DD,
   As a professional educator, I think I should concern myself very much 
with finding approaches that give my students the best chance at 
success. This is especially true of teaching writing, which isn't just a 
content area that can be lectured to them. I also think I have an 
obligation as a citizen to care deeply about what is happening in our 
inner cities. (The people running our cities are us, insofar as we have 
a democracy.) I'm not a big fan of no child left behind, but I do think 
our schools should be accountable, and I think teachers fall too easily 
into a pattern of blaming parents, neighborhoods, the media, and so on, 
and not their own teaching.  
   What I worry about with tests like the SAT is that people think they 
measure capabilities rather than a rather narrowly defined current 
ability. My experience has been that they underestimate the abilities of 
many students.
   I don't think you meant the analogy to go that far, but my students 
are not Forest Gumps in any way, shape, or form. If they want to be 
doctors, they have to pass the same chemistry courses as other students. 
To an extent unpredicted by their admissions profiles, they are doing 
just that.
  I think it's naive to think that success in this country is merely a 
matter of hard work and innate ability. Like good doctors, we can't turn 
away patients on the grounds that they deserve to be sick.

Craig

DD Farms wrote:
> At 08:59 AM 9/17/2007, Craig Hancock wrote:
>> 1) I have been told repeatedly from admissions officers that high school
>> average is a much better predictor of college success than SAT or ACT
>> scores. . . .
>
> DD: It was also true back in the dim dead days of long ago, when I was 
> studying the issue. It also correlated highly with IQ. Lumped 
> together, it improved the prediction significantly. At that time.
>
>> 3) Even when average scores for a group are higher or lower than 
>> averages
>> for other groups, that can not and should not be used as a predictor of
>> how any one member of that group might perform. In other words, many
>> African-Americans score very high on those tests. Many Caucasions score
>> very low. Group identity, especially one as rough as "race", is not a
>> particularly good predictor of ability or of individual success. . . .
>
> DD: Don't know of any studies that used race as a dummy variable, but 
> I have been out of the interested group for a long time.
>
>> 4) We all need to admit that some groups are underperforming in very
>> painful ways. High school graduation rates in the inner cities are
>> woefully low, something that should trouble all of us. . . .
>
> DD: Why should it trouble me? Or any but their parental units, or 
> them? Come on now, they graduate those with basically certificates of 
> completion for showing up for some acceptable percent of the time. 
> Leave no child behind implies that all children must graduate from 
> high school, and if they don't it isn't their fault, it is the local 
> school system that must them be, "Punished." Let those that rule in 
> the inner cities decide on that.
>
>> We need to do a
>> much better job of addressing that problem. Many of our schools are now
>> more deeply segregated than they were in the 1950's, and we now have 
>> deep
>> pockets of poverty in a relatively rich country.
>
> DD: No change there.
>
>> For years now, New York
>> state has been defying court orders to equalize spending in its schools.
>> (They might say "slowly complying".) Because we fund our schools largely
>> through property taxes, wealthy districts have tended to have more money
>> available for their schools, though poor districts have the greater 
>> need.
>> This is a national issue, not a local one.
>
> DD: Why?
>
>
>> 5) We need to think of all our citizens as important resources for the
>> future of this country. And we will do a much better job of educating 
>> all
>> those citizens if we approach the task with high expectations. In my
>> program at least, I can say that high expectations have been highly
>> realistic.
>
> DD: A nice change of topic, but I agree with the self fulfilling 
> prophecy concept. Works in the Military, Basic Training. Think Forrest 
> Gump.
>
>
>> 6) None of this means that we should conspire toward a lowering of
>> standards. Standards mattter. I believe we should make standards far 
>> more
>> explicit and that we should have programs in place to help all students
>> along that path. To me, that means much more explicit understanding of
>> what literacy entails, and a much more explicit mentoring into those
>> literacy roles. If we want to be honest and not just politically 
>> correct,
>> then let us celebrate success when we find it and be honest about our 
>> own
>> deep failures.
>
> DD Succinctly phrased, "Lets have a clear and operationally define 
> statement of the mission." 
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