All of educationrealist's Comments + Replies

What makes "higher than 600 on ONE section" a cutoff above which counts as an "eminently respectable" score? Would you accept "mediocre"? ;-)

I apologize for the late response. I do not know where you come from, but I have personally reviewed the math placement criteria of hundreds of middle schools and high schools. Teacher recommendations are always on the list, whereas I have never seen a school which used "principal recommendations". Wake County, NC's placement criteria: http://www.wcpss.net/policy-files/series/policies/5611-bp.html Alamance County's placement criteria: http://tinyurl.com/d35dtfy I will find more if you'd like me to, but teacher recommendations are plainly listed. In my experience, principals generally back their math teachers when it comes to which students get placed where. The schools do not outright assign math placement based on race; it is slightly more subtle than this. An example would be Wake County, in North Carolina. Wake County used a model called the "effectiveness index". A student is given a score based on: 1) Their previous test scores 2) Their income level (trinary: free lunch, reduced-price lunch, normal) 3) Their race. If two students with exactly equal grades and test scores were evaluated using the effectiveness index, with one student being a poor black, and another being a middle-class white, the former would be given a lower residual score, and therefore would be less likely to be placed into an advanced class. These scores were also used to determine how well a school is doing at teaching. If the poor black student did as well as the white student, the difference between his score and his effectiveness index residual would be larger than the white student's, and so the school would be rewarded for overcoming the "risk factors" of being poor and black and managing to instruct him anyway. Wake county is currently doing away with the effectiveness index, replacing it with EVAAS, a system which takes into account nothing but test scores. Source: http://content.news14.com/pdf/sas_report.pdf Can you point me to a federal settlement forced on a school that suspend

Do you have citeable evidence that principals are facing lawsuits for using 'teacher recommendations' to either assign students to limited slots, or to discourage students from competing for those slots (e.g. tell students that a teacher recommendation is required, knowing that one group of students will see it as more of a bar to entry than another, resulting in a smaller proportion of that group even competing for the slot). Because either of those actions are indistinguishable from using race as a factor in determining access to classes.