<p>Predictably, people are always anxious to hear about the Philosopher’s Stone that will turn leaden circumstances into golden achievement. Starting with the proposition that if only everyone went to school, or went to high school, or graduated from high school, or went to college, everyone would be so much better off! And then we want to hear that if only we had more dedicated teachers, or more flexible work rules, or better funding, or smaller classes, or uniforms, the barriers to social advancement would magically cease to matter.</p>
<p>None of it is true. Educational improvement is a matter of unsexy marginal gains, not alchemy. I am ambivalent about stories like this, because they DO inspire people, but they are also B.S. and overpromise to take advantage of various political agendas. I don’t understand why xiggi buys into it and shills for it, although I understand perfectly why someone like him would want to buy into SOMETHING and have SOMETHING to shill for. </p>
<p>This dovetails well, of course, with missiepie’s adjacent thread about whether schools track their graduates’ college performance. Of course they don’t! Why would they possibly want to be judged by outcomes they lack the power to affect? Their own graduation rate and college acceptance rate are at least somewhat in their control. Sure, college performance would be a great way to figure out which high schools work better than others, but (a) it’s going to be really depressing to decide that high school A is doing a great job because 25% of its graduates finish college, and the norm for its students’ social class would be 15%, and (b) even if we knew that high school A was doing a great job like that, we would have a lot or trouble figuring out what exactly it was doing that was so great (and whether that something had been changed by mistake in the decade since the students on whom its reputation now rests were being educated). Who is going to start spending money for that?</p>