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Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Monday, August 11th, 2008 9:20am PDT - promote requested by original submitter jwray.

School performance measurements that focus on the quality of the graduating students while ignoring the quality of the incoming students are fallacious. I have little doubt that 6-year olds about to start classes at the worst inner-city schools have lower IQs on average than 6-year olds about to start classes at the best public schools in expensive suburbs, because intelligence is partly hereditary and correlated with income.

A better metric is this:

For each student coming in to the school, record his standardized test score. Three years later, record his standardized test score again, and whether he has left the school. Counting only the students that remained at the school for the duration, compute the average increase in test scores. (otherwise a school can fake progress without any individual student actually increasing his test score, through the dropping out of the low-scoring students)

This is like a 6 parter all of which can be found on youtube. Aggree of diagree with him, he is definitly the spokes person for classical liberalism and one of my favorite econimists. I recomend if you have about an hour to burn to watch all 6 parts, it is very very interesting.

I consdier myself a libritarian, and even I didn't condisder the posibility of private education on such a scale.

part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMgz2W3taw8&feature=related
part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdUHbs-x5sc&feature=related
part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJtNJ5-Ma2w&feature=related
part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkPfY5MJQZQ&feature=related
part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_U_kKxwWps

>> ^jwray:
School performance measurements that focus on the quality of the graduating students while ignoring the quality of the incoming students are fallacious. I have little doubt that 6-year olds about to start classes at the worst inner-city schools have lower IQs on average than 6-year olds about to start classes at the best public schools in expensive suburbs, because intelligence is partly hereditary and correlated with income.
A better metric is this:
For each student coming in to the school, record his standardized test score. Three years later, record his standardized test score again, and whether he has left the school. Counting only the students that remained at the school for the duration, compute the average increase in test scores. (otherwise a school can fake progress without any individual student actually increasing his test score, through the dropping out of the low-scoring students)


you assume that standardized testing can chart progress instead of peoples abilities to take standardized tests. I recomend reading up on mutiple intellegence theory and decide how one can truely measure intellegence with tests.

MI is largely irrelevant to school assessments. School assessments (not to be confused with college admissions tests) are not meant to judge your overall ability as a person, they're meant to judge whether you have leaned what you were supposed to learn in school, such as reading, writing, math, history, geography, science, etc. People don't go to school to learn how to play football or juggle well.

>> ^jwray:
MI is largely irrelevant to school assessments. School assessments (not to be confused with college admissions tests) are not meant to judge your overall ability as a person, they're meant to judge whether you have leaned what you were supposed to learn in school, such as reading, writing, math, history, geography, science, etc. People don't go to school to learn how to play football or juggle well.


Taking tests in a skill in and of itself and doesn't accuretly judge if those things were learned or not is what I am saying. Hope that clears up what I ment to say. In the modern teching envirenment, teacthers are conditioned to teach students on a student per student basis; not everyone learns the same, and not everyone can recall information the same. A "test" is only a very small way one can gauge what a student has learned. Hope that clears up what I was getting at.

But, to your credit, I misread your comment entirely. I think you have a valid point of using testing to track students improvment. Just the idea of a standardized test where you lock 30 people in a room and set them against a clock doesn't always test if the student is learning, but tests if they can not freak out and answer the correct answer. As long as you are advicating some over all grading tracking instead of a single test, I would whole heartedly agree with your statement...language can be a tricky one in these cases.

So many views and so few votes! Boo, Milton is worth your time, trust me!

My main thought at the end of this was "where has television like this gone?"

The debate at the end was mostly what impressed me. Rarely is it this informative, with real debate from people who're both knowledgeable, and seemingly unrehearsed.

These days "experts" all have talking points, and repeat them ad nauseum. When they do go off-script, it's usually a YouTube moment that makes them look like a fool. This looked like a real academic debate, which just doesn't get televised enough.

In that debate I think Friedman failed to address the concerns about increased class stratification in levels of education. In other words, "what happens to the difficult students?" and "what happens to the poor students?"

Friedman just rubbed his magic capitalism medallion and said "if they can choose their school, they won't be difficult students" and didn't really have anything to say about the poor ones, except to say that he'd already "covered" poverty in an earlier episode of his series as if that settled the issue.

All in all, very interesting. Worth watching, and upvoting.

Taking tests in a skill in and of itself and doesn't accuretly judge if those things were learned or not is what I am saying.

That hypothesis is unfalsifiable by definition. I mean how do you know how well the test results match up with some notion of "real ability", except by comparing those results to the results of some other tests?

Yes, "not everyone learns the same things". But if you put a random sampling of vocabulary on the test, you still can still get a good estimate of a student's vocabulary. The larger the sample, the narrower the confidence interval, of course. Random sampling is a bit more complicated in other subjects, but it still works.

Those "test taking skills" are nothing but elementary deductive reasoning (in the case of multiple choice, and almost all standardized tests are multiple choice). If a student doesn't comprehend that sort of deductive reasoning, that is a deficiency in itself that will have negative effects reaching far beyond test-taking. Likewise the ability to stay calm and think clearly under pressure is a skill that has uses far beyond test-taking and should be considered just as important as mastery of the subject.

Though test taking skills are helpful in getting high scores, they are not sufficient for getting high scores on a test. If you know the subject perfectly, you do not even need to use elimination or reductions on multiple choice questions, and you get a high grade regardless of test-taking skills. If you know test-taking skills perfectly, but don't know the subject, you're still getting a low grade on the test. So the issue you raise doesn't make these tests useless, it just makes them a bit less accurate.

The "tests don't really measure knowledge" mantra is, I think, comforting wishful thinking coming from parents of underachieving students.

There are intangible aspects of education that are difficult to measure directly, but they contribute towards general problem solving and reasoning ability.

>> ^jwray:
The "tests don't really measure knowledge" mantra is, I think, comforting wishful thinking coming from parents of underachieving students.
There are intangible aspects of education that are difficult to measure directly, but they contribute towards general problem solving and reasoning ability.

I don't exactly disagree, but I'd like to make an observation: I regularly scored in the 99th percentile on standardized tests while in elementary and high school, I am also a terrible student.

My scores show you that my parents made lots of money, and this, incorrectly in my case, implies that I will be academically and economically successful.

We see high scores in my case, and low scores in others, and I see little or no correlation with the methods used by the schools. If the externalities set the starting point at such different places, is it not reasonable to consider that they may also functionally define the rate of improvement as well?

How would we know, with your proposed system, if the externalities overshadow, and relegate the educational methodology to statistical irrelevance?

How would we know, with your proposed system, if the externalities overshadow, and relegate the educational methodology to statistical irrelevance?


Stratify the statistics. For example, for several ranges of scores, compute the average improvement over X years for students who entered the school in that range of scores. This would expose whether the school specializes in catering to a particular range of students.

>> ^jwray:
Stratify the statistics. For example, for several ranges of scores, compute the average improvement over X years for students who entered the school in that range of scores. This would expose whether the school specializes in catering to a particular range of students.

But what if the improvements have little or nothing to do with the school, but the common environment which the students share? Beyond keeping an unschooled control group I don't see how you could separate the influences.

From my experience I am inclined to believe that community and socio-economic status have a very powerful, perhaps a completely overriding influence on education and social development.

What if the mere presence of a school is the only contributing factor heaped on top of a nearly infinite set of variables which comprise a child's environment?

People have argued for decades about which schools are better, but what if none of them are?

>> ^NetRunner:
My main thought at the end of this was "where has television like this gone?"
The debate at the end was mostly what impressed me. Rarely is it this informative, with real debate from people who're both knowledgeable, and seemingly unrehearsed.
These days "experts" all have talking points, and repeat them ad nauseum. When they do go off-script, it's usually a YouTube moment that makes them look like a fool. This looked like a real academic debate, which just doesn't get televised enough.
In that debate I think Friedman failed to address the concerns about increased class stratification in levels of education. In other words, "what happens to the difficult students?" and "what happens to the poor students?"
Friedman just rubbed his magic capitalism medallion and said "if they can choose their school, they won't be difficult students" and didn't really have anything to say about the poor ones, except to say that he'd already "covered" poverty in an earlier episode of his series as if that settled the issue.
All in all, very interesting. Worth watching, and upvoting.


I see varius ads for "problem" children all the time. There is money to be made in it, only makes since that there would be a market in it

As it is now, the ridgedness of the school system has a hard time rolling in all the different types of students more than it has solutions. I would be really interested to see how the free market solution would play itself out personally. Sometimes it takes more than a board to figure something out, it takes an entrepreneur.

^ Yes, and yet still we have problems with children...even though there's money to be made.

I wonder why.

>> ^NetRunner:
^ Yes, and yet still we have problems with children...even though there's money to be made.
I wonder why.


I don't have children, so I can't really address that as fully as someone else...but my guess is not enough electroshock theropy!

Joking aside, the solution isn't really the debate here, but rather the problem of if there was a place for them. No doubt, if there is money to be had for children with any kind of special need, be it handicaped or out of control teen, there would be some specialty school or set of teachers for them. It would be interesting to see what types of things developed in a free market system. Right now, it is a board of directors that may or my not be very good at coming up with out of the box ideas. If you opened it up a little, not kill the public school system mind you, I think it would be a far better solution.

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