Identity and Ideology in the School Boardroom (nber.org)
- Reference: 0180554962
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/09/1832229/identity-and-ideology-in-the-school-boardroom
- Source link: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34590
> School boards have statutory authority over most elementary and secondary education policies, but receive little attention compared to other actors in education systems. A fundamental challenge to understanding the importance of boards is the absence of data on the policy goals of board members -- i.e., their ideologies -- forcing researchers to conduct tests based on demographic and professional characteristics -- i.e., identities -- with which ideology is presumed to correlate.
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> This paper uses new data on the viewpoints and policy actions of school board members, coupled with a regression discontinuity design that generates quasi-random variation in board composition, to establish two results. The first is that the priorities of board members have large causal effects across many domains. For example, the effect of electing an equity-focused board member on test scores for low-income students is roughly equivalent to assigning every such student a teacher who is 0.3 to 0.4 SDs higher in the distribution of teacher value-added. The second is that observing policy priorities is crucial. Identity turns out to be a poor proxy for ideology, with limited governance effects that are fully explained by differences in policy priorities. Our findings challenge the belief that school boards are unimportant, showing that who serves on the board and what they prioritize can have far-reaching consequences for students.
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w34590
Identity (Score:4, Insightful)
If identity is a poor proxy for ideology, perhaps it is also a poor proxy for almost everything else. Perhaps equality was the answer all along.
Re: Identity (Score:1)
Identity is hardwired into the lizard brain. It takes constant mental effort to refrain from using that portion of your mind.
Are they in the room with us now? (Score:1, Interesting)
"Our findings challenge the belief that school boards are unimportant"
Who is saying that?
They're frightfully important.
Like towns, there are all levels of varying dynamics - there are strong school admins with rubber-stamp school boards; there are overwhelmingly powerful school boards making critical decisions for tens of thousands of students, and unfortunately, usually beyond culpability for the policies they inflict.
But I don't think anyone has suggested they're unimportant.
Many people worldwide may not
Equity focused types correlate (Score:1)
with rich districts. Where performance skews higher.
More BS.
Yes, elected officials do matter (Score:3)
Yes, the ones who deal with schools have big impacts on the running of the schools they oversee, for good and for evil. This is somehow surprising?
What the hell is this rant? Who the hell is Styopa? Why should I care about their rambling, clueless, childish opinion?
this does not belong on slashdot (Score:1)
can you keep this culture war stuff out of here? What ever happened to posting about linux distros?
Re: (Score:2)
As much as you may lament it, the culture war stories are often the ones with the most comments.
How was academic achievement measured? (Score:2)
Electing an "equity focused board member" probably means changing (dumbing down) curriculum and/or grading scales in order to achieve equal outcomes. In other words, by inflating grades without achieving any improvement in actual learning of useful information. This happened in my children's school district when a DEI hire was put in as Superintendent. He then hired even more DEIs to replace far more compentent retirees. The result was that over 10 years there was a drastic decline in academic achievement a
Keep Ideology Out of Schools (Score:2)
The problem is that there's ideologies in the schoolboards and in the classrooms at all (both far-left and far-right). If everyone wants to turn society into a tribalistic ideological hellhole, that's bad enough. But let the kids be kids without everyone trying to shove their ideological shit into kids' heads.
religion (Score:2)
Where I live, churches have encouraged their members to apply for the school board and a disproportionate number did it. So now the schools are basically controlled by organized religion.
The Big Picture - a Case Study (Score:2)
California is all-in on imposing the exact same identitarian based equity this school board study tries to tout, yet it’s an all around debacle. It’s plummeted in the national NAEP state rankings, especially in classically underserved demographics, and its colleges are surging remedial classes - 25 percent of whose students got straight As in K-12 math.
What’s going on? Maybe, just maybe, discarding blind justice, standardized testing, long proven teaching methods, and empiricism, then repl
It used to not be this way (Score:2)
Having worked in public schools for 20 years now, the vast majority of school board members just went along with rubber-stamping about 99.9% of everything that was recommended by school officials. They had practically no reason to not trust what was happening in their school. Also, a majority of board members I've worked with didn't have college degrees, so I think some of the materials presented to them might have felt a little over their heads in the first place.
What's really concerning is that, when it
Evangelicals... (Score:4, Insightful)
...have known this for a long time. They've slowly ingrained themselves in school and library boards, banning books, forcing education changes in the US. And now we see the results: a largely uneducated and complacent populace, which votes against their own interest, but as long as Jeeeesus is here, all is great again.
Re: (Score:2)
And so does the LGBTQPIA+++ NO CARRIER groups.
And Communists / leftists /Marxists / Palestinian sympathizers
The thing is, many of those can't co-exist with themselves, let alone 'normal' people.
See my sig for my thoughts on the subject.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
So what do you think about Donald Trump's multiple credible rape accusations, especially the eight of which or against children?
I bring it up because Donald Trump is basically right wing Jesus. God knows the right wing wants nothing to do with the actual Jesus.
Re: (Score:3)
> ...have known this for a long time. They've slowly ingrained themselves in school and library boards, banning books, forcing education changes in the US. And now we see the results: a largely uneducated and complacent populace, which votes against their own interest, but as long as Jeeeesus is here, all is great again.
Evangelicals and right-wing Republicans have focused on three targets over the last few decades: school boards, state legislatures, and federal judges. The school boards control education, and the Republicans recognize, just like Lenin, that indoctrination of young people has inertia that lasts for a generation. State legislatures control voting maps and direct and indirect methods to exclude undesirable voters. Federal judges are lifetime appointments, and it takes a lifetime to reverse the entrenched
Re: (Score:1)
> ...have known this for a long time. They've slowly ingrained themselves in school and library boards, banning books, forcing education changes in the US. And now we see the results: a largely uneducated and complacent populace, which votes against their own interest, but as long as Jeeeesus is here, all is great again.
Anti-identitarianism is embraced by many of the world’s religions - judge by character, not identity - and isn’t at all equivalent to identitarianism! Martin Luther King had the right idea, as much as that apparently bothers hard core progressives. To understand why the anti-identitarianism does NOT suffer from identitarianism’s foolishness using your very own “book ban” analogy, take a look at quotes from actual banned books. These books fully embrace the identitarianism at a
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
This last year the Democrat party has pushed back hard and taken back a ton of the school boards that got taken over by right wing lunatics.
The Democrats don't have tons of billionaire cash to run in school board elections like the Republicans do but the people the Republicans run were so batshit crazy it didn't take a lot of money. After parents experienced a little bit of Evangelical Republican politics they pretty quickly looked for alternatives.
It's one of the major things that's thekilling relig