Health insurance and math achievement...

[Sancho]

This is a new research article demonstrating higher math achievement when the child has health insurance...interesting...

http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/1370/1162

[AllyCat]

1. Had an interesting conversation with my kid's teacher about CCSS and

this very topic. She said that Common Core, while "internationally-based", pushes our kids to be as educated as the rest of the developed world and held to the same standards...but the rest of the developed world has paid parental leave, paid health care, shorter work weeks, lower rates of homelessness and hunger...all things our kids face every day, unless the family is really well-off. Then we take kids starting at a deficit and thrust them headlong into this "standard" and expect them to do well. And expect the teachers to overcome all the societal shortfalls or be fired.

[LWolf]

4. Yes.

Our evaluations are tied to test scores. Regardless of what population we serve, of where they are coming from, and what they are going home to each day.

Regardless of the fact that we have no influence over those outside factors that influence their learning and their testing ability, which aren't the same thing.

[Igel]

2. The silence of the typically barking dog is deafening.

It looks at private insurance. Period.

That means it's looking at a subgroup of the insured. There's no controlling for the parents of these kids, and parents and home life account for a greater variance in academic achievement than schools.

For example--no more than that--I've never had a minimum wage, part-time, short-term job that provided health insurance. All the full-time permanent jobs that required more education or dedication had health insurance, provided or subsidized. All this is to show is that in many cases the presence or absence of private insurance isn't random. Those who have private insurance in the US tend to be better educated, work full time, are more likely to be in a committed relationship. I'd guess that they're also more likely to be legal residents (not "a legal person who resides", but "a person who resides legally&quot or citizens. Even if Latino.

These go to their home life, their SES. Yet the parents are considered irrelevant. They're not controlled for. There's hope in the abstract, but the article dispels such fluff.

This means that the researchers have excluded something that others have said is very important, and have presented the correlation they found as causal ("effects" isn't so much an implication as an explicit claim). Instead, health insurance status might be as dependent as academic achievement on more basic factor.

This laxness and motivated, goal-centered reasoning and research wouldn't fly in my field even among fairly goal-centered researchers. They'd at least make a pretense of checking competing theories that could, with barely a gesture, cause dismissal of their claims by any but the truest of believers. Any peer reviewer worth his salt would have said, "Go take this other factor into account, beginning graduate student. And tell your future PhD advisor to scrub behind your ears before sending you to bed." In lesser PhD programs, it would have counted as a publishable paper to allow advancement to candidacy and been included in a working-papers volume. In better PhD programs or post-doc programs, not even.

[LWolf]

3. Our current education policies,

funded by the corporate "reform" movement, are all based on the motivated, goal-centered reasoning and research you mention.

We knew LONG before the standards and accountability movement brought high stakes standardized testing to the arena that the best predictor of standardized test scores is not related to teacher, school, or education system, but parent SES.

As long as tptb control the propaganda machine and the money, reality won't matter.