Comment

Barbara Schneider is to be congratulated on presenting a most interesting paper. Parents, taxpayers, and voters would all regard the questions tackled in her paper as obviously significant. The question of how to help children make it through school successfully and learn material that will improve the quality of their lives is probably the central question for high school reform. So Schneider conducts a valuable exercise in trying to operationalize these concerns and draw explicit linkages between pedagogical practice, curricular structure, and outcomes for children.

The paper helps to illustrate the challenges that emerge when scholars seek to use large data sets to draw specific prescriptions regarding policy or practice. The questions and cautions are similar to those regarding the effects of private schooling or school choice, as researchers are forced to wrestle with issues of omitted variable bias and similar concerns that are difficult to get one's hands around. This paper is also useful as an opportunity to discuss some of those analytic challenges, primarily for the purpose of guiding other scholars who will seek to build upon Schneider's valuable work.

In terms of the actual policy prescriptions that Schneider lays out, she offers nothing that I would quibble with. Giving students better information, counseling, and advice and encouraging them to take more challenging courses can only redound to their benefit. All of these strike me as relatively commonsensical. High schoolers in the last thirty or forty years have been done a disservice in being provided with a take-out menu of course options that are too often academically inadequate.

Schneider's policy prescriptions resonated strongly with me on a personal level. I used to be a high school social studies teacher in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Every time a ninth or tenth grader moved out of remedial classes into a more challenging course, I felt that he or she was being given at least a fighting chance to have post-high school choices beyond dry cleaning or food delivery.

That said, a couple of assumptions embedded in the proposed policy recommendations are worth thinking about. First, assuming the presence of linear effect in this context means that course taking is presumed to have a consistent and incremental effect on all children. This suggests that if those students not enrolled in the advanced sequences of math or science are placed in those classrooms, then they would accrue the same kinds of benefits as those gained by the students already enrolled in the advanced courses.

A potential problem is self-evident. It is not clear that the students currently in the lower tracks have the preparation or ability to benefit from more advanced courses in the same way that students currently in those courses do. For instance, it is not clear that all students would become better football players if placed on the varsity team or better musicians if placed in the district symphony. Some might improve under the heightened demands, but others might recoil or give up in frustration. Achievement always takes a certain amount of natural ability and a certain degree of preparation. Proponents of lower-level courses and offerings have always made this claim, which is that some students might come out worse if enrolled in advanced tracks than in their relatively mediocre offerings. All of this merely suggests a need to be careful about generalizing too readily about the benefits of enrolling students in advanced classes.

The benefits that accrue to those currently in these classes would not necessarily accrue to other students. In particular, the students who complete high-sequence courses are different from their peers. They are the students who, for whatever reason, chose to enroll in more challenging classes and then managed to pass those courses. They are not the students who failed out of earlier math classes or who were counseled out of more challenging math classes after receiving a "D" in algebra or geometry. As somebody who was counseled out of a number of...