Worth Repeating

Matt Yglesias makes a point that can't be made often enough (we make it here at least once a year): when you compare urban school districts on a common measure (the NAEP) and break the numbers out by socioeconomic status, some are much better than others. Which, to my mind, suggests that it's reasonable to focus on the school districts that are doing worse (e.g. DC) and expect that they could improve, a lot.

Of course NAEP results are only one measure but when you look at these districts from other perspectives the results tend to be similar. So when the Washington Post gave the pre-Fenty/Rhee DCPS the full-scale investigative journalism treatment, lo and behold they found that all kinds of non-NAEP reasons to believe that the city schools were, in fact, quite terrible. New York City, by contrast, does quite well on the NAEP compared to other districts and when the new state-specific (i.e. non-NAEP) NYC tests results were released today--hey, major gains. It's hard not to see the pattern.

There's going to be a lot of back-and-forth in the coming days about how much of these gains are legit, and this is a healthy conversation to have. Test scores increases are plausibly the result of many things, virtuous and otherwise. But on some level it's going to be tricky for those who simultaneously think that public education needs large new infusions of money but can't be expected to boost test scores for poor and minority students to argue their way through this, since New York City has in fact received large amounts of new money in the past decade, made teacher salaries more competitive with surrounding suburbs, reduced the percentage of uncertified teachers, won a massive school funding lawsuit, etc., etc. Maybe some of that stuff worked? And, thus, maybe we should raise our expectations for how much NYC educators can accomplish on behalf of their students?