On "Recent Study Finds"

Is it just me or are "recent study finds" pieces more often than not the result of sophisticated methods applied to vast amounts of data confirming the obvious?

Consider this lede from a prominently highlighted piece in the 纽约时报 yesterday:

New data shows, for the first time at this level of detail, how much students’ standardized test scores rise with their parents’ incomes — and how disparities start years before students sit for tests.

The piece titled New SAT Data Highlights the Deep Inequality at the Heart of American Education is well done and I hope it gets those who have been averting their gaze from what others have seen for decades to take note of how the inequitable choices we as a society have historically made in how we allocate resources to K-12 schools, combined with the use of standardized tests to gain entry into our country's top public and private colleges and universities, has denied myriad talented students their fair shot at meeting their full-potential.

The Times, as it is prone to do, opens the piece with the following graph - which is compelling enough to also be used as the bait to click (which is not the same as clickbait):

But while this may be a thought-provoking visual — the lessons one can learn from it, the policies and practices it suggests must be adopted, have long been known.

Here's but one example from 15 years ago. My though-partner Rima Brusi and I were trying to understand why low-income students were not gaining access to STEM careers at the University of Puerto Rico - Mayagüez (which in the then and there provided graduates the surest path of upward mobility). One of the main reasons was that their College Board examination scores were much lower than their higher-income counterparts and that price of entry into STEM careers was very high - as measured by an index called the IGS which combined the GPA and College Board test scores of prospective students.

I presented our findings at a 2008 meeting convened by EdTrust in a presentation titled: Democratizing Knowledge: Access and Success at the University of Puerto Rico. Here are the three most relevant slides for the matter at hand:

Clearly, far from being an engine of opportunity, by shortchanging our lowest-income students in K-12 and then limiting entry into our college's STEM programs to the highest testing students, we were simply reproducing economic status from one generation to the next.

Of course, these findings presented 15 years ago were in turn based on earlier studies by myriad researchers who established the link between economic status and access to quality education. And while the data as limited to a single institution and the methods of analysis limited in sophistication, it was not a big leap to realize this was happening everywhere. I mean, this is the link that myriad advocacy organizations have worked hard to break for decades.

So, what's my point? Let's spend less time analyzing data to death and more time driving toward solutions. If more institutions took it upon themselves to serve as engines of opportunity, vehicles of economic mobility, and drivers of social impact, we'd be in a much better place.

Thankfully, there have been recent studies — by the same researchers that bring us this recent study — showing that many schools do a god job of this - what we need is more studies of how they are doing it.

Time to stop looking at the problem in ever more depth, time to start acting to solve the problem with ever more resolve.