Children with special abilities and skills need to be nourished and encouraged. They are a national treasure. Challenging programs for the “gifted” are sometimes decried as “elitism.” Why aren’t intensive practice sessions for varsity football, baseball, and basketball players and interschool competition deemed elitism? After all, only the most gifted athletes participate. There is a self-defeating double standard at work here, nationwide.
—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1996)
I’d like you to feel about the impending destruction of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the same way you might’ve felt when the Taliban threatened to blow up the Bamyan Buddhas, and then days later actually did blow them up. Or the way you felt when human negligence caused wildfires that incinerated half the koalas in Australia, or turned the San Francisco skyline into an orange hellscape. For that matter, the same way most of us felt the day Trump was elected. I’d like you to feel in the bottom of your stomach the avoidability, and yet the finality, of the loss.
For thousands of kids in the DC area, especially first- or second-generation immigrants, TJHS represented a lifeline. Score high enough on an entrance exam—something hard but totally within your control—and you could attend a school where, instead of the other kids either tormenting or ignoring you, they might teach you Lisp or the surreal number system. Where you could learn humility instead of humiliation.
When I visited TJHS back in 2012, to give a quantum computing talk, I toured the campus, chatted with students, fielded their questions, and thought: so this is the teenagerhood—the ironically normal teenagerhood—that I was denied by living someplace else. I found myself wishing that a hundred more TJHS’s, large and small, would sprout up across the country. I felt like if I could further that goal then, though the universe return to rubble, my life would’ve had a purpose.
Instead, of course, our sorry country is destroying the few such schools that exist. Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York, and the Liberal Arts and Science Academy here in Austin, are also under mortal threat right now. The numerous parents who moved, who arranged their lives, specifically so that these schools might later be available for “high-risk” kids were suckered.
Assuming you haven’t just emerged from 30 years in a Tibetan cave, you presumably know why this is happening. As the Washington Post‘s Jay Matthews explains, the Fairfax County School Board is “embarrassed” to have a school that, despite all its outreach attempts, remains only 5% Black and Latino—even though, crucially, the school also happens to be only 19% White (it’s now ~75% Asian).
You might ask: so then why doesn’t TJHS just institute affirmative action, like almost every university does? It seems there’s an extremely interesting answer: they did in the 1990s, and Black and Hispanic enrollment surged. But then the verdicts of court cases, brought by right-wing groups, made the school district fear that they’d be open to lawsuits if they continued with affirmative action, so they dropped it. Now the boomerang has returned, and it’s time for a more drastic remedy: namely, to eliminate the TJHS entrance exam entirely, and replace it by a lottery for anyone whose GPA exceeds 3.5.
The trouble is, TJHS without an entrance exam is no longer TJHS. More likely than not, such a place would simply converge to become another of the thousands of schools across the US where success is based on sports, networking, and popularity. And if by some miracle it avoided that fate, still it would no longer be available to most of the kids who‘d most need it.
So yes, the district is embarrassed—note that the Washington Post writer explains it as if that’s the most obvious, natural reaction in the world—to host a school that’s regularly ranked #1 in the US, with the highest average SATs a...
"In a world-historic irony, the main effect of this “solution” will be to drastically limit the number of Asian students, while drastically increasing (!!!) the number of White students. The proportion of Black and Hispanic students is projected to increase a bit but remain small. Let me say that one more time: in practice, TJHS’s move from a standardized test to a lottery will be overwhelmingly pro-White, anti-Asian, and anti-immigrant; only as a much smaller effect will it be pro-underrepresented-minority."
my guess would be that moving to a lottery is going to drastically shift the demographics of the school to the general demographics of the region, which would be affluent white people.
Scott's saying that the rigorous testing regime got a lot of Asian kids into the school because they tend to do very well on tests, the affirmative action helped minorities, what is presumably the political majority felt left out.
This topic really hits home for me. I went to a 'magnet' middle school on the other side of the river from TJ. I don't know that a more nerdy group of 300 students existed anywhere - or that any other group of people aged 11-14 had such a high portion of having submitted patches to open source software. It was, frankly, the only place in the world where I was ever told it was ok to be nerdy, where geeky obsession with learning about technology was praised rather than mocked. The anecdotes are amazing in themselves - I taught myself the difference between assembly and BASIC so I could write faster games on my TI83; the 8th graders built a mesh network in 2005; most of us had websites written in php or perl; we wrote guides on reverse engineering instant messenger protocols.
It was truly a phenomenal place and the forcing of these brilliant and motivated students back into an environment where they will be mocked for their intellectual interests is a great loss.
The current educational strategy seems stacked against what you experienced. ‘We don’t want a diversity of schools, we want students to all learn the same things to these standards!’
My parents really wanted me to go to TJ; I lived in the county next door, took the test, and was awarded one of the first four berths to go to TJ from my county (I think it was the first out-of-county program for TJ). I chose to stay where I was and continue going to the magnet school I was going to, which was a creative arts/freedom oriented school, but plenty of the students like myself went on to get degrees in the hard sciences.
For reference, my school also switched to a lottery system the year after I was there (so I guess it was 20 years "ahead" of TJ; incidentally it was also one of the first public "charter" schools in the strict sense of the word, a school with an educational charter).
It's easy to say that things are only getting worse, I feel that way about my college, and so have alumni of that school for at least a hundred years. In the case of my high school, I think other more secular things have changed the character of the school far more than switching over to the lottery system (for example mass paranoia over child abductions, and school shootings).
The author suggests that because affirmative action was deemed a poor solution to the "problem" that too many Asian kids attended the school, the only choice left was to abandon the entrance exam.
Maybe the racist "problem" wasn't actually one and so racist solutions wouldn't be appropriate.
Eliminating meritocratic school admissions in favor of balancing the school population bases on immutable characteristics such as skin color or "race" is the antithesis of the American ideal. It simply sows distrust and division between fellow Americans.
> Let me say that one more time: in practice, TJHS’s move from a standardized test to a lottery will be overwhelmingly pro-White, anti-Asian, and anti-immigrant; only as a much smaller effect will it be pro-underrepresented-minority.
So we're only pro-diversity and representation when it's anti-White, not pro-White, got it.
I think a good faith interpretation of this section requires the context:
>the Fairfax County School Board is “embarrassed” to have a school that, despite all its outreach attempts, remains only 5% Black and Latino—even though, crucially, the school also happens to be only 19% White (it’s now ~75% Asian).
The initial motivation in changing the school was (at least partially) to increase specific nonwhite minority student representation. Aaronson is pointing out that removing the entrance exams will likely not achieve these goals, though it will remove any negative attention from the school. I don't think Aaronson is advocating that good schools should all have smaller white student populations, instead he is criticizing methods that don't achieve their goals and have significant negative effects.
> The initial motivation in changing the school was (at least partially) to increase specific nonwhite minority student representation.
I.e. even though white students were under-represented, improving their representation was never a goal, and when it happens as a side-effect, it's presented as a negative.
presented as a negative because it is contrary to some group's views, not Aaronson's. Or to use a phrasing from his line of research, relative phase matters, not global phase.
I personally don’t care about affirmative action, but if you truly care, shouldn’t you be focused on income diversity over skin diversity? We know a lot of very well-off minorities (my wife for starters) and advantaging their children because of skin color doesn’t make any sense to me. An upper middle class black family and an upper middle class white family have way, WAY more in common then they do with a poor family of any race.
You're assuming that those pushing for affirmative action do truly care about helping disadvantaged people. Attempts have been made to do affirmative action by income, but were halted because they were helping poor southeast Asians and eastern Europeans, not Blacks and Hispanics. Affirmative action is pretty nakedly a system of racial spoils.
The term "affirmative action" is generally used only to refer to the race bits. Every organization I'm familiar with that uses affirmative action also has outreach programs for poor people, generally called "nontraditional backgrounds" in business and "underserved communities" in academia.
Depends what you see as the point of affirmative action. One of the primary benefits so far as I see it is that it helps make the country's ruling class more reflective of the underlying population. There's a lot of research that increasing representation of disadvantaged groups improves their outcomes.
They're quite distinct problems. Study after study shows that Black boys have much worse outcomes than white boys even when comparing families that have similar incomes: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c.... White boys whose parents have an income at the 90th percentile (compared to all households) will statistically end up around the 70th percentile (regression to the mean). A black boy raised to parents who have a 90th percentile income will end up at the 55th percentile.
There is something unique about the economic status of Black Americans, especially Black boys. The income gap between Black and whites hasn't narrowed at all since the end of Jim Crow in the 1960s. Gaps for other groups have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing-even groups, such as Hispanics, that typically come into the country near the bottom of the economic ladder.
> The research makes clear that there is something unique about the obstacles black males face. The gap between Hispanics and whites is narrower, and their incomes will converge within a couple of generations if mobility stays the same. Asian-Americans earn more than whites raised at the same income level, or about the same when first-generation immigrants are excluded. Only Native Americans have an income gap comparable to African-Americans. But the disparities are widest for black boys.
> The research makes clear that there is something unique about the obstacles black males face. The gap between Hispanics and whites is narrower, and their incomes will converge within a couple of generations if mobility stays the same. Asian-Americans earn more than whites raised at the same income level, or about the same when first-generation immigrants are excluded. Only Native Americans have an income gap comparable to African-Americans. But the disparities are widest for black boys.
Percent of children in single-parent families by race in the United States:
Asians are also 73% of Stuyvesant, rather like TJHS. Any purely merit-based educational institution in the US invariably skews in that direction. And, because Asians don't have the same political agency that Jews achieved many decades ago, very little is being done in their defense.
But Jews had a much easier time than Asians ever will because they could mostly blend in with White people. They now get counted as "White" in the statistics. This is the uncomfortable truth of the new racism. This country is hellbent on disenfranchising high-achieving Asians, who have the misfortune of looking too "Other" and get marked as such in racial composition stats.
Stop using skin color and race. Just stop. The only consideration that's remotely permissible, beyond merit, is financial posture.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
EDIT: Removed the use of caps, as requested by @dang. However, he seems to have ignored my appeal to restore this comment to where it was prior to moderation (it was at the top and quite popular). See @dang's auto-collapsed reply to this comment for more details.
I am an Asian American with kids in school. I am a fierce opponent of race based affirmative action but a huge supporter of income/wealth based affirmative action even knowing that it will make life tougher for my kids. The way I figure — my wealth has given my kids an unfair advantage over their peers. A poor kid is reading about polar bears in a 1985 World Book encyclopedia while I take my kids to Churchill Manitoba to see them in person. So the wealth based affirmative action will help drive home for them that because the road was smoothed for them, they will he expected to run farther on it.
Might not seem that way to you but poor kid reading about Polar Bears has a huge advantages over your kids seeing them in person.
For your kids polar bears are a vacation trip, little annoyance that has to be done in-between watching netflix or playing video games. Poor kid reading about them on the other hand can enter a mystical world of flying polar bears fighting fire-breathing dragons... ;)
my wealth has given my kids an unfair advantage over their peers. A poor kid is reading about polar bears in a 1985 World Book encyclopedia while I take my kids to Churchill Manitoba to see them in person.
Congratulations. You have done your bit to increase carbon dioxide emissions for a very dubious educational outcome.
> STOP USING SKIN COLOR AND RACE. STOP. The only consideration that's remotely permissible, beyond merit, is financial posture.
This is my stance as well, since it represents a sustainable solution to the fact that race is correlated with poverty in America.
Being poor sucks, regardless of whether systemic racism put you there or not. Being poor deprives all children of opportunities, regardless of skin color. (due to constraints on time, budget, and education of the parents)
Race-based affirmative action only solves the immediate problem that minority races are poorer on average. Financial-need-based affirmative action solves the immediate problem, in addition to guaranteeing that, if demographics shift, we are still helping the groups most in need.
I feel like whatever is happening here is more subtle than being "hellbent on disenfranchising high-achieving Asians". I think it's probably still in the category of 'racist', but works via a more complicated mechanism.
I can kinda imagine: it is ingrained in people's minds that a 'proper' institution ought to be mostly white, with some small percentages of each minority, and if things aren't working out that way the institution seems 'wrong' and becomes up for re-organization. The mindset is explicitly racist and is some sort of modern rendition of colonialism: that this country is still white society, foremost, and everyone else is here with white approval. But it's probably not that the individual bureaucrats (or whoever is in charge of this) is consciously bigoted -- it's that it's baked into society in a way that they can't see beyond.
This is an off-the-cuff unqualified theory. Would love to know if anyone with more familiarity of the situation has a more reality-based model.
The U.S. has been a White super-majority country for centuries, and is still a White majority country. Is it 100% [racism/colonialism(what?)/biogtry] for people to believe that institutions follow the demographics of the communities that they exist in? As the demographics of the country change (less and less White), so will the institutions.
The school in question is 19% White. 75% Asian. Fairfax County is 63% White, 18% Asian. Sure. It's all racism.
I'd appreciate a response to my prior appeal. The only change I'm noticing is that you collapsed your own comment and my reply. The optics of how this has been handled seem a bit questionable to me.
There's no point. @dang's intervention had what may have been the intended effect (suppressing the comment). He's been doing this long enough to know precisely how the various moderation knobs he turns will distort the conversation.
The original comment had 24 upvotes and was solidly at the top of the comment page. Given its popularity, it likely would have stayed there. Mea culpa for exceeding the bounds of the Overton Window.
I reduced the downweight when you fixed the main problem with your comment. I didn't remove it altogether, though, because "Jews had a much easier time than Asians" is racial flamebait. I don't think you meant it that way, but it takes a rather close reading of your comment to arrive at that conclusion, and many readers, alas, aren't going to do that. It's our job to moderate flamebait on HN because otherwise flamewars take over everything.
I collapsed this subthread about allcaps in your comment because once you fixed the issue, the subthread was no longer relevant.
Optics are often going to be questionable here because the quantity of moderation actions we have to do vastly exceeds our ability to explain them all in detail, let alone answer all the additional questions and objections that such explanations invariably stir up. That constraint is a fundamental fact of the job.
On the other hand, there's no specific question you can't get an answer to. You should email hn@ycombinator.com, though, because if you ask your question in comments here, the odds are pretty high that we won't see it. Also, the guidelines ask you not to: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> This country is hellbent on disenfranchising high-achieving Asians, who have the misfortune of looking too "Other" and get marked as such in racial composition stats.
Being hyperbolic like this diminishes the rest of your point(which I'm generally inclined to agree with)
It's not hyperbolic. The school board presented it as an explicit selling point of the merit lottery program (https://youtu.be/n3FS9TY0lcg?t=1669) that Asians would be disenfranchised in favor of other races.
"Oppressing" is a much more fraught judgement, I agree. But it seems clear that the architects of this policy think there are too many Asians and want to see fewer of them, and I'd characterize policies aimed at excluding specific racial groups as disenfranchisement.
You may find it interesting to read the book Whiteshift - https://www.amazon.com/Whiteshift-Populism-Immigration-Futur... . The thesis of the book is that over time, Hispanic and Asian Americans will start to be considered white, similar to how the perception of Irish, German, and other nationalities changed in the 1900s.
As an Asian who has been to the USA, I find this to be highly unlikely, especially considering that Asians (East Asians, not Indians) are not even Caucasians. Whiteshift happened because all those nations (Germans, Irish, etc.) are of Caucasian European stock. Maybe it could work with Hispanics, but even that is a stretch. Many of us don't want to admit this, but our brains are wired to immediately understand how much genetic history we share with another person just by looking at them.
You make a good point, but in the past the same argument was used to say that Slavs or Latins (southern Europeans) would never be perceived as the same race as the people of Germanic descent. I think you're right that Hispanic is closer, though. Think of Hispanic people like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, are they really perceived as so different from white? Also, speaking to your comment that you are an Asian that has been to the USA, I want to mention that the author of the book is partly of Asian descent himself. If you're curious to read it I recommend it!
I'm mildly appalled by this blog post. The author seems to prefer the "affirmative action" solution which would result in increased uptake of Black & Hispanic kids, over the proposed "lottery" solution that would result in increased uptake of White kids. I guess this is quite in vogue nowadays, but personally I still oppose racism on principle, even the pro-Black, anti-White (and often anti-Asian) racism.
The value Aaronson sees in the affirmative action solution isn't the precise racial balance, which you and I and I'm sure he all agree doesn't matter. It's that it might be able to preserve the school's character as a place that values and demands academic excellence, whereas a lottery of 3.5 GPA students almost surely won't.
the "'affirmative action' solution" would allow the school to keep its rigorous entrance exam system in place, which is what Aaronson seems to actually care about, not some demographic percentages.
Affirmative action means that the exam remains in place. You have to be interested in going to the school to get in. You can't casually be accepted by having a 3.5 GPA or over (which probably 20 or so percent of people have).
The author touches on a really important shift in how diversity advocates have approached their goals in recent years: the relative abandonment of meritocracy as a desirable thing. Whereas before, they advocated affirmative action and similar solutions as ways to slightly tweak merit-based systems to benefit historically disadvantaged populations, there seems to now be a more widespread rejection of those systems as inherently discriminatory. The only transformative net effect, it seems, will be to significantly reduce the proportion of Asians across elite institutions.
You write as if our institutions will always remain healthy and the only uncertainty our future holds is which groups or which individuals will get which share of the "pie" (or "prosperity") produced by our healthy institutions.
This is one of the reasons I can’t get fully behind public education because in a democracy, everything government operated must eventually revert to the mean. Excellence is not prized in government.
It's the only way to ensure that the school system continues to function. Otherwise you'd have great schools for the rich and terrible schools for the not-so-rich and horrible schools for the poor (assuming they'd have an education at all). As it is there is still lots of skewing but by having the rich kids go to the same schools as the poor ones at least the divide is a smaller one (of course, neighborhood and town/city still leave plenty of room for differences, as does the existence of home tutoring for wealthy people's kids).
No, you'd actually have gifted schools for gifted children from gifted parents, unrelated to how rich they are. IQ is highly hereditary. Asians which now dominate these schools weren't rich, they were both economically as well as socially disadvantaged as a population because of racism.
Dunno, I’m not sure I would have had that but I got in. Jr high was kind of a bad time. Times change and all, I’m not sure what the grades mean any more.
But that’s (3.5) what I got there, and and in college.
The gist of this article seems to be that it is bad that this high school changed its entrance criteria from being based on exams to GPA and that this will ruin the school. GPA based entrance (w/ a lottery if there are to many applications) doesn't sound terrible to me. Seems like eliminating exam bias would make this a net gain, but the author obviously disagrees.
GPA is a biased criteria in an education system where some people have disproportionate access to educational resources. The United States is one such system, with white people and affluent people having considerable advantages^ over others.
The post’s author correctly observes that the resulting random lottery will accurately represent the biases that influenced the applicant pool, and therefore the outcome will be a school that reinforces societal biases rather than weakening them.
The error in reasoning here is in the relative evaluation of “bias in entrance exams” versus “bias in GPAs”. The school has thrived under the former bias, and the essence of the issue is simple:
Which biases are healthier for students and society? The biases of school’s exam process, or the biases of GPA?
And that phrasing highlights a particularly ugly truth that most of the citizens supporting this change will do everything in their power to refuse recognizing consciously:
“A system that’s biased towards my family’s skin color and/or wealth level is better for my family than any system that is not biased in my family’s favor, no matter how good it may be for society in general.”
^ For example, “test prep” biases GPAs towards students with wealth and free time, against students with evening/weekend jobs and family responsibilities.
Personally I think that if the school is that good and popular it should expand and accept everyone who applies. Dropping kids that can't keep up back to the standard school system. Eliminating entrance bias completely.
Can you show evidence of any bias in the testing? Could it be possible its not biased?
Asians are a historically disadvantaged population who have had to ensure so much racism in USA, yet unlike blacks in recent decades they've had huge upward mobility on all social and economic indicators. So how have the supposed racist biases in tests changed to allow asians to surpass the dominant whites yet blacks and latinos continue to struggle?
Asians and immigrants tend to value education because it can offer a path to a higher standard of living and coming over to the US kinda self selected for the type of people with an upbringing that valued education and the willingness to take risks in unknown territory (even if it's because life in their country of origin was really bad). This is why Asians/immigrants and their children have a disproportionate occupation of seats in high caliber schools and jobs at well paying companies in the US.
There's a couple problems with saying this out loud though:
1. Some people are reluctant to admit that culture may be a nontrivial part of the reason why some groups of people do better than other groups in academics.
2. People are thinking too much about race when i think immigration is a bigger factor. Children of people from African countries excel in US schools too.
For those interested, you may want to look into studies relating to the 'immigrant paradox in the US' to learn more.
EDIT: just to clarify something: I'm all for immigration and I wish the current administration wasn't so anti-immigrant. This country has prospered from the work of immigrants and I absolutely think non-immigrants should compete with immigrants instead of acting entitled and pretending like some immigrants took their good jobs. Just because you were born on the right soil doesn't mean you deserve a better chance at getting a job. And immigrants pay taxes too.
A certain percentage of people just have test taking anxiety or other issues that impede their ability to test well. If you judge only on the results of a test, then you've just eliminated all those people from the start. But then our school system tends to already be biased against such people so it wouldn't really be that out of line.
It's not just moving from an exam to GPA, it's taking students above a GPA of 3.5 and entering them into a lottery. Scott seems concerned that incoming students will not be as high achieving, because they're chosen at random from a pool that's not very selective, and they won't be as interested in STEM, because the school will be using the SAT instead of their own more specific exam.
If that's the case then I agree completely. An application is absolutely necessary, otherwise you'll get a lot of kids there who don't want to be there. I also tend to think a basic interview or some other way of determining that it is the kid that wants to be there, not the parents who want the kids there.
I disagree with the way the article frames the issue.
It would help America more to have universally "pretty good" schools, than a few great schools in a sea of "pretty bad" schools.
So, like many other American issues, the argument reminds me of two people in a tiny parking lot squabbling angrily over who is at fault for boxing the other in. If the business that designed and painted the lot allocated insufficient space, neither driver should blame the other.
The premise that there are groups in America who need saving from poverty and lousy schools is true, but why save only a few of them by sending them to a school for gifted students? Deal with the inequality of income and of the school system. Last time I checked, Finland does pretty well with that strategy.
Unless Finland had similar demographics to the US, which it does not, it's hard to try to transplant policy decisions from there to the US and expect similar outcomes. Maybe as Finland's non-Finnish population grows significantly in the coming decades, the two countries can compare notes more easily.
It seems like every attempt to learn from other systems when discussing American issues, from education to public transit to healthcare to gun control, is met with a wave of “yeah that could never work here because we’re too [big, diverse, spread out, individualistic]. Have some humility and consider that other countries might have better outcomes in some things due to better policy choices, not just because they’re smaller, more homogeneous, colder, warmer, or whatever.
I am not American but the parent comment definitely has a great point: homogeneity, population size, and various other factors can drastically affect the outcome of such policies. So this may not be a lack of humility, but simply naivety on your part.
Certainly, but blanket, reflexive dismissal of other experiences is just exceptionalism. I’m not saying every foreign approach would work without modification, or even at all, but sheesh... at least have a look at them.
I've heard people use the two rebuttals — but America's bigger; but America's more diverse — to justify many of America's failings. They're effective, not because they are clearly correct, but because a good counter to them requires answers to many difficult-to-answer questions:
How does a large population affect policy? How much do economies of scale make things easier? How much does bureaucracy make things harder?
What does diversity mean? How much is in the eye of the beholder?
To what extent does diversity cause division? To what extent does diversity spark innovation?
In addition to these questions, the debate entails comparisons and contrasts of nations, most of which you hasn't visited. You end up trading pairs of statistics, without intimate knowledge of their correctness and equivalence.
For such reasons, I just avoid arguing about size and diversity. I'd have to write a book to provide a solid answer.
And even Wisconsin is more diverse at 86% white to Finland's 96%.
Another fun note:
The population of Finland is only 20% bigger than the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, California Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is 4.1 million. If we add in the San Jose-Santa Clara-Sunnyvale, California MSA at 1.9 million, what we tend to consider the "San Francisco Bay Area" has a greater population than Finland.
Yes, there might be better policy choices. However, even with good policy decisions we would have to see them through while grappling with the extremely different demographics and other widely varying conditions. One of my education professors at Rice felt strongly that the USA needed a "Marshall Plan" for educational funding across the nation. I've always thought this sounded like a dream come true, but even I have to admit that one thing that makes wrestling with educational reform in the USA so different from most places is that Americans have historically been highly opposed to centralized control of how children are educated and favor more local decision-making and funding. It seems very messy compared to the streamlined top-down approaches in many other countries. So somehow one would have to win Americans over to accepting more centralized control and funding of schools, or get them to somehow ensure that schools in under-funded districts get the resources they need to enjoy whatever we all decide is the baseline for an excellent education. It seems like it would be much easier to go with the first option since we have over a thousand school districts in the country, but millions and millions of people feel that would be an overreach by the government. I'm all for learning from other places, but when those other places don't have to overcome the same problem it's hard to figure out how to replicate the things they are doing right.
Also, the U.S. is more comparable to the EU than to any individual EU country. Obviously, EU countries make their own funding decisions. But many EU countries push funding decisions even further down to individual localities. Germany and Sweden, for example, have highly decentralized education systems. The same is true for Canada. Indeed, in Canada, an even smaller percentage of school funding comes from federal sources (just 2%) compared to the US (about 5-10%).
Wow, rayiner - you're almost at 100,000! Well, that's interesting how decentralized Germany is. I'm not an expert, but I live in the 4th largest city in the country and am aware of a lot of problems. Texas is not one of the ones mentioned in your link - no danger of the poorest getting the most here!
This article mentions multiple times how some funding calculations have not been adjusted in decades and ends with, "Most agree that the patchwork set of calculations for how to distribute money to Texas’ schools is ready for a major facelift." Convoluted formulas are piled on top of one another without achieving the goal of well-funded school systems, so I'd be all for throwing those out and going with something straightforward.
I'd guess that poor kids are likely to be more expensive to educate, but maybe it's a toss up. Some factors I'm aware of in my locale:
* Poor kids are more likely to require special-needs programs and other kinds of extra attention.
* The district has different maximum class sizes for lower and higher income schools.
* On the other hand, the system lets teachers apply for transfers while keeping their seniority, so the higher income schools (where it's easier to teach) end up with higher salary costs.
So I'd have to see a breakdown on actual costs to know whether the general level of funding is actually a measure of whether rich and poor schools are receiving comparable funding relative to their actual needs.
Yeah, frankly I think it’s because we do a horrible job of maintaining a basic level of economic security and opportunity for huge swathes of our population. Western European countries generally do a much better job of that.
As someone who moved to the US from Europe and has spent decades living in both, I would say that it’s not a lack of humility driving these comments. The US really does have different characteristics and a different society, based on different values. It’s very easy to overlook the complexity of US society and culture.
It’s a trope in itself to see the US as dumb for not simply adopting ‘sensible’ policies that seem to work elsewhere.
I think you've gotten faulty information. Finland's high schools are explicitly tracked, as is common in Europe; about half of students attend vocational schools that don't offer college preparatory education.
Yes, but the "pretty good" schools come from kids and families taking academics seriously. In Finland that's the default, but in the US you need an entrance exam to keep the jocks out. It's no surprise that middle-class white kids are underrepresented and would like to get in without all the hard work and discipline.
Can’t you fail them during the previous year, where they don’t have enough grades to graduate ?
That’s the system in France, where public schools can’t refuse kids, but those kids can only move classes if they passed. If you aren’t interested in studying you’ll spend your life in middle school until you’re 16 and just drop out.
In the US, graduation rate is seen as the primary metric of public school quality, so policies that encourage people not to graduate aren't feasible. (One of our most famous educational reforms was named the No Child Left Behind Act, on the principle that in an ideal world not a single child would fail to graduate high school.)
The really scary thing is that world-wise bloggers like Scott Aaronson and Siderea think that bullying is an inevitable fact of going to school. Those of us that grew up outside the US know different.
Where, pray tell, do you live that bullying is nonexistent?
The surveys that I've seen show that bullying is pretty universal. About ⅓ of students worldwide are bullied at some point in their education, and these rates don't change all that much from country to country, although the form of bullying does have drastic differences. (Notably, Europe and the US tend to have less physical bullying and more psychological bullying compared to the rest of the world).
That's surely where the financing model is important. Schools here get money based on the number of students, and the dispatch of teachers is done at a region level depending on the needs.
A school with "bad" teachers would just get better teachers if it was warranted (in practice, everyone understands why kids are failing, and they'll send low experience teachers instead, because fuck them, I guess)
> but in the US you need an entrance exam to keep the jocks out
This comment is unnecessarily and rudely exclusive.
I went to a county-wide gifted magnet school that was a satellite to one of the regular county high schools. The athletes played sports at the main school, and non-athletes took gym classes there. About 20% of each class were varsity athletes, and the athletes fit in quite nicely with the non-athletes in academic and social settings.
It’s sad that you added this line, since your first sentence regarding the need for kids and (most importantly) families to take academics seriously is a very important point.
> > but in the US you need an entrance exam to keep the jocks out
> This comment is unnecessarily and rudely exclusive.
Indeed. It's also completely wrong about TJ, just as it is about the school you went to. From my experience (graduating in '02), lots and lots of TJ students played sports -- and quite a lot of them were very serious about it and quite proud of how well they did. I believe our crew teams, in particular, were nationally competitive.
This is counter-intuitive to a lot of people who don't expect "nerds" to be interested in sports or "jocks" to be good at math, science, or technology. (Including me when I first got there.)
But I don't think it's a coincidence. It turns out that working hard, showing up, and keeping at it even when things aren't easy is a powerful way to get better at something. That's just as true for a sport as for an academic subject.
The anti-sports stance is deliberate. Pursuing athletics at a high level takes time and money, both of which would better be directed elsewhere in a world of limited resources. It's also sending a message: this is a school, not a sports club; if you want sports, join the sports club, there you get sports.
Especially, what's with the focus on competitive sports? At school you absolutely want to reach the unfit kids because school sports is the only time they get any kind of exercise. You have to be inclusionary, the purpose is public health, individual fitness, not competition, but competitive sports is exclusionary.
Also, what's with the focus on team sports? American schoolkids have a staggering need for conformity, and team sports seem to feed that need.
> There are studies that school districts that dropped sports have better academic outcomes: [link]
I don't see such a study described in that article. After not finding it, I searched for "study", "studies", and "research", and still didn't. Can you perhaps quote a key sentence from the bit you're thinking of?
There is a story about one district that dropped football (not all sports), under severe budgetary pressure. Seems like the right choice. I should add some context that may not be obvious outside the US: that district is a small town in Texas, and Texas and especially its small towns are where high-school football is a really especially big deal. (My dad grew up in a small town in Texas.) In the rest of the country it's generally not so extreme as it was in that town.
The article is quoting a study saying that team sports may improve outcomes for the players but not for the rest of the students. The obvious doesn't need saying: organized sports is a moneysink that takes funding away from the core mission, which is academics.
The kids that really cause trouble aren’t usually “jocks” because in many states you have to pass classes to play sports. To play sports you also have to be disciplined and listen to instructions, and not get caught with drugs or arrested for armed robbery.
I'm from Finland and I don't understand what you're talking about. There are no gifted options in elementary school but immediately from high school onwards standardised tests rank students into better and worse schools. Everyone knows which ones are which and the entrance scores are widely publicized in the media.
And you can bet your ass the best schools and universities only have kids from upper middle class parents. Turns out free education just means subsidising rich kids' education with public money here, just like everywhere else.
It's relative. America's disadvantaged are not like Finland's. There's an underclass in the US straight out of Oliver Twist.
The essay stresses the unfairness of depriving a subset of that underclass — ie: strivers — of a chance to pull themselves up.
The goal instead should be universally to lower American inequality. We should bring it closer to Finnish levels, even if Finnish levels are imperfect.
I'm confused - are you talking about inequality of opportunities (social mobility) or inequality of outcomes?
Yes, we have really high income taxes which means our income equality is less in Nordics than in the USA. However, that also means that strivers are unable to get rich. You can't get rich by working.
That means our wealth inequality is just as bad as in the US. Our 1% has just as much of the wealth and power as in the US.
Whereas in the US, that 1% is mostly entrepreneurs with minority having inherited, in Nordics it's the opposite.
Happy to dive deeper into statistics if you want to.
There is definitely some kind of miscommunication here. I know the area well enough (Sverige lite bättre än ditt land men iaf...) that your comments puzzle me.
I know that you know that poverty in your country, compared to the US, is a non-issue.
I know that you know that citizens in your country don't have basic educational deficits that many Americans have.
I know that you know that your country is very capable of competing in the world market.
Americans, few having visited places like Finland, have a heaven-like perception of the nordic countries. Everyone lives happy lives, powered by public transportation, true equality, and unlimited healthcare unlike almost anywhere else.
I'm sure things are great there, but the perception is rarely based on reality. Rather, the Nordics are almost wholly invented by Americans in their minds based on what they imagine them to be.
That's probably a bit too dismissive in my case, but I don't want to turn the thread into my personal travelogue. You could ask tupputuppu whether his/her opinion of the Finnish system is the norm within Finland itself, though.
Fairfax County has excellent schools. In the 2013, the county participated along with several others in a cross-country PISA comparison. Herndon High school, which is not in a particularly wealthy area, performed right between Germany and Canada, and a bit below Finland: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/OECD%20Test%20for%20Schoo... (see page 104).
Finland has a major advantage of being full of Finns, as opposed to American demography. In broad swathes of the country there are not enough "good students" to go around.
Students need to be clustered according to their abilities and interests. Not doing so is impractical at best and wasteful at worst.
Different subsets of students require different amounts of attention, different specialties, different classes, etc. Go too fast and the bad students fall behind. Go too slow and good students will get bored and act out. One of my top students failed my class for missing too many lectures -- because attendance was written into the student contract to motivate the lower-performing students.
Certainly, and, to the extent that it (ie: separating into classes according to aptitude) doesn't railroad disadvantaged students into bad schools, I have no issue with that.
Agreed. I think schools that turns bad students into good ones deserve more funding and publicity than schools that turns good students into excellent ones.
This is really upsetting. I didn't go to TJHS, but the sense I got from the three people I know who did was that it had that critical mass of nerdy science-and-tech-obsessed teenagers.
At least in Canada, it's more common to have smaller programs operating within a larger high school - my program was 30 people, mostly humanities kids with maybe 8-10 STEM kids. There wasn't anything approaching that sort of critical mass. Plus, as a subset of a smaller school, you still had to play politics with everyone else. TJHS always sounded like one of the only places that, somehow, did have that critical mass and managed to maintain it for decades.
Maybe this sort of public school is just politically infeasible now - which is a pity, since locating and nurturing the talents of disadvantaged youth benefits all of us.
Critical mass would be one way to put it. There was also a willingness to let the kids do what they were interested in and provide support for it.
For example, in 10th grade, 4 of us got together and decided we wanted to make a new high temp superconductor. (87-88, around the time that the first LN2 one was out there). With the support of a couple of the labs, we researched it, ordered chemicals, made a pill press, mixed it, pressed it, baked it in a o2 rich environment, and then tested with ln2. I think at the time it was the first high school to make one.
None of that was something that was part of the classroom flow, it it was absolutely something that was supported.
Tj was absolutely amazing when I went. (‘90) It is, in my experience, the existence proof that public education can be effective. I’m not sure what was the key component, but one of them was that every single person was there by choice.
I don’t pretend to know what would be the maximally fair distribution of places, but I am disappointed that that there one seem to be a spawning/cloning of the concept so that the experience can be spread to more students. We learned things, there were special people there, but its not something that’s unique to that building, staff and students.
"I’m not sure what was the key component, but one of them was that every single person was there by choice.'
I can tell you for a fact that wasn't true then. It likely isn't true now. I was forced by my parents to apply for admission to TJ and was accepted. I ultimately refused to attend despite the great pressure from both my parents and school officials. I know several people who were in the same boat as I was but gave into the pressure and attended hating doing so. This would have been during the same time period you attended.
Speaking as someone who actually went to the school in question (class of 2008), here's my thoughts:
TJHSST has been going downhill for a long while. Probably Lodal leaving as principal was a catalyzing factor, as she was much more adept at insulating TJHSST from school system politics than her successor was. The philosophy of treating the students as adults was under fire from parents of students at other schools for reasons I don't completely understand. (e.g., they forced the school to cancel all off-campus lunch privileges).
Another issue I saw was that the school generally trended away from a science & tech magnet to a more generic gifted & talented school. Instead of getting in because you were passionate about, say, programming or robotics, and the school's tech labs were a good fit for you; you are now going there because it's the best school in the country and you're top in the class, even if you don't much care for the enrichment activities that are provided.
You missed the golden era by a bit. I was there during the Geoff Jones era, and Lodal was the beginning of the end. Fairfax County got tired of TJ telling them to f--k off, and installed Lodal. She was a bit of a "company woman" in terms of appeasing the county, but apparently not as bad as who came after.
I don't know anything about the school but it sounds like the prestige took over- like with harvard, MIT, etc all, it's a great school but that's as much being driven by it's reputation for being a great school, attracting the most ambitious students in the world
I would argue that the most recent principal has likely done far more destruction than the Lodal -> Glazer transition did, but I have heard that sentiment before from older alumni. (I was a student near the end of Glazer's tenure.)
As to the latter point, the school has definitely been trending in that direction. In my time, I would wager that around 50% of students had primarily a science interest, 35% had primarily a technology interest, and the remaining 15% had no strong inclination between the two. (From what I have heard, in more recent classes the tech has become more popular than the other sciences.)
At the end of the day, though, as long as the curriculum still requires sci-tech rigor, it's entirely beneficial that the school also have strong humanities and arts programs. 13 year olds are applying to this school, and people's interests change throughout high school in unpredictable ways.
Funny how perceptions changed over time. I attended in the early 90s and back then I was not aware of any philosophy to treat the kids as adults. We did not have an off-campus lunch program; I got detention one time when I got caught sneaking off campus. And there was definitely a vibe of gifted and talented across the board. The labs were not as sophisticated as they are now. My classmates had broad interests and ended up with achievements across many professions. Just within the few folks I’ve kept track of, there are successes in science and tech but also theater, TV, movies, writing, restaurants, politics, etc.
I attended TJ from 1998-2002, and my brother attended a few years later, and I've had a lot of conflicting thoughts about this over the last few months as I have watched the decision unfold.
To begin, whether TJ was "America's best high school" depends on what you mean by "best." It was the high school with the highest average SAT score--similar to several Ivy League universities. It had some amazing programs: you could take classes in quantum mechanics as a junior or senior. It had great connections with local private and public research labs for students to do their senior projects. You were surrounded by kids who were smart, dedicated, and competitive.
All that is not necessarily what makes for a great school, at least not in every situation. (For my own kids, I preferred to send them to a small K-12 private school in Annapolis--which has less competition, tiny class sizes, and a lot more art and theater). And obviously some of the things that were good about TJ will be affected by getting rid of the admissions test, such as the SAT scores, while others will remain the same.
I tend to agree with Scott that getting rid of the test entirely was an overreaction, and a hastily-done one at that. What precipitated the change was, around the same time George Floyd was killed, news came out that the incoming class at TJ had no black students. (It turned out not to be quite true, but the number was very small.) People were broadly supportive of reforms. Many supported a holistic admissions process which considered racial diversity. Such a policy had been in place prior to 2003, when the school moved to a race-blind process. Under the prior policy, the percentage of Black and Hispanic students was twice as high, and the percentage of Asians was about 30-40%.
To my knowledge, few actual students, parents, and alumni supported the substantially more radical decision to abandon the admissions test entirely. The Fairfax County Superintendent made the decision with little input from TJ parents and the community as a whole. And, as Scott points out, the primary beneficiary under the specific lottery-based approach the county adopted will be upper middle class white students, who are significantly underrepresented currently.
More troubling I think is the fairly radical ideology underlying the change. Solid majorities of all groups, including Black and Hispanic people, oppose using race as even a "minor factor" in admissions: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ.... Asians are actually the most supportive of considering race, and even then under 40% of people support the practice. At the same time, most people continue to think that high school grades and standardized tests should be the main criteria for admissions: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-want-grades-n.... Northern Virginia being, in the last decade or so, a fairly liberal place, a holistic admissions process that considered race to built a diverse class--similar to those used universally by colleges--could have gotten buy-in from the community.
More evidence of the radicalness of the approach was the accompanying rhetoric: "meritocracy is a lie" and "admissions tests are racist." Not more nuanced views, such as "some people ar...
> It was the high school with the highest average SAT score
It also shouldn't be that surprising that a school with an SAT-like admission test would produce graduates who have incredibly high SAT scores. It is an admission process that highly selected for great test takers.
The TJHSST admissions procedure when I did it was basically the same as the college admissions procedure, complete with SAT-like test, grade submissions, letters of recommendations, and the essays.
I initially thought this was a guest post by Elezier Yudkowsky as well, but I believe this is Scott Aaronson’s post and the previous post on his blog was a guest post by Elezier.
Fellow TJ grad here ('99). I also entered this conversation proud/grateful for my experience, and worried about the politicization of the entrance process. (I also believe in structural racism and have been concerned about the ethnic balance at TJ, but I would have said the solution should come way earlier in the educational process, and still think that most effort should go there.)
However, I think treating this as the abandonment of meritocracy is a straw man. Discourse with other grads changed my mind. A key factor is how much the test is now being gamed.
Based on some facebook polls of ~500 alumni (not scientific but moreso than any other direct evidence presented!), the percentage of accepted students going through specialized test prep has climbed from <2% in my day to >50% today. Some of these programs cost thousands of dollars for a chance to change your admissions outcome.
A test that draws this much financial investment is no longer a tool of meritocracy. And the plan that replaces it is not devoid of meritocracy. It includes a baseline GPA requirement, a holistic application package, and a lottery. I think we can and should do better than the lottery, but the test isnt it.
Those of us who are activated about keeping TJ meritocratic and advanced, let's put energies into fairer approaches than this test, which wouldn't be viable with Covid anyway.
> However, I think treating this as the abandonment of meritocracy is a straw man. Discourse with other grads changed my mind. A key factor is how much the test is now being gamed.
> Based on some facebook polls of ~500 alumni (not scientific but moreso than any other direct evidence presented!), the percentage of accepted students going through specialized test prep has climbed from <2% in my day to >50% today. Some of these programs cost thousands of dollars for a chance to change your admissions outcome.
The median income for a family in Fairfax county is over $140,000. A few thousand dollars isn’t a lot of money for them. It surely is for some people, which is why I would support a holistic admissions system. But I’m not sure why, for everyone else, we can’t just treat that as the cost of doing business. Especially if, as you say, everyone is doing it. Everyone studies for the LSAT, the MCAT, etc.
Now, if your point is that it’s a bit mental to treat admissions for a high school like admissions to medical school, in sympathetic to that argument.
Your comment got me interested in FCPS income distribution, which is indeed skewed high (although I couldn't find $140k median [1]). If you're in the 20th percentile at $54k, or even the 40th at $94k, you have significantly less available after the many living expenses that don't scale with income.
With that said, I recognize that household expenditure on education is going to play a role in preparedness for an advanced curriculum. But I think expecting folks to shoulder an early test prep burden (with uncertain result) is directionally un-meritocratic. For me it raises the evidence necessary that the test is playing an otherwise useful role. What's the best argument you've seen there?
Those are medians for all households, which includes say a recent college grad living alone. The median income of a family with kids in Fairfax County is close to $140,000: https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/9184-median-inc.... Probably well over $150,000 for people with high-schools aged kids, who tend to be at peak career earnings.
The brutal truth is that shelling out that kind of money for test prep might actually result in academically better prepared students.
In other words, if the test prep leads to learning the material more thoroughly, it may still be a good predictor of who is going to thrive in an advanced educational environment.
It’s not clear that any system that accurately predicts future student success, cannot be games by parents throwing money at it.
I think the current proposal agrees - "Minimum bar plus lottery" caps the returns on spending money, but also other forms of merit.
I also agree that it's impossible and probably undesirable to keep folks from investing in every kind of preparation they can.
However, I think the test is a uniquely concentrated opportunity to invest in swaying the admissions system rather than in preparing more holistically. What I'd love to see explored are:
- A more holistic admissions packet that includes evaluation beyond GPA.
- Public resources on advanced education earlier in the curriculum.
- Some examination of Chicago-style admissions, which ranks students within local geographies to pick highest achievers from many backgrounds (yes, I'm aware of many arguments from both sides against this structure).
You're starting with the assumption that you can't buy merit. But you absolutely can. At every opportunity in my life where the resources available to me did not support further growth, someone else could have bought more merit. It's still a meritocracy when that person is selected.
What it isn't is a pontetial-ocracy or a inherent-worth-ocracy, and I don't understand the argument for those models.
And you are starting with the assumption that admissions should reward merit rather than produce it. If a public school is not intended to convert potential to merit, I don't know what is. A school is not actually an "-ocracy" of any kind and this is a weird semantic argument.
If one were going to take a fundamentalist view of merit and exclude potential (again, weird choice for a school!) it would be especially important to define what merit it is you think you can measure. Are you sure the test (+ prep system) do that well? Does spending money on a specialized prep that improves your score translate to producing the merit you are talking about? Or are you retroactively defining merit as "the thing you can measure", because measuring is itself the appealing part?
I would agree with you if this were the national or even regional model, such as the case in some countries in East Asia. But it's not. This is a single school with a unique model that has proved succcessful and is being torn down. No one was being denied a highschool education or a chance to succeed over this.
Questioning the measurement of merit is easy when you don't have to offer an alternative. There's always something to pick at in every methodology, including every alternative you may think of.
If test scores didn't correlate to academic performance that would be embarrassing and really easy to show. But they do. Test prep is just focused studying. It doesn't have any hacks or shortcuts other than learning the material better.
And how is this any different than what has happened with high-school athletics over the same time-frame?
Parents regularly now spend thousands (tens of thousands!) of dollars on elite athlete training for 5th-8th graders in order to make the varsity team once they hit high-school. In my state (MN) it's not unheard of to rent an apartment in a desirable (aka good athletic) school district to play for that team.
My sister was an elite athlete and spent a few post college years at a specialized training academy. Multiple professional athletes trained here in the off-season.
She had multiple classes of middle school children to run training sessions with. Some of these middle schoolers even paid for 1 one 1 training with her for even more money.
Replace "Admission test" with "varsity tryouts" and you have basically the same system, with the same gamesmanship and money being spent.
What's disturbing to me — and this cuts both ways — is the subtle shifting of what's meant by "meritocracy".
Here, on HN and on Scott's post, there's an implicit equating of "meritocracy" with "test score."
Do people here really think test score and ability — to say the least of merit per se — are equivalent?
Go find a scatterplot of some data correlated 0.80 (e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3576830/). That's a very generous estimate of how correlated that test score will be with actual ability, whatever that means. The correlation probably is lower, like 0.50-0.70. Look at the y axis. Now cut it and take the upper fraction of your choice. See how wide a range of the x axis is represented?
That's the problem.
The reason why test scores are a problem is because when you select on an imperfect indicator, at some level you are randomly selecting with regard to actual ability, which is even further removed from merit. Throw in any kind of bias of any sort associated with anything, and the problem gets worse.
The truth is, it was already a lottery before. It was just a lottery that everyone pretended wasn't a lottery, and that's the problem people have with it.
The problem with meritocracy isn't the idea of selecting people based on merit, it's the idea that test scores or other such quantitative metrics are equivalent to merit.
The analogy with sports is fundamentally flawed because, among other things, the metrics are the thing of interest in sports. If you are interested in who can swim 50m the fastest, then your speed on the 50m swim is the metric of interest. In school, though, presumably you're not interested in test score, you're interested in someone's ability to solve problems, or create things, or be productive, or whatever. And we're not talking about sport, we're talking about gateways into careers in general. If we are selecting into schools to maximize ability to achieve high test scores on standardized tests per se, then at least be frank and honest about that, and accept that what you are arguing is that the school is an institution whose purpose is to achieve high standardized test scores, and nothing more. But if you want to argue that the school should produce people who are solving problems, innovating, and so forth, then you need to be honest about selection based on test scores, because the scores aren't what they intend to measure.
Scott laments the loss of the ability of some kid to work their way into the school based on some test score. But shouldn't he be screaming about a system that doesn't provide resources to kids where they're at? That assumes the kid's ability is equivalent to their score on some entrance exam? What about those problems?
I agree that throwing out test score and relying on GPA per se is a problem; relying on GPA alone is just as much of a problem as relying on test score alone. You could, for example, have a lottery for everyone whose score is above some generous threshold, or for everyone whose GPA or score is above some threshold. But staying with the system as it is seems at worst like turning a blind eye to systemic injustice, and at best like missing the forest for the trees.
You’re kinda smushing together two different things: reliability and merit. The SAT (which is similar to the TJ test) is highly reliable—meaning that it’s measuring something real, and not just producing a “random” result.
> How reliable is the SAT? The College Board website reports that a student’s true score is within 30 points of his or her measured score (SEM = 30; College Board, FAQ, 2005). A test with a standard deviation of 100 and a SEM of 30 has an internal consistency coefficient of .91 (α = .91). In a study specifically investigating SAT I score change upon repeated testing, 1,120,563 students in the 1997 college- bound cohort who took the SAT I one to five times in their junior and senior years gained an average of 7 to 13 points on the verbal section and 8 to 16 points on the mathematics section (Nathan & Camara, 1998). Thus, a student who retested at the higher end of both ranges still would not breach the standard error of measurement, indicating high test-retest reliability. Additionally, in a study of the effects of commercial coaching on SAT scores, Powers and Rock (1999) found that the average increase in student scores after intensive coaching was only 30 points on the verbal section and 50 points on the mathematics section, demonstrating that SAT scores remain relatively stable even with intervening practice.
With an SEM of 30, there is less than a 1% chance that a 100 point difference, between a 600 and a 500 on a section is due to random chance. The difference between a median score and and a TJ level score is 250.
Validity, whether the test measures something we care about is a separate issue.
Metrics aren't the thing of interest in sports. Randomly looking at the justifications for some of the top high school athletics programs in California:
"Honor, Glory and Love... the school is dedicated to the development of the whole person: spiritual, intellectual, physical, emotional and aesthetic"
"students learn lifelong lessons in teamwork, discipline and leadership"
"We encourage the development of team collaboration, communication, and characteristics that foster empathy, tolerance, personal growth and positive citizenship."
I mean, it's all bullshit. Or at least, people aren't buying expensive houses in good school districts just so their kids can learn the value of teamwork. But if you take athletics' programs words at face value, winning and metrics aren't the primary objective.
Specialized high schools are intended to build impressive application packets for college, which in turn is meant to get access to elite jobs and social opportunities. Indeed, that's one of the major reasons parents even try to get their kids into sports! One of the easiest ways into an elite university is to become an above average athlete in an obscure sport (this is the go-to approach for well-off but academically mediocre white people, actually). And so the admissions process for these high schools is geared toward facilitating that objective.
TJ provided a pathway for academically gifted first generation Asian immigrants to achieve social mobility. And with this new process, many won't have access to TJ, to mostly be replaced with mediocre white kids (and a couple more token underrepresented minorities).
I have an honest question. In the US, all sports teams emphasize one word: mileage. That is, one is expected to prep hard. You practice free throw 10K times in the summer, and you’ll be a role model for your fellow team members and basketball fans. You work your ass off to squat with 300 pounds and now you can vertical jump 120 cm, again you're the role model of your fellow sportsmen. Now how is it different from I spending my entire fucking summer finishing 1,000 AOPS math problems and completing Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics and get ahead in all the tests? If story of the month is that James LeBron spends 1.5 million dollars a year to keep him fit, why is it wrong for me to spend 10K a year to find a private tutor so that I can learn abstract algebra in grade 7 while other kids are still confused about fractions? Or put it another way, it’s American spirit if a middle-class mom quits her job so she can take her kid to all kinds of tournaments, but it’s disgusting elitism if a mom in Chinatown takes three jobs so her daughter could prep for AIME? Why is practicing really hard on STEM is "gaming the system", while practicing like crazy in sports is hailed as heroism?
I see some serious hypocrisy here.
Oh, as for SAT. Come on, that's bottom line. If you get perfect scores, it does not mean you'll excel in college, but if you get really low score, you're just not that good academically, at least statistically speaking. Why is it so hard to understand the some tests are designed to be a filter with low false negatives? If anything, SAT is too simple for it has only standard questions.
I guess the point is, the 100m sprint is about as objective as you can get when it comes to testing short distance running ability. A shorter time means a faster person, no exceptions.
There is no such academic test, so there's always a gap between 'test prep' and 'learning'. The best prepared student may not be the best student.
To me at least, there's nothing depressing about working hard for some goal. There is something depressing about learning something ultimately meaningless (the contents of a test) so you can make the test itself meaningless.
Paraphrased: "Sports do this so schools should also work this way."
For me this is a bizarre leap, but many people love the sports analogy. I think these are the drivers and please tell me if I'm wrong.
(1) Sports clearly do a good job of finding exceptionally talented people, so maybe we should follow their playbook.
(2) People like and accept competitive sports, so emotionally they should have the same reaction to competitive academics.
On (1), there are so many ways that STEM success is not like sports.
- On an individual level, sports are literally engines for scoring performances, so progress towards success is completely observable. The highest levels of STEM success are defined by doing never-previously-observed things in highly collaborative environments with no opportunity for an exact head-to-head comparison. There is zero reason to believe that your 1,000 AOPS math problems are the best way to advance your STEM education towards real success, even though it may help you outcompete your neighbor on a single test.
- On an industry level, sports are entertainment businesses that only needs to find enough exceptional individuals to create events people will pay to see. Participation as both a spectator or contestant are voluntary. Public education is a social investment in economic opportunity for its citizens. It needs to succeed for far more people, and the definition of its success doesn't stop at finding a few stars who fill stadium seats.
On (2), there's a difference between rooting for the participants and rooting for the system. We like seeing people overcome obstacles whether they are fair or not. I bet a lot of people would enjoy a movie about the Chinese family you describe building a better life for their kids. I like movies about people overcoming gangsters, nazis, and tornados. It doesn't mean I want to fund gangsters, nazis and tornados to make more great stories.
Finally, I unequivocally agree on flipping the bird to anyone who judges the Chinatown mom for doing the best for her kid. The issue is that a similarly brilliant kid shouldn't be held back because they don't have the same awesome mom. And hey, maybe there are other great ways that three-job mom could be investing in her family and herself.
> Paraphrased: "Sports do this so schools should also work this way."
That's actually not what I meant. Granted, though, my question, for its not so accurate writing, can easily lead to such generalization. I was wondering about a much narrower difference: Americans value toiling in sports, yet despise similar practice in STEM. Toiling is a personal choice, as no one forces a student to practice hard, certainly not in American schools. So, why is it a bad thing if a student chooses to get better, sometimes much better, at math by solving more challenging problems?
> (2) People like and accept competitive sports, so emotionally they should have the same reaction to competitive academics.
Not sure if it matters, but I do think that competition is of secondary importance here. What matters is practice makes a better student, at statistically speaking -- this holds true for both sports and academia.
> On (1), there are so many ways that STEM success is not like sports.
There are. Practice is necessary but not sufficient. And I'm not saying practicing guarantees success. Instead, it's more like conditional probability: some people will get ahead by practicing, and I don't see how it's morally wrong if that happens.
> The highest levels of STEM success are defined by doing never-previously-observed things in highly collaborative environments with no opportunity for an exact head-to-head comparison.
I'm more concerned about the majority of the students. The US is a great place for truly talented few. They have access to vast resource: clubs, communities, online groups, local colleges, and at least dozens of programs and awards.
> There is zero reason to believe that your 1,000 AOPS math problems are the best way to advance your STEM education towards real success, even though it may help you outcompete your neighbor on a single test.
I guess this is where we differ. Why does it have to be the best way? I can also say there's zero reason to believe that 10K free throws is the best way to advance one's basketball career. We choose the best way to our best knowledge. And everything has a marginal return, I get it. I was simply comparing toiling in sports with toiling in STEM. You practice until your marginal return approaches zero, and you move on to the next level fo drilling. For elementary students, it can be getting really familiar with multiplication table. For student in junior high, it could be deep understanding of algebra and calculus, for high school student, it could be entry-level research with collaboration with other people.
> Public education is a social investment in economic opportunity for its citizens. It needs to succeed for far more people, and the definition of its success doesn't stop at finding a few stars who fill stadium seats.
Agreed.
> there's a difference between rooting for the participants and rooting for the system.
This is a really nice way of putting it. I just didn't understand why on individual level, Americans value personal effort in sports yet treat personal effort in education as "elitism" or "gaming the system".
> The issue is that a similarly brilliant kid shouldn't be held back because they don't have the same awesome mom. And hey, maybe there are other great ways that three-job mom could be investing in her family and herself.
I guess this is where we differ too. I think the K-12 education of the US is so bad that it does not hold back brilliant kids, but hold back millions of ordinary kids by not pushing them hard enough. See, it's like any college entrance exam in East Asia. Passing the exam does not necessarily mean you're good, but failing it means you're a lousy student. The problem is that more than half of American students couldn't even do well in SAT, which is a very, I mean very, low bar for STEM students.
Thanks for expanding your points, and apologies that I was glib in the synopsis.
Your point is taken on free throws vs test prep. But I think the underlying issue is actually that you are focused on what kinds of prep we should respect, and I'm focused on what kind of admissions we should expect. I do think kids show an admirable and relevant grit by any kind of practice. But we do them a disservice if we overindex on a single method, and should adjust - just as you'd require a coach to adjust if they based team membership.
That amounts to an argument against overweighting the test, and not one in favor of the lottery. But I think the other piece is that if the test does more harm (in making things harder for otherwise qualified kids without access to prep) than good (in detecting the grit that will lead to success), it's better to retire it then keep it. Either way we shouldn't stop with the lottery.
Finally, this point is really interesting:
> the K-12 education of the US is so bad that it does not hold back brilliant kids, but hold back millions of ordinary kids by not pushing them hard enough
I agree that way more kids should have an opportunity to have effort and capabilities recognized with more opportunities all along the education track. I'd be really interested in finding ways to do this that are less dependant on the parents.
People of color (which in practice excludes Asians) are over-represented in sports, but under-represented in academia. A lot of people see the former as desirable and the latter as indicative of systemic racism. I suspect that if sports were dominated by Asians, the people who oppose standardized testing would feel the same way about sports.
Will this type of move inevitably trickle down to the best public CS undergrad programs? Berkeley and UCLA CS are almost entirely Asian (east and south) with a sprinkling of mostly Jewish Americans who fill the "white" category. That reflects in part California's demographics but even less heavy Asian American places like UT Austin, UW Seattle, and UIUC are 50%+ Asian in undergrad CS.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadChildren with special abilities and skills need to be nourished and encouraged. They are a national treasure. Challenging programs for the “gifted” are sometimes decried as “elitism.” Why aren’t intensive practice sessions for varsity football, baseball, and basketball players and interschool competition deemed elitism? After all, only the most gifted athletes participate. There is a self-defeating double standard at work here, nationwide. —Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1996)
I’d like you to feel about the impending destruction of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the same way you might’ve felt when the Taliban threatened to blow up the Bamyan Buddhas, and then days later actually did blow them up. Or the way you felt when human negligence caused wildfires that incinerated half the koalas in Australia, or turned the San Francisco skyline into an orange hellscape. For that matter, the same way most of us felt the day Trump was elected. I’d like you to feel in the bottom of your stomach the avoidability, and yet the finality, of the loss.
For thousands of kids in the DC area, especially first- or second-generation immigrants, TJHS represented a lifeline. Score high enough on an entrance exam—something hard but totally within your control—and you could attend a school where, instead of the other kids either tormenting or ignoring you, they might teach you Lisp or the surreal number system. Where you could learn humility instead of humiliation.
When I visited TJHS back in 2012, to give a quantum computing talk, I toured the campus, chatted with students, fielded their questions, and thought: so this is the teenagerhood—the ironically normal teenagerhood—that I was denied by living someplace else. I found myself wishing that a hundred more TJHS’s, large and small, would sprout up across the country. I felt like if I could further that goal then, though the universe return to rubble, my life would’ve had a purpose.
Instead, of course, our sorry country is destroying the few such schools that exist. Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York, and the Liberal Arts and Science Academy here in Austin, are also under mortal threat right now. The numerous parents who moved, who arranged their lives, specifically so that these schools might later be available for “high-risk” kids were suckered.
Assuming you haven’t just emerged from 30 years in a Tibetan cave, you presumably know why this is happening. As the Washington Post‘s Jay Matthews explains, the Fairfax County School Board is “embarrassed” to have a school that, despite all its outreach attempts, remains only 5% Black and Latino—even though, crucially, the school also happens to be only 19% White (it’s now ~75% Asian).
You might ask: so then why doesn’t TJHS just institute affirmative action, like almost every university does? It seems there’s an extremely interesting answer: they did in the 1990s, and Black and Hispanic enrollment surged. But then the verdicts of court cases, brought by right-wing groups, made the school district fear that they’d be open to lawsuits if they continued with affirmative action, so they dropped it. Now the boomerang has returned, and it’s time for a more drastic remedy: namely, to eliminate the TJHS entrance exam entirely, and replace it by a lottery for anyone whose GPA exceeds 3.5.
The trouble is, TJHS without an entrance exam is no longer TJHS. More likely than not, such a place would simply converge to become another of the thousands of schools across the US where success is based on sports, networking, and popularity. And if by some miracle it avoided that fate, still it would no longer be available to most of the kids who‘d most need it.
So yes, the district is embarrassed—note that the Washington Post writer explains it as if that’s the most obvious, natural reaction in the world—to host a school that’s regularly ranked #1 in the US, with the highest average SATs a...
Everyone - please use the web archive link.
"In a world-historic irony, the main effect of this “solution” will be to drastically limit the number of Asian students, while drastically increasing (!!!) the number of White students. The proportion of Black and Hispanic students is projected to increase a bit but remain small. Let me say that one more time: in practice, TJHS’s move from a standardized test to a lottery will be overwhelmingly pro-White, anti-Asian, and anti-immigrant; only as a much smaller effect will it be pro-underrepresented-minority."
Scott's saying that the rigorous testing regime got a lot of Asian kids into the school because they tend to do very well on tests, the affirmative action helped minorities, what is presumably the political majority felt left out.
FCPS is actually probably the largest diverse school district in the US. It's about 37% white, 27% Hispanic, 20% Asian, 10% black, and 6% multiracial.
(Although affluent still holds true--Fairfax County is the second-highest median household income county in the country).
It was truly a phenomenal place and the forcing of these brilliant and motivated students back into an environment where they will be mocked for their intellectual interests is a great loss.
For reference, my school also switched to a lottery system the year after I was there (so I guess it was 20 years "ahead" of TJ; incidentally it was also one of the first public "charter" schools in the strict sense of the word, a school with an educational charter).
It's easy to say that things are only getting worse, I feel that way about my college, and so have alumni of that school for at least a hundred years. In the case of my high school, I think other more secular things have changed the character of the school far more than switching over to the lottery system (for example mass paranoia over child abductions, and school shootings).
So we're only pro-diversity and representation when it's anti-White, not pro-White, got it.
>the Fairfax County School Board is “embarrassed” to have a school that, despite all its outreach attempts, remains only 5% Black and Latino—even though, crucially, the school also happens to be only 19% White (it’s now ~75% Asian).
The initial motivation in changing the school was (at least partially) to increase specific nonwhite minority student representation. Aaronson is pointing out that removing the entrance exams will likely not achieve these goals, though it will remove any negative attention from the school. I don't think Aaronson is advocating that good schools should all have smaller white student populations, instead he is criticizing methods that don't achieve their goals and have significant negative effects.
I.e. even though white students were under-represented, improving their representation was never a goal, and when it happens as a side-effect, it's presented as a negative.
1. Gender: https://economics.mit.edu/files/792 2. Caste: https://www.uh.edu/~achin/research/w16509.pdf 3. Policing: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-01/how-to...
Maybe we shouldn't expect similar outcomes from different groups and shouldn't focus on groups at all?
There is something unique about the economic status of Black Americans, especially Black boys. The income gap between Black and whites hasn't narrowed at all since the end of Jim Crow in the 1960s. Gaps for other groups have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing-even groups, such as Hispanics, that typically come into the country near the bottom of the economic ladder.
> The research makes clear that there is something unique about the obstacles black males face. The gap between Hispanics and whites is narrower, and their incomes will converge within a couple of generations if mobility stays the same. Asian-Americans earn more than whites raised at the same income level, or about the same when first-generation immigrants are excluded. Only Native Americans have an income gap comparable to African-Americans. But the disparities are widest for black boys.
Percent of children in single-parent families by race in the United States:
African American: 65% Native American: 53% Hispanic: 41% White: 24% Asian: 15%
https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in...
But Jews had a much easier time than Asians ever will because they could mostly blend in with White people. They now get counted as "White" in the statistics. This is the uncomfortable truth of the new racism. This country is hellbent on disenfranchising high-achieving Asians, who have the misfortune of looking too "Other" and get marked as such in racial composition stats.
Stop using skin color and race. Just stop. The only consideration that's remotely permissible, beyond merit, is financial posture.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
EDIT: Removed the use of caps, as requested by @dang. However, he seems to have ignored my appeal to restore this comment to where it was prior to moderation (it was at the top and quite popular). See @dang's auto-collapsed reply to this comment for more details.
For your kids polar bears are a vacation trip, little annoyance that has to be done in-between watching netflix or playing video games. Poor kid reading about them on the other hand can enter a mystical world of flying polar bears fighting fire-breathing dragons... ;)
Congratulations. You have done your bit to increase carbon dioxide emissions for a very dubious educational outcome.
Makes me wish you had studied a bit harder.
This is my stance as well, since it represents a sustainable solution to the fact that race is correlated with poverty in America.
Being poor sucks, regardless of whether systemic racism put you there or not. Being poor deprives all children of opportunities, regardless of skin color. (due to constraints on time, budget, and education of the parents)
Race-based affirmative action only solves the immediate problem that minority races are poorer on average. Financial-need-based affirmative action solves the immediate problem, in addition to guaranteeing that, if demographics shift, we are still helping the groups most in need.
I can kinda imagine: it is ingrained in people's minds that a 'proper' institution ought to be mostly white, with some small percentages of each minority, and if things aren't working out that way the institution seems 'wrong' and becomes up for re-organization. The mindset is explicitly racist and is some sort of modern rendition of colonialism: that this country is still white society, foremost, and everyone else is here with white approval. But it's probably not that the individual bureaucrats (or whoever is in charge of this) is consciously bigoted -- it's that it's baked into society in a way that they can't see beyond.
This is an off-the-cuff unqualified theory. Would love to know if anyone with more familiarity of the situation has a more reality-based model.
The school in question is 19% White. 75% Asian. Fairfax County is 63% White, 18% Asian. Sure. It's all racism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is particularly important on inflammatory topics like this one where high emotion is already activated.
The original comment had 24 upvotes and was solidly at the top of the comment page. Given its popularity, it likely would have stayed there. Mea culpa for exceeding the bounds of the Overton Window.
I collapsed this subthread about allcaps in your comment because once you fixed the issue, the subthread was no longer relevant.
Optics are often going to be questionable here because the quantity of moderation actions we have to do vastly exceeds our ability to explain them all in detail, let alone answer all the additional questions and objections that such explanations invariably stir up. That constraint is a fundamental fact of the job.
On the other hand, there's no specific question you can't get an answer to. You should email hn@ycombinator.com, though, because if you ask your question in comments here, the odds are pretty high that we won't see it. Also, the guidelines ask you not to: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Being hyperbolic like this diminishes the rest of your point(which I'm generally inclined to agree with)
You write as if our institutions will always remain healthy and the only uncertainty our future holds is which groups or which individuals will get which share of the "pie" (or "prosperity") produced by our healthy institutions.
On the other hand, look at what public education can actually do when it works. We need more of these schools, not fewer.
But that’s (3.5) what I got there, and and in college.
The post’s author correctly observes that the resulting random lottery will accurately represent the biases that influenced the applicant pool, and therefore the outcome will be a school that reinforces societal biases rather than weakening them.
The error in reasoning here is in the relative evaluation of “bias in entrance exams” versus “bias in GPAs”. The school has thrived under the former bias, and the essence of the issue is simple:
Which biases are healthier for students and society? The biases of school’s exam process, or the biases of GPA?
And that phrasing highlights a particularly ugly truth that most of the citizens supporting this change will do everything in their power to refuse recognizing consciously:
“A system that’s biased towards my family’s skin color and/or wealth level is better for my family than any system that is not biased in my family’s favor, no matter how good it may be for society in general.”
^ For example, “test prep” biases GPAs towards students with wealth and free time, against students with evening/weekend jobs and family responsibilities.
Asians are a historically disadvantaged population who have had to ensure so much racism in USA, yet unlike blacks in recent decades they've had huge upward mobility on all social and economic indicators. So how have the supposed racist biases in tests changed to allow asians to surpass the dominant whites yet blacks and latinos continue to struggle?
There's a couple problems with saying this out loud though:
1. Some people are reluctant to admit that culture may be a nontrivial part of the reason why some groups of people do better than other groups in academics.
2. People are thinking too much about race when i think immigration is a bigger factor. Children of people from African countries excel in US schools too.
For those interested, you may want to look into studies relating to the 'immigrant paradox in the US' to learn more.
EDIT: just to clarify something: I'm all for immigration and I wish the current administration wasn't so anti-immigrant. This country has prospered from the work of immigrants and I absolutely think non-immigrants should compete with immigrants instead of acting entitled and pretending like some immigrants took their good jobs. Just because you were born on the right soil doesn't mean you deserve a better chance at getting a job. And immigrants pay taxes too.
It would help America more to have universally "pretty good" schools, than a few great schools in a sea of "pretty bad" schools.
So, like many other American issues, the argument reminds me of two people in a tiny parking lot squabbling angrily over who is at fault for boxing the other in. If the business that designed and painted the lot allocated insufficient space, neither driver should blame the other.
The premise that there are groups in America who need saving from poverty and lousy schools is true, but why save only a few of them by sending them to a school for gifted students? Deal with the inequality of income and of the school system. Last time I checked, Finland does pretty well with that strategy.
How does a large population affect policy? How much do economies of scale make things easier? How much does bureaucracy make things harder?
What does diversity mean? How much is in the eye of the beholder?
To what extent does diversity cause division? To what extent does diversity spark innovation?
In addition to these questions, the debate entails comparisons and contrasts of nations, most of which you hasn't visited. You end up trading pairs of statistics, without intimate knowledge of their correctness and equivalence.
For such reasons, I just avoid arguing about size and diversity. I'd have to write a book to provide a solid answer.
Both have a population of about 5 million.
And even Wisconsin is more diverse at 86% white to Finland's 96%.
Another fun note:
The population of Finland is only 20% bigger than the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, California Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is 4.1 million. If we add in the San Jose-Santa Clara-Sunnyvale, California MSA at 1.9 million, what we tend to consider the "San Francisco Bay Area" has a greater population than Finland.
In all but a few states, poorer school districts receive similar funding to rich ones: https://hechingerreport.org/in-6-states-school-districts-wit.... In several, poor school districts receive more funding.
Also, the U.S. is more comparable to the EU than to any individual EU country. Obviously, EU countries make their own funding decisions. But many EU countries push funding decisions even further down to individual localities. Germany and Sweden, for example, have highly decentralized education systems. The same is true for Canada. Indeed, in Canada, an even smaller percentage of school funding comes from federal sources (just 2%) compared to the US (about 5-10%).
https://www.texastribune.org/2019/02/15/texas-school-funding...
This article mentions multiple times how some funding calculations have not been adjusted in decades and ends with, "Most agree that the patchwork set of calculations for how to distribute money to Texas’ schools is ready for a major facelift." Convoluted formulas are piled on top of one another without achieving the goal of well-funded school systems, so I'd be all for throwing those out and going with something straightforward.
* Poor kids are more likely to require special-needs programs and other kinds of extra attention.
* The district has different maximum class sizes for lower and higher income schools.
* On the other hand, the system lets teachers apply for transfers while keeping their seniority, so the higher income schools (where it's easier to teach) end up with higher salary costs.
So I'd have to see a breakdown on actual costs to know whether the general level of funding is actually a measure of whether rich and poor schools are receiving comparable funding relative to their actual needs.
It’s a trope in itself to see the US as dumb for not simply adopting ‘sensible’ policies that seem to work elsewhere.
Ok, sure, but we don't need to destroy the great schools in order to work on making more pretty good schools.
If you want to turn bad schools into pretty good ones, please leave the great ones alone, while you go about that.
That’s the system in France, where public schools can’t refuse kids, but those kids can only move classes if they passed. If you aren’t interested in studying you’ll spend your life in middle school until you’re 16 and just drop out.
Theoretically this can happen, but in practice it is very rare.
No school wants to be in such position.
The surveys that I've seen show that bullying is pretty universal. About ⅓ of students worldwide are bullied at some point in their education, and these rates don't change all that much from country to country, although the form of bullying does have drastic differences. (Notably, Europe and the US tend to have less physical bullying and more psychological bullying compared to the rest of the world).
A school with "bad" teachers would just get better teachers if it was warranted (in practice, everyone understands why kids are failing, and they'll send low experience teachers instead, because fuck them, I guess)
This comment is unnecessarily and rudely exclusive.
I went to a county-wide gifted magnet school that was a satellite to one of the regular county high schools. The athletes played sports at the main school, and non-athletes took gym classes there. About 20% of each class were varsity athletes, and the athletes fit in quite nicely with the non-athletes in academic and social settings.
It’s sad that you added this line, since your first sentence regarding the need for kids and (most importantly) families to take academics seriously is a very important point.
> This comment is unnecessarily and rudely exclusive.
Indeed. It's also completely wrong about TJ, just as it is about the school you went to. From my experience (graduating in '02), lots and lots of TJ students played sports -- and quite a lot of them were very serious about it and quite proud of how well they did. I believe our crew teams, in particular, were nationally competitive.
This is counter-intuitive to a lot of people who don't expect "nerds" to be interested in sports or "jocks" to be good at math, science, or technology. (Including me when I first got there.)
But I don't think it's a coincidence. It turns out that working hard, showing up, and keeping at it even when things aren't easy is a powerful way to get better at something. That's just as true for a sport as for an academic subject.
There are studies that school districts that dropped sports have better academic outcomes: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-cas...
Especially, what's with the focus on competitive sports? At school you absolutely want to reach the unfit kids because school sports is the only time they get any kind of exercise. You have to be inclusionary, the purpose is public health, individual fitness, not competition, but competitive sports is exclusionary.
Also, what's with the focus on team sports? American schoolkids have a staggering need for conformity, and team sports seem to feed that need.
I don't see such a study described in that article. After not finding it, I searched for "study", "studies", and "research", and still didn't. Can you perhaps quote a key sentence from the bit you're thinking of?
There is a story about one district that dropped football (not all sports), under severe budgetary pressure. Seems like the right choice. I should add some context that may not be obvious outside the US: that district is a small town in Texas, and Texas and especially its small towns are where high-school football is a really especially big deal. (My dad grew up in a small town in Texas.) In the rest of the country it's generally not so extreme as it was in that town.
And you can bet your ass the best schools and universities only have kids from upper middle class parents. Turns out free education just means subsidising rich kids' education with public money here, just like everywhere else.
The essay stresses the unfairness of depriving a subset of that underclass — ie: strivers — of a chance to pull themselves up.
The goal instead should be universally to lower American inequality. We should bring it closer to Finnish levels, even if Finnish levels are imperfect.
Yes, we have really high income taxes which means our income equality is less in Nordics than in the USA. However, that also means that strivers are unable to get rich. You can't get rich by working.
That means our wealth inequality is just as bad as in the US. Our 1% has just as much of the wealth and power as in the US.
Whereas in the US, that 1% is mostly entrepreneurs with minority having inherited, in Nordics it's the opposite.
Happy to dive deeper into statistics if you want to.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/we...
I know that you know that poverty in your country, compared to the US, is a non-issue.
I know that you know that citizens in your country don't have basic educational deficits that many Americans have.
I know that you know that your country is very capable of competing in the world market.
As a reminder of the scope of the differences, see: https://youtu.be/YEywCppqeZo or https://youtu.be/JHDkALRz5Rk
So, I too am confused.
if you're selling it, there are many places for you to go.
they're all screwed up, badly.
Different subsets of students require different amounts of attention, different specialties, different classes, etc. Go too fast and the bad students fall behind. Go too slow and good students will get bored and act out. One of my top students failed my class for missing too many lectures -- because attendance was written into the student contract to motivate the lower-performing students.
At least in Canada, it's more common to have smaller programs operating within a larger high school - my program was 30 people, mostly humanities kids with maybe 8-10 STEM kids. There wasn't anything approaching that sort of critical mass. Plus, as a subset of a smaller school, you still had to play politics with everyone else. TJHS always sounded like one of the only places that, somehow, did have that critical mass and managed to maintain it for decades.
Maybe this sort of public school is just politically infeasible now - which is a pity, since locating and nurturing the talents of disadvantaged youth benefits all of us.
For example, in 10th grade, 4 of us got together and decided we wanted to make a new high temp superconductor. (87-88, around the time that the first LN2 one was out there). With the support of a couple of the labs, we researched it, ordered chemicals, made a pill press, mixed it, pressed it, baked it in a o2 rich environment, and then tested with ln2. I think at the time it was the first high school to make one.
None of that was something that was part of the classroom flow, it it was absolutely something that was supported.
I don’t pretend to know what would be the maximally fair distribution of places, but I am disappointed that that there one seem to be a spawning/cloning of the concept so that the experience can be spread to more students. We learned things, there were special people there, but its not something that’s unique to that building, staff and students.
I can tell you for a fact that wasn't true then. It likely isn't true now. I was forced by my parents to apply for admission to TJ and was accepted. I ultimately refused to attend despite the great pressure from both my parents and school officials. I know several people who were in the same boat as I was but gave into the pressure and attended hating doing so. This would have been during the same time period you attended.
TJHSST has been going downhill for a long while. Probably Lodal leaving as principal was a catalyzing factor, as she was much more adept at insulating TJHSST from school system politics than her successor was. The philosophy of treating the students as adults was under fire from parents of students at other schools for reasons I don't completely understand. (e.g., they forced the school to cancel all off-campus lunch privileges).
Another issue I saw was that the school generally trended away from a science & tech magnet to a more generic gifted & talented school. Instead of getting in because you were passionate about, say, programming or robotics, and the school's tech labs were a good fit for you; you are now going there because it's the best school in the country and you're top in the class, even if you don't much care for the enrichment activities that are provided.
As to the latter point, the school has definitely been trending in that direction. In my time, I would wager that around 50% of students had primarily a science interest, 35% had primarily a technology interest, and the remaining 15% had no strong inclination between the two. (From what I have heard, in more recent classes the tech has become more popular than the other sciences.)
At the end of the day, though, as long as the curriculum still requires sci-tech rigor, it's entirely beneficial that the school also have strong humanities and arts programs. 13 year olds are applying to this school, and people's interests change throughout high school in unpredictable ways.
I attended TJ from 1998-2002, and my brother attended a few years later, and I've had a lot of conflicting thoughts about this over the last few months as I have watched the decision unfold.
To begin, whether TJ was "America's best high school" depends on what you mean by "best." It was the high school with the highest average SAT score--similar to several Ivy League universities. It had some amazing programs: you could take classes in quantum mechanics as a junior or senior. It had great connections with local private and public research labs for students to do their senior projects. You were surrounded by kids who were smart, dedicated, and competitive.
All that is not necessarily what makes for a great school, at least not in every situation. (For my own kids, I preferred to send them to a small K-12 private school in Annapolis--which has less competition, tiny class sizes, and a lot more art and theater). And obviously some of the things that were good about TJ will be affected by getting rid of the admissions test, such as the SAT scores, while others will remain the same.
I tend to agree with Scott that getting rid of the test entirely was an overreaction, and a hastily-done one at that. What precipitated the change was, around the same time George Floyd was killed, news came out that the incoming class at TJ had no black students. (It turned out not to be quite true, but the number was very small.) People were broadly supportive of reforms. Many supported a holistic admissions process which considered racial diversity. Such a policy had been in place prior to 2003, when the school moved to a race-blind process. Under the prior policy, the percentage of Black and Hispanic students was twice as high, and the percentage of Asians was about 30-40%.
To my knowledge, few actual students, parents, and alumni supported the substantially more radical decision to abandon the admissions test entirely. The Fairfax County Superintendent made the decision with little input from TJ parents and the community as a whole. And, as Scott points out, the primary beneficiary under the specific lottery-based approach the county adopted will be upper middle class white students, who are significantly underrepresented currently.
More troubling I think is the fairly radical ideology underlying the change. Solid majorities of all groups, including Black and Hispanic people, oppose using race as even a "minor factor" in admissions: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ.... Asians are actually the most supportive of considering race, and even then under 40% of people support the practice. At the same time, most people continue to think that high school grades and standardized tests should be the main criteria for admissions: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-want-grades-n.... Northern Virginia being, in the last decade or so, a fairly liberal place, a holistic admissions process that considered race to built a diverse class--similar to those used universally by colleges--could have gotten buy-in from the community.
More evidence of the radicalness of the approach was the accompanying rhetoric: "meritocracy is a lie" and "admissions tests are racist." Not more nuanced views, such as "some people ar...
It also shouldn't be that surprising that a school with an SAT-like admission test would produce graduates who have incredibly high SAT scores. It is an admission process that highly selected for great test takers.
My year was approx 800 applicants for 400 places, that ratio skewed significantly harder, Quickly, as years went on. (I was in the second class)
By the time I went there, it was roughly a 5:1 application ratio.
My understanding is that SAT + grades is a better predictor of college graduation than grades alone.
However, I think treating this as the abandonment of meritocracy is a straw man. Discourse with other grads changed my mind. A key factor is how much the test is now being gamed.
Based on some facebook polls of ~500 alumni (not scientific but moreso than any other direct evidence presented!), the percentage of accepted students going through specialized test prep has climbed from <2% in my day to >50% today. Some of these programs cost thousands of dollars for a chance to change your admissions outcome.
A test that draws this much financial investment is no longer a tool of meritocracy. And the plan that replaces it is not devoid of meritocracy. It includes a baseline GPA requirement, a holistic application package, and a lottery. I think we can and should do better than the lottery, but the test isnt it.
Those of us who are activated about keeping TJ meritocratic and advanced, let's put energies into fairer approaches than this test, which wouldn't be viable with Covid anyway.
> Based on some facebook polls of ~500 alumni (not scientific but moreso than any other direct evidence presented!), the percentage of accepted students going through specialized test prep has climbed from <2% in my day to >50% today. Some of these programs cost thousands of dollars for a chance to change your admissions outcome.
The median income for a family in Fairfax county is over $140,000. A few thousand dollars isn’t a lot of money for them. It surely is for some people, which is why I would support a holistic admissions system. But I’m not sure why, for everyone else, we can’t just treat that as the cost of doing business. Especially if, as you say, everyone is doing it. Everyone studies for the LSAT, the MCAT, etc.
Now, if your point is that it’s a bit mental to treat admissions for a high school like admissions to medical school, in sympathetic to that argument.
With that said, I recognize that household expenditure on education is going to play a role in preparedness for an advanced curriculum. But I think expecting folks to shoulder an early test prep burden (with uncertain result) is directionally un-meritocratic. For me it raises the evidence necessary that the test is playing an otherwise useful role. What's the best argument you've seen there?
[1] https://statisticalatlas.com/county/Virginia/Fairfax-County/...
In other words, if the test prep leads to learning the material more thoroughly, it may still be a good predictor of who is going to thrive in an advanced educational environment.
It’s not clear that any system that accurately predicts future student success, cannot be games by parents throwing money at it.
I also agree that it's impossible and probably undesirable to keep folks from investing in every kind of preparation they can.
However, I think the test is a uniquely concentrated opportunity to invest in swaying the admissions system rather than in preparing more holistically. What I'd love to see explored are:
- A more holistic admissions packet that includes evaluation beyond GPA. - Public resources on advanced education earlier in the curriculum. - Some examination of Chicago-style admissions, which ranks students within local geographies to pick highest achievers from many backgrounds (yes, I'm aware of many arguments from both sides against this structure).
What it isn't is a pontetial-ocracy or a inherent-worth-ocracy, and I don't understand the argument for those models.
If one were going to take a fundamentalist view of merit and exclude potential (again, weird choice for a school!) it would be especially important to define what merit it is you think you can measure. Are you sure the test (+ prep system) do that well? Does spending money on a specialized prep that improves your score translate to producing the merit you are talking about? Or are you retroactively defining merit as "the thing you can measure", because measuring is itself the appealing part?
Questioning the measurement of merit is easy when you don't have to offer an alternative. There's always something to pick at in every methodology, including every alternative you may think of.
If test scores didn't correlate to academic performance that would be embarrassing and really easy to show. But they do. Test prep is just focused studying. It doesn't have any hacks or shortcuts other than learning the material better.
Parents regularly now spend thousands (tens of thousands!) of dollars on elite athlete training for 5th-8th graders in order to make the varsity team once they hit high-school. In my state (MN) it's not unheard of to rent an apartment in a desirable (aka good athletic) school district to play for that team.
My sister was an elite athlete and spent a few post college years at a specialized training academy. Multiple professional athletes trained here in the off-season.
She had multiple classes of middle school children to run training sessions with. Some of these middle schoolers even paid for 1 one 1 training with her for even more money.
Replace "Admission test" with "varsity tryouts" and you have basically the same system, with the same gamesmanship and money being spent.
Here, on HN and on Scott's post, there's an implicit equating of "meritocracy" with "test score."
Do people here really think test score and ability — to say the least of merit per se — are equivalent?
Go find a scatterplot of some data correlated 0.80 (e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3576830/). That's a very generous estimate of how correlated that test score will be with actual ability, whatever that means. The correlation probably is lower, like 0.50-0.70. Look at the y axis. Now cut it and take the upper fraction of your choice. See how wide a range of the x axis is represented?
That's the problem.
The reason why test scores are a problem is because when you select on an imperfect indicator, at some level you are randomly selecting with regard to actual ability, which is even further removed from merit. Throw in any kind of bias of any sort associated with anything, and the problem gets worse.
The truth is, it was already a lottery before. It was just a lottery that everyone pretended wasn't a lottery, and that's the problem people have with it.
The problem with meritocracy isn't the idea of selecting people based on merit, it's the idea that test scores or other such quantitative metrics are equivalent to merit.
The analogy with sports is fundamentally flawed because, among other things, the metrics are the thing of interest in sports. If you are interested in who can swim 50m the fastest, then your speed on the 50m swim is the metric of interest. In school, though, presumably you're not interested in test score, you're interested in someone's ability to solve problems, or create things, or be productive, or whatever. And we're not talking about sport, we're talking about gateways into careers in general. If we are selecting into schools to maximize ability to achieve high test scores on standardized tests per se, then at least be frank and honest about that, and accept that what you are arguing is that the school is an institution whose purpose is to achieve high standardized test scores, and nothing more. But if you want to argue that the school should produce people who are solving problems, innovating, and so forth, then you need to be honest about selection based on test scores, because the scores aren't what they intend to measure.
Scott laments the loss of the ability of some kid to work their way into the school based on some test score. But shouldn't he be screaming about a system that doesn't provide resources to kids where they're at? That assumes the kid's ability is equivalent to their score on some entrance exam? What about those problems?
I agree that throwing out test score and relying on GPA per se is a problem; relying on GPA alone is just as much of a problem as relying on test score alone. You could, for example, have a lottery for everyone whose score is above some generous threshold, or for everyone whose GPA or score is above some threshold. But staying with the system as it is seems at worst like turning a blind eye to systemic injustice, and at best like missing the forest for the trees.
https://joss.tcnj.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/176/2012/04/2...
> How reliable is the SAT? The College Board website reports that a student’s true score is within 30 points of his or her measured score (SEM = 30; College Board, FAQ, 2005). A test with a standard deviation of 100 and a SEM of 30 has an internal consistency coefficient of .91 (α = .91). In a study specifically investigating SAT I score change upon repeated testing, 1,120,563 students in the 1997 college- bound cohort who took the SAT I one to five times in their junior and senior years gained an average of 7 to 13 points on the verbal section and 8 to 16 points on the mathematics section (Nathan & Camara, 1998). Thus, a student who retested at the higher end of both ranges still would not breach the standard error of measurement, indicating high test-retest reliability. Additionally, in a study of the effects of commercial coaching on SAT scores, Powers and Rock (1999) found that the average increase in student scores after intensive coaching was only 30 points on the verbal section and 50 points on the mathematics section, demonstrating that SAT scores remain relatively stable even with intervening practice.
With an SEM of 30, there is less than a 1% chance that a 100 point difference, between a 600 and a 500 on a section is due to random chance. The difference between a median score and and a TJ level score is 250.
Validity, whether the test measures something we care about is a separate issue.
"Honor, Glory and Love... the school is dedicated to the development of the whole person: spiritual, intellectual, physical, emotional and aesthetic"
"students learn lifelong lessons in teamwork, discipline and leadership"
"We encourage the development of team collaboration, communication, and characteristics that foster empathy, tolerance, personal growth and positive citizenship."
I mean, it's all bullshit. Or at least, people aren't buying expensive houses in good school districts just so their kids can learn the value of teamwork. But if you take athletics' programs words at face value, winning and metrics aren't the primary objective.
Specialized high schools are intended to build impressive application packets for college, which in turn is meant to get access to elite jobs and social opportunities. Indeed, that's one of the major reasons parents even try to get their kids into sports! One of the easiest ways into an elite university is to become an above average athlete in an obscure sport (this is the go-to approach for well-off but academically mediocre white people, actually). And so the admissions process for these high schools is geared toward facilitating that objective.
TJ provided a pathway for academically gifted first generation Asian immigrants to achieve social mobility. And with this new process, many won't have access to TJ, to mostly be replaced with mediocre white kids (and a couple more token underrepresented minorities).
I see some serious hypocrisy here.
Oh, as for SAT. Come on, that's bottom line. If you get perfect scores, it does not mean you'll excel in college, but if you get really low score, you're just not that good academically, at least statistically speaking. Why is it so hard to understand the some tests are designed to be a filter with low false negatives? If anything, SAT is too simple for it has only standard questions.
There is no such academic test, so there's always a gap between 'test prep' and 'learning'. The best prepared student may not be the best student.
To me at least, there's nothing depressing about working hard for some goal. There is something depressing about learning something ultimately meaningless (the contents of a test) so you can make the test itself meaningless.
For me this is a bizarre leap, but many people love the sports analogy. I think these are the drivers and please tell me if I'm wrong.
(1) Sports clearly do a good job of finding exceptionally talented people, so maybe we should follow their playbook.
(2) People like and accept competitive sports, so emotionally they should have the same reaction to competitive academics.
On (1), there are so many ways that STEM success is not like sports.
- On an individual level, sports are literally engines for scoring performances, so progress towards success is completely observable. The highest levels of STEM success are defined by doing never-previously-observed things in highly collaborative environments with no opportunity for an exact head-to-head comparison. There is zero reason to believe that your 1,000 AOPS math problems are the best way to advance your STEM education towards real success, even though it may help you outcompete your neighbor on a single test.
- On an industry level, sports are entertainment businesses that only needs to find enough exceptional individuals to create events people will pay to see. Participation as both a spectator or contestant are voluntary. Public education is a social investment in economic opportunity for its citizens. It needs to succeed for far more people, and the definition of its success doesn't stop at finding a few stars who fill stadium seats.
On (2), there's a difference between rooting for the participants and rooting for the system. We like seeing people overcome obstacles whether they are fair or not. I bet a lot of people would enjoy a movie about the Chinese family you describe building a better life for their kids. I like movies about people overcoming gangsters, nazis, and tornados. It doesn't mean I want to fund gangsters, nazis and tornados to make more great stories.
Finally, I unequivocally agree on flipping the bird to anyone who judges the Chinatown mom for doing the best for her kid. The issue is that a similarly brilliant kid shouldn't be held back because they don't have the same awesome mom. And hey, maybe there are other great ways that three-job mom could be investing in her family and herself.
That's actually not what I meant. Granted, though, my question, for its not so accurate writing, can easily lead to such generalization. I was wondering about a much narrower difference: Americans value toiling in sports, yet despise similar practice in STEM. Toiling is a personal choice, as no one forces a student to practice hard, certainly not in American schools. So, why is it a bad thing if a student chooses to get better, sometimes much better, at math by solving more challenging problems?
> (2) People like and accept competitive sports, so emotionally they should have the same reaction to competitive academics.
Not sure if it matters, but I do think that competition is of secondary importance here. What matters is practice makes a better student, at statistically speaking -- this holds true for both sports and academia.
> On (1), there are so many ways that STEM success is not like sports.
There are. Practice is necessary but not sufficient. And I'm not saying practicing guarantees success. Instead, it's more like conditional probability: some people will get ahead by practicing, and I don't see how it's morally wrong if that happens.
> The highest levels of STEM success are defined by doing never-previously-observed things in highly collaborative environments with no opportunity for an exact head-to-head comparison.
I'm more concerned about the majority of the students. The US is a great place for truly talented few. They have access to vast resource: clubs, communities, online groups, local colleges, and at least dozens of programs and awards.
> There is zero reason to believe that your 1,000 AOPS math problems are the best way to advance your STEM education towards real success, even though it may help you outcompete your neighbor on a single test.
I guess this is where we differ. Why does it have to be the best way? I can also say there's zero reason to believe that 10K free throws is the best way to advance one's basketball career. We choose the best way to our best knowledge. And everything has a marginal return, I get it. I was simply comparing toiling in sports with toiling in STEM. You practice until your marginal return approaches zero, and you move on to the next level fo drilling. For elementary students, it can be getting really familiar with multiplication table. For student in junior high, it could be deep understanding of algebra and calculus, for high school student, it could be entry-level research with collaboration with other people.
> Public education is a social investment in economic opportunity for its citizens. It needs to succeed for far more people, and the definition of its success doesn't stop at finding a few stars who fill stadium seats.
Agreed.
> there's a difference between rooting for the participants and rooting for the system.
This is a really nice way of putting it. I just didn't understand why on individual level, Americans value personal effort in sports yet treat personal effort in education as "elitism" or "gaming the system".
> The issue is that a similarly brilliant kid shouldn't be held back because they don't have the same awesome mom. And hey, maybe there are other great ways that three-job mom could be investing in her family and herself.
I guess this is where we differ too. I think the K-12 education of the US is so bad that it does not hold back brilliant kids, but hold back millions of ordinary kids by not pushing them hard enough. See, it's like any college entrance exam in East Asia. Passing the exam does not necessarily mean you're good, but failing it means you're a lousy student. The problem is that more than half of American students couldn't even do well in SAT, which is a very, I mean very, low bar for STEM students.
Your point is taken on free throws vs test prep. But I think the underlying issue is actually that you are focused on what kinds of prep we should respect, and I'm focused on what kind of admissions we should expect. I do think kids show an admirable and relevant grit by any kind of practice. But we do them a disservice if we overindex on a single method, and should adjust - just as you'd require a coach to adjust if they based team membership.
That amounts to an argument against overweighting the test, and not one in favor of the lottery. But I think the other piece is that if the test does more harm (in making things harder for otherwise qualified kids without access to prep) than good (in detecting the grit that will lead to success), it's better to retire it then keep it. Either way we shouldn't stop with the lottery.
Finally, this point is really interesting:
> the K-12 education of the US is so bad that it does not hold back brilliant kids, but hold back millions of ordinary kids by not pushing them hard enough
I agree that way more kids should have an opportunity to have effort and capabilities recognized with more opportunities all along the education track. I'd be really interested in finding ways to do this that are less dependant on the parents.