I thought the Lind article was interesting , and I had previously not heard of the Overton Window concept; also interesting. I did not find, however, direct support for Loyek's very specific statement. I can see that his statement is implied, though a little exaggerated, if one starts breaking the data apart by ethnicity. What is reasonable, and what we can all accept, is self-evident. Combining data from higher performing students with lower performing, will give naturally, a result somewhere in the middle. If the mix of higher and lower performing students included in the PISA studies varies from country to country this will obviously affect country rankings. So we are back to the old problem of making sure when we compare two things we are not trying to compare the incomparable. In this case, however, the comparison is meant to compare educational results between countries; not between cohorts of the same racial, cultural or national origin. The result is valid on a country basis. It is invalid to say we do as well as other countries, unless one is not including minorities as part of the country!!! As the results show, the U.S. does much worse than some other countries. That is the result we must focus on. Breaking the data down will help us understand why we compare poorly and where to focus efforts for improvement.
Lind, if he is right, is showing us how politically useful the country to country comparison figures could be, and how useless they might be, unless we break the data down, if we want to learn how to get better K-12 educational results.
I have posted here on ET, at length, on the effect of doing away with tracking that came into vogue following LBJ's "Great Society" initiatives. Should we return to tracking? If we were to, in some schools the college prep track would be nearly all white, and the vocational track nearly all minority. That's not likely to be politically acceptable.
I would not want to see a return to tracking in any case, however, without returning to the pre-LBJ public school model of substantial curricula in the arts (music, visual, and dance), languages, vocational training and physical education. These latter programs are all examples of areas that have suffered cut-backs post LBJ, and all areas that must receive full support if tracking is to be morally justifiable.
Crucially, any return to the prior model would have no chance of succeeding unless there were a simultaneous return to the prior educational paradigm in which responsibility was gradually shifted from the teacher onto the student. Prior to the Great Society, a "failing student" in secondary education meant exactly that. Today it means a failing School or Teacher!
There are, in the U.S., secondary and high schools that haven't changed one whit for a century or more. These are our elite private schools. There emission standards accomplish what tracking in U.S. public schools used to accomplish. And their insistence on making students responsible for their own education and behavior used to be a feature of U.S. public schools.
Do some Charter Schools represent de facto tracking, I wonder? Do charter schools place more responsibility on the student? If this is true, it may explain, in part, why some charter schools are successful in comparison with public school alternatives, where students are lumped together regardless of their abilities, and the teachers are made responsible for both a students academic progress and therefore, by extension, their behavior in class as well.
It seems political correctness has created a monster that defies logic.
