Education: Is quality education real or a fantasy?
As famous investor Warren Buffet said: "Price is what you pay. Value is what you get". He was talking about stock investment. It is not far fetch to apply the same principle to college education.
Yesterday we were invited to a friends' eleven-year old birthday party and I mingled a bit with another dad. Very quickly, our discussion moved into education and more specifically the cost of education.
While we both agreed it was important to develop expertise and skills in a field, the dad had a refreshing view. He was not convinced it was worth the money to send his kids to get a 4-year college degree. He was aware that the average time to graduation is over six years; put differently, the average price of high education is in average 50% higher than what most people think.
The Value Investor
As famous investor Warren Buffet said: "Price is what you pay. Value is what you get". He was talking about stock investment. It is not far fetch to apply the same principle to college education. The price is somewhere irrelevant as long as you are getting good value. Obviously, measuring the value of education is the hard part, otherwise everyone would become a millionaire.
I will confess: I am a value investor and I like to think of my kids education using the same value framework. Like the majority of Americans, my kids are going to public schools (elementary and junior high). You cannot beat the price! But are we getting good value?
When we bought our house, the quality of schools was a key factor. We did not want to follow the path of our neighbors, who played the lottery system in San Francisco, got unlucky, and moved their kids to private schools as a result.
Besides price and commute time, quality of school was an essential criteria in our home buying process. In our mind, quality of schools truly implied quality education. Like others, we turned to school rankings and trusted Trulia school ratings (every real estate website has one) to select a real estate area with good schools.
Trulia’s School Rating
Trulia ranking is very easy to follow. Schools get rated on a scale form 0 to 10. Thanks to their color coding, parents do not have to think critically. Schools are put in color buckets: red, yellow, and green. Even a toddler could pick the best schools!
Little did we wonder the source of those ratings and how they were calculated. Does green mean you get a better education and red a bad one? If it is so, isn't there a risk to further divide populations in the rich and wealthy against the middle and low class who cannot afford higher priced housings? If you can afford green, are you and your kids better off in the long run? If you end up in the red zone, does it mean your kids are doomed?
Binary thinking is always dangerous. It is very easy to jump to conclusions without doing your own due diligence; so let’s dig further.
Trulia gets his school ratings from GreatSchools.org, a
nonprofit providing high-quality information that supports parents pursuing a great education for their child, schools striving for excellence, and communities working to diminish inequities in education.
A Non-profit To The Rescue
Looking at their donor page, you find the common culprits. As an avid reader of The Corbett report, this raised a red flag right away; so I took a cursory look at their 2021 financial report. Call it a hunch.
I was so relieved to learn that the US government granted them a $742,506 PPP loan in April 2020 (page 13). Covid must have been so disruptive to their online business. It makes total sense to treat NGOs, special the ones with a business 100% online, like a small business owner who runs a restaurant or retail shop. After all, one should not expect a NGO to raise funds from donors, right?
Do not fear for GreatScools.org my good roosters! The US government went the extra mile to support this small business and granted them another PPP loan in January 2021 in the amount of $757,733. And here's the icing on the cake: GreatSchools.org received full forgiveness for both loans in November 2021. This amounts to $1.5M in free money -sorry, in taxpayers donations!
But I digress.
GreatSchools.org summary rating is calculated using a weighted average of five distinct ratings
Student progress rating calculates academic progress made by students over time
Academic progress rating is basically a proxy rating based on school testing data
College readiness rating tells how well a school prepares students for college and careers (graduation rate, SAT, etc)
Equity rating indicates how well a school serves the academic development of disadvantaged student groups
Test score rating measures schools on academic proficiency, using performance on state tests
(Too Much) Trust In The Ratings
So what to make of their rating? At first glance, it looks like a decent proxy of what you'd expect to find in a rating. Looking at academic test data, college preparedness, test scores makes sense. Student progress rating and equity ratings seems like measures born out of idealistic views; the quality of students you get is driven by economics (good schools attract wealthy home buyers and bring privileged kids). But what do I know.
So if you get a 10, does it mean you get the best education? Yes and no. It's definitely indicative of a school with students who consistently perform well in academics and testing. You may imply a correlation to high quality education. But remember, correlation is not causation.
Ratings in the 1-10 scale are assigned using percentile ranges, i.e.: if the school is in the 0-0.99 percentile they get a score of 1, in the 1-1.99 percentile a score of 2, etc. Mathematically it is a good approach. However, it is hiding a very important aspect: schools are rated against each other, so it is all relatives.
Take "College Readiness" score for instance; no matter how good or bad schools score, there will always be a smooth distribution between schools and an even number in each percentile. Put differently, even if quality of education decreases, you will find the same number of green, yellow and red schools.
Covid with the associated school closures had a terrible impact on kids worldwide creating education inequalities; in this article from Children's Health Defense we learn that (emphasis added):
Prior to the pandemic, 57% of 10-year-olds in low and middle-income countries could not read properly, but this has increased to an estimated 70%.
The effects of the learning losses could be lifelong, leading to $21 trillion lost due to lower lifetime earnings.
Existing education inequalities have only worsened due to the closures; learning losses in lower-income countries are significantly worse than those in rich countries.
Even under a “best-case” scenario, students made “little or no progress” during remote learning; students had a learning loss equivalent to one-fifth of a school year, and learning losses were up to 60% greater among students from less-educated homes.
With children still reeling from the educational, physical and social-emotional effects of school closures, data now show that their suffering is in vain because the closures did little to influence COVID-19.
Do you think GreatSchools.org will reflect those national drops in education readiness? Absolutely not since the use of percentiles ensure a smooth distributions. So even if overall students nationwide are behind by 20% for the school year, you will still have the same number of red, yellow, and green schools. Misleading, don't you think?
To be clear, I am not saying that GreatsShools.org is trying to mislead people. They are democratizing a lot of important data and making it easy to digest. Their approach with relative ranking makes me fell uncomfortable and seems at odd with their mission to support
parents pursuing a great education for their child, schools striving for excellence
especially coming from a "NGO" taking generous taxpayers donations.
We, parents, need trusted source of informations to make informed decisions for ours kids education. Too often, we use shortcuts, blindly trust third party institutions, websites, and do not apply critical-thinking . And I am the first one to fall for it.
But are we expected to challenge everything we see? Is Trulia responsible? At the end, they are a for-profit company so it is not their job. Then should GreatSchools.org be more transparent and educate us about potential drop in education quality? If they would do so, do you truly think they could sell their data, get $1.5M in PPP loans, and donations from Bill Gates and Co.? Most probably not.
A "Bright Future" For Illinois Students
GreatSchools.org is just the reflection of a bigger problem facing us: our government institutions and their representatives are hiding the fact that education has been steadily declining and is in disarray.
Governor Pritzker for example recently said that the 2022 Illinois report card shows "great promise" and that she was “proud to see that our children have a bright future.”
This is pure state propaganda. In this great article from Wirepoint, we learn that statewide student reading proficiency dropped again in 2022. Talk about "bright future".
The highlights of their article are breathtaking:
Reading proficiency actually dropped in 2022.
Over 350 districts saw overall reading proficiency drop in 2022, including Chicago
A “record high” graduation rate disguises the fact that most high schoolers can’t read at grade level.
Over 86 percent of Illinois schools are labeled “Exemplary or “Commendable” despite the collapse in student proficiency.
Illinois still lacks accountability for teachers: 97 percent were rated “excellent or proficient” in 2022.
ISBE’s proficiency and growth numbers don’t square up - this one is so unbelievable that I had to add the image
Those numbers are catastrophic. And still, there is no calls for reforms or changes from elected officials. The US Education department is a big machine ran by bureaucrats. As graduation rates increase nation-wide, reading and math proficiency decreases.
At the same time, in states like Illinois with serious education issues, 97% of teachers are rated excellent even though less than one out of three students achieves reading proficiency at his grade level. Besides a few pesky websites, you will only hear positives about schools. Nothing to see here people, keep moving.
This, to me, brings a trust issue. We, parents, put our trust in government institutions like education and health. We pay tax dollars, a lot here in California, with the understanding that this money will be reinvested in the future education of our kids among other things.
The more I dig, and the more it looks like a big circus. Not only the overall quality of our education system is cratering but we face new indoctrination with Critical Race Theory and Radical Gender.
Conclusion
I have always been impressed by Americans interest for data and statistics in sports like baseball, basketball, American football. I once believed Americans were data driven and understood statistics. In retrospect, I was being naive. This is mass media entertainment.
The more you feed Americans with data, the less they seem able to think for themselves. News and media bring a constant overflow of information and do not leave time for individuals to digest and process that information.
We, as parents, want the best for our kids and too often blindly trust the system. This article covers several fallacies around the perception we have on the quality of our education system. Awareness is the first step towards change.
As a parent, I would summarize my current view on the quality of education as follows:
We put too much trust in official government statistics
We put too much trust in random source of information
How does a kid get indoctrinated? One day at a time
Parents need to recognize propaganda and seek trusted sources of information
Parents have to look at education with a critical eye and use critical thinking
Beyond awareness, parents need to take a more active role in their kids education (observer, actor, enabler)
Getting a "better education" is not about money spent or top schools
Getting a "better education" in this DNA age will feel uncomfortable at best
The journey to "better education" will require plenty of courage, determination, hard work, and trust in yourself