> A district analysis of the program found that more than 70 percent of students enrolled in the program were white and Asian, even though nearly 80 percent of all Boston public school students are Hispanic and Black.
I'm having a hard time trying to understand what the acceptable outcome they want is. Proportional enrollment based on race?
This possibility bothers me, since I never identified myself by race. So would I be lumped into a generic "Asian" category in their statistics based on my skin colour? Why is this the correct form of human categorization?
It is a common trick of managers to only measure things that make them look good. Is the number of regressions going up? Remove the isRegression checkbox from your bug tracking system.
EDIT: This is the opening paragraph. It says it all:
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
I thought the original was a bit over the top a bit ridiculous almost. Bergeron's some kind of god being almost. The movie kept it a little more realistic and was darker i felt.
Every time people talk about the real problem of so-called "gifted" classes containing disproportionately large numbers of white students, this story gets trotted out as an ominous warning of "where this could go". This is the slippery slope fallacy; who is suggesting that we attach bags of lead weights to people who are stronger than average or play loud noises to disrupt the thinking of people smarter than average? No such measures, or anything like them, is proposed in the article. Actually, no measures are proposed at all because the school hasn't decided what to do yet (beyond temporarily suspending gifted classes).
So how is this story at all relevant or illuminating to the article, beyond as an exercise in fearmongering?
You can't apply a literal interpretation of the story when no such interpretation was intended by Vonnegut. Of course he never expected actual lead weights would be strapped to people by legal decree. That's not the point.
How it relates to the article is the "lead weight" of removing the availability of AP classes from White and Asian students is a severely misguided attempt at making Black and Hispanic students equal, as if they weren't already. It's actually a terribly wrong message to the Black and Hispanic students.
It seems to me that a better approach is try to understand the reasons why more Black and Hispanic students aren't enrolling while continuing to provide these classes to any student who qualifies, regardless of race.
“Antiracist” doesn’t mean “not racist”; it’s a Marxist ideology focusing on racial identities and purposeful systemic racism to “balance” the power between racial tribes.
It’s extremely racist.
Anti-Asian racism will become normalized as long as “antiracism” is part of the Democratic agenda. They’re literally fighting to overturn civil rights laws in CA and WA so the government can discriminate based on race again.
>They’re literally fighting to overturn civil rights laws in CA and WA so the government can discriminate based on race again.
Source? From a reputable location, the only ones I'm finding are sites with headlines like:
“If I wanted America to fail”
Capitalism Explained
George Soros
Honest News
How Do You Kill 11 Million People?
Joe Biden in Five Minutes
Lara Logan’s Warning to America
Make Mine Freedom
Obama Admin Caught Sending Guns to Drug Cartels
Rules for Radicals
SCOTUS: Government Can Force You to Buy Anything
The Iron Lady
The Socialist’s Camoflage
Trump Admin Accomplishments
Vote Fraud
What is a Constitutional Moderate?
and even Breitbart says
Prop 209 prevents race-based affirmative action in state contracts, government jobs, and university admissions
> “Antiracist” doesn’t mean “not racist”; it’s a Marxist ideology focusing on racial identities and purposeful systemic racism to “balance” the power between racial tribes.
Why do you say this is "Marxist ideology"? What makes it Marxist, precisely?
“Antiracism” is another name for “critical race theory” which inherits from the general Marxist body of philosophy, of which “critical blah theory” tends to be a common name. Like “people’s republic” — it’s a fashion thing.
In sociology and political philosophy, "Critical Theory" means the Western-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, developed in Germany in the 1930s and drawing on the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Though a "critical theory" or a "critical social theory" may have similar elements of thought, capitalizing Critical Theory as if it were a proper noun stresses the intellectual lineage specific to the Frankfurt School.
This is true, antiracism is active in the presence of racism, “not racist” may or may not be.
> it’s a Marxist ideology
No, it's not. I suppose if you met “Marxist” metaphorically in that, like Marxism, it posits the existence of a status quo struggle, and calls for consciousness of that struggle and activity within it rather than indifference to it or denial of it, it would be accurate, but that's kind of a weak basis for such an emotionally-loaded metaphor.
> purposeful systemic racism to “balance” the power between racial tribes.
Antiracism does not call for “purposeful systemic racism” for any purpose.
If you take a random sample from a population, then you'd expect the sample to be representative of the population. All else being equal: if you categorize a population in some arbitrary way, and there's a particular distribution of those categories in that population; you should expect the same distribution in your sample.
In this case the distribution in the population was not identical to the distribution in the sample.
Why would you expect the sample of gifted children to be representative of the population. By almost every measure Hispanic and Black students fall behind other students. The achievement gap is very well studied.
The challenge is fixing the problem, not pretending it doesn’t exit by making white and Asian students educations worse.
This is like the Boston PD issuing orders to shoot more unarmed Asians since black and Hispanics are shot more disproportionately.
In combination with other indicators, a strong gender/racial skew relative to the underlying population can be a predictor that your program or organization will be in trouble soon.
Indeed, it seems to be in trouble at this time: The article states: "Cassellius says interest in the program had declined over several years[...]". So there are clearly more issues.
My understanding of the article is that they're going on a one year hiatus to figure out the issues and fix them.
The populations in these urban school districts are very skewed due to middle class Black and Latino populations migrating to the suburbs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_flight. So the district comprises rich white yuppies, and lower income people of color, often recent immigrants, with little in-between.
So according to you, it's due to demographics, where people are actually becoming more affluent!
That does seem rather hopeful for the future.
Thank you for taking the time to explain.
Are you predicting that schools will have a rough time for the next generation or so, until the current generation (or the one after) become parents themselves?
Yes and no. Immigrants are constantly coming in, and cities like Boston will probably continue to be a first waypoint for immigrants getting their legs under them. So in that sense, school districts in cities will continue to face these disparities. Apart from that, even as the Black middle class grows, there is persistent multi-generational poverty among Black people in urban areas that has proven nearly impossible to improve. Schools will continue to deal with that as well.
important to note that is not really a clear cut case in boston, most kids in the boston public school system are not white (largely due to white flight to the suburbs when the city tried to desegregate schools)... this is despite the fact that boston itself has recently become predominately white (and white kids are going to private schools at a higher rate since... forever)
this is changing slowly as the city gentrifies and the traditionally black neighborhoods are becoming less affordable for black people (who have an average net worth of only $8)... which I suppose is black flight, but the term is problematic because it’s evocative if white flight (which was a choice to avoid integration)... black flight largely is the lack of choice due to racial inequity
Two other Asian kids and I were at a public school of several hundred kids of mostly minority groups. We three were consistently in the top 5 ranks and none of us were especially well off.
Intelligence being shown in schools isn't random: it's a result of who can afford better education in the lower grades, education materials in pre-school, a baby sitter who can teach basic math before school begins, private school, pre school, etc. This makes perfect sense, and the smart thing to do is to implement a program below this at the younger grades to try to give the entire lower grade levels a better chance at getting that advanced learning. "Something isn't right" doesn't mean kill the whole damn program. Maybe evaluate their on-boarding process in addition.
In my elementary school, I was lucky enough to not miss the one day they were testing for advanced learning (if you missed it, tough luck: that was the only onboarding year) and it changed my school experience forever. I don't think I would be the person I am today, at all, if I had been sick that one day. If there are similar restrictions or barriers for entry that are not related to intelligence, they need to be looked into.
Sure. It's just my district's extended learning program though, I am not in the Boston program.
It was a program that started in elementary school (https://ycsd.yorkcountyschools.org/EXTENDCenter). In second grade they tested us for it, I don't remember a whole lot about it. I do remember it was logic-based and math-based. Every Wednesday from 2nd grade to 5th grade (then in middle school on a different schedule) we would spend in the extended learning program's building (a very small wing). We learned French (though looking back it was more preparing us to learn other languages than actually learning French), did science projects, wrote stuff about a random topic selected out of an encyclopedia, etc. It really is my most fond memory of school and I still keep in contact with the teacher.
Over in the middle school side, we did more advanced topics. We studied the Ebola virus and how it affects the body, we wrote papers about an unknown John Doe in Yorktown in 1770's (then we literally walked to it, separate tangent below), we had a "socratic seminar" where we debated topics, we built a Rube Goldberg machine, all sorts of stuff.
It actually changed my life. Anyone who says advanced education doesn't help simply doesn't see the changes a well-designed, thought out program has. And this was all in a public school. I checked their site recently and they are still running it even through the pandemic, which warms my heart.
I mentioned the one-day, one-time onboarding process. They have since remedied it, instead scheduling tests with students chosen. This is a good solution and I'm glad they implemented it.
Tangent: I lived in Yorktown Virginia, which is probably my second favorite thing about my childhood. The pre-school I went to was a 30 second walk down a hill to Yorktown Beach. In middle school, we read about the Revolutionary War, then took a field trip consisting of walking outside the doors, through the forest and 5 minutes of walking, and just like that we were where it actually took place, with monuments, statues, historical signs, etc.
No problem. And I do agree with you: there is a problem that needs to be addressed with their system. I just don't think "let's not let new students in" is the answer.
I couldn’t agree more. I benefited greatly from a gifted track in my otherwise fairly mediocre public school system. Now seeing my kids and their peers, the differences in starting point of kindergarten and 1st graders was shocking. Many kids came in knowing how to read Dr Suess, do basic math, and take turns in games/crafts/conversation. Others couldn’t even manage any of those basics. We’re in a controlled choice district (where there is cross-city busing but some bias towards the two schools closest to you and to where an older sibling attends). I think I could watch a kindergartner for 90 minutes and predict the family economic status with high accuracy. (Cambridge, MA has plenty of affluent people of all races; this breaks down on economic lines much more than on any other dimension.)
I can’t even really “blame” the families for whom they need to have all adults working outside the home and often more than one job. How can you do that and expect to give the kids a level of attention that a family with a full-time adult in the house (whether a parent or nanny)? Kids are exhausting; so is working multiple jobs and worrying about money all the time.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I think it’s terrible to kneecap the successful and promising students just because not everyone is one or because you find a socio-economic discrepancy in the makeup. If you do that, you accelerate the flight of better students out to better public districts, to private schools, or supplemental experiences, which does nothing to lift the majority of the student body. (I suppose private schooling means you get some money from the parents who didn’t leave your town without having to bother to serve them. But you also lose all that role modeling.)
How in the space of seventy years or so did equal rights go from 'Stop Segregation' to 'Everybody Should be Segregated Based On Race or Other Physical Factors'?
"Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we've got to stay together. We've got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh's court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity."
-MLK, I've Been To The Mountaintop, last speech given the night before assasination
They just don't understand that Asian families work their kid harder? It's a different world. When I was a kid, there were only 3 acceptable outcomes: becoming a lawyer, a doctor, or a professor. Then I discovered coding - sorry mom :)
So I went to a bottom of the barrel districts for school, but still aced it. I got admitted in a great US school, and a semester later I had proved my worth enough to get a full scholarship. What if you had put me in a better system? I would have only excelled more!
The problem is not the school environment, but the families. From what I have seen, only military-style schools, with the students living in, can provide better chances for disadvantaged students. The best school environment will do nothing against a toxic family and toxic friends that use racist monikers to attack those that have a chance to succeed ("crab mentality").
And BTW the comment below "I miss the days when the schools in the wealthier part of town had things like advanced classes and air conditioning, and the rest of us just sucked it up and didn't whine" makes no sense. I went to school in a tropical country, with no AC. Yes I did sweat a lot in class and I took 2 showers per day minimum, but I didn't die.
Since the lack of amenities like AC or computers will do nothing to prevent people that are pushed up by their family, I think they will likewise do nothing to help people succeed when they are held back by their social group. Amenities are just a highly visible distraction, correlated, but not causal.
> "Diversity substantively means fewer whites and asians."
So here's what I fail to understand: why punish Asians? They (or perhaps I should say we) had nothing to do with the history of white vs black oppression in the United States. Many of us weren't even here until well after the civil rights movement of the '60s and '70s. This sort of "diversity" is basically progressives being willing to be racist to Asians to compensate blacks for the past injustices perpetrated by whites, which is basically robbing Peter to pay Paul any way you look at it.
So here's what I fail to understand: why punish Whites? The students had nothing to do with the history of white vs black oppression in the United States. None of them were even here until well after the civil rights movement of the '60s and '70s. This sort of "diversity" is basically progressives being willing to be racist to Whites to compensate blacks for the past injustices, which is basically robbing Peter to pay Paul any way you look at it.
Because Asians broadly speaking do not depend on favors from the ruling elite for their position, thus they are politically unreliable (although currently mostly aligned with them).
If I wanted to take a critical view of your comment, you're basically saying "Sure, punish white people.. but how dare you punish Asians!"
The goal of any diversity program - ignoring whether or not that goal is good - is to increase representation among historically under-represented groups. At least as far as academics and education are concerned, Asians are objectively not under-represented. If you're looking at diversity programs in the urban United States, this translated pretty directly into "more black and brown kids."
It's hard to ride that line between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. But it seems to be that just saying "wow there's not enough black and brown kids in these classes, so we better cancel them rather than see what went wrong (or if anything actually went wrong)" is a pretty ass-backwards way to handle things.
Because Asians perform better and that would contradict the narrative that without systemic racism the outcome would reflect the overall demographics of the population, so 50% men/women, 60% whites, 18% latinos, 13% blacks, 6% asians etc.
Because Asians blow up their entire "critical race theory". If racism is truly the cause of certain minorities poor outcomes, then why are Asian outcomes as good or better than whites?
> "There's been a lot of inequities that have been brought to the light in the pandemic that we have to address," Cassellius told GBH News. "There's a lot of work we have to do in the district to be antiracist and have policies where all of our students have a fair shot at an equitable and excellent education."
This is how Marxist ideas always go: some groups work harder and succeed more, so we have to suspend the programs that upset central planning statistics.
Working to improve the pipeline by rebuilding community and raising education as a family value is verboten because it requires we address uncomfortable truths.
It must be racism; it can’t be the fault of the people involved.
> School Committee member Lorna Rivera said at a January meeting that she was disturbed by the findings, noting that nearly 60 percent of fourth graders in the program at the Ohrenberger school in West Roxbury are white even though most third graders enrolled at the school are Black and Hispanic.
> "This is just not acceptable," Rivera said at a recent school committee meeting. "I've never heard these statistics before, and I'm very very disturbed by them."
I’m not sold on gifted education to begin with. It’s a complicated issue for sure, with pluses and minuses. But suspending gifted education programs expressly based on the racial makeup of the kids in the program is illegal discrimination, plain and simple.
> But suspending gifted education programs expressly based on the racial makeup of the kids in the program is illegal discrimination, plain and simple.
If they were selected based on their race, it's racial discrimination. If the classes were suspended based on the student's race, it's racial discrimination, plain and simple.
It would only be a legal risk if they were putting kids in the program based on race. This does not seem to be the case. It just so happens to be that a disproportionate amount of whites and Asians made it into the program.
Why do you conclude that it doesn’t seem to be the case? There are a ton of known second-order causes of education inequality like redlining, tax disparities, etc. It’s highly likely that the disparities in this program happen because of racism, even if no one sat down and said “we should admit mostly white and Asian kids”.
There is no evidence that there was any racism involved. I wouldn't say with 100% certainty there was no racism, but until anyone can show any evidence of racism I will not jump to that conclusion.
There is a perfectly logical (and non-racist) reason for blacks and Hispanics to not make it into the gifted program as frequently as their white and Asian peers and that is they, in average, have lower grades.
People see the outcome is disproportionate and assume racism. Instead of looking at the evidence to see why it happened they look at the outcome and try to fit their preferred narrative into it.
If there is racism which causes students to have a difficult life which then causes them to do worse in school and doing worse in school means the student won't be accepted into the gifted program then I do not consider the gifted program admission to be racist. The solution should be to help those in a bad situation (regardless if it was caused by racism or something else) so anybody who is disadvantaged can be on an equal playing field and meet the requirements.
There are a lot of poor white students. They likely struggle in school because of that. I don't think the solution would be to make it easier for those poor whites to make it into the gifted program just because they are poor. And yet many people would make that argument for blacks and Hispanics.
Removing the gifted program because you don't like the races who make it in is racist.
The problem is that the people who benefit from the situation are never interested in identifying and fixing the "bad situations" until things like this happen. They're fine accepting a system that privileges their own children at the expense of others, and only when their children might be affected do they become ostensible advocates for looking at the situation holistically.
Most people support things that aid themself or their family. I don't think that has anything to do with racism. Supporting more objective standards like grades and test results are the only fair way to determine who goes into the gifted classes. Determining gifted class placement by race is racist.
Helping people in a bad situation is a different issue and should be treated as such. Even if there were no poor people, uneducated parents, single parent homes, etc we still don't know that blacks and Hispanics would make it into gifted classes at a higher rate then they are now. Whites and Asians also have those issues and they would likely do better if they didn't have to deal with them.
Is your goal educating students to the best of their individual abilities? Or correcting for societal inequalities that aren’t that kid’s doing or fault, meanwhile using the kids as pawns in the pursuit of that goal of equal outcome?
I’m heavily biased toward meeting the needs of the individual students. If you don’t, affluent parents will nope out of your school anyway (and possibly out of the neighborhood altogether), as they reasonably should.
We are heavily pro-public schooling, attending and volunteering often at the elementary school and intending to attend the high school, but grades 6-8 schools are a mess in our town, so we’re going to private schools for those years. It’s not worth sacrificing our kids’ academic outcome at the altar of fairness and equality pulled down to the lowest common denominator.
My point is that the status quo is not educating students to the best of their individual abilities. It's neglecting the education of some — in ways that heavily correlate with class and race — and then, when those students unsurprisingly do worse, saying "well, they're not as smart, so they can't have the gifted education."
If anyone (regardless of race) went into a class that was too difficult for them they would do worse in school. This will result in them not getting into as good of a university (or not getting into any university) and would result in them doing worse in life.
But if the rationale is compensating for things like redlining, then it doesn’t make sense to count Latinos in the “disadvantaged” category while counting Asians in the “advantaged” category. (The majority of the kids in the groups that the administrator deemed underrepresented were Latino, not Black.) Racist policies like redlining in the 1950s-1970s were not applied to Latinos any more than to Asians, and in fact were applied less so. (There was never anything comparable to the Asian Exclusion Act applied to immigrants from Latin America.) Moreover, Latinos have similar income mobility to whites. Latino families who have been in America since the 1960s and 1970s would have quite small income gaps compared to whites by now: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353.
It’s true that economic disparities can be caused by historical racism. But that’s not a basis for distinguishing Latinos from Asians, or really Latinos and Asians from Italians, Polish people, etc., who are similarly situated to each other.
I think trying to look at this through the lens of a single issue is doomed to fail. And frankly, the full scope is beyond what can be covered in a single HN discussion. Because there are a ton of intertwined issues, and many of them don’t have a neat line straight to “underperformance in schools”. It’s the “systemic” part of “systemic racism”.
If there is systemic racism then which system is racist? I think 99% of people nowadays would be fine fighting against such a system. Is it the school system, bank system, the government?
"Which system is racist?" is the wrong way to look at this. The point I'm trying to make is that there are many intertwined factors in play, and it may not be immediately apparent how some of them impact the issue.
Let me expand a bit on the two factors I mentioned above, redlining and taxes. In the US, schools are generally funded by local taxes. On its own, that wouldn't seem to cause racial education disparities. But the neighborhoods in which people congregate are affected by the legacy of redlining, in which Black people were segregated into neighborhoods with lower property values. As a result, children in those neighborhoods receive worse educations, which makes them appear less "gifted" when combined with other students in higher grades.
Those are of course not the only factors in play. But hopefully they illuminate how a seemingly benign program can entrench disparities created elsewhere.
I am a bit confused. You said it is systemic racism but can't provide a system (or systems) that are racist. I looked up the definition of systemic to ensure I wasn't missing something and it is "relating to a system, especially as opposed to a particular part." This clearly sounds to me that there needs to be a system involved. Perhaps systemic is not the correct word?
In relation to taxes: I don't think you read tne article. It says the standards are determined at the school level. That means how well students do at a school in a wealthier area is irrelevant to how they do in a school in a poorer area.
As for redlining, it is illegal. Even if you want to say there are historical issues that are still around today because of redlining, it wouldn't matter since the standards are school based not district widd based.
If it was district wide or statewide I would generally agree with you that there could be issues related to that. I do think that funds should be distributed based on number of students (and perhaps a bit of a difference due to cost of living for teachers) rather than based on property tax rates in that area. I don't know how Massachusetts (or Boston specifically) handles this so it could already be done how I described.
> Let me expand a bit on the two factors I mentioned above, redlining and taxes. In the US, schools are generally funded by local taxes
That’s not true. Only half of school funding comes from local taxes. The other half comes from state and federal sources, and are targeted to level the differences in local funding. Including state funding, many school districts have progressive funding (with poor districts getting more per student than rich ones). https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-...
> Only half of school funding comes from local taxes.
That still leaves a lot of wiggle room for school revenues, and a lot of influence on those revenues (and, correspondingly, student education) by residents' economic class.
And further, just because the state/federal spending is "targeted to level the differences" doesn't mean it actually does so.
As a general rule, minority-heavy urban districts spend ~2x the $/student than middle-class white exurban districts in the same state. Definitely true in MA. Go check the numbers for your state, maybe it's an outlier, I don't know.
Money goes less far in the city and they have more issues to deal with, but the $/student is not "inequitable" to borrow a word.
All three of those are subsystems of a broader overall system that makes up American society. It's that overall system that perpetuates systemic racism through a combination of factors in the myriad subsystems.
Addressing economic inequality along class lines would go a long way, since it's the economic system that has the strongest (or at least most tangible) impact right now. That doesn't do much to address lingering cultural issues, however.
> There was never anything comparable to the Asian Exclusion Act applied to immigrants from Latin America.
You mean other than ICE crackdowns just so happening to target Latinos? Or the exact same "they're stealing our jobs" rhetoric once used against Chinese immigrants now being applied to Latino immigrants? Do we wait until after Latino work crews are executed and buried in mass graves before we acknowledge there are some problems? Or maybe we wait until Latino neighborhoods get torched by populist mobs?
It can at least sound like a statement the school will invest more in some kids than others. At least that what it can sound like outside the gifted bubble.
Probably the solution is to have high standards for all students and classes they all can participate in.
I think its more about segmenting based on aptitude and interest. The gifted classes consist of children that can move at a quicker pace with less distraction. I don't think its about giving more resources to that set of children, but be able to alter the curriculum to challenge them more.
Different students have different needs. It doesn't make sense to provide the same experience to every student. Homogenizing the experience is a disservice to all students, not just the gifted.
>It can at least sound like a statement the school will invest more in some kids than others.
Schools already do this ever since No Child Left Behind. It's just in the opposite direction. Kids below the average get far far more money than the median student. Why not have gifted classes as well to support those who excel?
Because those kids who are below average will suck up way more state and federal money in the long run if left to their own devices than anyone will benefit because Gifted Greg got to take Linear Algebra in high school.
Gifted class don't just “support those who excel”, they support those who perform poorly and disrupt the class because they are not engaged because the mainstream coursework is targeted well below their capacity.
It also mitigates the way which this has gotten worse since NCLB and it's successor policies because schools strongly prefer not to advance students (pre-NCLB, this was an issue because of somewhat legitimate developmental/emotional concerns, but since NCLB and ratings based on the distribution of performance vs. grade level on standardized tests, preventing advancement is now also a way of juicing metrics.)
Of course both forms of special ed are blunt instruments to deal with not doing better by-student calibration across the board to students, incliding those in the wide middle of performance.
>Probably the solution is to have high standards for all students and classes they all can participate in.
Well, one could propose that "AP Calculus" should be the high standard for a high-school diploma for _all_ students but neither the parents nor teachers would support that.
EDIT to reply: the "AP Calculus" was just a placeholder that people are familiar with and not intended as a tangent into any hidden self-serving agenda of The College Board revenue generation. We can just call it "Calculus 101" for purposes of this discussion. The parents would not universally support passing "Calculus 101" as a mandatory requirement for their child to get a high-school diploma.
It’s no surprise that parents and teachers would not support “AP Calculus” as a standard, as it is run by the College Board with no oversight. The school has to pay for each child enrolled and pay again if the child doesn’t take the exam at the end of the class, the exams are graded but offer zero feedback to the teacher or student.
They have annual revenue >$1B with over $100 million in “excess revenue” (you can’t call it profit because they are a non-profit). The CEO earns over $1 million per year, sold his education consulting company to a huge education textbook publisher, claims that he “had” to get a job at McKinsey because he couldn’t find work as a high school English teacher, etc.
I was lucky to test into the gifted program in high school in the mid-late 80s in poor rural US nowhere, it worked exactly like that - kids demonstrate ability to get selected (not race/status), as the resources were very slim. It allowed me to use/learn the TRS-80/3 and Apple ][e and make a career in tech - there is absolute value in these programs for the kids as an anecdotal story from one of them decades later. ;)
Why would there be more investments in the “gifted” program? In its simplest form, it’s the exact same classroom, exact same teacher, just different stuff being taught - less repetition, less simple exercises, progressing faster through concepts, learning harder stuff.
I think my life would be very different if I was challenged more in school.
I strongly suspect that per-student spending is heavily biased towards special education programs at the not highest-achievement end of the spectrum.
I support the necessity of those programs, but the idea that money is flowing upwards on the achievement curve is probably contradicted by the data, given the intense needs of special education programming.
I think there may be some truth to that, I think some gifted programs pay the teachers a bit extra.
But, often, it may just be the appearance of extra things; if the gifted class does more 'enrichment' activities, it's often because they've got more time left after doing the required curriculum. Or, in my district, the gifted program had busing (which costs money) to get enough kids together to run one class per grade.
If the issue is money though; maybe it could be addressed through demonstrably worse conditions in the gifted program. Maybe a cap of 35 students per class in gifted, and 25 in mainstream. Then there's a tradeoff. My district had bussing as a negative characteristic for the gifted program as well (although my neighborhood school was the bus destination for four out of six years, so it wasn't bad for me)
I'm not. There were approximately 30ish "gifted" students in my graduating class. By that, I mean they were identified as gifted early on and attended gifted classes until middle school when there were other minor accelerated learning classes (like taking Algebra a year early).
For the vast majority of "gifted" children, the reason they were gifted at all has a ton to do with the amount of time their parents spent with them outside of the classroom. Usually, "giftedness" is about a parent's ability to focus their child in a way that the child would likely not focus on their own.
Just look at the science fair projects that get national recognition. It takes no effort at all to determine the difference between a project produced by a kid and a project created by a parent who guided the kid through the steps necessary to produce a scientifically valid conclusion.
I'm all for high schools pairing with universities to let high school students knock out college classes and get high school credit for them, though. English III and English IV are particularly useless classes which do nothing for most kids. Replace them with college classes.
None of them became medical or PhD doctors. One became a lawyer. Two have Master's degrees.
Their classmates? 7 PhDs. 4 MDs. About 10 MBAs (that I am aware of), 8 lawyers, 2 psychologists, 3 SLPs, at least 5 with MEs, and several self-made millionaires.
Gifted doesn't mean genius. For most, it simply means they have a head start. Head starts don't last once your peers have a reason to compete.
This is why I don't care whether gifted programs live or die. Place the child in the system where he needs to be, but stop pretending that little Bobby with the parents who have been trying to teach him to read since he was crapping his diaper is a genius simply because people spent time forcing him to learn something. For many kids, telling them they're gifted compared to their peers simply inflates their egos past their talent.
I was with you initially, but after thinking about it could be argued that creating classes that are overwhelmingly white in an overwhelmingly non white district are something approaching segregation. In the end, all that is being done to the “advanced” students is that they’re being offered the same education that their peers are getting. Resources spent on the advanced learning program could have been spent on offering a better quality of education for the entire school. I’m sympathetic to both sides of this issue but I don’t find it simple.
It’s not segregation because the school doesn’t place students in these classes based on their skin color.
Oftentimes these disparities arise from communities being economically mixed along racial lines. It’s not even the case that these economic disparities arise from what’s called “systemic racism.” In urban school districts many kids are immigrants or children of immigrants, and have lesser economic circumstances because of recent migration. Treating them differently based on skin color doesn’t help erase some historical injustice. For example, Bangladeshi Americans, a group I belong to, have a household income in New York City much lower than whites. Indian Americans, by contrast, have incomes much higher than whites. These disparities aren’t due to differing effects of “racism” but recency of immigration and characteristics of the immigrants. This is true for Latinos as well. They have lower incomes now because a large number are recent economic migrants. But their incomes are converging with those of white people over time: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. (In fact, after three generations, half of Latinos don’t even identify as such.)
The data shows that, apart from Black and Native American people, other ethnic groups in the US are similarly situated to how Polish people, Italians, etc., were during the early 20th century. Or how Cubans or Vietnamese were in the later 20th century. They’re in the process of economic integration. It’s not a situation where government discrimination is required now to erase the effects of past government discrimination.
For similar reasons, it makes no sense to discriminate between kids based on race to address present (rather than systemic) economic disparities. For purposes of dismantling gifted programs and test-based admissions, whites and Asians are typically lumped together. But in NYC, for example, most Asian kids in the gifted programs are actually fairly poor, because they’re the children of recent immigrants. It’s irrational to lump them together with whites in the “advantaged” group.
"The data shows that, apart from Black and Native American people, other ethnic groups in the US are similarly situated to how Polish people, Italians, etc., were during the early 20th century. Or how Cubans or Vietnamese were in the later 20th century. They’re in the process of economic integration. It’s not a situation where government discrimination is required now to erase the effects of past government discrimination."
That will end the narrative of systemic racism and then all the "diversity" officers and quote will be blown away.
Call what you want but America is the least racist country.
> It’s irrational to lump them together with whites in the “advantaged” group.
Why?
The “advantaged” here isn't about transitory economic status but systematic racism, and the durable effects of historical racism.
The material you are citing, taken at face value, justifies lumping not only Asians, but everyone but Blacks and Native Americans, into the “advantaged” group with Whites, rather than providing an argument against lumping recent Asian immigrants into that group.
In the paragraph you’re quoting, I’m talking about what you call transitory economic status above. The point is that if you’re trying to address that, it makes no sense to lump poor Asian kids in NYC together with wealthy white kids. Or to treat poor white or Asian kids differently than poor Black or Latino kids.
I address systemic racism in the second to last paragraph above, and I agree that in that context, everyone but Blacks and native Americans should be in the advantaged group.
That's a pretty wide exception, and it's worth addressing why they remain an exception. Why are these groups so slow to economically integrate?
The simplest (and therefore most Occam's-razor-friendly) explanation for the black population is that they can't usually pass as "white" as easily as other demographics. But this doesn't really explain much for Native Americans, who could pass as "white" about as easily as Latinos and/or Asians.
Did you miss that part of the article or have you intentionally excluded the presence of Asian students in your reply because it makes your argument stick better? I don't think it meets the definition of segregation when a subset of multiple groups are given special treatment due to their aptitude on topics that are inherently race-agnostic. Yes, those with money and power can better educate their kids compared to the poor, but so can those without money who simply value education higher (speaking as a 1.5 gen immigrant who grew up extremely poor). Why are we always the first ones to be penalized in the name of racial equality?
> In the end, all that is being done to the “advanced” students is that they’re being offered the same education that their peers are getting.
This is generally not what advanced students get. They are usually taught different, more advanced curricula. Not all kids are capable of learning quickly, so the whole point of a separate program is to provide quick learners with advanced curricula and others with the support they need.
>Resources spent on the advanced learning program could have been spent on offering a better quality of education for the entire school.
This assumption rests on the false supposition that all children have the same intelligence and learn at the same rate, and the only difference is environmental factors. While environmental factors are certainly important, they aren't everything, despite how wonderful that would be towards realizing the fantasy of a "fair and just" world. The fact is that people are different - innately. Just as a proper schooling system allocates resources for students that learn at a slower rate, so should a proper schooling system allocate resources for students who learn at an advanced rate.
> Resources spent on the advanced learning program could have been spent on
Segregating students who would fail to be engaged by mainstream coursework unless disproportionate effort and attention was focussed on them is “offering a better quality of education for the entire school.”
I can only speak for myself, and my experience as a rather low income kid in the public school system.
Without advanced learning, I'd have learned at a much slower pace and felt held back and bored. I started in regular classes, and the amount of disruptors and time teachers spent babysitting was absolutely absurd. Luckily I was able to be placed in advanced classes, and all that disappeared.
As for curriculum, we were doing calc 2 while the standard classes ended at about an intro to trig, for example.
I don't know how to fix the disparity, and unfairness, if it exists. But please don't throw out the whole program.
These days no one is ready to talk about cultural and behavioral differences that lead to different outcomes, but it is the most obvious cause of disparities in education and career success between ethnicities. The reason policies like affirmative action or gutting gifted education are discrimination to me, is that students from certain backgrounds are being punished for their cultural and behavioral differences. For example, most Asian cultures emphasize a focus on hard work, academic success, respect for your elders, etc. Anyone who has spent any time in the American schooling system knows that Asian students have remarkably different behavioral patterns from white or black American students. They make choices that lead to their success, and now they’re being discriminated against by those claiming there are “too many” successful Asians. A similar argument can be constructed for other groups.
The 30% of black and Hispanic students who were already in Boston's gifted program by virtue of their intelligence are now also going to be discriminated against in order to pack the advanced classes with their less intelligent peers. This will push the black and Hispanic students already qualified for the program out.
The biggest fallacy is that gifted students would attend regular public school classes if gifted program is unavailable. In reality students with wealthy parents will transfer to private school, middle class will move to suburbs and few students with poor parents (disproportionally people of color) will stay in shitty regular school. Only last group prospects and education will be damaged long term and overall numbers involved is not really enough to have material positive influence on overall level of students in Boston public school.
“My kids are dumb. I do not want other parents kids to get ahead only because they are smart”
What do you tell a poor black gifted student? "Sorry friend, no gifted classes for you the gifted classes were making the administration look bad. That is more important than your accademic career."
Why do you assume this is about making the school look bad, and not that there might be some serious issue if black/hispanic people are not performing as well as others. They are launching an investigation into the matter, not removing the advanced classes. Did you misread the word 'suspend'?
> few students with poor parents (disproportionally people of color) will stay in shitty regular school.
I'm white and this was me. If it weren't for these programs, I'd either be in jail or working retail/fast food. Congratulations on provoking me, I'm going to take a long hiatus from HN now and go build something. I've changed my password to a randomly generated (ephemeral) string on this and my main account; I won't be back to contribute.
Goddamn, its weird how its so common to just insult vast swaths of people, under the guise of helping them. I went to one of those shitty city regular public schools and I managed to test into honor schools for Jr High
As a parent of white and asian children, this type of thing does cause visceral concern for me. Are public programs that benefit my children going to be cancelled because they tend to include disproportionately more children from our group than other groups? Will I be forced to go private to get the teaching I need for my children?
At the same time, I also recognize that there is scant evidence that gifted and advanced learning programs are beneficial. Selection bias is extremely hard to control and is the driving factor behind most deltas in education statistics. Are the kids coming out of the program better equipped because of the program? Or were the better equipped kids selected into the program? I'm inclined to guess that typically it's more of the former than the latter.
So for now I'm delaying judgment on these moves. We will be watching carefully to see whether the quality of the teaching slips when our gifted programs are cancelled. If that happens, and if I believe we can get better teaching elsewhere, we will go private and it will be fine. But my guess is that the gifted program is really not that important and we will be fine continuing without it.
> Are public programs that benefit my children going to be cancelled because they tend to include disproportionately more children from our group than other groups? Will I be forced to go private to get the teaching I need for my children?
Well yes, this is what they mean when they talk about "combating privilege".
I think the most efficient and ethical way to combat privilege is to spend more resources to bring underprivileged people up, rather than taking away resources to bring privileged people down. In many respects that is the only viable option. For example, kids who have been abused are going to need more support to reach the level of achievement of kids who live in homes free of abuse. You can't solve this by taking away the advantages of the more privileged group (i.e. abusing the children who haven't been). You can only address this issue by providing more support for victims of abuse.
You're free to believe whatever you want and it's really none of my business, but what you're saying is just not going to happen. It has been tried many times before and it's a Herculean task. Way too hard, if not virtually impossible and it always ends up like this. If you support combating privilege, just be prepared to lose everything. It's fine by me, but let's not get disillusioned about what it actually means.
> I think the most efficient and ethical way to combat privilege is to spend more resources to bring underprivileged people up
In the context of primary education, and I mean this in the most sincere way possible, what if they don't want to? You're ignoring the agency of the students. A lot of children, occasionally my younger self included, see it as their duty to rebel against the educational system. So how can you improve someone's educational attainment against their will?
Students, even in gifted programs, push back on the demands that are placed on them. I did too when I was in school, and I was in gifted and advanced placement programs throughout my schooling. I'm not sure to what extent this is specific to privileged or underprivileged groups.
There is nothing a school can spend money on to fix this problem.
Likewise, there is nothing the occupying US army can spend money on to solve extremism in Iraq.
They would have to entirely reinvent their organization to be something that it’s not. This is the NAACP unwisely putting pressure where it’s not needed (schools) instead of where it is needed (legislators). Blame the NAACP for failing at the governmental level and trying to backdoor into the schooling level.
The funny thing is that if they really tried to combat the privilege - the rich families connected to the ruling class - the privilege would combat them into the ground, so they wisely chose a weak opponent that vaguely resembles the rich (common skin color).
As a parent of Bangladeshi-Irish children, I’m not delaying judgment. Whether or not gifted programs are valuable is besides the point. I’d welcome a concrete debate about the utility of gifted programs, and whether the benefits are worth the resources spent on them.
But the gifted program here wasn’t eliminated because of cost-benefit reasons. It was eliminated because administrators felt that too many kids in the program looked like our kids. They’ve taken a page out of the Old South playbook and there is no reason to reserve judgment on that.
I recognize that the terms of the debate might not be what I would choose. But I'm more concerned about the practical impact on my children than the ideological content of the debate. If the gifted programs are not actually having a causal positive impact on my children, I don't care so much if they are cancelled, no matter why they are cancelled. I am less interested in the ideology of the two sides of the debate, although I respect that other people feel differently and I don't wish to foreclose on other people arguing that aspect of things.
Ideology drives policy, and this won’t be the only policy decision made based on ideology. Virginia recently eliminated the admissions test in the science/tech magnet high school I attended because the school had too many Asian kids: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/thomas-jeffer....
Standardized testing has been a huge equalizer for Asian Americans vis-a-vis whites. My family came to America from Bangladesh—we were fortunate to be solidly middle class, but we lacked the social connections and cultural capital of even the average middle class whites around us. Standardized testing allowed my brother and I to stand out and break into professions that just a generation ago were reserved for the children of elite white families. Getting rid of those opportunities strikes me as ill-advised at best and motivated by anti-Asian sentiment at worst.
No place exists where this isn't happening to some extent or another. Where are you going to move to? No place I'd want to be is free from other human beings.
Yes, yes, and yes... this is happening in California already. As a future parent of Asian kids, I’m preparing to have to spend through the nose on private education.
"It is the year 2081. Because of Amendments 211, 212, and 213 to the Constitution, every American is fully equal, meaning that no one is stupider, uglier, weaker, or slower than anyone else. The Handicapper General and a team of agents ensure that the laws of equality are enforced."
Ya know, I miss the days when the schools in the wealthier part of town had things like advanced classes and air conditioning, and the rest of us just sucked it up and didn't whine. Because we gaddamn knew our places.
I'm all for equality but I'm not for enforcing equity of outcome. If there are any structural inequalities, tear them down. Everyone should have an equal shot a life. But this unfortunate does not mean everyone is going to have an equal outcome in abilities. Some people are just better at things than others.
This headline will receive a lot of backlash from the anti-woke crowd, but it's a pretty fair assessment in substance. They identified a glaring issue, that most kids in the advanced classes are white and asian, despite the district being mostly black and hispanic, and are trying to find solutions to that.
Of course, traditionally the solution has been to claim that blacks are just inferior to whites and nothing should be done, and then flail your arms about while crying that the school has been taken over by the woke.
>Of course, traditionally the solution has been to claim that blacks are just inferior to whites and nothing should be done
Isn't that the implication of such a move?
An elementary school is abdicating their responsibility to effectively educate black and hispanic students to advanced levels. Why would they do that unless they thought they were inferior and beyond educating?
These "educators" would do well to study the life works of Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass.
I live in the Boston suburbs. Not a single person at my work or social circle have kids in the Boston public schools. In fact no one even lives in Boston (because of schools of course). This would actually have the opposite effect on the Boston public schools if you ask me.
Private schools in the Boston area are booming because of Corona. Actions like this will continue the trend unfortunately.
The intention is kind, but there's no better way to force _every_ remaining parent who can afford it to send their kids to private schools (or move to the 'burbs) and increase the inequality even more.
There was an interesting podcast series that took on the disparity issue in some detail when a neighborhood public school in NYC got effectively taken over by parents who could no longer find slots for their kids in the "good" schools: "Nice White Parents" [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren...].
It's an uncomfortable thing to approach no matter how you look at it. But the solution, if there even is one, is for parents to take a much deeper role in how schools are operated and funded. For the wealthy, that will simply mean private school, period. For those that can't do that but who still care about their kids education, it going to mean A LOT MORE involvement in public schools.
I attended an advanced school as a student. We really didn't have any more resources than the non-advanced schools. It was simply a different, more advanced curriculum taught to those who both qualified (via test score) and were lucky (it was rationed via lottery).
But we still had the same bad teacher:student ratio, the same ancient textbooks, a building in a terrible location, the bare minimum for athletics, etc.
I think nurses are an excellent example of systemic racism/sexism. Being a nurse used to be seen as an exclusively male profession. Given that it is pretty clear it is a cultural rather than innate association. How we handle this is really complicated and requires a lot more thought than “lets do nothing, it must be natural this is way”.
>People are different and they have different aptitudes.
There is some thinking that if we don't have ALL categories/jobs/promotions with the same population proportion it is because "systemic racism".
>I am still waiting for at least 53% of NBA be white.
People are in fact different and have different aptitudes, but there's no reason to believe that those differences cut across racial lines. When you see wildly different racial/socioeconomic/gender representation in a field, you should look at it more closely.
Consider basketball. It's predominantly black today, but it wasn't always so. Basketball was at one point more closely associated with Jewish people than blacks people. In fact, not long ago, people called basketball a Jewish sport [1]. And here's a fun fact: the first non-white NBA player was Asian [2]. There was a point in history where Jews and Asians were better represented in basketball than black people.
So why is the NBA 80%+ black today? Let's look at outside factors. During the Great Migration, blacks moved to from southern towns to northern cities and transitioned from a largely rural population to a largely urban one. In a city, basketball is the perfect sport for a poor/working class kid. It doesn't require a field. It doesn't require a lot of equipment. It can be played on pavement. It's easy to pick up but has a high talent ceiling. So if you're a kid in the city who's interested in a sport and you don't have a ton of resources, you're probably going to end up playing basketball for reasons that may have less to do with your natural interests and aptitudes than your situation, environment, and (eventually) societal expectations.
This dynamic cuts both ways. Jeremy Lin was one of the best high school players in the country in 2005 but wasn't nearly as a heavily recruited as he should have been based purely on his stats. UCLA wanted him to be a walk on. If he were black, he would have gotten an athletic scholarship and been on magazine covers. I wonder how many other Asian basketball players are underrecruited simply because they're Asian. Whether it's 1 or 1,000, the sport is poorer for it.
Sometimes what appears to be the consequence of "different aptitudes" can suggest something systemic instead. That doesn't mean that we should enforce a quota, but it does mean that we shouldn't take differences in representation to be the result of differences in aptitude.
>You can see it on your own family with siblings. Same "genetics" but very different aptitudes and skills.
I'm not sure that siblings have the "same genetics" or that it's fair to compare differences in populations to differences in individuals. It's obvious that individuals are different due to genetics. It's not obvious that the distribution of those individual differences should differ across racial lines.
There are absolutely reasons to believe that there are differences of all sorts between races on a statistical/population wide level, but we’re at the point where people can’t even conceive of that.
Clearly black children are not achieving at the rate that white children are, but that’s no reason to suspend the gifted program. Yes, the white kids are getting more academic and overall support at home, and this can only be fixed by getting all of the kids this kind of support, not by kneecapping the white children (who are not super privileged or they wouldn’t be in Boston Public Schools to begin with).
Ridiculous policies like this are why we sold our house in the city and left for a $2 million house in the suburbs, where the price of admission means that every kid has lots of support at home, depleting the city schools of one more kid and dragging them down even further.
Arguably the overall societal gains are higher from turning a future accountant into a future scientist than improving the 25th percentile student’s outcome anyways.
Is it that "black children are not achieving at the rate that white children are", or is it that black and hispanic children are not being placed in the program in the numbers they should be? Did you in fact move because you didn't like to be reminded of your inferiors? Are you conflating wealth and whiteness with intelligence and worth?
This is the first comment I’ve seen that is in touch with the reality of Boston Public Schools. The Boston public system was destroyed by forced integration that caused people with financial means to withdraw and move to the suburbs and/or put their children into private school. The racist motives for the initial split may have faded, but the legacy of that public/private split continues in a way that is self-reinforcing. No matter how woke you are now, nobody who can afford to do otherwise wants to send their kid to a public school that is failing based on every available measure.
Almost every major American city has the same story of a stripped city core where even as young professionals gentrify the real estate in the area they don’t do the same to the schools by sending their kids to private school. A family will live in a neighborhood with a gang reputation (eg San Francisco’s Mission or Viz Valley) before they send their kids to a bad school.
This is a really hard subject. I can remember growing up as the only black kid in an all white class of kids in elementary school, and all of my friends made it into the "advanced" cohort. I knew I was just as bright as any of them, and that given a chance I would thrive there too. But for whatever reason I didn't make the cut, and this removed me from my peer group for the rest of my school years. They grew apart and I ended up mostly friendless. I don't think race really had a lot to do with it. But if you're going to separate kids, at least have a whole other school to send them to, rather than creating a distinct hierarchy among the classes. I think that really messes with kids' self esteem.
In my advanced program, they would ship us to a nearby elementary school, and the advanced students there would be sent to our school (same district, same grade level, just 10 minutes down the road), I can only assume it's for the same reason you mentioned...
If you believe knowledge of this world can be gained from evidence, and that when evidence shows something, that should be believed over ideology or dogma, what should you then believe about race and intelligence, and about equality?
Intelligence appears to be mostly genetic (see the Wikipedia page “heritability of IQ”). There are many maps online showing average IQ in different countries, which hints at races having different intelligence.
This hints at ideas of equality of outcome between people of different ethnicity being a thing this world will not see.
In nature, I don’t believe there are any examples of equality between entities, except on the level of physics or maybe chemistry. No two entities are equal.
This would imply that to get equality, the only way is to push down the groups that most often reach top achievements - to design a society that is anti-white, anti-Asian, and anti-male. I once met a girl with a poignant tattoo: “free men are not equal - equal men are not free”.
I look forward to the intelligent HN community enlightening me on this subject
The oppression and equality narrative seems to be like the Christian Gospel - the absolute truth. Everything that contradicts it, even science, must be false.
The article below, while technically not wrong, go as far as to undermine the most robust abstraction we've ever came up with, math itself, to deny the IQ.
Tracking started because struggling students need more help, and the best thing for them is to get the advanced students out of the classroom. So fine, don’t have advanced classes, send those kids to play outside, whatever. But this is pure ideological self-harm.
"A district analysis of the program found that more than 70 percent of students enrolled in the program were white and Asian, even though nearly 80 percent of all Boston public school students are Hispanic and Black."
"The program was open to all students in the Boston Public Schools who took a test known as Terra Nova in the third grade and received a high score."
"Last fall, 453 students received invitations, 143 students applied and 116 enrolled this year, officials said."
"Cassellius says interest in the program had declined over several years and only five schools currently offered the program"
So, in summary, about ~25% of invited students enroll in the program, i.e. parents aren't interested in their kids taking this program, it's dying out anyway, undoubtedly costs money, and those that are interested in the program are vastly, disproportionately white and asian. I think bringing up racism might be a bit inflammatory. I think it's safer to say, though, that the program isn't desirable to anyone, and particularly undesirable to minorities. And yes, they should have an enrichment program that people find worth taking.
This issue is an artifact of a factory assembly line system that educates pupils on each subject in lock step. Their solution to different needs and paces is to split into a slow, normal and fast track. We can do a lot better.
With modern wealth and info tech we can abandon that for most academic subjects, and let each child learn at their own pace, on their own laptop, touchpad, etc. Not an assembly line but a collection of artisans. It doesn't matter if a genius is sitting next to a plodder if the whole class isn't expected to be on the same page.
Part of the problem is that the teacher is expected to be knowledgeable on the subject, which is fine. But now we can geographically separate the subject expert from the classroom manager. Teacher can't teach a fourth grader calculus? No problem, here are a list of online teachers who can give personal help, along with canned videos, etc.
We'll get closer to equal protection under the law by treating every child as unequal in the classroom. If you teach to the mean you poorly serve the long tails on either end.
The single greatest skill you can learn in class is autodidactics. Learning that should be at the center of the school experience. Self-paced learning of a predefined curriculum is a large step toward that. And a return toward the standard practice of pre-industrial one-room schools.
I have a son enrolled in boston public schools. I live in a gentrifying part of town. When I go to the prarent meetings the principal (who is an absoutely AMAZING women easily putting in 80 hour weeks) had to fight tooth and nail for funds to add a social worker to the school. The range of incomes between students is HUGE. There are a lot of parents struggling to pay rent, and definatley don't have the ability to invest in their childs education outside school the way I've been fortunate enough to.
We put about $8k into a fund to help these parents... but it's not even close to enough. Honestly, if you want to improve outcomes, maybe we should look into helping struggling families pay rent, and become more stable.
When my wife and I got our foster care license I was astounded by how many resources our state puts towards foster kids after they're put into the foster system: hundreds of dollars a month to the foster parent, life coaches, psychologists, tutors, birthday and Christmas allowances, great medical care. And the main goal is reunification with their family.
Meanwhile, before being put in foster care they and their families get no support!
I often think about how broken of a system that is. I feel like if half the foster resources went to the families to begin with, then we could avoid a lot of foster care (parental abuse notwithstanding) in the first place! And it's so traumatic taking kids from their moms.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadI'm having a hard time trying to understand what the acceptable outcome they want is. Proportional enrollment based on race?
This possibility bothers me, since I never identified myself by race. So would I be lumped into a generic "Asian" category in their statistics based on my skin colour? Why is this the correct form of human categorization?
[1] https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...
EDIT: This is the opening paragraph. It says it all:
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film)
I thought the original was a bit over the top a bit ridiculous almost. Bergeron's some kind of god being almost. The movie kept it a little more realistic and was darker i felt.
So how is this story at all relevant or illuminating to the article, beyond as an exercise in fearmongering?
How it relates to the article is the "lead weight" of removing the availability of AP classes from White and Asian students is a severely misguided attempt at making Black and Hispanic students equal, as if they weren't already. It's actually a terribly wrong message to the Black and Hispanic students.
It seems to me that a better approach is try to understand the reasons why more Black and Hispanic students aren't enrolling while continuing to provide these classes to any student who qualifies, regardless of race.
Yes.
“Antiracist” doesn’t mean “not racist”; it’s a Marxist ideology focusing on racial identities and purposeful systemic racism to “balance” the power between racial tribes.
It’s extremely racist.
Anti-Asian racism will become normalized as long as “antiracism” is part of the Democratic agenda. They’re literally fighting to overturn civil rights laws in CA and WA so the government can discriminate based on race again.
Source? From a reputable location, the only ones I'm finding are sites with headlines like:
and even Breitbart saysWA prop 1000 https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/initiat...
Thanks for the links
Why do you say this is "Marxist ideology"? What makes it Marxist, precisely?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Marxism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory
This is true, antiracism is active in the presence of racism, “not racist” may or may not be.
> it’s a Marxist ideology
No, it's not. I suppose if you met “Marxist” metaphorically in that, like Marxism, it posits the existence of a status quo struggle, and calls for consciousness of that struggle and activity within it rather than indifference to it or denial of it, it would be accurate, but that's kind of a weak basis for such an emotionally-loaded metaphor.
> purposeful systemic racism to “balance” the power between racial tribes.
Antiracism does not call for “purposeful systemic racism” for any purpose.
In this case the distribution in the population was not identical to the distribution in the sample.
Clearly something isn't right.
The challenge is fixing the problem, not pretending it doesn’t exit by making white and Asian students educations worse.
This is like the Boston PD issuing orders to shoot more unarmed Asians since black and Hispanics are shot more disproportionately.
In combination with other indicators, a strong gender/racial skew relative to the underlying population can be a predictor that your program or organization will be in trouble soon.
Indeed, it seems to be in trouble at this time: The article states: "Cassellius says interest in the program had declined over several years[...]". So there are clearly more issues.
My understanding of the article is that they're going on a one year hiatus to figure out the issues and fix them.
The school district addressed in Nice White Parents (great podcast) exemplifies this dynamic: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren....
That does seem rather hopeful for the future.
Thank you for taking the time to explain.
Are you predicting that schools will have a rough time for the next generation or so, until the current generation (or the one after) become parents themselves?
this is changing slowly as the city gentrifies and the traditionally black neighborhoods are becoming less affordable for black people (who have an average net worth of only $8)... which I suppose is black flight, but the term is problematic because it’s evocative if white flight (which was a choice to avoid integration)... black flight largely is the lack of choice due to racial inequity
Is there a racial issue here?
In my elementary school, I was lucky enough to not miss the one day they were testing for advanced learning (if you missed it, tough luck: that was the only onboarding year) and it changed my school experience forever. I don't think I would be the person I am today, at all, if I had been sick that one day. If there are similar restrictions or barriers for entry that are not related to intelligence, they need to be looked into.
Your experience sounds very interesting. Would you care to share some more? Were you in the Boston program, or elsewhere?
It was a program that started in elementary school (https://ycsd.yorkcountyschools.org/EXTENDCenter). In second grade they tested us for it, I don't remember a whole lot about it. I do remember it was logic-based and math-based. Every Wednesday from 2nd grade to 5th grade (then in middle school on a different schedule) we would spend in the extended learning program's building (a very small wing). We learned French (though looking back it was more preparing us to learn other languages than actually learning French), did science projects, wrote stuff about a random topic selected out of an encyclopedia, etc. It really is my most fond memory of school and I still keep in contact with the teacher.
Over in the middle school side, we did more advanced topics. We studied the Ebola virus and how it affects the body, we wrote papers about an unknown John Doe in Yorktown in 1770's (then we literally walked to it, separate tangent below), we had a "socratic seminar" where we debated topics, we built a Rube Goldberg machine, all sorts of stuff.
It actually changed my life. Anyone who says advanced education doesn't help simply doesn't see the changes a well-designed, thought out program has. And this was all in a public school. I checked their site recently and they are still running it even through the pandemic, which warms my heart.
I mentioned the one-day, one-time onboarding process. They have since remedied it, instead scheduling tests with students chosen. This is a good solution and I'm glad they implemented it.
Tangent: I lived in Yorktown Virginia, which is probably my second favorite thing about my childhood. The pre-school I went to was a 30 second walk down a hill to Yorktown Beach. In middle school, we read about the Revolutionary War, then took a field trip consisting of walking outside the doors, through the forest and 5 minutes of walking, and just like that we were where it actually took place, with monuments, statues, historical signs, etc.
That does sound like a lot of fun. And I'm glad to hear you had such a great time.
I can’t even really “blame” the families for whom they need to have all adults working outside the home and often more than one job. How can you do that and expect to give the kids a level of attention that a family with a full-time adult in the house (whether a parent or nanny)? Kids are exhausting; so is working multiple jobs and worrying about money all the time.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I think it’s terrible to kneecap the successful and promising students just because not everyone is one or because you find a socio-economic discrepancy in the makeup. If you do that, you accelerate the flight of better students out to better public districts, to private schools, or supplemental experiences, which does nothing to lift the majority of the student body. (I suppose private schooling means you get some money from the parents who didn’t leave your town without having to bother to serve them. But you also lose all that role modeling.)
-MLK, I've Been To The Mountaintop, last speech given the night before assasination
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemou...
So I went to a bottom of the barrel districts for school, but still aced it. I got admitted in a great US school, and a semester later I had proved my worth enough to get a full scholarship. What if you had put me in a better system? I would have only excelled more!
The problem is not the school environment, but the families. From what I have seen, only military-style schools, with the students living in, can provide better chances for disadvantaged students. The best school environment will do nothing against a toxic family and toxic friends that use racist monikers to attack those that have a chance to succeed ("crab mentality").
And BTW the comment below "I miss the days when the schools in the wealthier part of town had things like advanced classes and air conditioning, and the rest of us just sucked it up and didn't whine" makes no sense. I went to school in a tropical country, with no AC. Yes I did sweat a lot in class and I took 2 showers per day minimum, but I didn't die.
Since the lack of amenities like AC or computers will do nothing to prevent people that are pushed up by their family, I think they will likewise do nothing to help people succeed when they are held back by their social group. Amenities are just a highly visible distraction, correlated, but not causal.
What does 100% diverse means in this context ?
So here's what I fail to understand: why punish Asians? They (or perhaps I should say we) had nothing to do with the history of white vs black oppression in the United States. Many of us weren't even here until well after the civil rights movement of the '60s and '70s. This sort of "diversity" is basically progressives being willing to be racist to Asians to compensate blacks for the past injustices perpetrated by whites, which is basically robbing Peter to pay Paul any way you look at it.
https://spandrell.com/2017/11/14/biological-leninism/
The goal of any diversity program - ignoring whether or not that goal is good - is to increase representation among historically under-represented groups. At least as far as academics and education are concerned, Asians are objectively not under-represented. If you're looking at diversity programs in the urban United States, this translated pretty directly into "more black and brown kids."
It's hard to ride that line between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. But it seems to be that just saying "wow there's not enough black and brown kids in these classes, so we better cancel them rather than see what went wrong (or if anything actually went wrong)" is a pretty ass-backwards way to handle things.
This is how Marxist ideas always go: some groups work harder and succeed more, so we have to suspend the programs that upset central planning statistics.
Working to improve the pipeline by rebuilding community and raising education as a family value is verboten because it requires we address uncomfortable truths.
It must be racism; it can’t be the fault of the people involved.
> "This is just not acceptable," Rivera said at a recent school committee meeting. "I've never heard these statistics before, and I'm very very disturbed by them."
I’m not sold on gifted education to begin with. It’s a complicated issue for sure, with pluses and minuses. But suspending gifted education programs expressly based on the racial makeup of the kids in the program is illegal discrimination, plain and simple.
Just running the program is a legal risk.
Please go back to re-education camp.
If they were selected based on their race, it's racial discrimination. If the classes were suspended based on the student's race, it's racial discrimination, plain and simple.
Unfortunately it's not in 2021.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There is a perfectly logical (and non-racist) reason for blacks and Hispanics to not make it into the gifted program as frequently as their white and Asian peers and that is they, in average, have lower grades.
People see the outcome is disproportionate and assume racism. Instead of looking at the evidence to see why it happened they look at the outcome and try to fit their preferred narrative into it.
If there is racism which causes students to have a difficult life which then causes them to do worse in school and doing worse in school means the student won't be accepted into the gifted program then I do not consider the gifted program admission to be racist. The solution should be to help those in a bad situation (regardless if it was caused by racism or something else) so anybody who is disadvantaged can be on an equal playing field and meet the requirements.
There are a lot of poor white students. They likely struggle in school because of that. I don't think the solution would be to make it easier for those poor whites to make it into the gifted program just because they are poor. And yet many people would make that argument for blacks and Hispanics.
Removing the gifted program because you don't like the races who make it in is racist.
Helping people in a bad situation is a different issue and should be treated as such. Even if there were no poor people, uneducated parents, single parent homes, etc we still don't know that blacks and Hispanics would make it into gifted classes at a higher rate then they are now. Whites and Asians also have those issues and they would likely do better if they didn't have to deal with them.
I’m heavily biased toward meeting the needs of the individual students. If you don’t, affluent parents will nope out of your school anyway (and possibly out of the neighborhood altogether), as they reasonably should.
We are heavily pro-public schooling, attending and volunteering often at the elementary school and intending to attend the high school, but grades 6-8 schools are a mess in our town, so we’re going to private schools for those years. It’s not worth sacrificing our kids’ academic outcome at the altar of fairness and equality pulled down to the lowest common denominator.
It’s true that economic disparities can be caused by historical racism. But that’s not a basis for distinguishing Latinos from Asians, or really Latinos and Asians from Italians, Polish people, etc., who are similarly situated to each other.
Let me expand a bit on the two factors I mentioned above, redlining and taxes. In the US, schools are generally funded by local taxes. On its own, that wouldn't seem to cause racial education disparities. But the neighborhoods in which people congregate are affected by the legacy of redlining, in which Black people were segregated into neighborhoods with lower property values. As a result, children in those neighborhoods receive worse educations, which makes them appear less "gifted" when combined with other students in higher grades.
Those are of course not the only factors in play. But hopefully they illuminate how a seemingly benign program can entrench disparities created elsewhere.
In relation to taxes: I don't think you read tne article. It says the standards are determined at the school level. That means how well students do at a school in a wealthier area is irrelevant to how they do in a school in a poorer area.
As for redlining, it is illegal. Even if you want to say there are historical issues that are still around today because of redlining, it wouldn't matter since the standards are school based not district widd based.
If it was district wide or statewide I would generally agree with you that there could be issues related to that. I do think that funds should be distributed based on number of students (and perhaps a bit of a difference due to cost of living for teachers) rather than based on property tax rates in that area. I don't know how Massachusetts (or Boston specifically) handles this so it could already be done how I described.
That’s not true. Only half of school funding comes from local taxes. The other half comes from state and federal sources, and are targeted to level the differences in local funding. Including state funding, many school districts have progressive funding (with poor districts getting more per student than rich ones). https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-...
That still leaves a lot of wiggle room for school revenues, and a lot of influence on those revenues (and, correspondingly, student education) by residents' economic class.
And further, just because the state/federal spending is "targeted to level the differences" doesn't mean it actually does so.
Money goes less far in the city and they have more issues to deal with, but the $/student is not "inequitable" to borrow a word.
Addressing economic inequality along class lines would go a long way, since it's the economic system that has the strongest (or at least most tangible) impact right now. That doesn't do much to address lingering cultural issues, however.
You mean other than ICE crackdowns just so happening to target Latinos? Or the exact same "they're stealing our jobs" rhetoric once used against Chinese immigrants now being applied to Latino immigrants? Do we wait until after Latino work crews are executed and buried in mass graves before we acknowledge there are some problems? Or maybe we wait until Latino neighborhoods get torched by populist mobs?
It can at least sound like a statement the school will invest more in some kids than others. At least that what it can sound like outside the gifted bubble.
Probably the solution is to have high standards for all students and classes they all can participate in.
Which side of the bell curve do you think gets more investment dollars? Left or right?
Schools already do this ever since No Child Left Behind. It's just in the opposite direction. Kids below the average get far far more money than the median student. Why not have gifted classes as well to support those who excel?
It also mitigates the way which this has gotten worse since NCLB and it's successor policies because schools strongly prefer not to advance students (pre-NCLB, this was an issue because of somewhat legitimate developmental/emotional concerns, but since NCLB and ratings based on the distribution of performance vs. grade level on standardized tests, preventing advancement is now also a way of juicing metrics.)
Of course both forms of special ed are blunt instruments to deal with not doing better by-student calibration across the board to students, incliding those in the wide middle of performance.
Well, one could propose that "AP Calculus" should be the high standard for a high-school diploma for _all_ students but neither the parents nor teachers would support that.
EDIT to reply: the "AP Calculus" was just a placeholder that people are familiar with and not intended as a tangent into any hidden self-serving agenda of The College Board revenue generation. We can just call it "Calculus 101" for purposes of this discussion. The parents would not universally support passing "Calculus 101" as a mandatory requirement for their child to get a high-school diploma.
They have annual revenue >$1B with over $100 million in “excess revenue” (you can’t call it profit because they are a non-profit). The CEO earns over $1 million per year, sold his education consulting company to a huge education textbook publisher, claims that he “had” to get a job at McKinsey because he couldn’t find work as a high school English teacher, etc.
You think this would be an improvement?
I think my life would be very different if I was challenged more in school.
I support the necessity of those programs, but the idea that money is flowing upwards on the achievement curve is probably contradicted by the data, given the intense needs of special education programming.
But, often, it may just be the appearance of extra things; if the gifted class does more 'enrichment' activities, it's often because they've got more time left after doing the required curriculum. Or, in my district, the gifted program had busing (which costs money) to get enough kids together to run one class per grade.
If the issue is money though; maybe it could be addressed through demonstrably worse conditions in the gifted program. Maybe a cap of 35 students per class in gifted, and 25 in mainstream. Then there's a tradeoff. My district had bussing as a negative characteristic for the gifted program as well (although my neighborhood school was the bus destination for four out of six years, so it wasn't bad for me)
For the vast majority of "gifted" children, the reason they were gifted at all has a ton to do with the amount of time their parents spent with them outside of the classroom. Usually, "giftedness" is about a parent's ability to focus their child in a way that the child would likely not focus on their own.
Just look at the science fair projects that get national recognition. It takes no effort at all to determine the difference between a project produced by a kid and a project created by a parent who guided the kid through the steps necessary to produce a scientifically valid conclusion.
I'm all for high schools pairing with universities to let high school students knock out college classes and get high school credit for them, though. English III and English IV are particularly useless classes which do nothing for most kids. Replace them with college classes.
None of them became medical or PhD doctors. One became a lawyer. Two have Master's degrees.
Their classmates? 7 PhDs. 4 MDs. About 10 MBAs (that I am aware of), 8 lawyers, 2 psychologists, 3 SLPs, at least 5 with MEs, and several self-made millionaires.
Gifted doesn't mean genius. For most, it simply means they have a head start. Head starts don't last once your peers have a reason to compete.
This is why I don't care whether gifted programs live or die. Place the child in the system where he needs to be, but stop pretending that little Bobby with the parents who have been trying to teach him to read since he was crapping his diaper is a genius simply because people spent time forcing him to learn something. For many kids, telling them they're gifted compared to their peers simply inflates their egos past their talent.
I don't believe you are gifted or not. If I did, I wouldn't be as successful as I am, because I didn't start out as "gifted."
Oftentimes these disparities arise from communities being economically mixed along racial lines. It’s not even the case that these economic disparities arise from what’s called “systemic racism.” In urban school districts many kids are immigrants or children of immigrants, and have lesser economic circumstances because of recent migration. Treating them differently based on skin color doesn’t help erase some historical injustice. For example, Bangladeshi Americans, a group I belong to, have a household income in New York City much lower than whites. Indian Americans, by contrast, have incomes much higher than whites. These disparities aren’t due to differing effects of “racism” but recency of immigration and characteristics of the immigrants. This is true for Latinos as well. They have lower incomes now because a large number are recent economic migrants. But their incomes are converging with those of white people over time: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. (In fact, after three generations, half of Latinos don’t even identify as such.)
The data shows that, apart from Black and Native American people, other ethnic groups in the US are similarly situated to how Polish people, Italians, etc., were during the early 20th century. Or how Cubans or Vietnamese were in the later 20th century. They’re in the process of economic integration. It’s not a situation where government discrimination is required now to erase the effects of past government discrimination.
For similar reasons, it makes no sense to discriminate between kids based on race to address present (rather than systemic) economic disparities. For purposes of dismantling gifted programs and test-based admissions, whites and Asians are typically lumped together. But in NYC, for example, most Asian kids in the gifted programs are actually fairly poor, because they’re the children of recent immigrants. It’s irrational to lump them together with whites in the “advantaged” group.
That will end the narrative of systemic racism and then all the "diversity" officers and quote will be blown away.
Call what you want but America is the least racist country.
Why?
The “advantaged” here isn't about transitory economic status but systematic racism, and the durable effects of historical racism.
The material you are citing, taken at face value, justifies lumping not only Asians, but everyone but Blacks and Native Americans, into the “advantaged” group with Whites, rather than providing an argument against lumping recent Asian immigrants into that group.
I address systemic racism in the second to last paragraph above, and I agree that in that context, everyone but Blacks and native Americans should be in the advantaged group.
That's a pretty wide exception, and it's worth addressing why they remain an exception. Why are these groups so slow to economically integrate?
The simplest (and therefore most Occam's-razor-friendly) explanation for the black population is that they can't usually pass as "white" as easily as other demographics. But this doesn't really explain much for Native Americans, who could pass as "white" about as easily as Latinos and/or Asians.
This is generally not what advanced students get. They are usually taught different, more advanced curricula. Not all kids are capable of learning quickly, so the whole point of a separate program is to provide quick learners with advanced curricula and others with the support they need.
This assumption rests on the false supposition that all children have the same intelligence and learn at the same rate, and the only difference is environmental factors. While environmental factors are certainly important, they aren't everything, despite how wonderful that would be towards realizing the fantasy of a "fair and just" world. The fact is that people are different - innately. Just as a proper schooling system allocates resources for students that learn at a slower rate, so should a proper schooling system allocate resources for students who learn at an advanced rate.
Segregating students who would fail to be engaged by mainstream coursework unless disproportionate effort and attention was focussed on them is “offering a better quality of education for the entire school.”
Without advanced learning, I'd have learned at a much slower pace and felt held back and bored. I started in regular classes, and the amount of disruptors and time teachers spent babysitting was absolutely absurd. Luckily I was able to be placed in advanced classes, and all that disappeared. As for curriculum, we were doing calc 2 while the standard classes ended at about an intro to trig, for example.
I don't know how to fix the disparity, and unfairness, if it exists. But please don't throw out the whole program.
Heather Mac Donald wrote about behavioral contributors to disparities and other issues stemming from a societal overfocus on diversity in The Diversity Delusion (https://us.macmillan.com/thediversitydelusion/heathermacdona...). You can read a brief contribution from her regarding behavioral drivers of socioeconomic disparities (like crime rates) at https://www.newsweek.com/if-systemic-racism-real-why-does-bi....
It really is the worse outcome here.
“My kids are dumb. I do not want other parents kids to get ahead only because they are smart”
(If it matters, I grew up Asian.)
I'm white and this was me. If it weren't for these programs, I'd either be in jail or working retail/fast food. Congratulations on provoking me, I'm going to take a long hiatus from HN now and go build something. I've changed my password to a randomly generated (ephemeral) string on this and my main account; I won't be back to contribute.
At the same time, I also recognize that there is scant evidence that gifted and advanced learning programs are beneficial. Selection bias is extremely hard to control and is the driving factor behind most deltas in education statistics. Are the kids coming out of the program better equipped because of the program? Or were the better equipped kids selected into the program? I'm inclined to guess that typically it's more of the former than the latter.
So for now I'm delaying judgment on these moves. We will be watching carefully to see whether the quality of the teaching slips when our gifted programs are cancelled. If that happens, and if I believe we can get better teaching elsewhere, we will go private and it will be fine. But my guess is that the gifted program is really not that important and we will be fine continuing without it.
Well yes, this is what they mean when they talk about "combating privilege".
In the context of primary education, and I mean this in the most sincere way possible, what if they don't want to? You're ignoring the agency of the students. A lot of children, occasionally my younger self included, see it as their duty to rebel against the educational system. So how can you improve someone's educational attainment against their will?
Likewise, there is nothing the occupying US army can spend money on to solve extremism in Iraq.
They would have to entirely reinvent their organization to be something that it’s not. This is the NAACP unwisely putting pressure where it’s not needed (schools) instead of where it is needed (legislators). Blame the NAACP for failing at the governmental level and trying to backdoor into the schooling level.
But the gifted program here wasn’t eliminated because of cost-benefit reasons. It was eliminated because administrators felt that too many kids in the program looked like our kids. They’ve taken a page out of the Old South playbook and there is no reason to reserve judgment on that.
Standardized testing has been a huge equalizer for Asian Americans vis-a-vis whites. My family came to America from Bangladesh—we were fortunate to be solidly middle class, but we lacked the social connections and cultural capital of even the average middle class whites around us. Standardized testing allowed my brother and I to stand out and break into professions that just a generation ago were reserved for the children of elite white families. Getting rid of those opportunities strikes me as ill-advised at best and motivated by anti-Asian sentiment at worst.
-HARRISON BERGERON (http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html)
https://www.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/12huv9/is_harri...
Of course, traditionally the solution has been to claim that blacks are just inferior to whites and nothing should be done, and then flail your arms about while crying that the school has been taken over by the woke.
I prefer the former.
Isn't that the implication of such a move?
An elementary school is abdicating their responsibility to effectively educate black and hispanic students to advanced levels. Why would they do that unless they thought they were inferior and beyond educating?
These "educators" would do well to study the life works of Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass.
Private schools in the Boston area are booming because of Corona. Actions like this will continue the trend unfortunately.
There was an interesting podcast series that took on the disparity issue in some detail when a neighborhood public school in NYC got effectively taken over by parents who could no longer find slots for their kids in the "good" schools: "Nice White Parents" [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren...].
It's an uncomfortable thing to approach no matter how you look at it. But the solution, if there even is one, is for parents to take a much deeper role in how schools are operated and funded. For the wealthy, that will simply mean private school, period. For those that can't do that but who still care about their kids education, it going to mean A LOT MORE involvement in public schools.
Should you spend your resources to nurture your best and brightest, or spend it to bring everyone up.
Given its public money, I suppose the latter is more desirable?
But we still had the same bad teacher:student ratio, the same ancient textbooks, a building in a terrible location, the bare minimum for athletics, etc.
There is some thinking that if we don't have ALL categories/jobs/promotions with the same population proportion it is because "systemic racism".
I am still waiting for at least 53% of NBA be white.
And 50% of nurse school be male.
Please have to desire and aptitude to do different things.
You can see it on your own family with siblings. Same "genetics" but very different aptitudes and skills.
Feels like a dictatorship where we should have quotas for each profession and team.
No it is not. See the most progressive countries and still the difference is large.
“lets do nothing, it must be natural this is way”
Sometimes it is. and that is ok. I don't want to be Quantum Physics or in a Medical Profession. That is ok.
>I am still waiting for at least 53% of NBA be white.
People are in fact different and have different aptitudes, but there's no reason to believe that those differences cut across racial lines. When you see wildly different racial/socioeconomic/gender representation in a field, you should look at it more closely.
Consider basketball. It's predominantly black today, but it wasn't always so. Basketball was at one point more closely associated with Jewish people than blacks people. In fact, not long ago, people called basketball a Jewish sport [1]. And here's a fun fact: the first non-white NBA player was Asian [2]. There was a point in history where Jews and Asians were better represented in basketball than black people.
So why is the NBA 80%+ black today? Let's look at outside factors. During the Great Migration, blacks moved to from southern towns to northern cities and transitioned from a largely rural population to a largely urban one. In a city, basketball is the perfect sport for a poor/working class kid. It doesn't require a field. It doesn't require a lot of equipment. It can be played on pavement. It's easy to pick up but has a high talent ceiling. So if you're a kid in the city who's interested in a sport and you don't have a ton of resources, you're probably going to end up playing basketball for reasons that may have less to do with your natural interests and aptitudes than your situation, environment, and (eventually) societal expectations.
This dynamic cuts both ways. Jeremy Lin was one of the best high school players in the country in 2005 but wasn't nearly as a heavily recruited as he should have been based purely on his stats. UCLA wanted him to be a walk on. If he were black, he would have gotten an athletic scholarship and been on magazine covers. I wonder how many other Asian basketball players are underrecruited simply because they're Asian. Whether it's 1 or 1,000, the sport is poorer for it.
Sometimes what appears to be the consequence of "different aptitudes" can suggest something systemic instead. That doesn't mean that we should enforce a quota, but it does mean that we shouldn't take differences in representation to be the result of differences in aptitude.
>You can see it on your own family with siblings. Same "genetics" but very different aptitudes and skills.
I'm not sure that siblings have the "same genetics" or that it's fair to compare differences in populations to differences in individuals. It's obvious that individuals are different due to genetics. It's not obvious that the distribution of those individual differences should differ across racial lines.
[1] https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/when-basketball-was-j...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wataru_Misaka
Ridiculous policies like this are why we sold our house in the city and left for a $2 million house in the suburbs, where the price of admission means that every kid has lots of support at home, depleting the city schools of one more kid and dragging them down even further.
Arguably the overall societal gains are higher from turning a future accountant into a future scientist than improving the 25th percentile student’s outcome anyways.
Intelligence appears to be mostly genetic (see the Wikipedia page “heritability of IQ”). There are many maps online showing average IQ in different countries, which hints at races having different intelligence.
This hints at ideas of equality of outcome between people of different ethnicity being a thing this world will not see.
In nature, I don’t believe there are any examples of equality between entities, except on the level of physics or maybe chemistry. No two entities are equal.
This would imply that to get equality, the only way is to push down the groups that most often reach top achievements - to design a society that is anti-white, anti-Asian, and anti-male. I once met a girl with a poignant tattoo: “free men are not equal - equal men are not free”.
I look forward to the intelligent HN community enlightening me on this subject
The article below, while technically not wrong, go as far as to undermine the most robust abstraction we've ever came up with, math itself, to deny the IQ.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/math/a33547137/why-...
So, in summary, about ~25% of invited students enroll in the program, i.e. parents aren't interested in their kids taking this program, it's dying out anyway, undoubtedly costs money, and those that are interested in the program are vastly, disproportionately white and asian. I think bringing up racism might be a bit inflammatory. I think it's safer to say, though, that the program isn't desirable to anyone, and particularly undesirable to minorities. And yes, they should have an enrichment program that people find worth taking.
With modern wealth and info tech we can abandon that for most academic subjects, and let each child learn at their own pace, on their own laptop, touchpad, etc. Not an assembly line but a collection of artisans. It doesn't matter if a genius is sitting next to a plodder if the whole class isn't expected to be on the same page.
Part of the problem is that the teacher is expected to be knowledgeable on the subject, which is fine. But now we can geographically separate the subject expert from the classroom manager. Teacher can't teach a fourth grader calculus? No problem, here are a list of online teachers who can give personal help, along with canned videos, etc.
We'll get closer to equal protection under the law by treating every child as unequal in the classroom. If you teach to the mean you poorly serve the long tails on either end.
The single greatest skill you can learn in class is autodidactics. Learning that should be at the center of the school experience. Self-paced learning of a predefined curriculum is a large step toward that. And a return toward the standard practice of pre-industrial one-room schools.
We put about $8k into a fund to help these parents... but it's not even close to enough. Honestly, if you want to improve outcomes, maybe we should look into helping struggling families pay rent, and become more stable.
Meanwhile, before being put in foster care they and their families get no support!
I often think about how broken of a system that is. I feel like if half the foster resources went to the families to begin with, then we could avoid a lot of foster care (parental abuse notwithstanding) in the first place! And it's so traumatic taking kids from their moms.