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Douglas_Knight comments on Problems in Education - Less Wrong Discussion
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Could you provide a source for that?
If you "know that there isn't actually any way to fix the problems," why do you care if the grants are scored in insane ways, or the interventions targeted demographically, or that 98% of the money is embezzled?
(Incidentally, a reason to give away incentives demographically rather than by test score is that they become an incentive to sandbag the early scores. Which could then produce the illusion that the program improved scores.)
What did the guy claim to have spent the $800,000 on?
How much predictive value do you lose if you just use 1 year? Using a single test is transparent. Is that politically good or bad?
(I guess I'm assuming that "test" means a standardized test. If it means comparing students across different tests written by different teachers, it might not seem fair to use them naively, but sometimes transparency is more important.)
This claim definitely conflicts with my understanding, although perhaps it's true for that portion of resources that is actually up for grabs and not already committed through the normal funding (government) process.
This link is more in line with my understanding, that is, that most resources come from state and local government, and most of those resources are not awarded through "grants," but rather that local resources generally stay with local schools and state resources are divided in other ways but not usually through award of a grant. But I'd be interested in hearing if my (not heavily researched/sourced) understanding is incorrect either generally or at least for some portion of schools.
Some quotes from the link:
Thanks!
That link did imply that the 10% of funding that is federal is structured as grants, which surprised me. Though it's not clear that it means exactly the same thing as in this post.
That sounds close to a tautology to me. Aren't grant applications the way that one grabs resources that are up for grabs? (OK, I can think of other examples, like specializing in disabled students, but...)
Yeah, I didn't phrase that very clearly. My thinking was drawing a distinction between (1) what may be the smaller portion of resources that is always up for grabs (and that is perhaps mainly grants) and (2) the larger portion of resources that is not discretionary in the same way because it is awarded by the government without the competitive grant application process. Of course, there may still be opportunities to also influence how that larger portion of resources is distributed, e.g., lobbying or maybe gaming the system to affect the distribution in some way.
Hm, I'm surprised you're surprised. I thought it was widely understood that giving and withholding grants was the main way the federal government got around its lack of de jure authority over them and exerted pressure on state and local governments and school districts* - you can read coverage of the sequester's effect on them and the funding comes as grants, and Obama's "Race To The Top" program was purely about competing for federal grants.
* because they are in effect insolvent without federal money
There are several aspects. I knew that federal highway funds are grants for the purpose of making highways to the interstate standards (eg, landing strips), but also conditional on various things, most famously the 55 speed limit. I thought federal school funding was like that. I am fairly surprised to learn that RTTT was zero-sum, but since it was part of the stimulus, I'm not sure that's very informative. I am still unclear on whether the states proposed things to spend the money on, or whether it was an unrestricted prize for winning the contest.
It occurs to me that what could be going on is not that the individual embezzled the grant money, but that the money wound up in the school's general budget. If I believe that most money flowing through the school is from grants, then I conclude that it is needed to pay teacher salaries. So it is a decidedly good thing that it is not spent on ipods.
Using one standardized test to choose placement in an academic route would be called tracking and for some reason is a terrible thing to do.
No, "tracking" is just having different academic routes - what the school is already doing. If you can find someone who has a strong opinion on the difference between tracking based on standardized tests vs local grades, I will be very surprised.
Well, it would be tracking either way, but it wouldn't be called such if it was entirely informal, which is what it appeared based on the OP.