How my school gamed the stats
post by Srdjan Miletic (srdjan-miletic) · 2021-02-20T19:23:25.202Z · LW · GW · 26 commentsContents
26 comments
I was reading the Slate Star Codex review of The Cult of Smart. Part of it discusses charter vs state schools and the allegations of fraud of various kinds undermining charter schools record of better achievement. Reading it, I realized that I took for granted that public schools engage in systematic fraud in a variety of ways. I don't think this is something everyone understands, hence this post.
I went to a state school in the UK. State schools are rated on a 1 - 4 scale from unsatisfactory to outstanding. My school was rated good, meaning a 3. A few memories which stand out. During my first week I saw one of the boys in my class who was 11 at the time held up against the wall in a corridor while a 16 year old put a shiv to his throat and robbed him. He handed over his wallet and keys. A year or two later and I remember seeing a small boy who struggled with depression held up by the throat against a locker and slapped in the face by a troublemaker from the same class in front of everyone just before we went in to the classroom. I remember classes which were filled start to finish with people shouting and talking. Neither of the first two events were common but they also weren't uncommon. No one was surprised to witness them. It's worth emphasizing again that my school was above average, in fact quite far above average, and in a middle class area. It's also worth noting that I was mostly in top ability streamed classes, meaning my classroom experience was likely far better than average.
There were many ways in which the school and teachers gamed the system to boost their measured performance. One way was to do exams for students. I was on a bottom set language class for French. After two years I literally couldn't speak a single sentence in french and maybe knew 20 words in total. I still passed my exams. How? We did the tests in class. Often the teacher would go through them with us. Literally giving us the test and then going through each question on the whiteboard and telling us what to write. A different year and a different teacher, this time the teacher would sit next to us and write the answers down. Why sit next to us? It was the bottom set so people often wouldn't even bother to write down the answer if they were told it. This kind of thing was normal, so much so that I, and I think most people there, didn't realize anything unusual was happening.
Another way schools game metrics is to cheat inspections. A major component of how schools are judged in the UK is through independent inspections carried out by an independent quasi-governmental organization called Ofsted. Now, you may imagine that these inspections would be unannounced, so as to best get a real image of how a school works. Not the case. They're scheduled well in advance. Before every inspection, a few things would happen in my school:
- The worst troublemaker kids would be taken aside and put in a special room where inspectors wouldn't see them. Either that or they would just be told not to come into school at all on that day.
- All of us were told in assembly that an inspection was coming and to be on our best behavior on that day. Often teachers would have conversations with less serious troublemakers and impress on them that they would behave on that day or face consequences afterwards.
- Teachers would put a great deal more effort into their lesson plans than was normal. Classroom behavior management would also be far stricter. Because of these and other measures my school during an inspection was utterly different than my school on a normal day. On some level this isn't surprising. If teachers' promotions and management's jobs depend on good inspection results and inspections are easy to game, people will game them. Incentives drive behavior. But it's still sad.
Another way the stats were gamed was by not recording bad behavior. When a school gives a detention or suspends/expels a student, there's a record of it. This is especially true of suspensions, students being sent home or expulsions. The more of these you have, the worse you look as a school. The solution then is obvious, don't punish people or punish them in non-recorded ways. Again, in my school it was completely normal for students in lower sets to swear at the teacher, talk over them or disrupt the class for everyone else. It was normal for someone to be aggressive and abusive towards others and to face at most a 40 minute detention, but even getting a detention would be unusual.
I realize that one data point is not enough to draw solid general conclusions. My own perception is that this kind of fraud wasn't specific to my school. My cousin went to a state school fairly nearby. He's 4 years younger than me. During one of my winters back from undergrad we discussed his school and his experiences mirrored mine. His exact words regarding inspections were "I learned 4 times more that day than any other day that year. It was amazing". I talked to a few British students at university, although specifically the not middle/upper class ones who would have gone to public schools. They had gone to schools similar to mine in different parts of the country and their stories were similar and often worse. Two particularly funny examples from my friends' experiences stand out. A teacher in year 9 walked up to a student who was talking, picked them up and threw them out of an (open) first floor window. My friend sitting in class noticed two boys making fun of him and then proceeded to get up in the middle of class while the teacher was talking, walk to their table, flip the table upwards to hit them in the face before going to sit down again when the teacher told him to. (Remember, my friend was a studious, sporty Asian kid and not a troublemaker. This kind of thing is normal in that environment). Comedic stories aside, my experiences in school, while not universal, seem fairly common in the UK and from what I've read of the statistics, bad US schools are far, far worse.
I'm unsure what my point here is. I think I have two:
- Charters may cook their books in various ways. In the UK, State schools do too. I would be surprised if it wasn't also the case in the US.
- I think that I feel like a lot of commentators on places like SSC have fairly middle class experiences of fairly good schools and that bleeds into how their comparison between state vs charter schools. It's just good to remember that it's not those nice middle class schools that charters typically replace.
Crossposted to my blog at https://dissent.blog/2021/02/20/how-my-school-gamed-the-stats/
26 comments
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comment by Viliam · 2021-02-21T01:14:44.102Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I am a former teacher. Not from UK -- and as far as I know the situation in my country is not as bad (yet! growth mindset) -- but I definitely see some similar patterns.
My favorite blog about teaching is Scenes From The Battleground (Teaching in British schools).
The mechanism "if you punish students, it reflects badly on school, therefore schools tolerate things they in theory shouldn't" applies both to behavior and grades. Some students are shy, and when you tell them to stop doing something, they stop. But if they call your bluff... well, there is not really much you can do about it. The official advice provided by school administration is completely useless. If they disrupt the lessons, you can record their behavior, but unless there are about hundred records for given student per year, there are no consequences, so who cares. If they don't pay attention, and then fail to answer your question, and you give them a bad grade, they have a right to ask for independent re-examination. Which means that if they are smart, they can ignore you for most of the semester, ask for re-examination, cram for the exam, and get their grade fixed, maybe not to A, but B is still good enough for a semester of not working. Consequently, most teachers don't even bother to give grades other than As and Bs. Actually, giving bad grades usually reflects badly on the teacher (because you didn't teach them well, duh), so most teachers mostly give As.
The relation between public and private schools is reversed in my country. Public schools are the boring mediocre, but most private ones are "pay to win". The teachers in private schools are paid slightly better than in public schools (like extra €100 a month), and in turn they are expected to turn a blind eye on everything, give everyone As, and generally not make trouble. The school inspections are just like you described (except for taking the worst kids away), everywhere. I taught shortly, so I only experienced one inspection as a teacher, and I was shocked how everything was completely different on that day. I didn't try to do anything differently, but kids were sufficiently instructed how to behave by the school administration. That was the only day when bad behavior could get them into actual trouble, and they understood the difference perfectly.
Cheating on exams I only saw at the one private school where I taught briefly. At the end of high school, you take the Matura exam, where teachers from other schools (randomly assigned) observe the process: each student chooses a random question by lottery, then answers the question in front of a committee (consisting of teachers from that school, and the visiting teachers from other schools); the committee then collectively decides on the grade. On that private school, selected students were told in advance which question they would get, and some of them even got answers written on paper they had to memorize. Then the lottery was rigged, so each of them "randomly" selected the one and only question they prepared for. (There were plastic tokens with numbers of questions, randomly mixed face-down on the table while the teachers from other schools observed. Then one local teacher distracted the visitors by small talk, the other teacher peeked at the tokens and told students waiting in front of the classroom "choose the third token from right" etc.)
Replies from: srdjan-miletic↑ comment by Srdjan Miletic (srdjan-miletic) · 2021-02-21T02:34:37.871Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I've read that blog too. It's pretty interesting. Do you have any other sources to recommend?
Also, if you're willing to share which country did you teach in?
Replies from: Viliamcomment by Larks · 2021-02-22T15:33:31.342Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
A teacher in year 9 walked up to a student who was talking, picked them up and threw them out of an (open) first floor window.
Worth clarifying for US readers that 'first floor' in the UK would be 'second floor' in the US, because UK floor indexing starts at zero. So this event is much worse than it sounds.
comment by ejacob · 2021-02-21T16:03:02.013Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
A brief translation for any confused American readers: in UK English, "State School" refers to what we in the US call a "Public School." In UK English, "Public School" refers to what we in the US call a "Private School" (it is privately owned and/or run but open to the 'public'). I think OP did a good job avoiding any possible confusion but this is a common enough error that it may be worth stating explicitly.
comment by gjm · 2021-02-20T22:48:53.235Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Just to provide a contrary datapoint: My daughter is in (UK state) secondary school right now, and nothing she has told us about her experiences there suggests that any of the awful behaviour you describe (of pupils, teachers, or school management) has been normal or anything like normal at her school at any time while she's been there.
It's in a nice middle-class area with, e.g., quite a substantial fraction of parents having PhDs, and she's one of the most able students, all of which of course makes it more likely that the school has an easier time of it and that what she sees doesn't include the worst the school has to offer. But then you said that your school was in a nice middle-class area and you were mostly in top classes, so the two seem broadly comparable.
My own experience of (UK state secondary) school was more like hers than yours, but as (1) that was back in the 1980s and (2) I was in a part of the country that had grammar schools and my school was an exceptionally strong one academically, that's of limited relevance to what most schools are like now.
My wife's experience of (UK state secondary) school was also more like hers than yours; again, that was back in the 1980s, and again she was at an unusually strong school (not a grammar school, though as it happens its name had "Grammar School" in it for hysterical raisins).
[UK state secondary school = US public high school]
Replies from: Davidmanheim, srdjan-miletic↑ comment by Davidmanheim · 2021-02-21T15:22:47.799Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Note that only around 3% of UK residents have PhDs - so I strongly suspect that what you're calling "middle-class" is closer to the top 5% of the population, or what sociologists would say is the very upper part of the upper middle class.
Replies from: gjm↑ comment by gjm · 2021-02-21T17:40:33.865Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Well, the "substantial fraction" I have in mind isn't all that large. Certainly not more than 20% of pupils having >= one parent with a PhD ~= 10% of parents having PhDs, which would be ~3x the general population, suggesting that the population here might be comparable to the top 1/3 of the population as a whole. Kinda. Which is, as I say, certainly a nice middle-class area, but not much like taking the top 5% of the population.
Class terminology is used differently by different people; the Wikipedia page for "upper middle class", which is probably reasonably representative, says that "[t]he upper middle class in Britain traditionally consists of the educated professionals who were born into higher-income backgrounds, such as legal professionals, executives, and surgeons"; interpreting "higher-income" fairly broadly, that might be 10% of the school's pupils. So no, not by any means "the very upper part of the upper middle class".
(Also, we're near Cambridge, which means a lot of people with good academic qualifications; so in this population, good academic qualifications will be less evidence of e.g. wealth and social status than in the population at large.)
Replies from: Davidmanheim↑ comment by Davidmanheim · 2021-02-22T11:59:46.245Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Even given your numbers, I think it's very likely that you're underestimating how privileged the group is. Most things like educational status are pareto-distributed; 80% of PhDs are in 20% of areas. While that assumption may be unfair, if it were correct, the point with 3x the average is in the 97th percentile.
And yes, you're near Cambridge, which explains the concentration of PhDs, and makes it seem less elite compared to Cambridge itself, but doesn't change the class of the people compared to the country as a whole.
↑ comment by gjm · 2021-02-23T01:03:40.775Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It's certainly possible that I'm underestimating the level of privilege here. But I guarantee that the area is not at all "the very upper part of the upper middle class". In particular, I know a lot of the parents-with-PhDs, and I'm pretty sure none of us is upper-upper-middle-class by any reasonable definition. To whatever extent the school sounds startlingly privileged rather than merely distinctly more than averagely privileged, I think it's more likely that my estimates of the parents are skewed than that the school is really super-duper-elite. (For instance: I'm an academic sort of person, the people I know will tend to be academic sorts of people, and so it would be very unsurprising if I overestimated how many parents have PhDs. Also, I am consistently trying to overestimate rather than underestimate, because I want to be honest about the fact that this school is serving a pretty "good" population.)
I don't think I agree with your second paragraph. I have a super-handwavy model in my head according to which populations like "Cambridge graduates", while of course both well-educated and high-status, are less high-status than you would expect from e.g. seeing where they sit in the distribution of education and assuming they're in the same place in the distribution of social status. Let me try to make it a bit more concrete and see whether I still disagree with you.
Effect #1: education and status are correlated but not at all the same thing. Toy model: status = education + otherstuff, both are uniform(0,1). If status <= 1 then status quantile = status^2/2; if status >= 1 then status quantile = 1 - (2-status)^2/2. If your education quantile (= your education) is 0.9 then your status is uniform between 0.9 and 1.9, so your average status quantile is (if I've got the calculations right) about 0.78. If your education quantile is 0.97 then your average status quantile is about 0.82. High, but not that high.
Effect #2: when you condition on somewhat extreme values of one variable, its correlations with other correlated variables tend to go away. Toy model: same as above. If I've done my calculations right, the (Pearson) correlation coefficient between education and status in the whole population is 1/sqrt(2); in the population with education >= 0.9 it's 1/sqrt(101).
Effect #3 (I'm much less sure about this one): education and status are correlated because of a bunch of causal links (e->s, s->e, other->{e,s}), and in a population like the Cambridge-area one you get more people who are highly educated for less-status-linked reasons. I won't bother with a toy model because it's obvious how this works, and the questionable bit is whether I'm right about the local population. I'm not at all sure I am.
Effect #4: while education and status correlate, I'm not so sure even of the sign of the correlation at the extremes. Very able people with ambitions that aren't strictly academic don't (I think) usually do PhDs. I wouldn't be surprised to find that wealth and status are higher on average for people whose academic performance would have got them a PhD place if they'd wanted one but who preferred to do something else, than for people who actually did a PhD. I wouldn't be surprised to find it the other way around, either.
Replies from: Davidmanheim↑ comment by Davidmanheim · 2021-02-23T08:48:50.912Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'd agree with most of your models, and agree that there is divergence at the extremes of a distribution - but that's at the very extremes, and usually doesn't lead to strong anti-correlation even in the extreme tails.
But I think we're better off being more concrete. I don't know where you live, but I suspect that your postal code is around the 90% income percentile, after housing costs - a prediction which you can check easily. And that implies that the tails for income and education are still pretty well correlated at only the 97th percentile for education - and implying the same about status more generally. (Or perhaps you think the people who attend the school are significantly less rich than the average in the area?)
↑ comment by gjm · 2021-02-23T12:22:04.255Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I checked. Annoyingly, the tool you linked to only tells you which 10%-sized block of percentiles the area is in. It says 70-80 before, and 80-90 after, adjusting for housing costs. (If you're trying to measure social status, upper-middle-class-ness, etc., then I claim you should actually use the figures before adjusting for housing costs.)
That's the village where I live and where the school is located, but it takes pupils from other places too; the neighbouring village that I think provides the largest number of other pupils is in the 70-80 percentile by both metrics.
The same page has a thing that gives finer-grained percentiles but only for the before-housing-costs figure (which, again, I think is actually the more relevant here). My village gets about 82%, the other one I mentioned gets about 78%.
I think all of this exactly matches my original description: very nice middle-class area but not "the very upper part of the upper middle class".
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "still pretty well correlated"; 97% on one -> 90% on the other isn't so different from what my toy model says, and 97% on one -> ~80% on the other (which I think is better supported by the evidence) is pretty much exactly what my toy model says.
Replies from: Davidmanheim↑ comment by Davidmanheim · 2021-02-23T13:13:44.034Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
That's fair - thanks for checking, and I'd agree that that would better match "very nice middle-class area" than my assertion. (In the US, the top 2-3% is usually considered upper class, while the next 15-20% are upper middle class, and the next ~25% are "lower middle class." This income level definitely puts your neighborhood in the middle of the upper middle class.)
Replies from: gjm↑ comment by gjm · 2021-02-23T14:14:09.947Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Some other relevant numbers: mean household income in my village (and the area around it that's part of the same area, as used by that tool) is about £36k before, and about £33k after, the cost-of-living adjustment. Those are means; presumably the median is lower.
Again, that makes it a better-off-than-average area, but note that £36k is not by any reasonable standard a middle-upper-middle-class household income. So yes, this is definitely a nice area, but no, it's not the case that everyone here is very well off or very high-status.
Replies from: Davidmanheim↑ comment by Davidmanheim · 2021-02-23T19:27:16.846Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Wait, the claim was never that everyone is well off - of course we expect there to be a distribution. But if a sizeable portion of the children at the school largely have very high-socioeconomic-status parents, even if it's only 10% of the parents, that should be compared to a median of plausibly less than 1% of parents in the set of schools overall, it would be incorrect to infer that the way the school is run can be usefully compared to the "average" school.
Replies from: gjm↑ comment by gjm · 2021-02-23T22:33:48.855Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I said the school was "in a nice middle-class area". You replied (way way back upthread):
Note that only around 3% of UK residents have PhDs - so I strongly suspect that what you're calling "middle-class" is closer to the top 5% of the population, or what sociologists would say is the very upper part of the upper middle class.
Which only makes sense to me if it's saying that what I described as middle-class is actually "the very upper part of the upper middle class", and what I described as middle-class is not "the best-off parents of pupils at the school" but the area the school was in. (For greater precision I should really have been talking about the people at the school rather than the area as such, but I take it that was always understood, and in fact I think the school's pupils are pretty representative of its catchment area.)
And of course I agree that the school isn't average. That's why I said, way back in my original comment,
It's in a nice middle-class area with, e.g., quite a substantial fraction of parents having PhDs, and she's one of the most able students, all of which of course makes it more likely that the school has an easier time of it and that what she sees doesn't include the worst the school has to offer. But then you said that your school was in a nice middle-class area and you were mostly in top classes, so the two seem broadly comparable.
Emphasis added here to make it absolutely clear that right at the outset I explicitly noted the things you're now suggesting I was somehow trying to hide or deny. Note the last sentence: I wasn't responding to a report about the failings of an average school by saying "but my nice middle-class school is different", I was responding to a report about the failings of a nice middle-class school by saying "but my nice middle-class school seems to be different from your nice middle-class school".
I also want to push back a bit again about "the middle of the upper middle class" and "very high-socioeconomic-status parents". I think it is flatly untrue that the area I'm in is "in the middle of the upper middle class" by either UK or US definitions, and I think it's at best debatable whether "a sizeable portion of the children at the school largely have very high-socioeconomic-status parents". Let me quote you some bits of Wikipedia, as indicative of typical usage of the term "upper middle class".
The upper middle-class are traditionally educated at independent schools, preferably one of the "major" or "minor" "public schools" which themselves often have pedigrees going back for hundreds of years and charge fees of as much as £33,000 per year per pupil (as of 2014).
Very few people in the village where I live send their children to public schools, or even to other independent schools. (And obviously the parents of children at my daughter's school don't.)
Although such categorisations are not precise, popular contemporary examples of upper-middle-class people may include Boris Johnson, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, David Cameron, and Matthew Pinsent (athlete).
I don't know anything much about Matthew Pinsent, but again: if there's anyone here in the same social class as Boris Johnson, David Cameron, or the Duchess of Cambridge, it's news to me. Maybe there are some lurking somewhere (though I doubt it), but the idea that those could be typical of the population around here is absurd.
What about US notions of the upper middle class? They don't fit much better. Social class in the US is more about money than it is in the UK. Here's Wikipedia again:
Sociologists Dennis Gilbert, William Thompson and Joseph Hickey estimate the upper middle class to constitute roughly 15% of the population. [...] In 2020, the threshold for entering the top 15% of American household incomes is $166,000
I'm sure there are people around here whose annual household income is over $166k, but they're a small minority. (I think my family is one of the better-off ones around here; our household income is comfortably below $166k.)
So: no, our neighbourhood is pretty comfortably off, but it's not anywhere near "the middle of the upper middle class" whether you mean the British or the US upper middle class. (It would be near the bottom of the upper middle class, if you translated the "top 15%" criterion from the US to the UK, but note that that gives you a group of people markedly less elevated than either the people called "upper middle class" in the UK or the people called "upper middle class" in the US.)
As for "very high-socioeconomic-status parents": I guess it depends on what you mean by "very high". This is an area rich in engineers (broadly defined), who tend to be higher in income than in social status (i.e., if you pick a bunch of people earning say a very comfortable £100k/year, there'll be engineers and doctors and lawyers and quants and senior managers and the like, and the engineers will on the whole be the lowest-status of them). And, while I don't know anyone's income other than my own, my impression is that e.g. the fraction earning over ~£80k/year, which according to the UK government's tables is about the 95th percentile, is not much bigger than 5%. In fact, my best guess is that it's somewhat below 5%. But let's suppose that fully 10% of the parents at my daughter's school are top-5% -- which, again, I bet is not true. Is that "very high"? I personally wouldn't say so, any in any event I don't think "maaaaybe as many as 10% of the parents are top-5%" is a stronger statement than the one I already made at the very outset about this being a nice middle-class school where quite a few parents have PhDs.
(I'm aware that the tone of this comment is a bit defensive. I'm sorry if that makes it disagreeable to read. For what it's worth, the way it feels to me right now is that I have gone out of my way to be honest about ways in which the experience I'm reporting may not be representative, and have been met with Isolated Demands For Rigor and implications that I have a wildly inaccurate idea of my own level of privilege and that of others around me, and that even after the person making these accusations has made a concrete prediction that turned out to be wrong while mine was spot-on there's still this constant suggestion that surely I'm trying to mislead everyone about how nice-and-middle-class my area is, and it's a little bit tiring.)
Replies from: Davidmanheim↑ comment by Davidmanheim · 2021-02-24T08:21:12.732Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
First, I apologize. I really didn't intend for the tone to be attacking, and I am sorry that was how it sounded. I certainly wasn't intentionally "suggesting [you were] somehow trying to hide or deny" any of the issues. I thought it was worth noting that the initial characterization was plausibly misleading, given that the sole indicator of being a "nice middle class area" seemed to be percentage of people with PhDs. Your defense was that it was no more than 3x the number of PhDs, but that doesn't mean top 1/3, a point which you later agreed to. And after further discussion, I made and you checked an object level prediction I made, so I ceded the point.
Despite ceding the main earlier point, I continued the discussion, since I think the terms and definitions have gotten very confused by citing various incompatible sources and citing isolated sections of articles. And the same way that I have picked specific things to focus on responding to, you have picked many things I have said which you ignore. That's fine - but my responses were not an isolated demand for rigor; I have made concrete claims and acknowledged those which were refuted, and you have raised points which I have responded to.
So again, I am not disputing your neighborhood, which I conceded I initially thought was more affluent than it is. Despite that, there is plenty you have now said characterizing classes, in responses, which I think should be clarified if you want to continue. Again, this doesn't reflect on your earlier claim about you child's school, but your defense of the position has been confusing to me, at least. For example, you compare $166,000/year in the US, which is the top 15% there, to incomes in your neighborhood - then note that £80k (i.e. $110k) in the UK is the top 5%. You don't say anything about the equivalent income in the UK. I again agree that your neighborhood is not in the top 15%, but the top 15% there in the UK is £46k. (not $166k, i.e. £118k) The actual average income in your area, £36k, is in the top 25%. (I would suspect the incomes for those with children in the area is higher, but again, not near the top of upper middle class) Finally, the specific examples of upper middle class that you cite - Cameron, etc. are discussing their family backgrounds, not their current status.
↑ comment by gjm · 2021-02-24T10:28:59.224Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I don't actively "want to continue", in that it seems to me that the whole content of this discussion is you saying or implying that I've badly misrepresented how affluent my area is, and me pointing out in various ways that that isn't so.
However, your last paragraph seems once again like an accusation of inconsistency, so let me clarify.
"Upper middle class" means different things in different places. In the US, "class" is largely (but not wholly) about wealth. In the UK, "class" is largely (but not wholly) about social background. These are less different than that makes them sound because the relevant differences in social background are mostly driven by the wealth of one's forebears, and in both societies there is a strong correlation between that and one's own wealth.
The US has a more wealth-based notion of class and is also richer. So being "upper middle class" in the US means a level of wealth that would make you quite rich in the UK.
The UK has a more social-background-based notion of class, which in particular is strongly influenced by the existence of a (statistically very small) aristocratic class. So "upper class" in the UK means a smaller, more-elite fraction of the population than in the US, and "upper middle class" is pulled in the same direction. So being "upper middle class" in the UK typically (but not always, because of the wealth/background distinction) means being at a distinctly higher percentile of wealth than it does in the US.
The combined effect of these things is to put the typical "upper middle class" person or family at something like the same level of wealth in the two countries, although there's plenty of fuzziness and variability.
(Perhaps I have by now made it clear that I do have some idea how social class works in the UK, enough so that you might believe me if I tell you that (1) I am definitely lower-upper-middle-class and (2) my household income is somewhere around the 95th percentile.)
So, issue 1 is that you're wanting to call my neighbourhood "upper middle class" even though the people here don't fit either the UK or the US notion of "upper middle class", because you think it matches the definition you'd get if you applied the US-based notion directly to the UK despite the substantial differences between the two societies.
This would be (annoying but) excusable given that your main point was to suggest that my daughter's school may be more atypical than I was claiming. But there's more.
That percentile-ranking tool is not ranking individuals, it is ranking areas of the country. Areas vary less than individuals do, and (e.g.) an 80th-percentile area is not composed mostly of 80th-percentile individuals. On the other hand, terms like "upper middle class" are descriptions of individuals and families, and only secondarily of areas. If calling an area "upper middle class" (or "upper class", or whatever) means anything, it should mean an area whose people are mostly of the class in question.
Almost no areas are "upper class" or even "upper middle class".
(Perhaps an analogy may help. Suppose you have an area where the Jewish population is at the 95th percentile of areas in the country. Would you call it "very Jewish"? You probably shouldn't, because I bet that 95th-percentile population is still <5%. I submit that "upper middle class" is like "Jewish" in this respect.)
In a typical 80th-percentile area, most people are middle-middle-class. That's unusual; in a more typical area a large fraction will be lower on the socioeconomic scale. How might you describe such an area? Well, maybe as a "nice middle-class area", for instance. Which happens to be exactly the term I used.
"But £36k is distinctly higher than a typical middle-middle-class salary in the UK." It's not all that much higher; median UK household income is £30k. Second, the £36k figure is a mean, not a median. Mean incomes are always higher than median incomes. UK mean household income turns out to be about £37k, if I've done my calculations correctly. Both the area mean of ~£36k and the national mean of ~£37k are described as "equivalised" and I don't know whether that means the same thing in both cases, but the point is that this area is in fact about as well-off as the UK as a whole. No contradiction with the 80th-percentile thing; most areas are (when you calculate in terms of means) a bit poorer than average and a few are substantially richer.
So, issue 2 is that you're taking terms that describe individuals and applying them to areas in a profoundly misleading way. You can call an 80th-percentile individual "upper middle class" if you like, though actually most classifications wouldn't call them that either in the UK or in the US; but an 80th-percentile area is still not an "upper middle class" area. That's not how the words work.)
Replies from: Davidmanheim↑ comment by Davidmanheim · 2021-02-24T12:21:25.178Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Sorry, this is clearly much more confrontational than I intended.
Replies from: gjm↑ comment by Srdjan Miletic (srdjan-miletic) · 2021-02-21T02:33:37.997Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
My sample size is pretty small, limited to myself and a few people I knew, so I don't have a high degree of confidence that my experiences generalize across the UK. Hearing about experiences like your daughters shifts me somewhat towards thinking that state schools are okayish on average. Still, I find it hard to convert the various good and bad stories I hear into any kind of high confidence conclusion without hard data, which I haven't managed to find much of.
comment by Bucky · 2021-02-21T08:42:09.459Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I find it interesting that company audits (that I’ve experienced anyway) suffer from the same problem as ofstead inspections.
It is perhaps worth noting that Ofstead inspections are nowadays done with a day advance warning and can be done with no warning.
Replies from: TheMajorcomment by JMatthews · 2021-02-21T21:16:59.624Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think your experience is very typical, if not a wee bit better, than most uk school kids. I am in my third year teaching in a nice middle class area yet there are still huge behaviour issues at my school. One kid in year 9 burnt down the toilets last term...! I hear many similar reports from my colleagues in other schools across the area.
I would make some disagreements on the inspections. Schools now get far less notice. Its just the night before were told ofsted will come. Also, if a school was found to be taking trouble makers out i imagine they would find themselves in special measures very quickly.
Also, I'm not sure how a school could game assessments which have external examiners? With coursework that could be an issue but thats all but eliminated now.
Replies from: srdjan-miletic↑ comment by Srdjan Miletic (srdjan-miletic) · 2021-02-21T23:12:15.211Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Fair enough. It's good to know that inspections are no longer pre-announced..