One size fits all schools

In a recent Mercury news article, the Cupertino school district had all schools exceed state standards, had the top two schools in the state, and yet is a failing district. Palo Alto also is failing, despite all schools exceeding the standards. Cupertino had problems with performance of a small Latino subgroup, while Palo Alto had problems with African Americans. These subgroups both make up a very small portion of the school population. In Cupertino, the district is overwhelmingly Asian, while Palo Alto is primarily wealthy whites (with a significant Asian minority.) Both districts are dominated by highly motivated students with very involved parents. So what do you do if you have underperforming minority groups? Do you isolate the low-performers in their own classes? I'm sure this wold go over well with a "dumb kids" class dominated by Latinos. Or do you integrate them in to classes, but teach to the lowest common denominator? This would perturb students who find class boring and slow, and anger parents who expect to be involved in a more active education. Dumbing down the classes may lead to an exodus of students to private schools, leaving the district with even a greater percentage of low-performers. The students would evolve to match the curriculum. But how would this help society? The quest for "equality" in schools can lead to a very "unequal" education experience. It is hard for a school to get a good reputation. It takes years of good performance and positive views of parents. A bad reputation is easy to get. Some bad test scores can usually trigger it. Parents will use this as an opportunity to relocate or send the children to alternative of private schools. This will leave less-motiviated students with less-involved parents. This will impact the school's performance, further chasing the students away. In Chicago, there is a south loop development, with many wealthy homeowners. The development has a neighborhood elementary school. However, the demographics of the school don't look anything like the demographics of the neighborhood. The school draws from poorer minorities in the nearby region, with very few local residents attending the school. People in the neighborhood usually send their children to private schools. Thus we get a poorly performing school in a nice neighborhood, with everyone traveling a ways to school. If they do want a good yardstick to school "equality", correspondence of a school to the neighborhood demographics may be a better bet. If the demographics of the school differ significantly from the neighborhood (or the district as a whole for magnet schools), then there is a problem. Alternatively, a neighborhood school could get failing grades if a disproportionately large number of local students seek other education opportunities (such as private schools, magnet programs, or home schooling) Another problem with the "racial group" measures is that they are artificially racist. In Cupertino, if a group of Vietnamese students are poor performers, we wouldn't know, because they would be lumped with the large "Asian" group. On the other hand a similarly sized group of poorly performing Guatemalans, they would trigger a "failing" score, because there are fewer other Latinos to offset their poor scores. And do the Guatemalans really have much in common with the Argentines that they are lumped with? If we wanted to, we could probably create a demographic measure to cause just about any school to "fail". (The subgroup of "people that failed the test last year!) Would it even be better if we let people fail? Would advanced math classes for a large group of high achievers be more valuable than remedial math classes for a small group of underperformers? Perhaps we should just open up schools and districts. If people from Redwood City want to go to Palo Alto, let them test their way in. A district may excel at educating high performers, while another may do better at raising up new immigrants. Why force everyone to focus on the small groups of low-performers while letting the high-performers fall through the cracks? Let them all chose the specialty, with students free to enroll anywhere (though with the local district on the hook for transportation expenses.) Districts can then focus on their local demographic. A free market in education? Now that is crazy talk.