History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
Do exclusive public schools teach better?
- 08-18-2011
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Blog by Matthew Yglesias/Think Progress
When I was growing up in New York City in the 1990s, the public high schools had a very bad reputation. There were, however, exceptions, namely the three “exclusive” high schools that you could only get into by getting a high score on standardized tests—Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech. One interesting thing about these schools is that not only are they free for the students, they’re wildly cheaper in terms of per student spending than the fancy private schools in the city and the kids seem to do just fine in the college admissions sweepstakes. But of course the whole point of these schools is that they have higher quality inputs—better students—than your average NYC public school. So the mere fact that the graduates do better than the graduates of the average NYC public high school doesn’t tell us much about the learning that happens there. Jay Matthews flags a fascinating study by Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Joshua D. Angrist, and Parag A. Pathak of Duke and MIT who look at exam schools in New York and Boston and conclude that there’s no there there. (more...)
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