Former Harvard hoops star Duncan feels very, very badly for the children of Texas

Well, to be fair engineering is hard stuff My point was that just because Texas have low drop out rates, does not mean it's a good school system.

 

I've skimmed this thread and it is depressing the state of Texas schools. When I went to Lamar in the late 80's it was the flagship of HISD with a great Magnet program and International Bacclaureate program. My class graduated people who went to Yale, Georgetown, West Point, Airforce Academy, Standford and myself who went to Cal. The only thing I hear about now is how the school is ridden with scandal and how crappy HISD is doing in general.

 

I agree in general, but I feel your use of comparison of college to grade school is a bit unfair. I feel American college, especially the more competitive majors, are designed to be cutthroat. But I don't feel that's how we like to educate at a grade school level.

So yes, in a school system where they cater to the best and the brightest while weeding out the regular kids you would be correct. And I've seen Chinese grade schools actually kind of subscribe to this philosophy in some ways. But I dislike this philosophy. I do prefer American grade school philosophies even if the execution is undeniably lacking IMO.

 

i feel sorry for harvard basketball

 

Yep. I don't understand the 1.8 percent drop-out crap. I went to Alief Elsik and there were 1200 students in my freshman class and less than 700 in my graduating class. Where did all these kids go? I also know my high school was definitely not the worse at the time.

 

it's like being valedictorian of summer school.

 

Actually, I don't think that was the debate, which I thought was 'does Texas do a good job of preparing kids for college?' So, maybe it isn't fair to lump in the private school kids.

But, wait, they have data for that too:

Public School Kids:

* TX: 481 / 504 / 469
* WI: 607 / 614 / 589

Here's a better argument for you. Texas kids are more likely than Wisconsin kids to take the test even if they won't do well. Wisconsin has about 1.3m children, and only 3,002 kids took the SAT for the 2010 dataset, or 0.2% of all kids. Texas has 6.9m kids, and 148,102 kids took the test, or 2.2%. There are probably some demographic differences that I gloss over here (maybe Texas has more 17 year olds and fewer 5 year olds), but I'd be surprised if they accounted for all of the 2% gap.

That would also explain why it is that public school kids in Wisconsin score better than private school kids -- only high-performing public school kids are thinking about college while most private school kids are, whether they've gotten a good education or not. That's not the case in Texas. Though private school Wisconsinites also outperform private school Texans.

I don't know what's going on with those other Wisconsite kids. Maybe they have more non-college career paths open to them through technical/vocational schools or union training or trade apprenticeships while Texas kids feel more pressure to go to college to get job skills.

So, NAEP definitely has the advantage that all kids must take it. It's too bad they don't do a high school test, but they probably want to get kids tested before they start dropping out. If my theory about alternate career paths in Wisconsin is right, maybe that means we're asking the wrong question worrying about college readiness. Maybe we have too many kids going to college who should be doing something else but aren't because the opportunities and infrastructure aren't there.

If we are dead-set on college education, my ideal data set would be: what percentage of all 18 year-olds (publicly and privately educated) take and score at least X on the SAT? No extra points for knocking it out of the park.

 

I've always thought of the ACT as an also-ran compared to the SAT. It looks like that was just a prejudice of mine borne from being educated in Texas. The ACT is taken by 69% of graduates in Wisconsin and by only 33% of Texan graduates.

Wisconsin beat us on the ACT too, btw.

http://www.act.org/news/data/10/states.html