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It's viewed as a form of juking the stats by some people, since the point of standardized testing is typically to measure the performance of teachers, schools, school districts, etc. If there are differences in policy on grade promotion, that makes it harder to do a fair comparison.
Just as a really simplified example, let's say low-performing students in state A learn approximately 0.7 of a grade level each year, while in B they learn 0.6. State A has social promotion, while state B holds students back a year if they are doing poorly. So in grade 4 standardized testing, the low-performers in A would be working at a grade level of 2.8 (4x0.7) while in B they would be working at a grade level of 3.0 (5x0.6). Someone just looking at the aggregate stats would assume B has more effective teachers, when the opposite is true.
This probably has a pretty minimal impact since the number of students held back is in the low single digits, but it is a confounding variable.
The bigger problem in my opinion is that standardized testing really emphasizes getting the bottom 10-20% over the bare minimum bar, while ignoring the top 10-20%. These inter-state comparisons are really just measuring which states are better at handholding the remedial students enough to just barely feign competence.
Honestly, the ideal way to measure it is buy tracking an individual student through the system and using something like “median student improvement per year” as a way to evaluate the school itself. A school system where students improve by 0.5 a year is objectively a bad school, no matter how the class behind them does.
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Doesn't seem like a real objection anyway -- data can always be adjusted by birth year or held-back status. The school obviously has the data, even if it's not currently being collected in a way that would enable it being used.
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Partially. It's also just used on an individual level to see if the children are learning. If one of the kids doesn't pass the reading test, you know he can't read well enough and needs more effort. For example by having him repeat the year. If none of the kids pass the reading test, there's something wrong with the school.
Ultimately, the difference is between teaching the kids to read (even if for some kids this takes longer than average), or not teaching the kids to read. Surely we can all agree that the first option is preferable, and if that also leads to the statistics looking better, that just means the measurement is valid (for once).
Getting the bottom 10-20% over the bar (even if this takes extra effort) is by far more important. You need to be able to read to participate in modern society. If the bottom 10-20% of people can't read, you get huge societal problems.
The geniuses can save themselves - they're smart. Ideally you have tailored education for everyone, but that's not possible.
Schools are supposed to be assessing learning on a more thorough, ongoing basis. If a student can't read at their grade level, that should be made very clear to the parents repeatedly throughout the year. The point of standardized testing is to keep the schools honest and get information on relative performance between schools or districts.
With respect to the bottom 10-20%, spending huge amounts of resources to get someone from a grade 4 reading level to a grade 5 reading level won't help them avoid getting swindled by someone with a law degree. Also, I suspect that there is a very significant overlap between the people who cannot read a basic contract, and the people who would not understand such a contract even if it were explained to them. The latter category cannot function independently in modern society and likely need some form of assisted living arrangement to help them navigate daily life.
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At the risk of sounding unfair, this seems like a rationalization for equality or “fairness.” I don’t see the huge societal problems. I assume most people who can’t read are not very smart, so reading won’t help much.
OTOH, geniuses can use what they learn more effectively. Competition and markets lead to them generating consumer surplus they cannot fully appropriate. Therefore, we should focus on them first.
Except our education system is so bad, I am sure we could fail at that and ruin the geniuses.
People who can't read are more easily taken advantage of. In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the narrator's grandmother saved up enough money over decades to purchase a plot of land to build a home. Once she thinks she's saved up enough, she hands over the money and signs a piece of paper that she thinks is the deed to the land. It wasn't.
It's difficult to overstate just how shitty the general atmosphere can get when you have a huge percent of the population that can be easily exploited like that. Increase the number of easily exploitable people and you increase the number of people exploiting them. Actually, I think anyone who's against low-skilled immigration can grok what I'm saying here. There will always be an underclass, but not every underclass is the same. I would prefer the kind that work hard and live in a high-trust way. Someone who can tally up money when the register is broken. Someone who can read through the terms of a lease. Someone who views smiles positively instead as a warning sign.
Geniuses are doing just fine. In many states, if you have a genius IQ you can actually qualify for an Gifted IEP and get a bus to another school district if they have a gifted program that your local school lacks. There are AP classes in most high schools, there are community college options, anyone can skip ahead an elementary year at any school in the country.
The ones who aren't doing just fine are the 120 IQ people who are too smart to need to learn how to study, not smart enough to seek out additional learning opportunities. They end up being bored in school and never develop the skills needed to get ahead.
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Depends on how you measure efficiency. Which school is better? With functionally illiterate students released in 3 years or one that releases students actually capable of reading and understanding in 5 years? (obviously in reality that applies to small sample, also threat of being held back encourages to take it more seriously)
I second this approach of thinking, at the end, the goal of school is to pump out students actually capable of reading and understanding. Pumping out illiterate students contradict the function of school, school is NOT day care facility and we should not treat them as such
A school pumping out illiterate students should do worst on stats, State A's school (0.7/year) in @odd_primes's example is a worst school than State B's school (0.6/year), even though State B's school has less effective teachers
Just like a company, the administration stucture matters, it might increase or decrease the overall profitability of the company, and State B's school's administration makes their school more functional at their goal, depite less effective teachers
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