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December 16, 2006

Not as bad as it seems

Ilya Somin over at The Volokh Conspiracy argues that the Texas 10% education plan is a failure. It creates the following policy:

The ten percent plan gives any high school student who is in the top 10% in his high school class automatic admission to any Texas state university, regardless of standardized test scores, the content of the classes he took, the strength of his high school, extracurricular activities, and other considerations.

By and large the argument is convincing, However, one complaint is not. Ilya complains that "Second, and probably much worse, the article notes that the formula creates perverse incentives for students to try to game the system by transferring to weaker schools or taking easier classes." Having students take easier classes is surely a problem, but having the high quality students transfer to lower quality schools is not an automatic bad. Having those high energy PTA-parents distributed more evenly in state high schools would be a good thing, making sure that passion, energy, and money made a larger marginal contribution. Don't take my word for it:
The supposition that the pace and content of whole classroom instruction must be watered down for the benefit of slow learners in the mixed-ability classroom has been disproved by the "untracking" of schools and entire school districts. In many of these untracked schools, scores on standardized achievement tests for the high achievers were quite stable or increased during the untracking process, and the test scores of the slower-learners rose dramatically.

Posted by OneEyedMan at December 16, 2006 8:12 AM

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