Voila. Next year NY State was crowing about what a great job it was doing closing the racial gap. They mentioned, at the end of the report, that they didn’t know why the grades of the white kids were falling.

Then teachers wonder why taxpayers close their wallets?

No. Really? Get out. I’m astonished.

“It isn’t an application of the “one drop” rule.”

Joanne’s post is. The switch is, as you say, an innovative way out of a dumb problem.

Race enters into it because historically schools could “hide” failing minority groups in the larger group average. An example (extreme to make the point): Consider a school with a 90% graduation rate. Looks pretty good and is above the national average. Things looks a *bit* different, though, if the graduation rate is 100% for the white kids who make up 90% of the school and 0% for the black kids who make up the remaining 10%.

NCLB breaks out by race/ethnicity so that situations like the hypothetical one above show that every black child is failing to graduate from the school even though the school’s average is quite good on the whole.

Whether we *should* care about things like this is a separate issue, but this is *why* NCLB breaks things out the way it does.

-Mark Roulo

http://dancallahan.net/2008/04/27/schools-play-the-game-to-save-themselves

Yes–there is goofiness when it comes to trying to define either race or ethnicity (both pretty arbitrary and inconsequential from a biological standpoint), but given our history of discrimination based on the above, I support the disaggregation of general categories (and their typical self-definitions). Even socio-economic status is at best a proxy measurement–yet yields some pretty important approximations of how well we are doing at meeting educational needs–and based on what.

But cooking the books is cooking the books, plain and simple. Ask some simple questions–what bias is introduced by the actions of these administrators (that of making the school look better on paper), and who benefits (umm–the administrators?) Research inevitably is hampered by bias, but responsible administrators act to minimize it. Unethical administrators introduce it for their own benefit. Forgive the pun, but let’s call a spade a spade.

And why is the schools grade dependent on race-based reporting anyway? Either the kids are leaning or they aren’t - race shouldn’t enter into it.

Rather then diagnose and solve a problem they just define it out of existence. Or rather they define it out of existence as a problem for which they’re responsible. The weighty intellect who came up with this solution’ll probably be rewarded with a promotion. Having solved the problem of having to deal with a problem a promotion’s only right.

What part of “can do”/”can’t do” do we misunderstand!?