Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
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Don't know about Detroit schools, but when Michelle Rhee took over in Washington, one of the things she did was to work to improve the schools in better neighborhoods to persuade more kids there to stay in the public schools instead of opting out to private schools. Cynically, you could say that was just about improving metrics by pulling students into the schools who are likelier to perform. Less cynically, you could say that you need the community to support the schools if they are to perform better, and she was playing a long game. Either way, parents from other neighborhoods interpreted her moves as an effort to shift resources away from the kids who need them the most.
All of this goes to show that it's very difficult to assess the job that schools are doing in educating kids -- the true outputs. IMHO, this is the prime reason that teachers are paid lockstep -- it's very difficult to figure out how to pay them for doing a better job, because even if you trusted the administrators to try to do that right, they wouldn't really know how.
