(Digital Vision)
Exam high schools are generally regarded as a cut above, turning out congressmen, scholars, and all-around high achievers. They account for over half of the top 109 American schools in the U.S. News and World Report best high schools list, and an incredible 20 out of 21 from Newsweek’s list of “public elite.”
But a new study from Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer of Harvard throws cold water on this notion, and calls into question whether the exam schools typically cited for excellence are, well, really all that excellent.
Writing for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Dobbie and Fryer take a fresh look into the measurable achievements of exam school students, specifically focusing on three well-known schools in New York City: Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant. While attending an exam school might be great for your overall education, and resume, this doesn’t come through in terms of increased test scores or college achievement. Here’s the abstract:
Publicly funded exam schools educate many of the world’s most talented students. These schools typically contain higher achieving peers, more rigorous instruction, and additional resources compared to regular public schools. This paper uses a sharp discontinuity in the admissions process at three prominent exam schools in New York City to provide the first causal estimate of the impact of attending an exam school in the United States on longer term academic outcomes. Attending an exam school increases the rigor of high school courses taken and the probability that a student graduates with an advanced high school degree. Surprisingly, however, attending an exam school has little impact on Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, college enrollment, or college graduation — casting doubt on their ultimate long term impact.
The numbers on college attendance and graduation are by far the most surprising – exam high schools have a lower college attendance and graduation rate compared to other high schools. The study breaks down the numbers according to individual high schools.
Students just eligible for Brooklyn Tech are 2.3 percentage points less likely to graduate from a four year college. Students just eligible for Bronx Science are 0.7 percentage points less likely to graduate, and students just eligible for Stuyvesant are 1.6 percentage points less likely to graduate, though neither estimate is statistically significant.
Though college graduation and the SATs might not show a winning formula, Fryer and Dobbie are careful to point out that the criteria they’re examining don’t paint the whole story.
… without longer-term measures such as income, health, or life satisfaction, it is difficult to fully interpret our results. To the extent that attending an exam school increases social capital in ways that are important for later outcomes that are independent of college enrollment, graduation, or human capital, then there is reason to believe that our conclusions are premature and the true impact of an elite exam school will only be understood with the passage of time.
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It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I am creating a football team, but only allow the fastest, biggest, most skilled football players on my team, yeah, I’m going to have better results than the school that gets the leftovers. Same with academics. When you filter it such that only the best and brightest get into your school, then, yes, you’re going to have better results.
Of course, the same thing goes with Harvard and Yale, and the such. When you are a marquee name, you can be highly selective. The best-performing students in the world want in. After all, a degree from Harvard means big bucks often.
But that doesn’t mean that these kids are getting a better education. In fact, they may be getting a quite mediocre one, yet because they are good students, they do well. Put those same students in Podunk Junction State College…same thing. They are good students and will excel wherever they go. But it makes much more sense to excel at Harvard than at PJ State.
At the same time, if you put DECENT students in a great college, I believe they can achieve more than they would have otherwise. But if you put poor students just about anywhere, you’ll still get poor results.
Going to an exam school is no guarantee that the student will be better educated (though that might be the case), but it likely a guarantee that your child’s chances for successfully reaching the college of his/her choice is upped.
I graduated from one of these schools, Brooklyn Tech, and I have to say using college graduation and attendance doesn’t seem to prove anything about the success of the school.
After high school I attended CUNY’s Baruch college. Many of the courses I took were not challenging. Why? I had already done work like that in high school. After four years of high school it’s not very exciting taking the same courses again in college. I’m one of those that hasn’t finished college
You need to look long-term at what the students have done after high school rather than their college attendance and graduation rates. This is the problem with education in general – we only want to see numbers that seem to indicate success rather than see if we are actually educating people. Instead of aiming for well-rounded people we look for well-scored people. Sigh.
Considering that standardized tests are created to test what students are supposed to be taught in a regular high school, and that colleges base their curriculum on continuing off of the public high school curriculum, both of which are sensible practices, it makes sense that students in an “advanced” program would not test better- their advanced learning is likely not being tested.
I went to a small, rural high school in Tennessee, and I am certain my scores were above the average of any school- I know my ACT was above the average for students at Vanderbilt University by two points. Does that mean Exam Schools are a waste? I don’t know- would I have scored that one more point possible on the Math section and gotten that one more overall point on the test if I had been at a “better” school? Or was I, as a student in a school that was teaching what it was supposed to teach, fully equipped for the test because nothing “advanced” was tested?
With SAT scores only predicting 15-20% of first year college gpa, I wouldn’t be surprised that high school entrance exams are substantially equivalent. If so, then eventual college graduation by exam school graduates should not be much different than the general population. Graduation from college depends on adjustments to academic and social conditions very different from high school. One of the things that educational researchers are discovering is that transitions from elementary to secondary and secondary to post-secondary can be difficult for students. Just when they become accustomed to a style of pedagogy and a social environment, it changes and knocks some of them back. A system based on chronological age does not allow for differing rates of maturity that enable students to make transitions between levels easily. Only recently with the investigation of the K-through-16 year experience has this problem started to be addressed. Up to now college faculty usually just have complained that new freshmen weren’t prepared for college work.
I think the Freakonomics authors need to find more solid studies before they give them this kind of airing. Studies “just eligible” for this column should be rejected.