Andy Rotherham has a post with some substance about competitiveness and gifted children’s achievement. It turns out Andy is gifted, but you probably knew that already.  I want to add a different wrinkle to this discussion. There is a lot of talk out there about the need to improve teacher quality for at-risk kids. But one of the findings in research that is a bit chilling is that the best way to maximize student achievement overall may be to systematically match your best teachers with kids who are not at risk. See for example this paper by Ladd, Clotfelter and Vigdor. Neither the authors nor I think this is a good policy, mind you.  

The paper's findings play directly into the competitiveness argument Andy is raising. I do think a number of administrators understood this type of matching to be the way to maximize average student achievement before NCLB’s provisions on disaggregation of data blew the whistle on this practice. That goes a long way towards explaining why I often say kind things about NCLB despite its flaws. Even so, this raises the question of what you are taking away from kids who aren’t at-risk if your solutions are about re-shuffling the deck on teacher quality rather than improving it across the board.  Implicit in just about any discussion of how to help at-risk kids is a question of how the reform will affect those who "have."  When it comes to using the tax code to make those who "have" subsidize equal opportunity for those who don’t, I'm right there. In fact, I'm out in front. 

But I want to focus on the the Ladd, et. al. paper's finding that wealthier kids will learn at a lesser rate if the best teachers are transferred to teach at-risk kids. I suspect this gets at the political cost to efforts to improve the services given to at-risk kids in ways that can be seen as leveling down the quality of services for others. I become particularly concerned when we start discussing this explicitly in the context of a policy that moves toward treating educational services as individual entitlements a la weighted student funding. When I look at budget lines for the kids who aren’t at-risk compared to those who are in WSF, I wonder about the potential for dozens of K-12 Bakke style cases and the conflicts this would create. I’m happy to be disabused of this notion. But if more people working on this part of education policy were engaged with TABOR (and I mean on the opposing end!) or other tax issues, or had a handle on the research of how Americans view government generally, I think they'd be wondering about it too. 

For those wondering, the Hobbes bit in the title refers to a saying of Thomas Hobbes: "I was born in the year of the Armada, and my brother was fear."  I usually try not to be such a pessimist.  But there is a balance to be struck within and between the service side and the tax side here, and I'm not seeing it as a factor in a lot of discussions about how to improve things for at risk kids.