And your expertise in education policy is certified how? Where did you do the doctorate?

Regarding not worrying about math in an intervention in a school setting, again, I’m not sure your rationale makes any sense.

“not everyone goes to college or needs to.” Part of the point of intervening in a public school setting is to make sure that kids who have the potential to succeed in colllege have the opportunity to do so, despite influences in their lives that might make it difficult to succeed in school. Attempting to teach math is a part of this. Again, your rationale for not worrying about math doesn’t seem related to the whole concept of intevening in a school setting.

Regarding math, not everyone goes to college or needs to. In the US a majority of those who attend don’t graduate, and many of those who don’t accumulate serious debt. A large majority of US adults lack degrees. Other developed countries have fewer college grads than the US. This is completely compatible with high standards of living.

I don’t understand the logic here. Because it’s difficult on many levels, one shouldn’t attempt to teach older kids to read? I really don’t think it’s zero sum, or that donors should give up on older kids. In fact, high school kids are right at the threshold of being unreachable by the school system, by definition, so that the attempt to help then can make a tremendous difference, since it’s in a way a last chance. I think the problem of shame is interwoven throughout all of education, and that it doesn’t make sense to use it as a reason not to do something, since it is always a factor.

As far as math goes, I think a big part of the issue isn’t just that it might be hard to do math for everyone anyway, so that therefore math isn’t important, but that if a child is to advance to college and beyond, he or she needs to be able to work up to a certain level in several subjects, including math, just to be considered for college.

http://www.uwex.edu/ces/pdande/evaluation/evallogicmodel.html

It describes program logic models, which are used by many nonprofits to attempt to frame the measurement of their effectiveness. The further out in time the outcome is, the less information is available. Schools would have to follow a large enough sample of their alumni through their lives to be able to draw any conclusions of the type you describe–an extremely expensive proposition.

You might give grants to a set of schools to pursue such a project. That would certainly add to the collective wisdom in the way you hope.

You’re explanation for why to focus on test scores (”it’s the only data that exists consistantly”) makes sense too — you’d have to be giving a lot of money to change what data got recorded and how. this also makes me think it will be difficult to track individual success since it seems unlikely that there’d be any individual identifiers for test scores once the data reached a public level.