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Re: [Phys-l] How Much Value is Added at Elite Institutions - Response to Haim #2



....
Haim continued "First, parents and students seem to know something
about Stuyvesant that educator assessments clearly fail to discern. .
. . . Second . . . very many of Stuyvesant's students graduate at a
very high level (certainly by comparison to most other high school
graduates) of academic achievement. . . . the real problem is
transparent. It is the ceiling effect. . . .City-wide and state-wide
assessments are simply not designed for academic institutions."

The above has nothing whatsoever to do with the theme of my post: "It
is conceivable that if there were 'Eric Mazurs' or 'John Belchers' at
Korsunsky's high-school and the Stuyvesant High School, scenarios
similar to that at Harvard and MIT might occur. . . . . [[i.e.,
realization that students were not learning much from traditional
passive-student lecture methods followed by a switch to
interactive-engagement pedagogy.]]. . . . , even though all those
institutions are regarded as 'elite.' "

That's nonsense. These schools already have teachers on the high school level equivalence of the Mazurs and Belchers and many others in top universities, who use techniques that have gotten and kept such schools on a high level throughout the years. They use whatever methods work best for the students there, who are selected from the best in the city. The assessments that are used for high schools in general may not be suitable for these students who see such tests as another annoyance to be tolerated.
Here's a typical example: My son attended a top notch comprehensive public high school in our suburban township. I was teaching in the inner city just a few miles away: his school offered courses we could only dream of offering. Every year, when NJ State high school testing "season" arrived we struggled just getting the students' attendance up for test days, plus we emphasized these tests to the detriment of everything else... pep rallies, "drop everything and read" days, guest speakers (athletes and entertainers, usually), and everything we could think of to get our kids pumped for the tests. I asked my son what his school was doing to prepare for the same tests. He looked at me and said, with a straight face, "What test?" When I named the test, his reply was, "Oh, that... we just go in and do it. No big deal." Guess what happened... my school had about 30 to 40% passing reading and about 20% passing math, while his school had 90% passing everything. By the time he was a senior and had taken honors chemistry, honors physics, calculus 1 and 2, and AP chem, he was so ready for college that the first year at a "top 50 university" was like a review of his senior year of high school. These tests are a joke; any value added bonus based on such tests is an insult to the teachers who work there.

Marty