\n\n \n\n \nI find this part especially interesting:\n\n\n \nHere’s a\n\nslightly earlier version of the paper<\/a>\nthat doesn’t require signing up to get it.\n \nIt appears to me that the Chamber and CUEE have\n\nno arguments left for school consolidation.<\/a>\nI agree with FVCS and Nimrod and both school systems and the Valdosta City Council\nthat consolidation is a bad idea and registered voters in Valdosta\nshould vote No to school consolidation Tuesday November 8th<\/sup><\/small>.\n<\/a>\nEsther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, and Michael Kremer wrote for American Economic Review, 101(5): 1739\u201374, DOI:10.1257\/aer.101.5.1739,\n\nPeer Effects, Teacher Incentives, and the Impact of Tracking: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Kenya<\/a>\n
\nTo the extent that students benefit from high-achieving peers, tracking\nwill help strong students and hurt weak ones. However, all students may\nbenefit if tracking allows teachers to better tailor their instruction\nlevel. Lower-achieving pupils are particularly likely to benefit from\ntracking when teachers have incentives to teach to the top of the\ndistribution. We propose a simple model nesting these effects and test\nits implications in a randomized tracking experiment conducted with\n121 primary schools in Kenya. While the direct effect of high-achieving\npeers is positive, tracking benefited lower-achieving pupils indirectly\nby allowing teachers to teach to their level. (JEL I21, J45, O15)\n<\/blockquote>\nThe first sentence is the standard “diversity” argument that CUEE\nkeeps making.\nThe authors state it so as to poing out that their study finds\nthat it’s far from the whole story.\n
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<\/a>\n\nLower-achieving pupils are particularly likely to benefit from\ntracking when teachers have incentives to teach to the top of the\ndistribution.\n<\/blockquote>\nThat appears to mean that teachers don’t even need direct incentives\nto teach to the rest of the distribution; merely focusing on one\npart of the distribution also frees teachers to to focus on other\nparts of the distribution.\nAnd then imagine what if teachers also had incentives to focus\non the lower-achieving pupils?\n