
re: 30.1
FWIW, there was an article in the Graun recently which claimed that homophobia is increasingly not the norm among teenagers. A friend with kids in their late teens claims that they -- raised in a very not-majority-white, and also not very rich part of London -- pretty much don't have any of the prejudices that were largely the norm when he (and I) was growing up.
I saw a wedding cake that was a model of someone's wedding top table, with another tiny wedding cake on it, and 2 men cutting it
"Are you having a themed wedding?"
"Yes, the theme is "themed weddings"."
A friend with kids in their late teens claims that they -- raised in a very not-majority-white, and also not very rich part of London -- pretty much don't have any of the prejudices that were largely the norm when he (and I) was growing up.
Terrible. Thirty years ago they would have had unrestricted access to a wide range of prejudices, all free at the point of use. I blame Tony Blair.
35: he pedals backwards while peddling backs?
Mmm.
There you again with the taunting.
Yeah, I don't mean to be declaring victory over racism/homophobia/sexism in general, there's all sorts of stuff going on under the radar. But I think that the last twenty years or so of open racism/sexism/homophobia being more and more consistently viewed as publicly inappropriate have had a real effect: if you can cut down the usage of slurs enough, after a while people aren't thinking them but not saying them, they're just not going there mentally.
re: 38
As another data point, my nephew -- classic central Scotland ned, right down to the tracky bottoms, and the lowered car with big exhaust -- doesn't seem to have any of those prejudices either. He has gay aunties, I suppose, so has always had at least one non-heterosexual couple around, but still.
Given how hateful people are, I assume there's something like a Newtonian conservation of hate that must ultimately hold. And given that, I can't help wondering where all of the hate is going to land. Oh, wait: Mexicans and Muslims brown people. Order restored!
A lot of homophobia is situational, rather than dispositional. The level of homophobia in a crowd of identical people at a Radiohead concert vs. a football match is likely to be very different. The situations call for performing different norms of group identity.
Football song sung at Brighton & Hove Albion fans: "We can see you holding hands".
I believe Barney Frank had a line that was something like "Americans are more racist and less homophobic than they say they are," which always seemed about right to me.
Ah, here it is. "He [Barney Frank] thinks the average American is "less homophobic than he thinks he's supposed to be and more racist than he's willing to admit."
That sounds about right.
if parents start transferring their kids to 'bad' schools to try to take advantage of the top 10% admissions rule
but this rule has been in place for more than a decade, already, hasn't it? Is there any evidence that people are moving in this way? I bet not.
As far as the socio-economic approach, I know someone who helped Michigan devise it's initial formula after race was ruled out. They were supposedly using a "distance" factor that had both geographic and social distance. Thus a kid from the UP got a boost similar to one from detroit. Seems eminently reasonable, but I'm out of touch with how it worked in practice and how it's been updated since.
Nothing to add on homophobia. Or rather, carry on you homos.
Is there any evidence that people are moving in this way? I bet not.
According to the study referenced in the excerpt in the OP, Julie Berry Cullen et al. (2011) found the law created a perverse incentive for students to transfer to a high school with lower-achieving peers, in order to graduate in that school's top percent.
Ooh, there's a picture of it online.
Have you watched any Cake Boss? I don't make cakes but I nevertheless found the first season surprisingly enjoyable.
I lost interest after starting the second season because it showed less of the fiddly details of the cake decoration, but the first season had about the right balance for me.
50: Yeah, but that assumes that a kid just below the top percentage cutoff at a good school will totally kick ass at a lower-performing school, instead of getting dragged down by lowered expectations and issues in the classroom.
No access to the paper itself, but from the abstract they apparently looked at school transitions from 8-10th grade and mention their choosing neighborhood versus "more competitive" magnet schools.
Our analysis of students' school transitions between 8th and 10th grade three years before and after the policy change reveals that this incentive influences enrollment choices in the anticipated direction. Among the subset of students with both motive and opportunity for strategic high school choice, as many as 25 percent enroll in a different high school to improve the chances of being in the top ten percent. Strategic students tend to choose the neighborhood high school in lieu of more competitive magnet schools and, regardless of own race, typically displace minority students from the top ten percent pool. The net effect of strategic behavior is to slightly decrease minority students' representation in the pool.
Hmmm, didn't check the wikipedia for underlying academic refs.
The conclusion seems to be, some families did this, but only if their kid was on the bubble. From the conclusion:
Though overall response rates are low, take-up rates of strategic high school
opportunities conditional on having a motive to respond may be as high as one-in-four,
depending on how narrowly motive is defined.
I take the "overall response rates are low" as validation of my initial assertion - not many people moved to game the system.
Would it do a poor school much good to have 10% rich families move in, if the 10% have an explicit interest in not improving the 90% much? it's not like the rankings-to-real-estate game that could make everyone better off.
55: I think that poor families are more likely to benefit in a mostly well-off school, where you can get the well-off to kick in a little extra so that everyone can afford to go on the big field trip, than in a majority-poor school, where nobody gets to go on the field trip at all. Asking the 10% "rich" (more likely UMC) to kick in 10x the cost of the trip so 9 other kids can afford to join their kid is a bit much - at that point, most UMC families will probably say "screw it - I'll just take my kid on enrichment activities privately."