>I agree that it is unacceptable to have eighth grade Algebra I classes and gifted education programs that disproportionately exclude Black and brown children. But if equity is the goal, we should be mandating that every eighth grader takes Algebra I—and then structure the entire pre-K to seventh grade student experience to ensure this is a legitimate possibility for every child. Since when does equity mean everyone gets nothing?
I don't know whether Algebra I is above or below what eighth graders can be expected to do, but raising the difficulty of every class to what the most advanced student is capable of is not the answer either. Everybody knows someone else that is better at math than they are, and someone who is not as good. It is universal common knowledge that the ease with which one takes to math is different for different people. Why can't we just admit it and quit trying to make people who are unique the same?
> "Why can't we just admit it and quit trying to make people who are unique the same?"
Because we are dealing with a group which is motivated by ideology. It's a religion to them. Some of them have doubled down on woke-speak around "equity" for so long, that they cannot backtrack and accept that merit and performance exist. Doing this would put them at odds with their current in-group and likely their only source of meaning and "friendship" with anyone.
It's the same crowd of people who just lost their very progressive DA in San Francisco during last night's recall election outcome. They keep doubling down on their policing strategy (see: no policing strategy) and being soft on crime and consequently crime has increased significantly. The same group of people that plugs their ears to reason and reality on why policing is necessary are the same group of people that are always trying to drag everyone down to their same floor level.
> Because we are dealing with a group which is motivated by ideology. It's a religion to them.
There really is no simpler way to say it than this, and it raises the question: how do you even make progress with a group who bases decisions on dogma rather than reason?
By responding with reason in writing as succintly as possible, and restating it as often as possible, and being unafraid to restate it when they respond with empty dogma.
And in the workplace, by gutting the types of roles that are just about being "thought leaders" in this direction. Technical people are afraid of those thought leaders because they don't want to get in trouble or fired for speaking against the cult. It's understandable since people need to get paid so they can provide for their families. But if companies just start dropping the negative weight that just encumbers everything and doesn't contribute code or design, it'll improve the bottom line and also gradually resolve this problem in the corporate workplace. The silver lining of a tech correction is that it may actually help make this decision more simple since companies can just start shedding the weight that is not actively making the product better.
So fire them, stop filling those types of roles, recall them in recall elections like San Francisco did last night with that terrible DA, vote in general, and let's stop associating with toxic people. It's effective if enough people do it.
> There really is no simpler way to say it than this, and it raises the question: how do you even make progress with a group who bases decisions on dogma rather than reason?
If someone were to not have read the above comments, this argument could be very easily used to support the opposing (political) stance as well. I suppose most humans are just emotion driven - though this need not be a bug.
First, recognize that "reason" is somewhat narrower than we'd like to believe. Our own reasoning is applied when convenient and suppressed when convenient. And many times there is simply too much complexity and you must rely on wisdom instead.
The reason that "reason" often wins is because it often works. Of course, sometimes it either doesn't work, or takes a long time to work, and we can conveniently ignore it. Eventually reality catches up, but not always in a way that illustrates the cause.
The best way to make reason work is to expose people making decisions to reality, such that they benefit or lose based on the quality of their reasoning. The most unreasonable people will all of a sudden become very reasonable.
Alternatively stated, prevent people from hiding from reality. There are many places to hide, and these are often the most unreasonable places. National politics is one: your ideas probably won't happen (even if you're in Congress), and if they do, and something bad happens, there are enough other factors to make it easy to blame something else. Academia is another such place. So is extended adolescence.
For all the flaws in reasoning that are being highlighted in this thread, progressive have very clear and concrete goals: Equity, removing discrimination, improving opportunities, raising the floor for the social safety net, closing the wealth gap, improving housing affordability, etc.
You may disagree with their methods and have criticisms. That is valid. But are you opposed to their goals or their means?
Do you have alternative goals?
I ask you because most of the internet and media that criticizes "woke ideology" does not seem to have it's own perspective. I genuinely need to understand what is the alternative that people are proposing. Because certainly "Things were just fine before we started talking about racism, and the world was already a meritocracy that we shouldn't try to fix" doesn't resonate with me either.
Many on this site complain about Woke SJWs and all their focus on ideology, but what do people seek here instead? Just pure free market libertarianism?
You don't make progress. Unless you're in a position to gain power, what you do is you have six to ten children, raise them on the homestead, and hope that in a few generations they can begin to fix some things. That, or violent revolt, but revolt is a bit harder
Consider why you think that it has, and whether you are also getting your information from an in-group that is primarily motivated by ideology and not reality. (Just a different one from the one you criticise)
I'm totally ok with believing statistics that don't match my worldview. I've even adjusted my worldview because of some statistics I've seen but my understanding is that those statistics are flawed. A very important part of statistics is understanding how they're gathered and these are usually gathered from crimes reported to police. From what I've heard people haven given up reporting most crimes there.
If you're going to blindly believe statistics without trying to interpret them then what about the ones showing the outsized homicide rate for Black people? Without interpretation all you can conclude from that is something extremely racist.
The problem is deeper. The traditional grade-based school is not good. It pushes some kids, and stymies other kids. Slicing kids in thin same-age layers is not good, especially for teenagers who cannot form reasonable social structures and end up with gangs and a group of outcasts.
A more reasonable school, after the elementary level, should mix and match kids, so that older kids with more advanced skills could help those who hasn't still advanced as much. It should allow to take courses, much like a college does, in whatever order a kid (and their parents) find most beneficial, independent of the age, with the goal to pass a GED test by the end of the school. Even better, it should be possible to pass a basic or an advanced level of a test for a subject, independent of the age. The presence of several parallel tracks for a subject solves the issue with gifted kids and struggling kids alike.
I don't think I have all the answers, but the standard school education system was invented in Prussia in the middle of 18th century, and is pretty obviously inadequate for today; ask teachers, students, or parents. Though maybe for some parents it looks adequate because it functions as a storage facility for kids for the day. But kids could spend their time much better than that.
> A more reasonable school, after the elementary level, should mix and match kids, so that older kids with more advanced skills could help those who hasn't still advanced as much
What about "flipped" classes, where students learn independently with electronic media, so at whatever speed and level they can handle, while teachers support them by reviewing their work, mentoring and tutoring?
Flipping classes is interesting, but it has problems.
Even trying to rely on outside media, it's still much more labor intensive for teachers.
And you need a more motivated student body than the typical middle school or high school student. The small quizzes you include to make sure that students consumed the flipped content beg for exploiting and cheating, even with randomization.
Finally, it's not really clear how well it works. In general, K-8th work away from teacher supervision shows no evidence of benefit, and the educational research we have on the flipped model is mostly of poor quality except for a couple of good studies of undergraduates.
Education tends to have big "trendy ideas" that have some plausibility that they'll work and excitement around them and a whole lot of administrator support and profe$$ional development services spring up around them. And then you have people endlessly debate the merits based on personal experience.
(I'm about to teach a microeconomics class where I'm going to flip 1/3rd of the lessons in a private high school environment with a relatively motivated student body; the motivation is so that I can fit more simulations into an already-very-dense AP curriculum without an infinite homework load. I've become a relatively successful middle school teacher of engineering and mathematics enrichment classes over the past couple of years and I struggle to see how I can flip much successfully-- so much of my success is around social pressures that come from interaction of students with each other and their teacher).
The reason children are “sliced up” by age is because of their lack of maturity. Consequently, if you mix younger children with older, more physically developed children what will inevitably happen is a lot of bullying.
> what will inevitably happen is a lot of bullying.
It may not be inevitable. Personally I had pretty great experiences with multi-grade clubs, camps, sports teams, classes, academic competitions, after school programs, etc. (not to mention the neighborhood/real world.) The older kids were usually pretty nice, often really helpful, and provided a kind of role modeling.
Sports teams can sometimes be kind of hilariously unbalanced due to the drastic difference in sizes of some kids though. Perhaps some sports should be sliced into height or weight classes rather than age classes, but that's probably only practical for large leagues.
Anecdotally, as a parent, I've found the opposite to be more true. We have several schools that are k-8 in my city, but the majority split 6-8 into middle school. Talking to parents of the k-8 schools, bullying is almost non existent. Not true in the traditional middle school. Some kids are more or less mature than others as they mature, and it helps to have options for friends. Also, kids weren't split into single year age bands for all of the existence of humanity and then the past hundred years or so we suddenly split them up.
None, because it’s not common. All I know is that research shows that bullying develops and evolves by age. It’s not going to be as prevalent in early age Montessori schools as it is in middle school. Let’s also not ignore that a private Montessori school is also a filter.
I have already told you it doesn’t exist for mixed ages because it’s not a common situation. The closest thing to it are papers noting at what ages bullying tends to occur and the nature of said bullying.
It would happen yes if the children are left on their own at that. But shouldn't we expect the school to intervene? It's not like they don't notice or they cannot know. But if the school culture says bullying is acceptable because hey that's the lead athlete and he didn't kill anybody, then yes, bullying will happen inevitably.
> But shouldn't we expect the school to intervene?
That’s a nice thing to wish, but at least in the public school system in the US, it’s no longer something that you can expect depending on the region. There are many reasons for this both including indifference and / or just being overwhelmed.
Children of the “same” age in school can be 11 months and 30 days apart in age. That is absolutely huge during the grade school years. In fact, month of birth is a significant factor in student athletic success. And when it comes to physical bullying, yes it’s generally the larger more
physically mature kids doing the bullying.
"In fact, month of birth is a significant factor in student athletic success."
This was not an argument for school athletics. It was an observation that age quantization-- whether by schools or by private athletic leagues-- makes a big difference on the trajectory of athletes. In turn, you have from age quantization alone pretty big physical differences in students of the same nominal age.
Your comment is completely orthogonal to what you replied to.
Sadly sports funds large portions of some school budgets in the US. School funding is quite messed up.
Individually you feel pressure to move into the best school districts. Yet collectively it falls into racial boundaries because of decades of systemic racism.
Forced busing suddenly fixes a lot of the funding biases, but is very unpopular because fear of the other is hard to overcome.
Subject categories such as "math" are also very broad. I struggled with math in elementary school, because it was mostly about memorization. 3 + 5 = 8. 6 x 7 = 42. Learning and being able to spit out those facts as quickly and flawlessly as possible was most of what I remember about math as a young kid. I was never good at that. I still am not good at that. I got Cs and sometimes lower grades in math.
Somehow, though, I passed a test in 7th grade to qualify to take algebra in 8th grade. Suddenly stuff started making sense, and I could see a point to it. You could actually solve an interesting problem. It wasn't just regurgitation of facts. It became more about thinking and connecting concepts and even being creative. I started getting As in math, and continue to do well in High School with geometry, trig, and calculus, but up until algebra was introduced I would certainly not have demonstrated a gifted ability in "math".
You struggled with math in elementary school because of deeply flawed teaching. Even at that early age, it's not hard to understand that "3 + 5 = 8" is not something that you'd need to literally memorize. Of course, the fact that teaching quality can vary to such an extent is itself noteworthy.
I don't think I agree. 3 + 5 = 8 isn't something you need to literally memorize, but if you don't memorize such facts of basic arithmetic you're at a disadvantage when it comes to doing homework and tests. It's easier and less error-prone to memorize 8*7 than it is to work it out manually every time you see it until it sticks.
For what it's worth, I struggled with math in elementary school and especially high school -- I failed algebra I, then passed it with a D; then I failed algebra II before passing it* with a D. It wasn't until I was forced to take a business calculus class in my 20s that it started clicking, and I assure you the quality of instruction wasn't any better at the college level than it was in high school. (I did eventually graduate with honors with a math degree.)
Agreed. It does need memorization. Anyone who don't think so can try to add and multiply in hexadecimal, what is 0xA + 0xC and what is 0x8 * 0x6? It becomes quite obvious memorization is required when you try it in any other radix other than decimal(which is memorized already).
> [...] Rote learning: the teaching of mathematical results, definitions and concepts by repetition and memorisation typically without meaning or supported by mathematical reasoning. A derisory term is drill and kill. In traditional education, rote learning is used to teach multiplication tables, definitions, formulas, and other aspects of mathematics.
I think they mean that it is very useful to “cache” these primitive results, but it is absolutely possible to regenerate them if one is missing or the like.
I don't plan to ever need to do math in hexadecimal without a calculator. Far as decimals go, I actually did get away with solving the multiplication problems on the fly...so no, memorization isn't necessary.
I've helped some students that are struggling in secondary math.
They tend to have a surprisingly good handle on the specific topic being studied that they're failing. I can have them tell me what to do on a problem on the whiteboard, and do all the arithmetic and simpler things for them, and they're flawless.
They also tend to have problems in arithmetic and in getting confused on simpler concepts. Context switching is expensive and they lose working memory of the higher order task, and then make silly mistakes.
Most outside tutors work to try and solidify the higher level topic even further, by drilling the heck out of it... this conceals the problem for it to reappear on next unit. (And, it ossifies the new knowledge in a way that compounds the problem for next year).
I don't like the whole "layer cake" model of teaching math that "builds" upon other math in the way we do in the US. But to some extent, it is justified in places. If you struggle with basic arithmetic and integers, algebra is much, much harder.
Our entire society is organised so that even university graduates are very rarely called upon to sum two single-digit numbers.
Adding up purchases in a shop? The till does it automatically. Admittedly, the cashier will need to be able to make up change promptly - but a customer needn't check their change.
Paying for parking? There will be a sign listing how much money you need to put in for 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours and so on.
Picking 14 items in a warehouse? You only need to count one at a time. There's a chance to speed things up by picking 2 packs of 6 plus 2 singles? Then the computer will print that on the pick list. No computer? Then the boss will print a sign with a lookup table like "14 items -> 2 six packs + 2 singles" and tape it to the shelf.
Trying to figure out whether you can get 9 people to lunch in two cars, one of which is kinda small? Add it up on your fingers, or keep your mouth shut and one of the other 8 people will figure it out.
> Paying for parking? There will be a sign listing how much money you need to put in for 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours and so on.
Then if the maximum parking time is 3 hours, it's 10:15 and you want to know at what time you need to leave you take out a cardboard clock, set the current time, and advanced the small hand one, two, three steps. And to know whether you can afford both the parking and a coffee with the money you have on you you make two piles and keep the parking money in one pocket and the coffee money in another pocket. I got it. [I'm joking, our society is organised in such a way that you don't need to be able to read a clock or handle money.]
Sigh, just happened to me. Booked a room at 1:45 for 3 hours, and was told to leave at 4. The staff insisted so hard that it was like we are the troublesome customer who try to milk out something.
A jaw-dropping moment. Maybe school education is more important than we though.
> Then if the maximum parking time is 3 hours, it's 10:15 and you want to know at what time you need to leave you take out a cardboard clock, set the current time, and advanced the small hand one, two, three steps.
Not at all - you simply count hours using your fingers.
You need some amount of this sort of practice to build numeracy. It's great to represent things in more accessible forms but at the end of the day it's useful for citizens to instantly recognize 3+5=8.
Similarly, I got Cs in math in middle school and early highschool. Once I got to calculus something clicked.
Now I have a degree in physics and am pursuing a graduate degree in applied mathematics. The math I do now is nothing like the math I was bad at in middle school.
Probably both ways. Some kids backslide with academics at that age, others seem to gain traction. I didn't mention it but have considered that part of the reason that things became easier for me in the 8th grade is that I was starting to get the mental maturity to think more abstractly and deliberately.
Which means we just need to make kids play Factorio or Eve Online to instill the desire to be good at arithmetic. Granted, Eve Online would instill other behaviors that might not be so desirable...
We could consider doing the labeling in the other direction where we keep calling calculus, real analysis, algebra, etc. mathematics but treat arithmetic more like we do learning the alphabet (a necessary stepping stone but certainly not the end goal). We could also more typically refer to arithmetic as arithmetic and not math(s), then.
So what happens when we decide "everyone is gifted" and teach all students at the level that would have been taught only to gifted students before? Seems like the obvious outcome would be a lot more students who struggle, necessitating a slower track for them. So instead of regular and gifted classes, you have regular and "non-gifted" (for lack of a better term) classes.
> teach all students at the level that would have been taught only to gifted students before?
You just can't do that, no matter how much you want it. Some teachers are better than others, they can't all be elite. The teachers union wouldn't let you sack all the mediocre teachers, and even if you somehow could fire them, where would all the new elite teachers to replace the mediocre ones come from? If you just sacked the bottom 50% of teachers and doubled the class size of the better half, I think classroom conditions would certainly deteriorate.
Who needs a better teacher? The gifted student or the remedial student?
Gifted students (at least up to middle school) don't need special teachers (an 8th grade math teacher could teach gifted 6th graders), they just need challenging material and peers to keep them motivated and study with.
> Who needs a better teacher? The gifted student or the remedial student?
The well-behaved students. Good teachers are wasted on troublemakers and class clowns, regardless of their IQ. And if a dim student who scores poorly on IQ tests knows how to sit quietly and behave themself, I think good teachers will help them a lot.
> Good teachers are wasted on troublemakers and class clowns
It is entirely natural for children to “clown around” in a boring setting, and their lack of interest / trouble focusing reflects a societal (and school) failure to make school engaging and give them the appropriate challenges and direct feedback to keep their attention. Many of the greatest human breakthroughs were made by people who were squirmy and distractible as children, who had difficulty with the formal school curriculum, or who were ostracized by their classmates for one reason or another.
Every child deserves attention from good teachers. Good teachers with enough resources can provide a significant benefit to these students and integrate them into a smoothly functioning classroom. Assigning troublesome students to weak or unsympathetic teachers is a tremendous “waste” of human talent.
Surely you had a class with a disruptive kid? They can suck the education value out of a lecture by forcing unnecessary context switches for the students who are paying attention.
It would be ideal if each class was so engaging as to enrapture each student but that just isn't realistic.
Even if you only hire "good teachers" and give them "enough resources", some of those teachers will perform better than others. And the attention of those teachers will be wasted on the students who don't want to be there; better to give it to the students who care.
School was never meant to be "engaging". It's not recreation, it's work. The problem seems to be that we've lost the value of working hard and pushing through things we find dull and uninteresting, in order to attain a greater goal. Instead we expect everything to be engaging, stimulating and entertaining. Real world success is not like that - it's work - so better get into the habit early on.
That's backwards. A school that doesn't engage its students has failed at its most important goals, and the very best schools have always striven to be engaging. Often this was done in unconventional ways, such as directing the youngest students to memorize their pre-set "lessons" word for word and be able to literally chant them back to the teacher. Similarly "direct" yet effective instructional methods were just as common wrt. practical exercises and problem solving. There was no space for the modern fashionable truism that "constructing" one's education from scratch, with practically no involvement from an outside educator, is the only possible source of engagement.
I guess we're circling around this question: Should schools bend to the natural tendencies of students, or should students bend to the rigours and structure of academic life?
Given that society itself doesn't bend much, I'm inclined towards the latter.
> Do you think kids should have recess? If so, for what purpose?
Sure, for the same reason that adults take coffee breaks. This doesn't seem to contradict what I said. In fact it's a very clear delineation between recreation and work. The problem is when children (or adults) behave as though they're on recess when they're supposed to be working.
> Or, what do you think of Montessori education?
I'm no expert, but it doesn't seem as though the educator/pupil ratios required to make it work are scalable.
Why do people always mention this like it isn't a niche educational experience that already self-selects for the children of well-off, white parents? Montessori is almost as relevant to the public education discourse as Catholic schools imo.
If it aims to be effective at education, it should.
> It's not recreation, it's work.
That's very true of what a lot of schooling is, largely because it evolved from a model aimed at indoctrination of a compliant population rather than education. But, nominally at least, the goal of the modern system is not to be work as a means of indoctrinating people to work.
> The problem seems to be that we've lost the value of working hard and pushing through things we find dull and uninteresting
Or, maybe, the problem is that while it is easy to make material dull and uninteresting, that's far from optimal from an educational perspective.
> Real world success is not like that - it's work
Real world success is mostly been born on third base and constructing a narrative about the hard-work of hitting a triple.
I don't disagree with your characterization, but given children are not agents, and are subject to the whims of their parents, I think it's appropriate.
Locking a child in their room is imprisonment, yet is widely used punitively at the whim of parents. Beating children is assault, yet operant conditioning is effective and also widely practiced towards children. It's also permitted in most jurisdictions if undue harm is not caused.
> among non-conformists
Why do we need these, exactly? What benefit are individuals who have not been appropriately conditioned to work, suffering, and self-sufficiency?
> What benefit are individuals who have not been appropriately conditioned to work, suffering, and self-sufficiency?
This ideology sounds an awful lot like fascism to me, or maybe some kind of psychopathy.
If you start looking around at the highest-leverage contributions to humanity throughout history, a disproportionate number of them come from people who weren’t “appropriately conditioned to work, suffering, and self sufficiency” (typically without getting anything for their trouble beyond satisfying their own curiosity). So if all you care about is some kind of personal benefit, then someone (often a teacher) nurturing and encouraging those people has been directly responsible for a significant part of your material well being.
But many of us recognize humans as ends in themselves, rather than tools for our personal aggrandizement or slaves to the collective.
I don't think it's psychopathic or fascist to expect that individuals be able to sustain themselves. Nor do I believe it's right to enslave the collective in order to provide a cushion on which those who fail to do so may land. I don't think it just to mandate the protection of people from the full consequences of their own misfortune, failure, or inadequacy. This is the domain of (voluntary) charity.
If you take a harder look at the disproportionate contributors you mention, you'll find that they were motivated to persist at problems for very long hours, often for many years without respite, and for very little reward beyond satisfying their own impulses. None of this indicates poor work ethic, or a reluctance to take responsibility for one's own actions and their consequences.
Individuals can sustain themselves without needing to be forced to spend their entire childhoods attending educational institutions.
There is proof of this everywhere. The vast majority of humans throughout history never engaged in such a system, and plenty of contemporary humans don't either.
> The vast majority of humans throughout history never engaged in such a system
It's true, in previous eras children were put straight to work as soon as they were useful. This has been true in every agrarian society across all cultures. Society increased in complexity to the point that it's quite hard to become an independent adult if you go straight to work as a young child, hence the need for an education. However the goal has always been the same: condition yourself (skills, mindset, habits, behaviour, etc.) as required to become a functional, independent contributor to society.
What is new and unusual is the idea that children should have a "childhood" of recreation, protected from the realities of work and life.
Attending an educational institution as a child is much preferable to working on a farm, or in a mine, don't you think?
Children are agents. And children / adults aren't a binary thing, they progress along a spectrum and if we never give them the ability to make their own choices how on earth do we expect them to be independent adults?
Why do we need non-conformists? I don't care about what you need or what society needs. You lack compassion for the individual.
They aren't hurting anyone by choosing a different life path. They can survive the world just fine without having the official educational path shoved down their throat.
Not really? They don't get to make their own decisions about any meaningful aspect of their lives, and can be lawfully imprisoned, punished, and controlled by their parents. Children have just a few more rights than pets. This has been true for all of history.
> And children / adults aren't a binary thing
Yes, they are. Off the top of my head: once you are legally able to make and be held responsible for your own decisions, can't be punitively confined against your will without due process, are able to enter into legal agreements, and do not need a guardian, you are an adult. Until then, you are a child. These things normally happen around the age of majority, which is 18 in most places [1].
I'm not suggesting that children never be given the opportunity to make their own choices, quite the opposite in fact. I'm suggesting that children be conditioned to the realities of work and life from an early age. The capability to tolerate dull, monotonous, boring work is essential to accomplish just about anything. This is the skill of delaying gratification, and its importance can hardly be overstated.
> They can survive the world just fine without having the official educational path shoved down their throat.
Just how much education do you think is optional to "survive in the world just fine"? Literacy? Numeracy?
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shawn
So, you're saying that school is an unpaid bullshit job and ought to remain that way? Why do you think that's acceptable? It's almost as if you want today's kids to suffer the same way that we had to when we were their age.
> It is entirely natural for children to “clown around” in a boring setting
Murder, rape, and eating your children is natural. That's not a good justification. Perhaps there is a way to help children rise above these base instincts instead of giving into them?
Trying to prevent small children from squirming and getting distracted when they are bored and don’t have enough active outlet for their energy is pretty well impossible. Even harder if the kids don’t get enough sleep, aren’t eating enough or healthily enough, have to deal with strong emotional challenges at home, etc. Kids are on varied biological rhythms, and some times a kid is in a place where they simply do not have the physical capacity to sit and focus.
You don't need to make sure kids stay 100% still and focused 100% of the time. But you should reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. You should build up a work ethic and the ability to be productive.
The idea that you should stimulate kids to the point where boredom is impossible, or that we should excuse harmful behavior if the kid was bored / upset, is just silly. It only sets the kids up to fail; to live a life where they can't focus on tasks and they lash out whenever they are in a bad mood.
> you should reward good behavior and punish bad behavior
In general, you should not impose external rewards and punishments in education, to the extent possible. They block students’ focus, creativity, and problem solving, and undermine learning, literally interfering with memory formation.
This is a subject of incredible amounts of research in psychology and education, and has been demonstrated over and over in a wide variety of contexts.
> idea that you should stimulate kids to the point where boredom is impossible
Nobody ever suggested this. Only that class should be engaging and teachers should try to earn students’ attention instead of demanding it under threat.
> excuse harmful behavior [...] sets the kids up to fail
The proposal was that students who are wiggly or have trouble focusing should be thrown out of class because it is a “waste” for good teachers to teach them. I think this would be harmful, would be failing those students, and misses the point of education.
What sets kids up to fail is being treated as though they are worthless or being told so. Having access to good teachers does not “set kids up to fail”.
> Who needs a better teacher? The gifted student or the remedial student?
Both “gifted” (well prepared) and “remedial” (poorly prepared) students benefit dramatically from expert teaching. The well prepared students can continue to progress very quickly through challenging material. The poorly prepared students can get help finding and correcting their weaknesses and misconceptions, and practicing underdeveloped prerequisite skills.
The ideal is for everyone to get significant weekly 1:1 attention from a dedicated tutor/coach, who can help the student to deliberately practice. This significantly outperforms even the best classroom, and students with direct coaching improve probably 2–3 times faster than students without. Essentially all world-class performers in competitive events (sport, music, chess, math contests, ...) have significant amounts of 1:1 coaching.
Unfortunately as a society we don’t have the budget/manpower to provide hours per week of skilled tutoring for every student for every subject. So we try our best to balance available resources with students’/society’s needs.
Take almost any “academically gifted” student and start looking into their biography, and you’ll find a shitload of preparation. As a general rule (to which, sure, you can find rare exceptions if you really hunt) the more “gifted” the student, the more hands-on help and attention from experts they had. Even for those without significant expert help, the “gifted” students are the ones who spent a ton more time thinking about the subject than their peers for whatever reason. The international math olympiad winners I took courses with in college were incredibly well prepared, and while clever and hard working, are by no means superhuman.
Preparation is not the only relevant factor that goes into what gets called academic “giftedness”, but it’s the vast majority of it.
It’s similar for other fields. Nobody can compete in sport at a world-class level nowadays without significant amounts of excellent coaching. Etc.
For instance, the reason my kid learned to read before he was 4 and most of his peers did not is because we spent many hundreds of hours reading books together aloud, and maybe 50 hours over 6 months on direct instruction in reading per se. Not because he’s biologically any different than his peers. The reason he’s really good at making stuff out of Legos is that he really likes it and spends hours per week doing it, not because he’s some kind of Lego prodigy. He’s not particularly skilled at drawing or dancing or playing the guitar or sewing, because those are things he did not practice very much yet.
Passion for a subject can indeed propel you far ahead of your peers in that subject, but intelligence is what allows passion to continue and grow. No matter how much time you spend preparing the dumb kids they will struggle with difficult(or often easy) subjects and get frustrated - because of this passion will never develop, and it’s entirely reasonable to not become passionate about something you’re not capable of doing well at. I was a very smart kid, although very far from a genius. My parents were young earth creationists who knew nothing about science or computers and shielded me from science because of themes like evolution. The town I grew up in was in poor rural TX, so my teachers barely knew more. I certainly wasn’t well prepared to understand science, but yet I developed a passion for that and computer programming and became a voracious reader of everything I could find on it in the school library, acquiring knowledge far beyond my grade level. The less smart but wealthier and better prepared kids I knew growing up never caught up to me.
> developed a passion for that and computer programming and became a voracious reader of everything I could find on it in the school library, acquiring knowledge far beyond my grade level
This is a huge amount of “preparation”, as far as I am concerned. It’s not as effective as working with an expert tutor/coach, but it still adds up over time. (And good job preparing yourself without much help!)
The wealthier kids in your town who spent their time on whatever else were less well prepared than you (academically; they might have been better prepared for schmoozing or playing sports or whatever).
But if you had wanted to be a child prodigy or world-class competitor in something as a teenager, you likely would have needed significant expert help.
> No matter how much time you spend preparing the dumb kids they will struggle
If the kids are dramatically struggling, they are likely significantly under-prepared for the work they are expected to do. But it is not true that no matter how much time you spend you cannot make a difference. Kids testing in the 10th percentile can if tutored 1:1 for a year or two surpass the 80th percentile kids taught in an ordinary class. Regular 1:1 tutoring is extraordinarily much better than other methods of instruction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
This is a fundamental aspect of human life that most people do not understand. My kids all walked long before their first birthdays. Why? For the same reason my lower back hurt so much before they turned 1. I held their hands and we practiced walking for hours upon hours.
Mozart wrote his first symphony at 8. He was also playing piano for courteseans at age 3. All at the behest of his father, to support the family. If you, you personally, played piano professionally for the next ~5 years, do you think you could write a quick and dirty symphony? Of course you could.
Anyways I find this basic truth to be incredibly liberating and hopeful. There really aren't any superhumans, just people who've spent more time playing guitar, learning about + coding , racing motorcycles etc. (there are but statistically irrelevant to me)
> For the same reason my lower back hurt so much before they turned 1. I held their hands and we practiced walking for hours upon hours.
I’m sorry to call you out on this but that is very much not a good thing to do. The mind is much more plastic so one can probably start teaching very advanced subject to their child soon, but the body does need plenty of support strength before it will be able to hold itself up, and holding hands is shown to not be too good for the child. Nonetheless, not ideal is far from harmful, so don’t worry, I’m sure they are wonderful children.
For any parents who want to help their small kids’ balance, let me recommend holding them by the hips for a few minutes at a time starting from about 5 months, instead of holding them by the armpits.
If you hold them from the top they will be passively stable, but if you hold them from the bottom they will need to actively stabilize themselves using their back/abdominal muscles. If you start with just 1 joint they need to stabilize, they figure it out reasonably quickly. (Babies start out surprisingly strong; what they completely lack is coordination.)
After about a month of that, you can carry them around on your shoulders and they will be able to hold up their torso and stay upright. This is great core strength/balance training, while also being a lot more convenient than any other way of transporting a baby, for a moderately healthy parent.
> Who needs a better teacher? The gifted student or the remedial student?
What outcome are you seeking from schooling? The answer to that determines which student needs the better teacher, in order to achieve the desired outcome.
>Seems like the obvious outcome would be a lot more students who struggle, necessitating a slower track for them.
That is not obvious to me. It is a known psychological phenomenon that children will meet external expectations, high or low. In sports it's commonly referred to as playing up or down to your opponent. Other countries have much higher standards and have not seen an explosion in children struggling. What is most likely to happen is... nothing. The percentage of kids exceeding and struggling will stay largely the same.
> So what happens when we decide "everyone is gifted"
This doesn't seem to be much of a problem in countries like Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, etc. which have much tougher cirricula for their average students than the average American public school. And before someone makes the funding argument, the US pays about double the cost of education that Japan does for dismal results.
As is typical, the concept get confused because one assumes that gifted programs correctly track students based primarily on ability, whereas in my personal experience and looking at the data, they primarily track students based on socioeconomic status.
It’s not about denying that some students have the ability to excel in subjects in comparison to their peers. The question is whether or not the current system actually achieves it’s stated goals.
Equality of outcome is not the goal of equity. That’s a straw man argument created by its detractors.
People point out disparities as evidence that there aren’t equal opportunities in society.
The conservative position is simply to assert that equality of opportunity exists cuz America, and if you question that you are a communist who just wants everyone to be the same.
I disagree its a strawman argument. Its a clear delineation. Trying to get all kids to successfully complete gifted programs is a very challenging if not impossible goal. Not all kids will be successful in gifted programs. However, Equality of opportunity states that any kids its appropriate for have access. Its an important distinction. Now, its arguable that certain sub-cultures within America make success in school or gifted programming challenging (parents who don't trust schools, parents who don't engage in school for various reasons).
no, they closed the gifted programs in the urban school system I attended, at that time, right after Music Education. The emphasis went to "no child left behind" whatever that is, sports programs, armed guards (yes), and at high school, loans and grants for college admission. Advanced placement ? most gifted kids and almost every single girl from my neighborhood, disappeared in a blink at grade 8.
not only is it entirely fair to ask how they work in practice, but we must do so. Do all children have equal access? maybe is your answer. The solution to get more access isn't to eliminate it. Its to educate parents in groups who "should" be in it but aren't.
Sure, larger socioeconomic problems will definitely turn up in statistics, because it turns out that being gifted heavily relies on parental model, and many many other things. Even a very motivated child will fail to partake in such a problem if he/she has serious problems at home, e.g. being beaten, having to work to support the family, etc.
But I feel it is very unfair, outright evil to take away an opportunity from gifted people (both from privileged families and a few from very bad families that would have been lifted up by said programs!! The aforementioned example could perhaps break the cycle and get a much much better life than any of his/her relatives) on the basis that the statistics on the enrolled will be biased. It is not the task of such a small-scale program to solve a huge, complex problem that probably can only be solved in decades if ever.
I'm all for equity of opportunity. However, the people California has chosen to set our curriculum are explicitly working toward equality of outcome.
They say they don't believe that any children are more talented than any other children, and are advocating eliminating standard "advanced" courses, such as calculus, from the high school curriculum. The only classes that would be available in their proposal are the current remedial math track.
I think you've confused "straw man argument created by its detractors" with "the actual concrete plan being established by its proponents".
The (successful) proponents of equity based teaching are so far outside the mainstream that it's an honest mistake. (I made it, and now I'm furious.)
I’m not intimately familiar with all of the details of what is being advocated in California. All I can speak to is my perspective on what equity is and how I think it should be applied.
People who disagree with the basic concepts around equity tend to view the entire discourse as a monolith, but people are actually allowed to have different opinions on what is actually equitable and what isn’t.
Personally I wouldn’t support doing away with advanced math courses either. But just because someone does that in the name of equity, doesn’t mean I think equity itself is bad. I’m able to separate the two.
They actually say that it is - have you seen the famous comic where the three guys are watching the baseball game but the short guy can't see through the fence? They literally are saying the equity of outcome is the beginning and the end of their goals.
We clearly have different interpretations of that metaphor.
The point is to demonstrate agency over the systems we create. What’s the flip side of that scenario? People aren’t given stools to stand on and tall people get to watch while short people don’t? Who built the fence? Why is it that height? Why aren’t there bleachers?
Is just sitting there doing nothing equality of opportunity somehow?
That cartoon literally ends with the resolution of all three heads being at the same height. It's depicting the equality of their outcomes. And it's hailing it as the goal to be achieved. The point isn't that stools are handed out demonstrating agency, but that they're handed out with the goal of outcome equality.
I think the outcome is that they all get to watch the game.
I guess you can call that "equality of outcomes".
I think reading "head height" as the outcome, is a very short-sighted interpretation.
Like anything else, interpretation has nuance and you could read it both ways. On HN we're supposed to address "the strongest possible interpretation" in our comments, so I would try to apply that principle here as well...
Equity of outcome can be a worthwhile goal if that outcome is a boolean opportunity for example, as in case of the cartoon. Also, setting the boolean to the worse value for everyone is not a morally good solution in my opinion - that way noone will see the game.
> People point out disparities as evidence that there aren’t equal opportunities
That’s a very low bar if you take population level disparities and assume it’s a lack of equity causing this. You’re talking about having a deep understanding of incredibly complex systems layered on top of one another.
Equality of opportunity is never possible. We’re all born with different genetics. Anything less is just arbitrary line drawing as to what’s ok and what isn’t (ie tribalism).
Thomas Sowell has a great book on the subject called Discrimination and Disparities. There are interviews where he goes over the high-level ideas in the book if you don't have time to read it, but the basic punchline is that this: no two populations have ever been equal, and only sometimes is that because of some form of oppression or because of genetic differences. There are a multitude of cultural and environmental differences that cause disparate outcomes, and unless equality of outcome is your goal those differences shouldn't bother you.
> unless equality of outcome is your goal those differences shouldn't bother you.
I’m sorry, but this simply doesn’t follow.
The premise: that there are a multitude of things that lead to to disparities (even just random chance). If disparities are random then yes, that’s not a problem I’m going to get tussled up about.
But it’s not a matter of “it could be anything”. We have strong evidence that it is oppression, and when that is the case, that I do have reason to care about, and it’s about opportunity not outcome.
If it is actually oppression, then yes that is a valid reason to be concerned.
But let's be clear, you just claimed that the mere existence of disparities is evidence of oppression. That only follows if group outcomes would be equal in the absence of oppression, but that is a completely invalid assumption that has no basis in historical fact.
I claimed that disparities are evidence, not that they are proof.
It’s not nor us it ever been about the disparities alone, but the disparities in conjunction with the long history of racial oppression in America. People are alive today who grew up under Jim Crow. People are alive today who were threatened with violence for attending elementary school.
I didn't say you claimed it was proof. I said "evidence" and I think that as a matter of evidence it is pretty weak.
Regardless, in practice people do treat it as proof. Before I move on to the other arguments supporting oppression as an explanation I want to drive home that point: there is hardly ever a serious attempt to rule out other possible explanations for disparities, and to suggest that anything other than racism/oppression might explain those differences opens one up to accusations of racism.
Merely referencing Jim Crow is not enough. It ignores both all the ways in which Jim Crow was ineffective at its aims at the time, as well as the seismic cultural and legal changes that have occurred within the intervening years.
It also fails to account for the success of various other minorities (Jews, Nigerians, descendants of Caribbean slaves, various Asian groups) - many of whom also have faced very serious oppression (including outright attempts at elimination) in the very recent past.
None of this is to say that racism does not occur, but I have yet to see a (non-circular) causal explanation for how that can account for a significant amount of present disparities.
I didn't say you shouldn't care about differences due to oppression.
I said that there are differences due to things other than oppression, and that those aren't a problem unless you think equality of outcome should be goal
No, differences in learning ability are largely heritable. Self-identified racial groups vary in statistical distribution of their mental abilities. I think generally in the West the chief cause of differing group outcomes on mental tasks is differing learning abilities.
In sports, the rules are whatever we say they are, that’s the part that’s socially determined. Lebron James is a amazing basketball player, due to a combination of his genetics and his hard work. But there’s a parallel reality wherein basketball was never invented. And people enjoy sports like horse racing or marathon running, where he would never be able to be world class given his frame. What sports are popular is based on culture and happenstance, and up to the whims of society, not genetics or hard work of individuals.
For several hundred years, America literally constructed a society where it was decided that white people were considered more valuable than black people. That had nothing to do with what individual black people did, those were just the rules of the game.
You may say “but that’s not how it is anymore”, and yes things have certainly changed. But at the same time, there are people who are alive today who weren’t allowed to attend the same schools as whites, weren’t allowed to drink from the same fountains as whites, etc.
The argument that is being made, is that society continues to favor people based upon the color of their skin. Certainly, individual talents and hard work contribute to one’s place in life, but that does not mean that the playing field is level.
Does social determination include culture? That's a greater determinant of outcomes than skin color, as the example of outcomes between African Americans and Nigerian immigrants indicates.
To be very clear about it, this is all the more impressive because Nigeria is, by and large, still a pre-industrial society. The differences in basic worldview and outlook (including attitudes towards education) brought by industrialization and modern economic development (often misattributed to "Whiteness" in divisive political rhetoric) are absolutely huge and easily overwhelm any model where "skin color" or "genetics" exogenously determine these outcomes. This is easily ascertained by looking at how individual countries in the modern West industrialized over time and went through these very changes in culture. The skin color of English lower classes did not change much from the 17th to the mid-19th century, but their culture absolutely did.
Why do we immediately assume that that's "impressive" and not "telling"? Isn't that assumption plain old American/Western exceptionalism?
Perhaps the hypotheses should be "maybe there is something in Nigerian/pre-industrial culture that allows children to thrive more than in American/industrialized culture"?
Culture is socially determined in the sense that culture is simply the collective actions and decisions that a group of people make.
Reading the intent behind that statement, though, that Nigerians have succeeded in America despite any hinderances they may have faced due to wider societies treatment of black people, that would be somewhat outside of the framework of what I am talking about.
The construction here is, do Black Americans have worse outcomes, on average, because of themselves, or because of societies treatment of them. Culture would fall into the bucket of “they are the reason for their own problems”.
Obviously Nigerians do well on average, but they are also a small fraction of the population. Pointing to Nigerians and saying that race isn’t a contributing factor is making an argument after having found the statistical outlier that proves your argument, how do Nigerians compare to the top cohort of white Americans based on ethnicity or whatever? Is it possible that Nigerians would actually be doing better were there not racial barriers?
Specifically, given the distribution of individuals in the group "Black Americans" across all socially relevant dimensions—including culture—individual Black Americans have identical* outcomes to similarly-situated individuals of every other group in America including Whites, Asians, etc.
As you would expect in a country with equal opportunity for all, both legally and culturally.
*Black Americans actually do better than expected because there's an enormous cultural push to promote Black Americans whenever possible—college admissions, management, etc. not to mention Black Americans being so over-represented in media that most Americans think the country is around 40% Black whereas the actual number is ~13%, i.e. they're off by a factor of 3.
Rewriting "culture" as "they are the reason for their own problems” seems rather uncharitable, and unhelpful to the discussion. Why are you doing that, given that it's not adding any clarity?
> having found the statistical outlier that proves your argument
Well, why are they a statistical outlier? If you ask Nigerians, they'll tend to credit their culture. Do you have a different explanation?
> Is it possible that Nigerians would actually be doing better were there not racial barriers?
I suppose it's more possible that they should be doing much worse than they are, because of the racial barriers.
> Rewriting "culture" as "they are the reason for their own problems” seems rather uncharitable, and unhelpful to the discussion. Why are you doing that, given that it's not adding any clarity?
I was under the impression that it did add clarity, so I find your question odd.
What would be the charitable interpretation of the statement “socioeconomic disparities between black Americans and white Americans are due to their respective cultures”?
I mean, there's nothing "problematic" about having a different culture, with different values. There's also nothing surprising about the fact that different cultures and values produce people vastly differently suited to social and economic success. I don't see any issue with these facts in combination, nor do I need to reach for "marginalization" or racism to explain any of this.
No one ever suggested that it was problematic that people have different cultures, or even that it’s bad to acknowledge that black culture is different from white culture, quite the contrary.
What’s problematic is the degree to which people can’t even entertain the idea that racism is the primary driver of these disparities, rather than things that are specific to POC, such a culture or genetics, especially given the clear and obvious precedent that is firmly established within this country.
What is a reach, is your reaction to this suggestion.
The research substantiates this thesis though. As cited variously in grandparent threads, domestic environment and culture are the main predictive factors of academic and economic outcomes. Poor kids who study do much better than rich kids who don't.
We no longer deny people opportunities based on their race. If your SAT score is high, you'll be admitted anywhere you want. If you study hard, your score will be high. The reach is constructing the SAT, or any other similar test, as racist because the scores are not evenly distributed by race.
> What’s problematic is the degree to which people can’t even entertain the idea that racism is the primary driver of these disparities
The reason why many people cannot accept this is because many other groups experienced problems from racism as well, but they were eventually able to overcome these barriers. Moreover, the system has already changed to be more accommodating, maybe even putting most of their focus and resources on the bottom 20% of students at the expense of everyone else. Yet, we still have people stating that it’s still unfair.
I believe they are social, but I also believe it is very much not the task of a school program to solve racial disparities that are multi-generational and perhaps one of the most complex issues in the US. It is the equivalent of a hospital closing down because they can’t save everyone.
Socioeconomic status tracks with academic ability because more well off parents are more likely to read to their kids, participate in their education, and get them help when they need it. It’s a lot like how being tall tracks with being in the NBA, it isn’t a requirement but it sure helps.
One of the hardest pills for education policy advocates to swallow is how important parental involvement is. Instead of bitching about equity, people should be hammering parents to be more involved and actively, daily, participate in their child’s education.
> people should be hammering parents to be more involved and actively, daily, participate in their child’s education.
And people shouldn't complain about the cost of gas, they should just buy EVs. The fact is, what you're asking for is really expensive. I imagine that the number of parents who would love to be reading to their kids or helping with homework but instead are working to feed and shelter them are quite high. In the US, I'd guess it's the millions or even tens of millions.
>Socioeconomic status tracks with academic ability...
Wow. Wrong answer.
Socioeconomic status tracks with academic ability because wealthy people are smarter then poor people and their offspring do better because academic ability is genetic!
Gifted programs track students, accidental or not, based on prerequisites. If the circumstances required to allow a student to excel at study are not met, it doesn't matter what they look like or what their economic status is.
Among the prerequisites for excelling at study are a stable home life and parents (or guardians) that value education. If the kids don't have that, they aren't going to do well.
Historically, at least in the United States, one of the means of selecting for "parents who value education" was those parents scraping everything they had to move to a school district that provided a better education.
In other countries, this was sometimes achieved by scoring students into tiered schools. The higher your score, the better the school you got to go to. High-achieving students landed in a peer group of like-minded students that were fellow high-achievers and school was difficult.
Granted, that last solution was more typical of Asian education than Western education, and in some parts of Asia (China, for example) they have slipped into the location-based schooling to worse results.
Aiming for equity with the assumption that we just need to teach harder is foolish. Aiming for equity in the form of outcomes is equally foolish, because again, various outcomes have various hard prerequisites that, if missing, no amount of effort can overcome.
Solving for the prerequisites, not by attempting to ignore them, but by finding ways to help supply them can be far more productive in the long run. But it really starts with the values of the parents.
I think your point comes down to whether or not you believe we’re all blank slates. If yes, then what you says makes sense. If no, then we would expect ability to somewhat dictate socioeconomic status.
Ability does affect socioeconomic status, I’m not disputing that.
The question in a school context, though, is whether socioeconomic status for children determines ability.
As I stated in my original list, what I observed was that gifted classes were filled with children from high social status backgrounds. They certainly didn’t create the conditions for their socioeconomic status, their inherited it.
What's your point? That if a rich parent teaches their kid to read, the fair solution is for the school to unteach the kid, to level the playing field?
I would imagine that the people who are pushing for more equitable systems would argue that would should give people who lack that kind of parental support more help.
Why should a child suffer simply because they were born into a less supportive family environment?
No child should suffer, and I think everyone can very easily agree on that point. But children born into a less supportive family environment are going to suffer for it. So maybe we should focus more energy on figuring out why less supportive family environments exist in the first place, and work on fixing those issues?
I don't know. I'm no expert and definitely don't have the answers.
What if equal access to educational opportunities is a contribution to the problem of less supportive families? Hence why we are having this conversation.
I certainly don’t believe in genetically engineering away differences, to answer your question directly.
But it begs the question, do you believe that racial disparities are primarily due to social factors or genetic ones? Because the whole point of equity is that advocates are arguing that it’s due to social factors, and that we should seek to change that.
What if socioeconomic status is heavily correlated with ability?
We know IQ is highly predictive of socioeconomic status. We know that IQ is almost entirely heritable barring things like nutrient deficiencies and disease.
So why would it be surprising to see that kids of higher economic status people are themselves more able than kids of impoverished people?
The state I occupy doesn't allow accelerated programs for students to help them advance to a higher level math than originally projected, they only allow it for students to catch up. This is the opposite of what the previous state I lived in which allowed motivated students to advance, but they're also turning gifted programs into lotteries versus achievement.
My daughter is in the high school math club, so she frequently talks with math teachers and they reveal what state or county school districts are intending for future high school students. Earlier this week, a teacher was ranting to the club about new guideline goals that either the state/county was pushing, that all (most) incoming 9th graders take Algebra 1.
I understand they're attempting to narrow the achievement bandwidth in public schools on the basis of race, but this appears to be creating societal inefficiencies and decreasing equity overall. Sort of like, how someone could have a PhD in physics and working as a middle school science teacher, they'd effectively be underemployed or underutilized in society due to lack of demand for particle physicists; however, unlike limited particle physicist positions, in the students case, they don't have to be limited or underachieving in classes. Further, the additional problem this push for public school equity is decreasing equity, without imposing the same limitations on private school, homeschool, or charter school students, this mechanism is increasing the divide between the haves and have-nots. Either lens you evaluate this from, either equity or utilitarian perspective, this is a poorly executed plan that isn't going to achieve success in equity; unless, equity strictly means racial categories and doesn't include wealth/income inequality.
> Earlier this week, a teacher was ranting to the club about new guideline goals that either the state/county was pushing, that all (most) incoming 9th graders take Algebra 1.
I hate to say it, but Algebra 1 by 9th grade is NOT a very high bar. In my area, the majority of students should be studying algebra no later than this. IMO, if most of the students aren't making it this far, something is wrong in the system.
Maybe the bottom 20% shouldn't, but talking about algebra 1 in 9th grade like it's a stretch goal is a danger sign to me.
Certainly true - but the advocacy of the philosophical distinction and its promotion originates from various intellectuals. I wish it would go back to where it came from, but I see that we may be stuck with it for quite a while.
> Conservatives, except the far-right nut-cases and wackos are more likely to support equality of opportunity
I have yet to hear any conservative advocate for more balanced education funding between school districts, more unified national standards for education, lowering tuition costs for public colleges or any other policy that suggests an "equality of opportunity" with regard to education.
Instead, I tend to hear policies that advocate inequality of opportunity, such as favoring parents who want to and can afford the time to homeschool.
Maybe I'm missing some, so please correct me.
> consider outcomes largely depend on the individual, their motivation, and luck.
Thanks for acknowledging "luck". Too many people refuse to.
Late reply here. Can you elaborate on "more balanced education funding between school districts"?
My experience as a Maryland taxpayer is Baltimore City spends far more tax dollars per student than any school district in the state. And has for many years. They also have more documented, charged, corruption than any school district in the state. And regarding standardized testing...
"BALTIMORE (WBFF) — Baltimore City Public Schools is among the highest funded large school districts in the country. On average, it receives nearly $16,000 per student, per year. Yet, it’s also one of the lowest-performing. Compared to similarly-sized urban school systems, Baltimore places near the bottom for student proficiencies in math and reading.
[...]
One of the most alarming findings came in January, when a Baltimore City teacher came forward with information, showing more than 75% of students tested at one high school are reading and doing math at an elementary school level."
The thing those conservatives don't seem to get is you can't know if you have equality of opportunity without monitoring and responding to equality of outcomes.
For example, say you implement a literacy test for voting. Everyone has the opportunity to learn how to read, but as we all know those that grade the literacy tests can fail people for arbitrary (or rather intrinsic) reasons. You'd catch this by measuring the outcomes, not just blindly assuming that the opportunities are enough.
And conservatives are flat-out wrong, as usual, because they're arguing against strawmen they've invented. No one is talking about individuals. The discussion is about group statistics. Individuals are irrelevant to the discussion.
If there is a statistical difference in outcomes, why? Is one group inherently inferior? Or is there maybe not the equality of opportunity that they claim?
It's reasonable to think that there is (A) some correlation between parental income and intelligence. Also, it's reasonable to think there is (B) correlation between parental intelligence and their children's intelligence, which in turn (C) correlate with school performance.
So yes, maybe people in the low income group are "inferior" in the sense that they'll have a harder time in school, because they are (on average) less bright. Everyone knows that some kids have an easy time in school because they are quick-witted, and others will have a harder time.
That's not saying we shouldn't try to help them, we certainly should! But I think we'll make less progress on that goal if we cannot admit that some kids will have a more difficult time than others.
> No one is talking about individuals. The discussion is about group statistics.
Sweeping group level decisions ultimately affect individuals.
> If there is a statistical difference in outcomes, why? Is one group inherently inferior?
Why not?
Progress isn't exclusive to the left, and people offering progress often destroy rather than improve. Progress doesn't necessarily require sacrificing meritocratic ideals to satisfy some sludge of totally-not-marxist, totally-not-postmodern, totally-not-intersectional, totally-not-critical-theory thought. We can make everyone's life better through other methods. I'm happy to see the zeitgeist finally getting over this fixation that politics is described by "The Good Guys vs the right wing".
My idea:
Judge people on their individual merits and whatever happens is fair game. Implement a social safety net to prevent people from suffering. Reparate historical violations of the first tenet. Aggressively target monopolies. Increase environmental protections. Increase transparency in business and government. Increase education about our financial system, personal finance, and contemporary topics.
These ideas can be easily composed onto the ideas we already have, will result in benefit for everyone, and the political distance between them and the common man is much less than it is between all the woke stuff.
> but raising the difficulty of every class to what the most advanced student is capable of is not the answer
The most advanced students will find one way or another to educate themselves. I think our school systems should focus on the middle: the students who could realize their full potential if they are sufficiently challenged. They are the group that do not always get STEM naturally but can eventually get it if pushed enough with the right material and exercises. Watering down curriculum means the students in the middle would lose the chance to truly grow, or their parents resort to tutoring and we get back to the discussion of how social-economic status matters in education.
Fair question. My assumption is that the US schools offer students enough exposure and resources of advanced topics, to the point that top students will find their way. For instance, libraries, vast resources on the internet, community colleges, programs with local universities, and etc.
Getting out of doing the "boring busywork" is part of the advantage of being in the gifted class too though. Just doing both sets of work isn't a solution.
As someone who didn't grow up in the American school system, I am a bit surprised that Algebra I in the 8th grade is considered "gifted education". If Algebra I is about solving linear equations with unknown variables, I am pretty sure I was taught this much earlier than 8th grade as part of the standard curriculum. But maybe this means something different in the United States.
Algebra I also generally includes systems of (2 or 3) linear equations, quadratics (different equation forms, factoring, graphing, solving) and basic exponential functions (although usually just recognizing them and filling in Ce^rt).
Ah makes sense then. I remember seeing stuff like 3x+2=11 around the 4th grade, but definitely no quadratics or graphing functions until much later. Maybe the order the information is presented is just different and it doesn’t make sense to compare.
That is not my experience. Systems of 2 linear equations ("intersecting lines") and quadratics were definitely part of Algebra I (and maybe even pre-Algebra).
I'm 95+% sure that basic exponentiation was also part of Algebra I.
It's actually not. It's not clear from the way the article is written, but he's talking about two different things, both of which various reform bodies have proposed eliminating. The first is "gifted and talented education" programs, which involve additional coursework and activities on top of normal schooling. I'm not going to claim I remember super well what we did at this point, but I do remember learning how to make donuts from scratch, holding mock trials, learning computer-aided design at a time the regular school system didn't even have computers yet, and taking the SAT in 6th grade. All of these happened either after school or in the summer.
The other thing is related to tracking. That is where Algebra comes in. Not all students will take it at the same time. Instead, students are segregated into separate tracks, one of which will start with Algebra in middle school and eventually end up taking Calculus by the end of high school. The other won't get to Algebra until high school and will never take Calculus at all.
These are separate phenomena, but the author here is drawing an analogy between the reasons given for eliminating both GATE programs and educational tracking systems (as in, both are seen as being racially biased).
> raising the difficulty of every class to what the most advanced student is capable
The alternate view is that we should very much do this as a meaningful challenge to K-12 math teachers. People throughout the Western world, at all levels of underlying aptitude (whatever might be meant by that), manage to learn their basic intro to algebra in junior high. It's not rocket surgery, FFS!
> It is universal common knowledge that the ease with which one takes to math is different for different people. Why can't we just admit it and quit trying to make people who are unique the same?
I disagree with this statement, especially at the level of arithmetic and basic algebra. While math "ability" is likely a bell curve I would wager that it is centered well above Algebra I, and whether a kid at that age is "Good" or "Bad" at math is much more mindset/perception.
> Why can't we just admit it and quit trying to make people who are unique the same?
Because this sentiment is exactly opposed to a dominant philosophical framework built upon the axiom that, because all people are exactly identical, any difference in outcome is necessarily the result of hidden power structures.
The replacement of “equality” with “equity” is a dead giveaway that you’re dealing with Marxism. Equality before the law and equality of opportunity are American principles, but they are fading as equality of outcome is held up as the only acceptable standard.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an outspoken Soviet dissident, famously wrote: “Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”
Much greater energy and intelligence is required to advocate for equal opportunity as compared to equal outcomes, and much greater worldly experience is required to value equal opportunity as compared to equal outcomes. It will always be easy for politicians to set people against each other and dilute the common good by pushing Marxism. It is the path of least effort and greatest personal return for low quality leaders.
> I don't know whether Algebra I is above or below what eighth graders can be expected to do
I went to school in Eastern Europe in the eighties. We had algebra (and separately geometry) since 7-th grade. Also physics, chemistry and biology. And it was an ordinary secondary school. Some kids were struggling, also depends on how good/bad the teacher was. But majority was coping with the load alright.
If you continue reading, the author seems to agree with you…
> My greatest concern? The admirable but demonstrably false notion that school systems can fully implement an “all kids are gifted” framework that attempts to address the issue of eliminating the need for specialized gifted programming.
Algebra I is right around what they should be able to grok.
When I went to high school, the expected path from Freshman year (9th grade) to Senior year (12th grade) was Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, MATH ELECTIVE (IIRC, that last could have been Trigonometry).
My middle school didn't have 8th grade Algebra I. But another middle school that fed the high school I went to did have it. And from what I remember, it was available to honor students as well as those in gifted programs.
So I don't agree that it should be mandated, that seems a step too far, but it's probably a good option to have for those who can handle it. And the number of students who can handle it is probably greater than the number who it is being offered to currently. So I don't agree with removing it entirely either.
At the very least it would be useful to offer supplements for the mathematically interested. If it's accredited we'll run into the same conversation but at least students will have access to more interesting material.
In my experience tutoring remedial math students just had a hole somewhere or never practiced. Once both of those were addressed (with lots of hard work) they passed just fine.
> Why can't we just admit it and quit trying to make people who are unique the same?
Because that would be an admission that we can't just pile 30 students in the same class and in doing so would mean that we need more teachers and nobody wants to spend the money to do that.
Algebra I at 8th grade would have placed you a year behind when I was in school. 7th grade was Algrebra 1, Algebra 2 was 8th, Geometry was 9th (first year of highschool). 10th grade had Trig, 11th had pre-Calc, and Calculus was the final year.
I took Algebra 1 in 9th grade, and Algebra 2 and Geometry in the 10th grade. The 9th graders in my Algebra 2 class (who took Algebra 1 in 8th grade) had holes in their algebra background because middle school algebra is taught at a lower level than high school algebra. But I wasn't behind, for I took AP Calculus in 11th grade successfully because of a strong foundation from high school level algebra classes. However, I'm struggling with placement choices for own children as we speak.
“…it is unacceptable to have eighth grade Algebra I classes and gifted education programs that disproportionately exclude Black and brown children.”
a definition of exclude is “deny (someone) access to or bar (someone) from a place, group, or privilege.”
no one is barring access to these classes on the basis race. can you even imagine that? “sorry, you’re not allowed to take this class; you’re black.” it’s like everyone who writes this lives in their mom’s basement and has never gone outside and thinks if they just make the boring and tired declaration that non-black/non-brown people are evil/racist, that it absolves them of every other sin they commit, like not caring about homeless people or the fact that everything they own is made by chinese children. in reality it accomplishes nothing except complacency and it helps the people raping the world continue their work of exploiting everyone.
>> “…it is unacceptable to have eighth grade Algebra I classes and gifted education programs that disproportionately exclude Black and brown children.”
> no one is barring access to these classes on the basis race. can you even imagine that?
A test for a gifted class that measures _knowledge_ rather than the _ability to learn_ will create an "elite" class full of students whose parents had them study the advanced topics. Even if they were not "good" at it. In this case high SES -> advanced knowledge -> good test scores -> elite class that excludes Black students primarily because the entrance test results are predicted by SES.
Not really. Any teacher qualified to teach HS math should be able to teach anything up to pre-Calc. If you have more Algebra students ahead of grade level than usual, you shift a teacher away from pre-Algebra and into teaching Algebra I.
That's not what the progressive complain about. But if that is true, the obvious solution is to create more spots.
If the same people wouldn't complain about disparate failure rates, I'd even support making them open enrollment, but weeding people out based on performance. But we all know, people would just claim the classes are racist.
Gifted programs are extremely important and the width of American gifted programs is a virtue. Canada has a much higher standard for gifted, and in Ontario we generally admit roughly the top 1% of students (many American programs cater to the top 10%).
There a number of large benefits to gifted, not the least of which is it changes the character of a program/school. If you are surrounded by bright students with nerdy academic interests it's suddenly acceptable to nerd out on things. This single fact may be more valuable to the development of the student than the entire program itself. Outside of gifted, schools have substantial challenges with creating environments where academic excellence is encouraged and rewarded not only by the schools grading system but also by social behaviour of peers. While bullying has gone down, and acceptability of geeky interests have improved in the past 30 years there is still nothing close to a gifted program from encouraging and accepting academic excellence.
As someone who just barely missed the gifted cutoff, my schooling was much too easy and I basically never had to study for tests or exams. I ended up developing poor academic habits that ultimately hurt me when the difficulty got hard enough that intellectual horsepower needed to be combined with hard work. I think being challenged early and often would have changed this behaviour substantially. Even creating an environment where I wanted to be around other students enough to participate in more extra-curriculars could have helped. I worry that we are going to create a lot of bright but unmotivated students by offering years of programs that are too easy for them. There are consequences far beyond just having these students occasionally act out out of boredom and I think it's a very bad idea to create an educational culture that suggests bright people should be lazy. This is ultimately what the removal of gifted programs do because classroom teachers generally aren't given adequate prep time or other resources to properly offer enrichment. I've even known some principals who encouraged their teachers to not offer enrichment as it created problems in later grades when other teachers didn't offer similar enrichment and parents expected it.
> As someone who just barely missed the gifted cutoff, my schooling was much too easy and I basically never had to study for tests or exams. I ended up developing poor academic habits that ultimately hurt me when the difficulty got hard enough that intellectual horsepower needed to be combined with hard work.
When you're little, you self-learn that if it's easy, it's not worth doing. If it's hard, it's probably impossible anyway. Your life is good and filled with fun. As you get older, when things get hard in school, you avoid or fail them with no strategies or habits around completing difficult schoolwork (which often feels as rewarding as easy schoolwork). Who would want to stop having fun? This is sometimes referred to as, the curse of the gifted.
I was in a gifted program but it was poorly executed and I deem it to have been detrimental to my growth.
I was randomly pulled from normal classes in order to hang out with a few other gifted students and do weird puzzles or whatever. Then later I’d have to figure out from classmates what I missed, including what homework to do etc. My social skills already sucked, and being labeled as special to the classmates whom I’d have to spend most of the day with certainly didn’t help.
I’m sure there a ways to do it better, but having no gifted program is better than a bad gifted program.
Dedicated gifted classes are the correct way to do these programs. I agree being pulled from an existing class for a bit of enrichment while having to make up everything you missed is not a good way to deliver programs.
If I’m leading a system in which the population of eighth graders taking Algebra I has a disproportionate number of white and Asian students, then eliminating Algebra I as an offering for eighth graders looks like an obvious pathway to equity.
Well, yes, if by equity you mean the race composition of every class equals the race composition of the school as a whole. But shouldn't equity in education mean that every student gets the instruction and support they need to achieve their potential, insofar as the school is able to provide it, without respect to their race, class or sex?
There were no gifted programs or classes when and where I attended school (6 decades back, in a very rural part of the Great Plains). But there was a teacher in my school who took it upon herself to run a reading lab that you could get into with the blessing of the school principal. Mostly she taught remedial reading to those who needed extra help, but one of her 5 periods each day was called "advanced reading lab" and into that group she took students who showed exceptional or nascent exceptional intellectual capability. In the guise of teaching us to read better and faster, she exercised our brains with science, history, and even math. She's the only teacher I remember by name, and she did more to launch my success in life than any 5 other teachers combined, behind only my parents. Because she made going to school worthwhile - interesting, exciting, and mind-expanding. (She also taught me to read 2000 words per minute with retention, which was a hell of a useful skill, but only a skill - the world of knowledge and thinking was her real gift).
> But shouldn't equity in education mean that every student gets the instruction and support they need to achieve their potential, insofar as the school is able to provide it, without respect to their race, class or sex?
You’re taking about equality. Equity is always just a euphemism for equality of outcome. Which can only ever be achieved by lowering the outcomes of top performs to the same level as the lowest performers.
I know. But I refuse give up the meaning of the word "equity" - which is not equality of outcomes, but rather fair, impartial. In the case of schools, that means fairly and impartially meeting the needs of every student. You can call med old fashioned, if you wish (I'm certainly old).
Well, we're talking about 55 years ago, so I'm pretty sure there wouldn't be any online references to the actual materials used, and the technology pieces were all pre-digital. (There was basically one time-share computer for public school students in the entire state I lived in at the time, and "interactive device" meant a KSR 33 teletype connected to that computer via 10 character per second dial-up modem).
So, I can tell you a little about the methods, but that's all. First, we spent a small, but meaningful amount of time each day in drills to train our eyes and brains to rapidly recognize and interpret increasingly longer strings of symbols. This was done by flashing a sequence of numbers (first) or letters (as we got better) on a screen for a set period of time, and having students transcribe them onto paper. As we achieved accuracy for a given flash (say 5 numbers for .1 second), the flash interval was incrementally reduced, and the length of sequence increased. I don't recall the flash intervals, but I do recall that at the end of a year of doing these exercises for a few minutes each school day, I was routinely reading 15 or more digit sequences accurately in a single, very short glance.
We also used machines (entirely mechanical) that built on that ability by scanning lines of text we were to read in multi-word chunks on a timed basis. The idea was to take the sight interpretation skill and extend it to reading phrases in a single glance, rather than reading and interpreting single words.
And finally, there was application of these skills to real texts, for comprehension. Comprehension was of course focused on getting the meaning of a text, but also on vocabulary. New vocabulary was introduced in relatively simple texts, and re-enforced over time.
I have no idea how well all this worked for average students. It worked beautifully for me, though.
Alright, I don't imagine this will be a common take here but here goes. I am a product of the New York City public school system. I have spent the majority of my life as a student in it. The New York city public school system is both the largest public school system in the country and the most segregated. The argument about removing gifted programs are built on the faulty assumptions that the students in those programs are "more gifted" than everyone else and that the work is truly more advanced. Neither of those are the case.
Gifted programs are used to advance and maintain the status-quo of segregation in our schools. The correlation between medium household (of which Black americans are at a disadvantage) and acceptance into the gifted program is much stronger than the correlation between merit and acceptance. I've spent my life in this system and I can tell you with one hundred percent confidence that the reason many if not most of my black peers don't get into these programs is not due to any lack of merit or intelligence.
Now lets look at the second assumption, that the gifted programs provide a higher level of education. This is not true. What happens is that gifted programs get significantly higher funding than other schools and so the gifted programs can afford to give a good well rounded education, which is a good thing! The problem is that so many of our schools, especially in Brown and Black neighborhoods) are completely underfunded, without enough teachers or resources. This of course perpetuates the systemic inequities that begun this cycle in the first place thus repeating the whole cycle.
When we are calling for an end to "gifted" programs in New York, it is not because we "hate smart kids" but because we want resources to be evenly divided so that everyone can get a well funded well rounded education, not just the rich kids in gifted classes. This is not a single issue but is a larger component of an attempt to dismantle segregation in public schools. It drives me crazy to no end to see smart people fall into the ideological trap of believing gifted programs are something they aren't.
> When we are calling for an end to "gifted" programs in New York, it is not because we "hate smart kids" but because we want resources to be evenly divided so that everyone can get a well funded well rounded education, not just the rich kids in gifted classes. This is not a single issue but is a larger component of an attempt to dismantle segregation in public schools.
Ok, then that's what you should ask for. Ask for a more even distribution of resources.
If you single out the elimination of a specific program as a proxy for what you really want, you shouldn't be surprised when the discourse fixates on your targeting that program -- especially when it's a program for gifted students. By doing that you've made it very easy for your opponents to portray you as someone who would rather bring all students down to the same level than allow differences in ability to be cultivated.
> If you single out the elimination of a specific program as a proxy for what you really want,
The problem is that in New York at least the gifted programs are the direct mechanism by which rich parents uphold the status quo of segregation. The gifted prgrams are not a proxy, they are a symptom. As I said elsewhere in this thread: we are looking for a fair allocation of resources to actually give schools the ability to meet every student where they are and to engage them wherever that is.
The fact that gifted programs would be needed at all is a failure of our public school system. Every school should have the resources to adequately engage and educate every student regardless of their academic starting point.
Aren't poorer Chinese students the ones that dominate various gifted programs throughout the city? Rich parents send their kids to private daycares and schools like Collegiate.
More funding doesn't solve the problem. If that were case, the whole country could have spent it's way out of special education. At an median of $24K per student, New York has plenty of funding. Kansas city once tried an unlimited funding model to disastrous results (https://www.cato.org/commentary/americas-most-costly-educati...).
Yes, but apparently that's "segregation". The notion is ridiculous. The gifted programs are open to any New Yorker, even poor first generation immigrants like the Chinese in Flushing, as long as they put in the effort to meeting or exceed the standards.
This is actually a great example of the flaw in the debate. NYC has a unique and byzantine school system that's unrecognizable to basically all Americans outside of NYC.
This means if you hear "eliminate this program because equity," and you grew up in the midwest where the gifted program didn't function at all like you describe or require much funding at all, this sounds completely nonsensical because we're not talking about the same thing.
I don't have an answer to this except that it's best discussed on a local case by case basis.
I was not in the gifted program but most of my friends and younger siblings were. I agree with this assessment. They had access to after school programs and opportunities that were not offered to the rest of us. Their classes gave a higher GPA for the same results in regular classes despite (in some cases) teaching basically the same thing as regular classes, from the same book. Regular classes were the same workload but less creativity, enthusiasm, and support.
I later found out that test scores didn't entirely determine placement. Many of my peers were put in the gifted program after a parent advocated for them.
So yes, I appreciate these efforts to equalize opportunity. I'd like that the lessons offered in gifted programs can be offered to all students
This is where I think things are kind to vary wildly between different regions and districts so we have to be specific make sure we are comparing apples to apples. A gift program like you describe “by name only” isn’t a gifted program at all, that doesn’t mean “real” ones don’t exist. It’s like saying the funding for baseballs is not producing any baseball players meanwhile they only use the baseballs for playing tennis.
Sure but the issues faced here in New York are not unique, just particularly visible due to the size. The systemically racist systems exist everywhere and I would be willing to bet money that in the majority of districts and regions where gifted programs exist will have absurdly low percentages of brown and black students. And again, that is not because brown and black students aren't as smart. The systems of this country deals them a bad hand before they even know they're playing the game in the first place.
I'm not sure if I agree with the premise that the gifted students keep all the resources to themselves. If anything they should require less mentoring, less discipling and their parents should be more likely to be involved financially and in PTA.
> and their parents should be more likely to be involved financially and in PTA.
And when gifted programs become screeners of affluence then there are going to be financially involved parents in the PTA which benefits the whole school. But if all of those parents end up at the "good" schools then those schools have considerably more funding (on top of the additional funding from the DOE) to allow them to actually educate their students. It is all a self reinforcing cycle that benefits a few and disadvantages many.
Now you are talking not only about a redistribution of taxed dollars but charitable time and donations from parents that want to give them to their children to less advantaged children.
Putting limits on how much a parent can help and support their child is a much more difficult ethical and political argument to make
The goal of a lot of the redistricting and ending of accelerated programs seems simple: put higher performing students in the same class as lower performing students. Then make the parents of the higher performing students responsible for everyone.
Having been in public school for most of my life I can say unequivocally: yes. It is not uncommon for teachers to purchase books and classroom supplies out of pocket since there simply is not enough funding.
Most estimates I've seen of funding for New York students is $25k to $30k a year though. I would think that's more of a sign of incredible corruption and mismanagement and not that there isn't enough money to go around.
To compare, Stuyvesant High School, the best in NYC, is $18k per student.
I would argue the point that Stuyvesant is the "best" but I don't disagree with your point. The problem is that a lot of the money ends up in the schools with the rich kids and for a lot a lot of students and schools they never see anywhere near that type of money.
Stuyvesant, like most good schools, raises a good deal of private funds. That actually accounts for good deal of the difference in resources between schools.
>Now lets look at the second assumption, that the gifted programs provide a higher level of education. This is not true. What happens is that gifted programs get significantly higher funding than other schools and so the gifted programs can afford to give a good well rounded education, which is a good thing!
You can't have it both ways. Is the education better or not?
Yeah I tripped on my words there a bit. My point is that the gifted programs have what is considered the necessities of a good well rounded education anywhere in the world. The fact that only the gifted programs have that is the flaw.
Then it's not enough to say it, show the numbers. Considering the tiny demographic it serves, I'd imagine the cuts on the basis of inequality are a convenient excuse to slash spending, and not increase it otherwise.
There's no relationship between gutting gifted programs and either alleviating inequality or improving outcomes of all other students. If you want to do the latter, that requires it's own intervention.
This basically apes the rhetoric of the right-wing on the part of social spending. "We can't afford it, it should be spent on other things". Same mentality.
There's absolutely nothing in there about the cost of those programs, which is why you didn't bother to quote it. What there is: talk about under-representation in those programs. That's it.
It's puzzling why you won't lend credence to an important factor: poverty has cognitive consequences. Yet rather than trying to improve the lot of those students, you're fixated on taking things away. This is how socialists think: some people have it too good and need to be punished.
Yeah, it's sad that there's no way to signal boost this. There's no way to convince people on this board to understand what is going on in New York. When you say "gifted program" people think that they are giving the smart kids opportunities that challenge them, but in New York it's not that at all. The screening process happens primarily before kids step into a classroom for the first time, and the divide between kids who get in and ones who don't is not innate intelligence, but rather preparation. The G&T program is the means by which the most motivated parents build a system within a system in which they can have good classes for their kids while neglecting the rest of the students, covered by a thin veneer of supposed meritocracy.
I was wondering why it seems to be such a big topic for the US. Where I’m from, gifted classes are for 1% of the kids and about socializing and keeping them engaged - their life outcomes are not statistically likely to be better than the “normal” children either way.
It provides them with an environment where they can develop at their own pace, and socialize with other children who think alike, which might not happen with only regular classes, where being gifted can be a disadvantage. I believe the programs are usually not full-time, but an addition to normal school hours.
This, to me, seems very different from being a better path to success as it apparently is in the US, in some kind of segregated system where millions of children are enrolled, up to 15% in some states.
Most studies I've seen also show that over the long term, gifted education does not result in better life outcomes, and does not eliminate differences in background (like being poor vs rich).
I guess the problem is how the gifted programs are being executed rather than their existence then.
When I read "gifted programs" I certainly would think that race or social background has zero influence on acceptance (even though they do influence kids access to education before getting there).
Reading what you said it seems logical that removing these programs is overall a good thing. But the way I see it the discussion about supporting kids that are truly gifted shouldn't be dismissed.
Maybe the solution would be to actually replace that program with something that's not perpetuating this segregation.
Disclaimer: I don't live in the US, so take it with a big grain of salt :)
> But the way I see it the discussion about supporting kids that are truly gifted shouldn't be dismissed
Sure! Yes! We are looking for a fair allocation of resources to actually give schools the ability to meet every student where they are and to engage them wherever that is. All teachers want to be able to meet kids where they are, wherever they are, but they don't have the resources to.
I went to a charter school because my designated high school was very prone to violence. I am an afro latino immigrant raised by a single mom. I truly understand that these public schools are losing their best performing kids to these charter schools which leads to worse aggregate outcomes. However, I am certain that I would not have been able to get into my ivy league alma mater without the support and isolation from chaos that my charter school provided.
Why should I have a worse outcome just to raise the mean scores in a place where everyone else isn't capable (due to harsh environment) or willing to learn? In addition, I think it hurts arguments for affirmative action. When people think of affirmative action / need-based approaches, they think of these other kids and not me. (You wouldn't be able to tell that I benefitted from those programs if you met me given my high school achievements from over a decade ago).
“Since when does equity mean everyone gets nothing?”
Unfortunately, in Oregon, Kate Brown and her acolytes think that it is "equitable" to get rid of all basic learning requirements for high school graduation, because they are "white supremacy" or something.
The kids of elites and the rich will always have opportunities regardless of aptitude. Is it any surprise actor's kids tend to also have many opportunities in acting. Opposing gifted education, acceleration, etc. seems like another way of pulling up the ladder, even if it's framed as being well-intentioned.
Exactly. The people hurt most by this are lower income Americans, many of them immigrants, for whom these programs are a golden ticket out of poverty. Absolutely shameful what they are destroying here.
I think a lot of the equity advocates fail to admit things just aren't working right now. So if you say you'll just pull your kids and send them private, they'll say that we need to force all kids into public schools. There's no middle ground.
I grew up as a dirt poor immigrant. The only reason I got into MIT, and am successful today, was because of the gifted programs that allowed me to stand out from the other mediocre students at the schools.
Were most of my gifted classmates wealthy? Yes. But being among them did more for my social mobility than anything else the school ever did.
It really pains me to say this but I find it impossible to see how this is anything other than an attempt to address inequality by eliminating any and all objective measures and drivers of success, talent, and/or performance. The promise for a long time was that we weren’t going to try to achieve equality by dragging down the high achievers but that appears to be exactly - exactly - the goal here.
At my high school, they were able to get funding for advanced program (for above average students) by arguing that there was already funding for programs for students who were struggling (below average students). That is, that is was unfair that one group of students were having their special educational needs met, but that another group wasn't. They succeeded and the program was very successful. The result was three levels for most subjects which students could choose based on their goals and abilities. They were also able to keep the bar for the advanced classes high so students who enrolled but found them too challenging would soon drop down a level -- as most preferred a high grade in middle level class then a mediocre or low grade in a high level class. I took classes at all three levels as I was strong in math and science but less so in the humanities, for example. I thought it worked great.
I think minimal standards are a pretty good idea, for both mental and physical education. The attitude that all children should be able to reach these standards, and if they don't that's the fault of the educational system, also makes a lot of sense. What those standards should be is a matter for debate, but if we look around the world (China ahem) we might get some ideas about what the competitive level is currently.
To enforce this, you need to do two things: fire underperforming teachers, and their administrative overseers if the problem is pervasive, and pay teachers competitive salaries to attract the best talent to the job. Teaching is a skill, and highly skilled people should be well-compensated for their work. This is just labor market 101. If you don't value education, you pay low salaries to educators and you scrape the bottom of the talent barrel. If you do value education, then you make the job competitive by offering high salaries and eliminating underperformers.
Of course, maybe the politicians and bureaucrats and corporate executives don't actually want a highly educated competent population? Perhaps they'd prefer dumb sheep who believe whatever propaganda they're fed and whose consumption habits can be easily directed by skilled advertisers and marketers. Herds of compliant consumers who do as they're told, that's perhaps what elite leadership is after. Might be a conspiracy theory but there's some truth to it I think.
What it really looks like is one set of schools for the aristocrats, and another set of schools for the serfs, and it's more about maintaining a certain class structure, just as in late 19th / early 20th century British schooling systems.
Probably late posting here but going to post here to maybe offer some understanding to why it is people support policies like this. For the record, I'm not personally for it but there is a method to the madness. I'm black, take that for what it is.
"unacceptably white" is probably the most triggering thing in here but it actually represents the core of this conflict. The people trying to eliminate gifted programs are recognizing that many forms of power in society are zero sum. There are plenty of ways to get a great education but there is only one Harvard. Access to higher education opportunities is not only a pathway out of poverty but also to power within the institutions that hire grads.
The supporters of this form of affirmative action recognize that in a system where black/latino/indigenous students have structural disadvantages (poverty, prejudice, health, etc) but also operates as a pure meritocracy leads to a system where their racial group possesses disproportionately less power vs their population. Less kids in these groups in gifted programs means less of these kids going to top universities and on to top positions in government and business.
Many of you may see this as tribal or even perpetuating divides on race. But I'd respond that you fundamentally are underestimating how much marginalized communities distrust communities outside of their own. I'll use the black community because I'm a member of it. There is very little trust (myself included) that the white individuals who attend these programs and (hopefully) go on to succeed in higher education will use their influence for the benefit of blacks. I don't believe that because I think white people are racist, just self interested (like most people). That thinking extends to other groups like east and south Asians.
Personally my views on this are not to eliminate gifted programs, I benefited from one myself and know how important they are. Ideally we'd do what many others here suggested and just build more programs. If there is this much of a fight about it obviously there is a lot of demand for schools where Algebra I is taught in the 8th grade. So let's make more of those. That won't solve the issue at the college level though. There is a reason there are not 50 Harvards and its because the access/power/influence that degree offers is zero sum. Until we figure out a way to ration out that power in a way that people think is fair we're going to see constant contention over it.
Equity matters for education, but not the sports teams? If the conversation about gifted and talented programs doesn't include the other activities the school sponsors, then its not fair. We've eliminated voc-ed and now g&t programs. I bet sports cost a bunch.
I'd say I learned much more from the elementary school and middle school sports programs I participated in than I ever learned from the gifted/talented programs I participated in. I find it to be a terrible shame that high school sports are so often limited in participation by elitism (e.g. basketball limited to 10 players, volleyball to ~12, cheerleading to ~20).
I would wholeheartedly support removing limits on high school sports participation. The free market can suck away the elite athletes if they don't feel that high school sports are adequate for their professional development - that's fine, high school should cater to the majority, not an infinitesimal minority.
Regardless of the usefulness of sports in schools (and I do believe they are useful), you point out that they are "often limited in participation by elitism" much as I suppose the critics of gifted & talented programs would say of those programs. If so, then they must be studied to make sure they don't disproportionately exclude certain racial groups. If racial imbalance is a guideline for cancellation then it should apply to every program and activity.
In your equivalence, the "sport" is studying math (or something) and everyone is participating, simply on different levels. Your equivalence would only work if the non-gifted students weren't allowed to study anything at all.
No. Both sports and gifted & talented programs require students that are more "gifted" at the activity to participate. If this elitist selection is bad for one then it is bad for the other.
That's my point. Parent poster was saying that excluding students from high school sports was the same as excluding them from gifted programs. I countered by saying that, for the equivalence to work, the students wouldn't be able to study at all to be like exclusion from high school sports.
"eighth grade Algebra I classes and gifted education programs that disproportionately exclude Black and brown children"
The absence of "Black and brown children" doesn't mean they were _excluded_, it means they weren't _selected_, or never applied in the first place.
If they were deliberately not selected because of their race, that's wrong and should be fixed pronto. And what are the odds of that? If they were not selected because they didn't meet the qualifications, well, that isn't the fault of the gifted program.
> If they were not selected because they didn't meet the qualifications, well, that isn't the fault of the gifted program.
But it could be the fault of the government, the school administration, and an entire culture of systemic racism.
And so there could be several problems to address.
Does removing the gifted program solve any of the problems? No. Does it make some people feel as though they're doing good by equalizing everything? Yes.
> Black students are 66% less likely to be identified as gifted compared to white students _with similar test scores_. Black, Latinx, and Native American students are far less likely to attend a school that even offers a gifted program.
Emphasis mine. The likely thing going on is something subconscious or unintentionally discriminatory, or somehow related to the home family life.
It took me two years to verify that I was gifted enough for the gifted program in middle school. In fact, they did so incredibly reluctantly because I achieved the highest math scores in my middle school on the state exams (two years in a row). It takes a lot of effort to be recognized as an afro-latino person that can be gifted even with higher scores.
They also only placed me in the math/science gifted sections and would only be placed in the english/social studies gifted sections after much arguing as well.
Guess what? I excelled there too. Now to get away from anecdotes:
> If they were deliberately not selected because of their race, that's wrong and should be fixed pronto. And what are the odds of that?
between 50 to 70% on an individual basis if some studies are to be believed.
I moved my family as the town I lived in did exactly this. They also removed support programs for those falling behind vs racing ahead. All under the equity banner.
The New town we moved to is great. Oldest kid in accelerated programs, accelerating. Younger kid got the support she needed to catch up. :chefs_kiss:
Taking a step back, I don’t know how ‘equity’ got twisted into creating a lowering tide for all vs. a rising tide for all. So confusing.
The bigger issue I see is the arbitrary separation of students into grades. Just because everybody is the same age does not mean they're at the same level in a subject. You should be able to take 8th grade math as a 7th grader. In fact it shouldn't be 8th grade math, it should just be Pre-Algebra. Montessori schools put three grades in one class which solves the problem somewhat, although talented students in the top grade quickly get bored.
This stratified structure also impacts how students view social interaction. Each grade is separate and therefore a different social entity. Sure, there are interactions across grades but it's still quite funny to see a sophomore make fun of a freshman when they're 15 and 14 years old respectively. To this day I know people who find it weird that I'm friends with someone who's 18 when I'm 23. I don't see why. We have the same interests and similar personalities. A few years difference doesn't matter.
One worldview is that progress is more important than equality, thus inequality is an acceptable side effect so long as life is genuinely improving for everyone. “Rising tide lifts all boats.”
Another is that equality is more important than progress. “Take from the rich and give to the poor.”
It seems mostly universal that we really want to raise the floor, not lower the ceiling. But so far history suggests that lowering the ceiling is easier.
Since the decision to value progress or equality higher is ultimately a personal moral choice, I don’t see this debate ever being resolved.
Still bending over backwards to accommodate a racial equity narrative. How about you don’t look at a child’s skin color before you decide how they are educated and instead focus on doing the best you can for each instead of trying to make everything about achieving social justice goals. Anything else is racism.
We were doing that for most of the 90s and early 2000s and it was working. It's only because of grifters and agitators and "thought leaders" who try to make a buck off of divisions and needless debates that we see this resurgence in these types of politics. And underneath the veneer of race concern-trolling there's a resurgence in communist ideas trying to use the wedge of race as the basis for justifying both the redistribution of wealth and the dissolution of merit-based systems.
"The current population of students we identify as academically gifted and talented is unacceptably whiter and wealthier than the actual student population of academically gifted and talented students should be."
A typical IQ threshold for a gifted program is 130. The average IQ overall is 100 with standard deviation 15. For black Americans the average score on IQ tests is about 85, which explains why blacks will be under-represented in gifted programs unless racial preferences are used. The makers of IQ tests would like to reduce racial differentials while maintaining the predictive abilities of their tests, but they have not been able to.
I just left a comment as a reply to this post because that statistic intrigued me. I had to go hunting for the actual paper, and when I finally found it it seems to suggest that discrepancy is because the study lumped students who have access to gifted programs with students that don't have access.
Additionally it identified that 83% of black students had access to a gifted program as opposed to 91% or something of white students.
Additionally the study cited says that they had several gaps in their data and used some statistical regressions to fill in those gaps. All this leads me to believe that we need to provide more access to gifted programs, and the problem isn't that we have a herd of racist teachers on the loose.
Schools literally send home papers to parents and communicate with them directly about the programs. Most school districts require parental permission before children are pulled out of class to be tested.
He said similar, and he didn't provide the data. We surely would like to delve into why this might be happening. We can know for certain that there is no skin-color criterion in the program selection.
So leftist are producing inclusivity and equity by forcing everyone stay at the lowest common denominator. Instead of trying to help disadvantaged people climb the stair, they are breaking the stair to be sure everyone remains down.
>we should be mandating that every eighth grader takes Algebra I—and then structure the entire pre-K to seventh grade student experience to ensure this is a legitimate possibility for every child.
Just "make" everyone qualified / good at algebra?
I feel like that glosses over the ALL the challenges with education ...
No child should be actively excluded based on a metric like race or gender, just like no student should be deliberately included because of race, gender, class, or any other metric that a parent could use to coerce a school to place their child in a gifted/magnet class. That should be common sense.
Kids should be placed in the gifted/magnet track because of performance, and performance alone. I don't believe that a meritocracy is racist, sexist, or biased in an unfair way. Placing students in classes where they may under perform, and excluding kids who would perform well in an accelerated program are unfair, and a meritocracy mitigates both of these problems.
The article raised a good point about schools that marginalized groups would attend don't have a gifted program, precluding them from even participating. That can be addressed a couple different ways. Either redirect high performers to a school where there is a gifted program present, or mandate the presence of a gifted program in all schools. There will, of course, be differing quality of the program from school to school, which would favor the former course of action.
Having gone through the "gifted program" through elementary and middle school, I can say that the only real differences I felt weren't related to curriculum, we were taught essentially the same things, with slight differences.
1. Smaller class size. In a class of 4th, 5th, and 6th graders, there was maybe 25 kids.
2. Less rowdy/troublemaking classmates. Made for less distractions.
3. Less busywork. The routine of getting a packet every night for homework was not something I had to suffer through like many friends I had that weren't in an accelerated program.
I don't believe you will ever truly eradicate inequities within public services, and the cost of private services, especially in education, preclude many from participating. That said, we should strive to mitigate them. My fear is that the steps taken to mitigate inequity will just move the availability of opportunity from one group to another, where the true solution is increasing the availability for all groups, and let performance be the selector of who is admitted to gifted/accelerated programs.
>redirect high performers to a school where there is a gifted program present
I am a bit hesitant of this. One valuable thing you get by having geographical schools is the same friends in and out of school. If you have friends at school but they are too far to hang out with or do homework with it can be bad for the kid learning social skills.
Mandating gifted classes as you mentioned seems better.
Latinos almost universally despise it. It was made up by non-Hispanic leftists because... I don't know, something about not forcing gender? It's utterly ridiculous.
If we insist on mutilating Spanish to satisfy intellectual fads, something like "Latine" would be better.
The broader issue is that having grammatical noun classes/gender serves an important purpose: not enforcing the patriarchy, but instead disambiguating different words and antecedents (basically adding an extra bit or two of information to a word).
Couple this with the fact that the whole "Latin[aeox]" terms aren't even inclusive to begin with. They are generally are used to broadly describe "a person from central/south America", except they are entirely Euro-centric, as if Latinos showed up to uninhabited open land. More than likely, the Qʼeqchiʼ person from Guatemala, who barely speaks Spanish, who has 100% Mayan ancestry, doesn't self identify as "Latino".
Intelligent kids are one of the most picked on and abused demographics in existence. Gifted programs for many is the only part of school that is positive for them.
Author cites the research on minorities being less likely be identified as gifted given comparable test scores, but selectively leaves out all of the research on the effects of eliminating gifted programs.
I guess Teach for America assumes their readers are too dumb to notice?
> Results indicated that parents perceived that their children were experiencing a decline in energy, curiosity, and intrinsic motivation to achieve at high levels and were beginning to disengage from the traditional curriculum [after elimination of the gifted programs].
> This review also found that the needs of many gifted and talented students are not addressed in many regular classroom settings across our country... A large body of research supports the finding that various forms of acceleration result in higher achievement for gifted and talented learners.
Somehow in last few years equity has been promoted and even equated with equality.
They are different concepts.
Equal Opportunity is a universal goal that as a society we continue to strive towards even though is impossible to fully achieve.
Equalized Outcomes (Equity) Is a dystopian nightmare.
The idea that all possible differentials between humans can and should have the same outcomes is ludicrous.
I work in education and will give you an example of this nonsense. In a well to do district in Chicago they found that Black students do not do as well in AP Calculus. After years of intervention the district achieved growth and had a record number of black student now enrolled in AP Calculus. However after five years and despite the increase of black students it was still found that white and asian students got higher scores on the AP exam.
The district solution was to cancel AP Calculus and now it is only offered as a third party online course not taught by the school district.
Why was the goal for all groups to have the same test scores? Just absolute rubbish.
It's hard for me to tell how many of these "progressive" programs are motivated out of a sincere desire to make the world a better place, and how many are simply motivated by hate and spite, a "if I can't have it nobody can" kind of attitude. Certainly eliminating advanced classes seems to fall into the latter case.
What's sad is that the US used to be the vanguard of modern civilization: science, technology, policies (making federalism work in a vast country like the US is an amazing achievement), and human wellbeing in general. And now we are debating common sense. Shame on the progressives.
It still is the vanguard of all those things, fortunately. The good news is that it seems the pendulum is beginning to swing the other way. For example, last night San Franciso booted the progressive soft-on-crime DA. This mirrors a trend in other progressive bases too. The mid-term elections will at this rate represent a chastising of the progressive left. Good riddance!
> I do not doubt the good intentions behind the decisions educators make in the name of equity.
I do. Or rather, I doubt the good intentions of the decision makers. I don't think educators are making these decisions. The more I experience the public education system through my child (I did not experience it myself, as I was homeschooled), and the more stories I hear from parents, the more it looks like school administrators are politicians looking to cut costs and get on a track to end up in city council. The actual welfare of the children doesn't really look like it ends up a part of the equation.
If certain groups of students are excluded because of their ethnicity, that is wrong and should be condemned. If certain groups are excluded because they did not have a lifestyle that nurtured their talent and therefore do not meet the requirements to join, their lifestyle needs to be structed differently so that then next time around they do meet the requirements. In the meantime, holding Asian students back is not going to solve the problem of other student having parents who don't recognize the importance of their education.
As a "gifted" student in a tiny town, I had my 3rd and 4th grade math "class" in the hallway, where the teachers drug my desk and slapped down a geometry textbook and told me to teach myself. In other classes they tried to get me to help teach my classmates the concepts, which is not a great place for a 4th grader to be in.
By high school I'd learned to read the textbook, ace the tests and do fuck-all for homework to the frustration of every educator at the school trying to teach me hard work alongside the actual material. There were actually AP classes in high school that I never qualified for because I never learned to actually work at school, and by high school I didn't really care. I was completely unprepared when Junior year in college, it actually got so hard that I had to study. I almost flunked out.
I can empathize with the gifted kids that are just a different shade, not getting challenged, basically getting the small town experience I got. It is a ton of potential being wasted. I agree with the article, throwing away gifted programs and just lowering the bar is a mistake, but raising everyones bar to the gifted level... that's going to leave some of the most vulnerable behind which I don't think should be done either.
Maybe working to shore up the problem of black/brown kids having equal test scores and not getting into a gifted program is the first hurdle, and then we can look around and see what to do next.
Gifted programs as we know, are basically advanced programs for shape-rotators, which closely relates to IQ.
The IQ distribution is different across race groups, therefore you expect to have more representation of certain groups relative to others.
It's obvious that Asians --I am not Asian-- perform extremely well in IQ tests compared to other groups. Same with Ashkenazi Jews. These groups would have, relatively speaking, a higher representation. It would also be more male than your typical classroom.
Just like we have "physically gifted programs" in sports, and in some Blacks are overly represented. People don't seem to bat an eye for such "inequity", because it is understood that, on average, Blacks have superior athletic ability in some sports.
People really have a hard time understanding basic statistical facts, and they take these things personally. When we compare average heights across countries, nobody gets offended because everybody is aware of their own height. A 6'4 American is just as tall as a 6'4 Indonesian, so people don't take personally. Somehow average IQ is this thing that people take personally as if it was an indictment on their intelligence.
Besides, there is much more than IQ. Plenty of people with average IQs are successful. Sure, the premium on IQ increased in our society, but there is so much variance in activities and other inherent or acquired characteristics, it is really not that big of a deal.
With that being said, it is important for a nation to identify exceptional talents --including intelligence-- and nurture these individuals so they maximize their potential. It's good for them, it's good for society as well. Recognizing that people should have different educational experiences is the right thing to do.
It is worth noting that IQ is heavily impacted by environment and nurture, especially so at the ends of the spectrum.
When different groups have different home and social environments, it is expected that there will be IQ differences.
It is strange that people can be vocal about the harsh conditions difference groups are subjected to, but in denial about the damage done by those conditions.
Wow as a white men that is completely against affirmative action I still 100% agree with everything in this article.
Basically if only 2% of student taking algebra 1 are black then the solution is :
1- not to Remove algebra 1 completely.
2- not to force a % of the algebra 1 student to be black by accepting student that are not ready for this level of Math
3- not too invent a new (non-racist) version of algebra 1 that is easier to understand .
The solution is simply to embrace asynchronous development!
If one student test score below average in English and Geography but above average in math. He should still be allowed to take Algebra 1.
Also algebra 1 should be offered as an option in all neighborhood (including poor one) even if only a single student in that neighborhood would like to take it.
I see being allowed to take the class if you qualify as a Right similar to the right to Vote. So the parent should not be forced to drive the student to another school because the local school prefer to not offer the class.
Gifted programs, depending on where in the country they are located, are deeply related to equity. Things have gotten better over the past decade even without their total elimination, but for the majority of people who are of age to be posting here, if they were in a gifted program, it likely is because they had parents who helped them study for the tests to get in by spending money. Once in said program, fundraising through the PTA is easier done because the average student is better off financially than at the nearby public school.
When I was growing up in NYC I was in a gifted program, and the average family was donating several thousand dollars a year per child. There were benefits such that if one child was in the program, other siblings automatically got in. This allowed us to have privately funded music program alongside privately funded teaching assistants in every classroom.
> "but for the majority of people who are of age to be posting here, if they were in a gifted program, it likely is because they had parents who helped them study for the tests to get in by spending money."
Source? It's certainly not the case for me individually, having been an immigrant child who got through on my own since my parents didn't know enough English to help me on homework and we were too poor to afford tutoring.
The elephant in the room: In the US, average East Asian IQ is 105, average white IQ is 99, average black IQ is 85-95. Nobody in politics can afford to admit that.
The highest IQ in US history belonged to a man that spent his life as a plumber by choice.
According to several studies, the greatest predictor of early academic advancement is the financial status of the parents. While scientific hubris and narcissism tend to quickly dominate competitive environments in colleges, the irrational pretense of a meritocracy quickly degenerates when you enter the faculty area. Note that most academically successful students will do well regardless of the curriculum or instructor, and the funding they bring in later makes anyone popular with staff.
Perhaps you are asserting that “intellectual gifts” are justification for inflicting misery or undue burden on the general community?
I speculate one could likely outrun a one-legged physicist or a one-legged golden retriever just as quickly… but not escape their own cognitive biases.
"most academically successful students will do well regardless of the curriculum or instructor"
Are contradictory - if the smarter students do well regardless, then it's not something in the school, home, or environment, that are making them do better. They are simply smarter, and that's not something you can create in other people.
From one perspective, isolation or artificial peer group selection can lead to aberrant moral, social, and cognitive development.
There is more to life than worksheets and exams.
While above normal intellect tends to bring a slight resilience to stress induced expression of latent psychological problems. It still doubles the probability that a latent disorder will develop if there is a generational precedent (roughly 20% of the general population). This is common 1st/2nd year developmental psychology and neurology material. Thus, I find it hard to believe anyone engaged in a pedagogical profession wouldn't already know this fact.
Equality of opportunity is impossible. Equality of outcome is an order of magnitude more impossible.
Each of us was born into this world through a randomized process that was not created by humankind: the genes you were born with, the environment you were given before you could manage your own affairs, the accumulation of genetic mutations over the course of countless millennia that resulted in who you are today. This is the opportunity you were born with.
To think that we can compensate for this random process with any level of precision is to wage war with nature, and I'd bet that nature will win.
It is an admirable goal, and certainly we can take steps to reduce inequality of opportunity. But true equality of opportunity, or anything close to it, is unattainable in this universe.
Ironically, equality of outcome is actually easier to realize, because you can just drag everyone down to the same crappy level by state mandate and call it "equity". True equality of opportunity would require the admission that certain cultures glorify things which are not conducive to academic success. We accept that black culture values athletics (and that this creates outsized athletic success for black people), why can we not accept that that same culture would deprioritize academics over athletics?
What you describe is not equality of outcome. If you impose some kind of lifestyle on different people, each of them will have different subjective experiences. Some will be completely content in state A whereas others will be extremely displeased. Are the outcomes equal? No. Simply the conditions.
>I agree that it is unacceptable to have eighth grade Algebra I classes and gifted education programs that disproportionately exclude Black and brown children. But if equity is the goal, we should be mandating that every eighth grader takes Algebra I—and then structure the entire pre-K to seventh grade student experience to ensure this is a legitimate possibility for every child. Since when does equity mean everyone gets nothing?
I think this is the key. Obviously eliminating gifted programs and just tossing those resources into the wind is bad. But if instead we eliminated gifted programs, shifting those resources into remedial programs and then made the normal classes more difficult that seems like a solution that would satisfy almost everyone.
Gifted programs threads on HN are the new flame war battlegrounds... turns people into an armchair geniuses, ready to post solutions based on some anecdotal data.
I pity the actual researchers in these fields. Must be tough to work in an area that everyone has an opinion on.
I went 3 different high schools in several states as a child. Some schools had lots of money (ie gifted programs) and others were quite literally at risk of losing state funding due to low standardized test scores. I was the first person in my family tree to graduate college and only person to ever have a PhD.
The teachers at the well-funded, near-apex "Magnet" school in North Carolina were generally better and had more time with students... especially in Science/Math. Teachers had more adult expectations of kids, but most importantly they were _consistent_ with their expectations and cadence of material presented.
Teachers at the under-funded, near-loss of state funding school in Tennessee were kind, "normal" people who happened to go to college at some point in the past. Primary detractors from the classroom were that student's low-expectations often led to large portions of uncontrolled "worksheet" tasks. Work was not graded well, inspected well or feedback given in a timely manner. I personally graded all the science teacher's Junior level homework as a Senior. She often didn't appear to understand the subject and was doing her best to not let the bottom students fall through the cracks.
Elimination of gifted programs, in my opinion, is the best option. The best students will learn what they need to, their parents will make sure of it, and the best teachers need to work with the worst students at this age group.
The crux seems to be who belongs in this "genius" club or should we eliminate the "genius" club altogether because it creates animosity.
A very similar debate can be in sports. Should we have a single league or a tiered league?
I've seen siblings with very different performance and outcome from the young age. Obviously they are both genetically close and were raised by the same parents.
There are certainly differences in people but the reason might not always be some "genius" gene. It could be very circumstantial. For example they were grouped with people who happened to do poorly in whatever was being measured so they were always the top of their group (academically or athletically) in their formative years. That provided them with a lot of self confidence throughout childhood which led them to believe they can achieve anything and always spent countless hours making sure that's true unlike their sibling who never developed the self esteem and settled for less all their lives. Maybe they didn't get too stressed when faced with challenges due to genetic or childhood differences.
So IMO there should be separate leagues (just like sports teams) but also some mobility across these clubs in case someone possesses the skills and has the motivation to compete at the higher level.
> My behavior challenges came from a lack of being challenged.
I've heard this a lot - it's always someone else's fault. In my experience in school, the disruptive students were not the gifted ones. They were the ones who never experienced negative consequences for their disruptive behavior. Neither the teachers, administration, nor parents ever disciplined them.
The unchallenged gifted students would read a book during class, or draw art in their notebooks, etc.
My issue with gifted programs, and this is the reality in many cities: wealthy kids with tutors and intelligent parents are the ones benefiting.
This essentially creates a two-tiered schooling system, and since it's very tightly tied to income, this further exaggerates economic disparity, which is closely tied to race.
My city's school system is comprised mostly of minorities (~80% black, hispanic, and asian) and the gifted programs are predominantly serving wealthy white kids (~50%).
We also have exam schools. The most popular exam school in my area receives tens of millions of dollars in private donations. If you combined the private fundraising of the bottom 90% of schools in the district, it's still less than this one school. This school is also 50% white in a school system where only 15% of the kids are white. So we've essentially created a private school in a public system.
I understand why people don't want to eliminate gifted programs, but they are further exaggerating economic (and racial) disparities. I have not seen any good solutions for this, but it does feel incredibly unfair.
Having been someone who was poor and happened to be in a gifted program, I personally don't think the benefit is worth the divide.
I was told that Vonnegut wrote "Harrison Bergeron" as a satire of the fears that the right had of equality, not as a satire of the left's possible execution of it. And yet here we are, firmly in "1984 was not supposed to be a how-to manual, people!" territory.
Of course, the shell game has continued. Recall how often you used to hear about equality and not equity, and yet somehow those goalposts have shifted in the last five years. Equity has somehow come to mean that you'll get "your share" of the pie even if you haven't contributed, or despite being completely untalented.
We should sort (not segregate, never that) students by race (self-reported, of course), and then grade such that only a certain percentage in each bucket get As, a few more get Bs, and so on. This ensures a perfect equity balance. If we do this for each grade and each subject within a grade, well, we ought to have very equitable outcomes. Diana Moon Glampers will shotgun down the grades of the Asian "Schroedinger's Minority" group to be in line with everyone else's.
> Since when does equity mean everyone gets nothing
This is why equity programs are controversial. When skeptical people hear "equity," they think of the allegory about crabs in a bucket. Too often, instead of helping more crabs escape the bucket, our society creates policies that make it harder for any of them to escape the bucket, or pick and choose which crabs get to escape the bucket.
As a student who went through gifted programs in public elementary and in private middle and high school, but otherwise not plugged into the literature on it, what does the evidence look like that gifted/magnet programs actually provide significant tangible benefit to the students? One way to break it down would be to look at the relative number of students in these categories:
1. Students identified as gifted who do well because of their gifted program/who would have done well if they were in a gifted program.
2. Students identified as gifted who would do well regardless of whether they had a gifted program, even if they might do marginally better in a gifted program.
3. Students not identified as gifted who would benefit from additional resources/gifted peers in their non-gifted program
4. Students not identified as gifted who would not particularly benefit from gifted peers/already have adequately resourced classrooms.
I would have a hard time believing that the number of students in any of those categories is negligibly small. So then the question becomes how do we, as a society, best balance the tradeoffs between them. For any given student, we don't generally have the ability to try it both ways and see what would have been better, and of course any given parent will tend to prefer to take any tiny marginal improvement in opportunity for their children, regardless of whether it's net beneficial for society. But some of the role of society is to not allow people to take actions with mismatched externalities.
If there are more #3 students than #1 students (and/or the benefits to society are larger), and if we cannot distinguish between #2 students and #1 students, then yeah, let's get rid of gifted programs.
For myself, I think I was probably a #2—I had affluent, educated parents, benefited from significant extra-curricular enrichment, and could probably have had more enrichment with several tens of thousands of extra dollars per year of saved tuition. At what point could my parents have known that I was a #2?
[...] school systems are making the decision to contract or eliminate their gifted education and advanced academic offerings.
On the surface, this seems logical. If I’m leading a system in which the population of eighth graders taking Algebra I has a disproportionate number of white and Asian students, then eliminating Algebra I as an offering for eighth graders looks like an obvious pathway to equity.
This doesn't seem logical at all. It sounds like sweeping under the rug.
I'm assuming that what is obvious here is that these programs reproduce inequity, and are not a cause of it.
[...] As these scholars argue shutting down gifted programs only deepens the inequities for brilliant, underrepresented students of color and adds another barrier to unlocking their genius.
I was a black child in the gifted program as a kid. At that age, there were other black kids too, it just depended on which school you came from. And I wasn't privileged, my classmates had way more money at the time and I could tell back then. But they were still my friends and treated me no different. I think its the parents that put the emphasis on it and use it as a status symbol for their kids. As a child, I had fun. But however, I do remember this one white girl, she was so stuck up and thought she was better than everyone else. I was in the 2nd grade and even then I could tell that. But I don't think it was because of the gifted program, she was just stuck up. But her mom was also a teacher, and her mom was super nice.
Another major issue in this discussion is the definition of 'teacher'. As referenced throughout these comments, a 'teaching' job varies dramatically on the district, age, etc. Students from a difficult home life need a social worker than an algebra teacher, yet the state mandates the class no matter how poor the delivery, content, outcome, etc. Meanwhile, teachers get stuck with responsibilities not in their job description...no wonder so many quit.
Its antithetical to the American dream (i.e. an equal starting point for everyone) but we must provide different paths better suited to acknowledging reality and providing reasonable outcomes. Staff them with job descriptions fitting the actual need, and work from there.
This 2021 article strikes me as mostly a straw man and a veiled sales pitch.
It's rare that a Gifted Program simply gets eliminated due to inequity with no replacement. The school district almost always proposes an alternate program to replace it. (The author is the CEO and Founder of one, though he does acknowledge this near the end.)
The author also links to two examples of districts with reduced or eliminated Gifted Programs. But one article says the Anchorage program was cut because of a budget shortfall, and the other (Boston) said they suspended their advanced learning program only at the city-wide level mainly because COVID made it hard to administer!
Gifted children are rare enough that they can be dealt with one at a time. I see no need for special programs. In contrast handicapped children may require special attention.
OTOH I have seen students unwilling to attend a particular school b/c it has a reputation for behavioral problems and also low testing scores. So best spend money on improving education for all.
I would like to see more usage of an old tradition: better students helping others during class. This promotes cameraderie and provides different perspectives for both parties. It always helps to "stand in another man's shoes" and see the world from that new perspective.
So why not have the normal needs students helping the children with learning dysfunctions?
Promote that camaraderie all the way down. Let them see what it's like in another's shoes. Etc. All of your arguments for putting the gifted in normal classes, but applied to normal students and children with learning dysfunctions.
Gifted students are special needs students. They exist on the entire other end of the spectrum than those with learning dysfunctions.
This is how you demonstrate that you should not be making decisions about childhood education in two answers.
What you are advocating is to essentially make every class a special education class serving the students with the lowest abilities. This won't bring those with learning dysfunctions up, it will only serve to bring the rest down while also building resentment towards those with dysfunctions.
And even gifted students need guidance. While they may be able to learn material on their own, knowing what material exists isn't something that is granted to one at birth. And it's not a guarantee that their interests will always align with what is necessary to learn.
Your statements are also kind of contradictory. You want to eliminated gifted education and put those students in normal classrooms. When I ask if you'd be fine with putting normal students in classes with those with dysfunctions with the explicit goal of helping those students, you said fine. But then you said gifted students can take care of themselves. So why would they go to class in the first place.
So, by your answers, you want to eliminate resources for children with learning dysfunctions and allow gifted children to skip school if they want.
There's no way to reconcile the disparity between acknowledging that children with learning dysfunctions need additional resources and ignoring that gifted children are also a special case of student that need additional resources.
Either you wind up advocating for the complete elimination of additional resources, acknowledging that not all students need all the same resources, or trying to pretzel yourself in a way where you can knock the gifted children down a peg while keeping the children with dysfunctions away from the general classes.
sometimes that can work but I have my doubts as to it being a good general policy. not at all guaranteed that it promotes camaraderie, over, say being called arrogant, teacher's pet, and ostracized by the others as 'too good'.
Kids should be able to form friendships with those at different levels and help their friends, but shouldn't be asked to be their teachers or mentors. it's incredibly unfair to require students in the class to function as teachers. They are there to learn, and if they've learned everything on the curriculum, they should be able to learn more.
Teachers used to handle this by letting the kids have 'free time' after assignments to go to the library, or whatever. Gifted programs do this even better by putting them in a class with kids at a similar level so they are less likely to need special treatment or to be called 'smart'. This can actually help them realize early in life that they aren't automatically special because they're at the top of their class.
This is a tradition that can go the way of other great old traditions like catching polio. In my experience it did nothing but find a way for me to be forced to spend more time with bullies and suffer trying to explain something to them that they were decidedly uninterested in learning.
My quick take on "gifted" programs.
* These are really supposed to be for kids that learn differently, not necessarily "smarter".
* The percentage of kids in these programs is higher than should be expected.
* The number of kids that happen to have teacher parents or some possible inside track seems high.
I think people hear "gifted" and think they are being left out, but that's not supposed to be the case. Sort of the difference between classroom and home school, sometimes one works better for a kid than the other, not that one is necessarily better than the other.
If equity is the goal, schools should spend some $$ providing extra tutoring for kids when they are younger..especially for kids with potential. But we can't have that because that may require a little more tax $.
'If equity is the concern, we should also name the inequitable reality that parents with means will always find a way to ensure their children receive whatever out-of-school enrichment resources their children need. My greatest concern? The admirable but demonstrably false notion that school systems can fully implement an “all kids are gifted” framework that attempts to address the issue of eliminating the need for specialized gifted programming.'
Very often equity at all cost means leveling down everybody. It also feels a bit contradictory to privilege already gifted students with a programme though.
I don't think it should be privilege to receive an education that challenges you. Punishing the kids for the sins of being born to "privilege" doesn't seem fair. And if kids of privilege are the only ones in the gifted program, you're not doing it right, which is the point of TFA.
It has been decades since I was in school. I was in the gifted program and found it to be an utter waste of time. My daughter is now in a gifted program and we both find it to be an utter waste of time. I attended a school in a middle class area and my daughter attends a school in a fairly wealthy area. Is there any studies which show a benefit to gifted programs in schools which are adequately funded?
A lot of my friends in the city I went to college in would have been on the "equity" side of this debate as well, until they had kids themselves. It dawned on them that their kids in public schools may not be able to get algebra in eighth grade anymore. And good luck with long division. So after they realized their kids will get a worse math education than they had, they changed their tune.
Most progressives end up changing their tune on all their major ideas when they collide with reality. For example, San Francisco last night booted the progressive soft-on-crime DA because of the increasing crime rate. Seattle recently saw increases in crime and had to walk back their tune on getting rid of law enforcement. Progressive ideas simply do not work in reality. Be it on law enforcement, dissolution of borders, dissolution of merit-based systems, equity as pertains to gifted programs...I've not seen a single progressive idea produce any good results when implemented.
I'm hoping the SF DA recall election is a sign that we're going to see the pendulum swing in the other direction as more people realize that the progressive platform is toxic trash.
I'm not sure at the end of the day there's such a thing as 'intelligence', in terms of how we talk about it, like some sort of RPG stat. In my experience, kids aren't really 'smarter' than other kids, they have learning styles and brain patterns that match up with how the courses are run.
Anecdotes, I know, but I was terrible at math compared to the kids in high school who could all just memorize and regurgitate (I have ADHD & very poor working memory, and no random-access). These kids also regularly looked up answers to future quizzes they found online and bsed their way through. But, in college, which involves a more abstract and rigorous (and dare I say meaningful) understanding of the material, I excelled while many of my former colleagues fell behind as these were 'new problems' they couldn't just look up because they didn't have answers.
My point is intelligence is not a scalar axis in which some people are 'gifted' and some people are not, it's a multidimensional series of mental configurations that must be adapted to in the classroom and outside. Hire better teachers and pay them more is the only concrete thing I can think of. Gifted programs aren't the way as they're entirely arbitrary to a specific environment. The wrong teacher for the right student will ultimately make the student worse for it, and these programs don't account for how truly uninspired some teachers can be. Not to mention parents, or availability of learning materials, quality of libraries, etc etc.
It's always worse in (US) election years, and I think it's inevitable for all online discussion sites. When people conflate their identity with their political beliefs, everything becomes political.
That said, HN has historically done a very good job in policing this through the vigilance of its admin team. I wouldn't be surprised if this discussion pales in comparison to the stuff they've axed.
When people talk about Communism, they imagine everybody being equally rich. Well, the reality showed us that Communism can only make people equally poor and miserable. Similarly, liberalism tries to make everybody equally stupid, not equally smart! But, as we know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions!
As a father of a decently-gifted son who gets bored to death at school and who's bombarded with brainless homework to stay "out of trouble" when not in school, I can tell the California education is the worst I can imagine in a civilized country!
I've never understood this approach of "eliminating gifted programs" due to equity concerns. Why not just implement something along the lines of affirmative action policies - make sure the demographics gifted programs roughly match the demographics of the school district?
This assumes that current admissions are purely meritocratic, when, as the article points out, they're not:
> Black students are 66% less likely to be identified as gifted compared to white students with similar test scores
But even if we supposed that the top 10% of Black students were slightly less qualified than the top 10% of White students (say, due to socioeconomic factors), the program would simply adjust towards the mean student. So maybe the program slows down a bit, but it's still an accelerated program, and now it's helping to correct those socioeconomic disparities.
The only case where this argument would break down is if the top 10% of Black students were _severely_ less qualified than the top 10% of White students, in which case the program would likely fail. But it seems pretty clear that this isn't the case.
We should not be punishing smart kids even if some of those smarts may be due to income inequality that may have some basis in racial inequality. It's not the kid's fault that their grandparents generation thought that lower taxes were better than good governance.
Eliminating accelerated or gifted programs doesn't create equality any more than mandating a uniform maximum height will stop people from growing past 2 meters in height. All it does it rob society at large from the possibility of the exceptionally able from realizing their potential sooner. If we're willing, as a body politic, to eschew the possibility of an exceptional learner from discovering things like the cure for cancer in the name of equity then we'll reap the fruit of that collective decision.
I will agree 100% that words and terms are being thrown around without adequate or agreed upon definition of terms. Without an agreement on the definition of the words being used it's pretty much impossible to have a cogent exchange of ideas.
But Equity also argues for treating people differently depending on their needs. Eliminating gifted programs so that all students are treated the same seems to me to be far closer to the equality bucket than any equity one.
Comrade I see you have formed some misinformations, please allow me to reeducate you. The pupil-with-non-intrinsically-greater-test-performance does not need increased schooling, as she already has too much. To increase equity and goodwill in our society, it is best for the student to receive less education.
That gifted students are disproportionately white or Asian reflects the value placed on education not racism. Outcomes will never be equal in a fair society. Provide equal opportunity. Those that take advantage will thrive. Those that don't, will not.
We should spend more on gifted programs, not less. These are the kids with the most potential push society forward, and they should get every opportunity to flourish to the greatest extent possible, even if they have the great misfortune of being born white.
Eliminating “gifted” programs because they offend the racial sensibilities of the managerial class is a blatant exercise in privilege and ladder-pulling.
I think it’s grotesque how many privileged people are happily destroying the lives of others (often, those they pretend to care about) so they don’t have to think critically about or be uncomfortable thinking about race.
Seattle is the epitome of “privileged White liberals hurt everyone for their comfort”:
I'm pretty socially conservative, and the equality-of-outcome mindset is very unintuitive for me.
It's very tempting (edit: for me) to lazily rest on the caricature, "I don't care how many people I hurt, as long as I can help just one!"
Despite that, or maybe because of that, I make a conscious effort to understand where the other side is coming from. I figure there's little chance of finding a compromise if I can't even comprehend their viewpoint.
So far I haven't been very successful. Maybe it's because the chasm is so large regarding values, understandings of human nature, predictions about how things will play out, etc. Or maybe I have blind spots that get in the way.
I wish I were better at this. It seems like at a very zoomed-out level we want similar things.
> I figure there's little chance of finding a compromise if I can't even comprehend their viewpoint.
I understand it just fine, but there’s a fundamental disagreement, in that I don’t support racism nor view people in terms of “racial tribes” — while proponents of equity do. That’s the frame they’re working from when they say denying an Asian student a place at Harvard in favor of a less qualified black applicant is “good”: that it’s okay to harm that person because they’re yellow and we need to balance between yellows and blacks — to accomplish their Utopian vision. Collectivism when applied to race inevitably leads to institutional racism.
I don’t believe that’s something we need to “compromise” on: institutional racism was a disaster when we tried it before and modern attempts (eg, Netflix and Disney catering to those views) show that bigotry is widely unpopular and a poor way to run a company.
Sometimes you just have to say “bigotry is wrong and we’re not trying it again — no matter how you dress it up in the language of civil rights or how righteous you feel about being a bigot”.
They aren't saying that. They are recognizing that many forms of power in society are zero sum. There are plenty of ways to get a great education but only one Harvard and a limited amount of power to be distributed via an institution like Harvard. You and many like you believe that access to these institutions should be gatekeeped via a meritocracy. The supporters of this form of affirmative action recognize that in a system where black/latino/indigenous students have structural disadvantages (poverty, prejudice, health, etc) that any pure meritocracy leads to a system where their racial group possesses disproportionately less power vs their population.
The reason you see that as "racial tribes" is that you fundamentally are underestimating how much marginalized communities distrust communities outside of their own. Black people do not trust that if Asian students go to Harvard and gain positions of power that those adults will protect their interests. They want their own in those positions.
> underestimating how much marginalized communities distrust communities outside of their own. Black people do not trust that if Asian students go to Harvard and gain positions of power that those adults will protect their interests. They want their own in those positions.
I can't adopt this level of cynicism, or else I'd have to conclude that multi-ethnic societies are doomed to fall apart like Yugoslavia, or remain together using synthetic means like the Lebanese National Pact⁰, which specifies power sharing with agreements like
* The Prime Minister of the Republic always be a Sunni Muslim.
* The Speaker of the Parliament always be a Shia Muslim.
* The Deputy Speaker of the Parliament and the Deputy Prime Minister always be Greek Orthodox Christian.
> The supporters of this form of affirmative action recognize that in a system where black/latino/indigenous students have structural disadvantages (poverty, prejudice, health, etc) that any pure meritocracy leads to a system where their racial group possesses disproportionately less power vs their population.
You’re describing why you believe it’s okay to discriminate against that Asian student because there’s “too many yellows, not enough blacks”.
You’re also ignoring that they’re choosing to engage in institutional racism rather than utilize programs such as meritocracy + individual aid, which automatically counter any “structural disadvantages” — that is, they’re choosing racism when better alternatives exist.
> The reason you see that as "racial tribes" is that you fundamentally are underestimating how much marginalized communities distrust communities outside of their own. Black people do not trust that if Asian students go to Harvard and gain positions of power that those adults will protect their interests. They want their own in those positions.
You just described racism and a belief in racial tribes — exactly what I said was driving this.
> They aren't saying that.
You start off disagreeing — and then go on to describe exactly what I said.
> You’re describing why you believe it’s okay to discriminate against that Asian student because there’s “too many yellows, not enough blacks”.
Not really. If intelligence is equal between races and a system is an actual meritocracy, then the balance between groups should be the same. One group outperforming indicates a difference in circumstances. If you believe those circumstances aren't because of disadvantages then you either believe one group is inherently more capable than the other, one group works harder than the other, or that one group has a more effective culture. Generally, there is a lot of animosity within the black community toward ̶A̶s̶i̶a̶n̶ people who tend to believe any of the above (because it is pretty common amongst racist).
> You’re also ignoring that they’re choosing to engage in institutional racism rather than utilize programs such as meritocracy + individual aid, which automatically counter any “structural disadvantages” — and is in sharp contrast to their proposed racist system that rewards privileged blacks ahead of poor Asians. One of the many reasons such racist systems fail, in practice: they don’t confront the issue you claim they address.
Are you arguing structural disadvantages are not real? are you arguing that the issue in the black community is effort? if the issue isn't structural disadvantages, what do you think they are?
> You just described racism and a belief in racial tribes — exactly what I said was driving this ... You start off disagreeing — and then go on to describe exactly what I said.
I'm disagreeing with the policy as an effective way to address a set of issues. I never said I disagreed with the idea that there are tribes. Tribes are going to exist as long as we live in a society that offers members of different tribes different opportunities and experiences within society. The way to fix that is not to just pretend that doesn't exist. A meritocracy can't exist until everyone within a society believes they have a fair chance to participate in it and it is not controversial to say most black people do not believe that is the status quo. You are choosing to see this as people trying to take something away from you when its really a bunch of people lashing out over the fact that the system was never fair in the first place.
> If you believe those circumstances aren't because of disadvantages then you either believe one group is inherently more capable than the other, one group works harder than the other, or that one group has a more effective culture.
The more blindingly obvious conclusion is study time among asians is far higher than all other races. [0]
> Generally, there is a lot of animosity within the black community toward ̶A̶s̶i̶a̶n̶ people who tend to believe any of the above (because it is pretty common amongst racist).
just so we can be perfectly clear, is the point you are trying to defend, that the differences circumstances of black people in America as compared to Asians can be explained with work ethic?
Absolutely there is but the way that those outside the group make it seem is that we're 100% responsible for how the culture that exists got to where it is. The mainstream culture has problems but a lot of those problems are the result of historical inequities. It needs to be fixed but all of American society needs to see it as something they are also responsible for fixing and not fixing by simply pushing people to adopt the cultural norms of another group of people.
> There are plenty of ways to get a great education but only one Harvard
We had only one Harvard when the country's population was quite a bit smaller. Perhaps, instead of the zero-sum struggle for Harvard attendance, we should be working to create new Harvards. We have the oversupply of academics.
> Perhaps, instead of the zero-sum struggle for Harvard attendance, we should be working to create new Harvards.
That takes not dis-investing in public higher ed to the degree we did during the 2008 recession. It takes decades to build a new R1 research institution, and a commitment of large sums of money over that time. Rockefeller created the University of Chicago, Leyland Stanford his namesake, where are Buffet, Bloomberg, Walton, Mars, and Gates Universities? That could be a good use of some of the modern billionaire money, if we're not going to spend tax dollars on new R1 institutions.
> It's hard to comprehend disinvestment given that tuitions have increased 10x over a few decades, but
Disinvestement is the exact reason tuition has increased. The discount funded by state legistatures is being reduced, so tuition has to go up to balance the books.
Equality of outcome simply isn't a rational value, because it can be achieved by bringing down the achievers, as well as bringing up the disadvantaged. When people call for that, they're most charitably engaging in very imprecise thinking.
The problem is not privilege but its expansion. Continuously and responsibly raising the bar and the expansion of the tent should be the goal and will lead to contribute to the contributed expansion of prosperity.
I would have loved to continue reading this, but he immediately claimed that "Black students are 66% less likely to be identified as gifted compared to white students with similar test scores". I clicked the link that supposedly contained the paper to back this up. The link takes you here[0].
That's a bit annoying since it doesn't take me directly to the source, but that's fine. Then I read the article and it says: "...found black students were 66 percent less likely to be assigned to a gifted program as white students. A black student whose test scores were on par with a white peer was still half as likely to be assigned to a gifted classroom." So, immediately the author of this original article saw the statistic 66% and the phrase "on par with test scores", and immediately conflated the two. According to this statement, it sounds like black students are actually 50% less likely to be identified as gifted with similar test scores.
I'm going to assume that's just an artifact of non-diligent research and not a blatant lie. Well, I'm still curious where these stats come from, so let's see where this article in the Tennesseean is sourcing this stuff from. They've got several links on this article and... every single link, with the exception of the link to a randomly named professor at Vanderbilt, lead to other articles on the Tennessean. Let's see if we can find where they obtained these stats from.
Alright, it looks like this is where they got it from[1], but I can't be 100% sure. This actually has a link to the paper as well[2]. It also has a nice disclaimer at the bottom of the article:
> One such additional factor impacting minority assignment to gifted programs is the availability of these programs in schools attended by minority students. Black students are less likely overall to attend schools that provide gifted programs. Ninety percent of white, 93 percent of Hispanic, and 91 percent of Asian elementary students attend schools with gifted programs, while only 83 percent of African American students do.
In other words, when the researchers took test scores into account for Hispanic students vs white students, the differences in the probability of being selected for a gifted program based on race reduced to 0%. With black students, they (seemingly) did not take into account whether a school even offered a gifted program. So they lumped together all the students who may not have had access to a gifted program, and then used that to conclude that teachers are racist and ignoring test scores.
Right off the bat I'm done with this article. If you're going to cite research, then cite the actual paper first of all. Second, look at how they gathered the data. Once you take the anomalies into account, it looks like we may not have racist teachers, but rather incomplete data. I wish we could just have an honest conversation about this stuff instead of all this stupid indirection and trying to hide the actual research being done because it doesn't fully support your claims.
The big issue here is a lot of black students don't have access to gifted programs, but instead we're fighting "racist" teachers that don't exist.
> A black student whose test scores were on par with a white peer was still half as likely to be assigned to a gifted classroom.
... Which would indeed be explained by the lack of gifted program at schools (can't assign a kid to a class that doesn't exists).
But there's also something the authors are omitting here: parental involvement. It's still the parent's decision to place their kid in a gifted program. And if there's no gifted program at the child's current school the parent will have to take the initiative to transfer his child to another school (and the child will probably object to it seeing as it means losing all his friends).
I completely agree. There's definitely visible disparity in many aspects of life between different races in America, and I wish people would stop jumping to the conclusion that it must be because of racism. If we actually want to solve this issue and help our neighbors and communities, we need to be looking for the true problems.
Parental involvement seems to be a large problem, as well as the lack of access to gifted programs in this case.
I have read so many of these types of arguments but why is it so hard to find the pro argument? Where are the proponent's rebuttals and counterarguments?
Every time I read this stuff I don’t get it, it always feels like some form of missing the forest for the trees when you try and make determinations based off of percentages/ratios of groups rather than keeping it about the individual.
Uplift the individual first, trying to tweak things just to pump your numbers up seems like missing the point. I would rather treat education on a more personal outcome level than to treat it like a retail shop where I’m just trying to boost sales to meet some number/category goals.
(I think something similar can be said about this concept when it comes to politicians on TV recommending medical treatments or vaccines “for everyone” which I think is worth mentioning to help frame what I am getting at here but that’s another story.)
Boing Boing never ended up importing the comments from back then, and when I reached out to a contact about writing a follow up, the entire site was DDOSed.
Too many teachers purposefully abuse the gifted, then react irrationally to perfectly reasonable responses.
(I wasn't paid, and they put it out without my opt in, though to be fair, the editor did quite a bit of editing and free graphics work when they could have thrown the text up as is - a few of the wording changes were probably a good thing, looking back with the wisdom of a 30 something.)
On the other hand, never once have the folks who abused me ever apologized, and they continue to gaslight me and obstruct me to the point I'm considering moving to Italy.
I'm really sick of rude people, and I know it's hypocritical given some of the comments I make on the internet, but from early on in life I've had perpetual issues with folks who have a very high standard for my behavior, but not their own.
I have literal scars from some of what they did, but I also have enemies in the education and medical community who continue to engage in illegal, retaliatory behavior for my first amendment protected free speech.
I cannot emphasize enough how badly it backfired that neoliberals engineered society around the idea that you can't interact with people without permission, then melted down when my response, due to COVID, was basically "Fine, you're right, I have anger issues. I'm also not your caregiver, so keep back six feet."
So this is a topic I have all kinds of interest and experience with.
I live in one of those top 100 zipcodes of USA with very small school district. It's plenty diverse racially but completely homogenous financially (i.e. pretty much everyone is rich). I have two kids just a year apart. One just barely didn't make it into gifted & talented program at grade 3, and another one definitely did, and has been in one since then. [Edit] oh and I was in gifted/advanced class myself from grade 7 on, but not here, but in Russia.
Plenty of parents pushed very hard for the kids to test into the gifted program, getting kids tutors and repeatedly testing in. There was one kid I remember who was bright as all get out but a complete asshole in social circumstances that apparently tested 3 times by his parents until he made it (2 highly focused doctors). My kid that tested in actually didn't start in it, but then about a month into 3rd grade complained that he was bored and we were able to move him in.
We've been involved with the teachers on both regular and gifted track. We - and every parent with child in gifted class - are not happy about our school sunsetting it for the district. No teachers - certainly no teachers of advanced classes - were consulted on this effort. None of them are getting any additional help in now trying to teach to all levels, and result will be (already is) a dilution of quality all around.
As with many schools everywhere, and with covid helping, there are some kids departing towards private education where your money talks and you do whatever. Where I live is increasingly unaffordable, too, so we have reduced enrollment because there are just less kids. I do fine but am not at economic place to afford private education, my offer to kids is where I live, which even with the dilution is still excellent education.
We (and almost every parent around us) are very engaged with schools with volunteering and additional funding. In fact I am a treasurer of the schools foundation that donates up to a $1 million/year to school for all kinds of things, mostly general funding. That tends to help but really, even our little district needs like extra ~$20mil to fund what we're supposed to.
Anyhow, on cleverness nd equity, what it boils down to me is that the world is becoming just one big lake now with talent being increasingly able to accrue huge benefits. This talent needs education and people who want best for their kids (including me) will do whatever is necessary to get that. This is why there is extra tutoring in china and private schools in USA and fancy boarding schools in UK for $$$. If public schools do remove this equity stuff, it'll just float via money to those other areas. It isn't bad/good, it just is.
Anyhow, a bit of a rant/laundry list, but here you have it.
the phrase 'luxury beliefs' is over- and wrongly- used , but it is useful in the sense that luxuries are one of the first things to dispense during crises.
Gifted kids can be quite a force of good and bad. Probably better ROI to keep them on the path towards the good regardless of the amount of pigment in their skin.
There are so many topics that are hard to talk about nowadays without getting into politics but politics and structural inequality are at the core of this.
For the benefit of non-US readers, know that how the US funds public education (K-12) is rather unique. It's done through property taxes essentially. Depending on your state and city your property taxes can vary a lot with the same value property.
But what this means is the wealthier localities have more tax revenue and thus better schools. This can be a vicious cycle of improving property values by having better schools and thus generating more tax revenue and so on. I say "vicious" because it is absolutely exclusionary to lower-income people who cannot possibly afford to live in these areas. And that's by design.
Twenty years ago Bush (43) passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which many dubbed the No Child Gets Ahead Act. A lot of this was also in the name of "equity".
I know people who send their children to public schools in NYC. NYC seems to be in the mood to eliminate these "gifted" programs because of "equity" too. The result? Those who can afford to send their children to private schools will. For those who are left, there are no more gifted programs.
> how the US funds public education (K-12) is rather unique. It's done through property taxes essentially. Depending on your state and city your property taxes can vary a lot with the same value property. But what this means is the wealthier localities have more tax revenue and thus better schools.
This is an oft repeated myth. In addition to property taxes, school funding is supplemented by state and federal budgets, in inverse proportion to property taxes, so that racial differences in per-pupil funding are negligible:
> Yet race remains related to funding disparities and schooling experiences in ways that raise concerns about the role of school finance in perpetuating racial opportunity gaps.
What you are pulling out seems to be narrowly-focused and highly-contextualized.
Consider [1]:
> Property taxation and school funding are closely linked in the United States. In 2018–2019, public education revenue totaled $771 billion. Nearly half (47 percent) came from state governments, slightly less than half (45 percent) from local government sources, and a modest share (8 percent) from the federal government. Of the local revenue, about 36 percent came from property taxes. The remaining 8.9 percent was generated from other taxes; fees and charges for things like school lunches and athletic events; and contributions from individuals, organizations, or businesses.
> What you are pulling out seems to be narrowly-focused and highly-contextualized.
It's the most straight-forward and objective measure. That the main result of a paper would be omitted from the abstract and "highly-contextualized" is not surprising, given social science's bias. If a study gets the 'wrong' findings, it tends to be rejected:
The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...
Suggesting that the authors intentionally omitted the main result of their study from the abstract and hid it under layers of obfuscating details for sharp-eyed readers to uncover is basically a conspiracy theory. The far more straightforward explanation is that the authors saw it as one fact among many that contributed to their overall conclusion stated in the abstract.
It's not a conspiracy theory, but an empirically validated fact, as the study in my link showed. It is not the only one with such findings:
Ceci et al. (1985) found a similar pattern. Research proposals hypothesizing either "reverse discrimination" (i.e., against White males) or conventional discrimination (i.e., against ethnic minorities) were submitted to 150 Internal Review Boards. Everything else about the proposals was held constant. The "reverse discrimination" proposals were approved less often than the conventional discrimination proposals. - https://jsis.washington.edu/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/...
Yes, but a study's conclusion isn't preordained. It's entirely possible for authors to end up disproving their hypothesis. So it doesn't follow that, because more research proposals about "reverse discrimination" were rejected, then more studies concluding "reverse racism" (holding all else constant) would be rejected.
Yes, both are covered. Studies that specifically look for inconvenient facts don't get funded, and studies that accidentally find them don't get published.
Compare California and Massachusetts. It seems to demonstrate the point of the poster you replied to. Despite MA relying nearly twice as much on property tax, as state revenue versus California, it seems to have better outcomes. Mostly because as the article discusses, MA appears to use targeted transfers from state revenue to poor districts.
And, as is often the case, there's a very loose relationship in Massachusetts between per-student spend and educational outcomes as measured by tests. It's common for urban districts in particular to have high spend and generally poor outcomes.
Property tax in California has its own history and complications that makes it difficult to compare California's funding of things based on property tax to anywhere else in the US.
I've taken a close look at the numbers for individual schools in my tri-state area, (NY, NJ, PA) and from my estimate it seems that lower performing schools far and away have the highest per student budgets.
It is much more expensive to teach and support the children at lower performing schools than it is at higher performing schools. Lower performing schools are also providing significant front line social support services for the communities they serve, including food, trauma counseling, sometimes medical intervention, extreme behavior management. None of that is cheap.
Students/families at higher performing schools have far lower need for support systems.
- in higher performing schools, parents fund a number expenses directly through a very active PTA, so those expenses don't show up in the school's official spending per pupil, while
- at lower performing schools with less active and more impoverished PTAs, those same expenses must be funded by school budgets, driving up their official per-pupil spending.
Absolutely, but the PTA at the higher performing (higher income) school pays for additional educational programs, like art, second language, science, etc. This amount is referred to in the PTA language as "the gap" in public funding for basics.
At the low performing school, the extra public funds received are often paying for support staff for serious social issues. There is little budget for the "nice to haves", and even when there is, the school staff has it's hands full managing the basics, so it's not always effectively utilized.
The lower performing schools also tend to be older and require more maintenance and repairs than newer schools in wealthier areas. Not all of that additional per-pupil funding makes it to the classroom.
The study I linked (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724...) addresses this in table 1, page 8. Surprisingly, Black pupils get on average $10 less "infrastructure" expenditures, and $150 more "instructional" expenditures compared to White. The table breaks the spending down into 5 different categories, but in all of them, the differences are negligible. The $150 instructional expenditure difference is the largest.
> The lower performing schools also tend to be older and require more maintenance and repairs than newer schools in wealthier areas.
Sure, that's a factor too, but I'd still call it a social service issue since it ultimately results from the historical disinvestment in the communities that today have low performing schools.
There are reasons that the roofs didn't get repaired and the lead pipes didn't get replaced in those schools: because middle income people took their lives, businesses, and tax dollars out of those communities starting in the late 1960s, both by migrating to newly built suburbs, and also by ensuring their tax dollars never went toward the communities they left.
Look up the opposition to "Robin Hood" school funding from the 80s and 90s. Where I grew up it was largely about keeping suburban tax dollars out of inner-city school districts.
A difference in maintenance costs is not necessarily a consequence of disinvestment... it could simply be that lower performing schools are more likely to be urban, and in urban areas everything related to the construction and maintenance of buildings, whether old or new, is more expensive (not to mention admin salaries, etc.). Or it could be that plus what you say for a double wammy at some schools. I'm just brainstorming reasonable seeming hypotheses that you could imagine trying to rule out with the right dataset.
Except that this whole movement is now reversing. These communities are starting to gentrify and grow rich - to the horror of progressive activists everywhere! Damned if you do, damned if you don't. You just can't win!
> It is much more expensive to teach and support the children at lower performing schools
Blame education schools and their failing "every student can simply learn their math on their own!" approach. Total self-serving garbage, devised to cater to the ego of naïve prospective teachers and their expectation of not doing any real teaching work.
Also you tend to find daycare programs for teenage mothers at poorer schools. Rich parents get their children abortions, while poor children give birth to their babies.
This is an oft-repeated myth, and in fact the opposite is true.
"there are substantial disparities in abortion rates in the United States, with low-income women and women of color having higher rates than affluent and White women"
If the incidence rate of teenage pregnancy amongst low-income women is significantly higher, then women amongst this group can simultaneously have more abortions AND be teenaged mothers completing schooling vs other groups.
Absolutely—my point is that these schools aren't behind the "good" ones, funding-wise, and even pay better.
Past a certain not-that-high point, giving schools more money doesn't help them much.
There's probably some astronomically-high level of funding that would help, past some tipping point, by enabling things like single-digit class sizes, tons of social workers and counselors, extensive home-outreach programs, et c., to the point that the staff-to-student ratio is 1:5 or better, but AFAIK no-one's tried that in public schools (that's not too far off from how lots of elite private schools, operate, though, except that they don't need the army of social workers or home-outreach or any of that)
Ever had a 3rd grader threaten to stab you, and look like they really mean it? A second grader call you the c-word? That kind of thing happening basically every day, often multiple times a day?
Credible threats of gang violence on a regular basis. School-wide lockdowns with some regularity due to threats of violence, or violence that has actually occurred. Admin with extremely limited options to deal with any of this, and having to triage their discipline pretty hard, plus having little to no support from home to back any of it up (this is why the stuff in the first paragraph happens constantly—no time or community/parental willpower to deal with it, given the rest of what's going on). Watching the kids suffering from the same shit day after day, plus all the usually-awful stuff they have going on at home, and not being able to do much about it. Seeing kids die or end up in the hospital with alarming regularity. Distressingly young kids plainly high or drunk in class.
Not many people can do that without burning out or giving up and half-assing everything, very quickly.
Me neither, because I don't live in the part of town ~10 miles away where this is the case.
Why don't I live there, even though the location would be more convenient and has far more nearby parks and businesses, the housing is dirt-cheap, they have better access to public transit than we do, the area's more walkable/bike-able, et c? The schools are bad.
Why are the schools bad? Because people like me (that is, people whose kids have a low-stress life outside of school) won't move there. Digging out of that hole is nearly impossible. It amounts to "gentrify things all to hell" (which just shifts the problem around rather than actually solving it) or "fix huge social and economic problems the US has".
In either case, you can't do much about it by focusing on the schools themselves.
I’ve recently become friends with someone from the inner city “hood”. It’s just unbelievable. Like someone below said, it’s not about race as much as poverty. The sad thing from what I’ve seen is the culture is self-destructive. Instead of trying to help each other up and out, many pull others back down (economically, socially, etc). I used to naively think I had answers, but after seeing the breath and depth of the problem I have no idea what would help.
Lowkey I think the current education system has evolved from communities that allowed teachers to beat their kids to teach obedience. that obedience was passed down through generations in those communities establishing a culture of obedience for teachers. The current system, although non-violent, is still heavily leveraging the culture of obedience from students. when a kid is disobedient, usually the above mentioned communities threaten to move the kid into an environment where the obedience culture is even more strict as a result of even more violent punishment historically. Early days Public school teachers might lightly smack you with a ruler, early catholic school teachers might spank you, and early military school teachers might straight up beat the shit out of you.
So I think by extending the current system to areas in poverty that do not have an established culture of obedience means we have to either change the system or start beating kids again imo. I vote for the former, obviously.
The crab mentality goes hand-in-hand with widespread poverty and lack of community development. In schooling it shows up as bullying those who are most academically successful, for being "nerds" or "acting white".
You didn't even get to the covid restrictions, and parents calling teachers anti-American and traitors and Nazis for supporting mask and vaccine mandates. Teachers were getting death threats after being told they were "essential workers" for a year. Meanwhile they have to use their own funds to buy their own body armor, because they have to buy that along with pencils and paper now.
Teachers are not always 100% sympathetic. When courts in Illinois shot down school mask mandates, teachers at a high school near me retaliated by sequestering unmasked students in a room and not teaching them.
This is correlated with poverty, not race, per se- it's all about the culture of the students. A relative of a friend is a teacher in rural Iowa, an almost all white school. She teaches young students who have no concept of respect for authority or value in learning- getting cussed out by a kindergartener (ages 4-5) is not exactly an unusual thing she has to deal with.
As kids get older, they fall into drugs and / or have kids of their own and / or are told they'll never get into higher education and / or they don't need higher education, they'll just get a low skill job like everyone else in town.
Education for the sake of education really isn't strongly valued by a lot of parents, who have their own struggles and can't really help with homework much past middle school.
Compare all of this with teaching in an area that is more middle or upper class- kids are usually more eager to learn, have fewer discipline problems, and as they get older many know they need to try so they can get into a community college or university.
Yes, poverty not race. I grew up below the poverty line in a bad neighborhood in Brooklyn. My neighborhood was the background in Hubert Selby Jr.'s, "Last Exit to Brooklyn". My friends were Irish, Italian, Dominican, and Puerto Rican mainly. There were gangs, drugs, violence, throughout my whole childhood in and outside of my family. My parents never finished high school. All of my inner core of friends did OK, because their parents instilled values in them regardless of all the crap around. BTW, without a phone, a TV in the early years, and of course decades before the internet, we were happy in our bubble. I didn't realize how bad it was until I started hopping on trains with my friends to NYC on the subway at 10 and 11 without our parents, and then the world popped open when I went to high school in NYC. Even my friend Junior's sister, who got pregnant at age 14, managed to finish high school there, and go on to college because of a two-parent household and grandma upstairs. I became an honor student, got accepted to major universities, and have been successful considering where I started. To me a lot is the negativity found everywhere. I still have friends from the baby carriage, and it just seems a lot of excuses are made when kids should be encouraged to rise up and try their best given the circumstances. I look at the preface of a book I still have, "The Boy Engineer: The Study of Engineering from Prehistoric Times to the Present (A Popular Mechanics Book Series)" (no gender wars please - the book is from the 50s!), and knowledge is seen as the key to the universe and doing anything you can imagine. I looked at my daughter's high school chemistry text and there is so much about the doomed earth, planet, life, which is OK to an extent given some real world issues, however, it dominates the narrative. Science is seen as limited and a point of view, not the wondrous thing that brought awe to me when I looked at the stars on my rooftop with binoculars with my Mom when I was 8 or 9. I shouldn't mention hearing gunshots one night with her on the roof, but I will for a bit of darkness for the doom-and-gloom types!
PS: I think putting education on such a high pedestal has demeaned the integrity and honor of working with your hands. I also believe it was a panacea given to the poor as a carrot, and is not the only way out of poverty. Hard work counts!
Not who you were replying to, but my grandmother was a teacher and specifically wanted to work in one of these schools to try to help the students in bad situations. She stopped teaching a while ago, but much of this likely still applies.
Basically, the students frequently don't do their homework, students would just not show up to class or outright just drop out, students misbehave more frequently (including violent behavior), parents care less (or at least act like it). The schools also tend to be in more dangerous areas. They had to lock the teachers' cars in a special lot to prevent vandalism and theft.
IMO the central problem with US schools isn't the schools. It's our broken policing and justice system, our bad social safety net, and our poor worker protection, among other things like the ongoing consequences of racist city planning. We will never move the needle very much, on school quality, by focusing on schools.
I'm not sure the broken policing and justice system account for a culture which glorifies violence, rejects education, promotes drug use, and encourages irresponsible procreation. In fact these things are relatively recent changes in poor urban culture, this isn't the mindset poor people had in the 50's (when policing and justice were much, much worse).
I'm not saying that these things are inherently "wrong" (save the violence), only that they can't be expected to produce the same outcomes as cultures which highly value education, nuclear family, sobriety, and hard work. This holds true no matter how much money you add. Any attempt to equalize outcomes without confronting this core reason is doomed.
It doesn't create a poor educational culture on its own, but excessive incarceration leads to more single-parent (even zero-parent, in a sense—think: living with aunts/uncles, grandparents, et c.) families, worse job opportunities, et c, while ineffectiveness at actually curbing crime (despite our high incarceration rate) leaves lots of these kinds of areas wracked with criminality and violence on top of the damage that our policing and punishment approaches do.
That and the school-to-prison pipeline are contributing to the overall problem of—at the heart of this issue—multi-generational, persistent slums. The justice system is far from the only problem, which is why I listed others and left things open-ended to account for the huge list of other things that contribute, but it's part of it. However, I don't think much can be done about it by addressing only issues with the justice system, absent broader social reforms.
Single parent households are perfectly capable of raising children who value education, cooperation, sobriety and non-violence. I would know, I grew up in one, as did many of my peers. The key difference was and continues to be culture. The question is who is accountable for culture? Is it "society", or the individuals who perpetuate that culture in their own households?
It can both be true that a particular single-parent household is very successful, and that if you study an entire population and control other variables, single-parent households are less successful than two-parent households.
Yes it can, but it doesn't follow that these studies are justification for removing accountability from individuals, their households, culture, and practices. Nor does it follow that the solutions are not found in changes to individual behaviour.
I'm not sure it is useless. If the problems are individual, not systemic, then the solutions lie with individual accountability, not systemic change, right?
My pet theory that 2-parent homes make a world of difference. Maybe if there was reliable male birth control there wouldn’t be so many single moms working 3 jobs because dad left and the children don’t have a second parental role model, or even a first because they never see mom.
Condoms are a very reliable form of male birth control. And, it may be hard to understand, but there are certain fairly popular subcultures where men brag about how many different kids they have with different women.
Because mainstream culture generally looks down upon "deadbeat dads" and doesn't celebrate impregnating multiple women?
Certainly, the first time someone told me they had 12 kids through 8 women, with more kids on the way, I was completely shocked. Even more shocked when I realized he was bragging about his masculinity, not lamenting "What have I done?!"
It's a factor among many. The other POV is that single parenthood matters less than you might expect, because others in the broader family or community can contribute to raising those kids. Which might actually work if you had that community orientation in the first place!
> According to Amato’s research, sociologists warn that many children of single parents are born into undesirable circumstances. These children have a higher likelihood of being poor, committing crimes or using drugs. Many sociologists agree that childhood’s adverse effects outlive youth.
I don't think you are correct. Parents not caring is probably one of the biggest issues.
My grandmother would call a student's parents on their home and work numbers multiple times over multiple weeks. She would even provide her home number and say they could call anytime, day or night.
Do you think she frequently got calls back? If you can't even take 20 minutes to call your kid's teacher then you don't care about getting your kid out of an area with bad policing and justice system, racism and bad jobs.
From what I’ve heard one of the biggest reason is students and parents who don’t care about education at all, who would actively disrupt others from learning and the teacher from teaching.
Yeah this is a fact. I moved from SF to a suburb of Sacramento. Our SF school was absolutely horrible (and the main reason we moved). Our suburban school has a much smaller per-student budget but the student body is mainly from families where the parents are skilled tradesmen, white collar workers (mainly Asian or Indian), and state government workers. These families instill very different values in their kids than we saw in San Francisco. Although the suburb is highly diverse, 35% White, 30% Asian, 20% Hispanic, 15% Black, the student body is excellent. The high school here regularly sends a couple dozen seniors to Ivy League schools, and another 30-40 students to the UC System.
And though they have few resources and a bad football team, the students have a chess club, robotics club, various study groups and college prep groups.
There is also a big difference in what the kids here are focused on. In SF there was so much chatter about politics, protests, gender identity, and sexuality. Out here kids just seem to be focused on studying and after school activities.
This comment is such peak HN. Maybe the people in SF don't care about these decadent bourgeois values that are so easily espoused, and would rather do their rightful part in fighting structures of oppression and injustice!
Values that produce measurably better life outcomes for participants.
> would rather do their rightful part
Refusing to participate thereby harming their own future and the community surrounding them. Or worse, actively encouraging others to reject values aligned with success.
> fighting structures of oppression and injustice
Fighting the most meritocratic system of governance we’ve had thus far in human history, whereby following values of success leads to success, whether you’re born here or elsewhere, and whatever your color, creed, or gender.
I am not sure if you’re being serious, but if you are, you should know advocating for crab bucket mentality does nothing to help the impoverished.
If that is what you believe, please continue to enjoy the wonderful and beautiful city of SF.
One of the great things about America is that we can separate ourselves into different communities and run our experiments. If your way is better you will have a better life.
I've just decided to choose a different path for my family. I truly wish you the best without sarcasm. I do hope the SF experiment succeeds, but after 20 years living there I feel, at least for me, its a total failure.
Sure. Title 1 schools, for example, get extra federal funding. They also have 40+% of students living in poverty. Some of that money goes to buy breakfast for kids who otherwise wouldn't have food to eat in the morning.
"State-Provided" funds are calculated by the LCFF (Local Control Funding Formula), which is a combination of both State and Local funds.
Depending on the district, if local funds is not enough to fund the district, then yes, state tax revenue steps in to provide the rest.
However, for districts where local funds is enough or exceeds the district need, then these these districts (referred to as "Basic Aid" or "Excess Revenue" districts) aren't provided state revenue, and they are able to keep the excess local revenue for their needs. (https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/ and https://www.saratogausd.org/Page/519)
In 2021, their total revenue was $169M, where $156M (92%) came from property taxes. This resulted in spending per pupil of $23,491, far exceeding the state medium of $16,042.
> This is an oft repeated myth. In addition to property taxes, school funding is supplemented by state and federal budgets, in inverse proportion to property taxes, so that racial differences in per-pupil funding are negligible:
This is not my experience. I chose a more expensive house with higher taxes because the schools are better. They are better funded than those in the surrounding areas. Sure the Federal Government gives free meals but my kids' books and chromebooks are always nice and new.
> my kids' books and chromebooks are always nice and new
There's plenty of evidence that parental attitudes are a big factor:
"Middle-class pupils do better because parents and schools put more effort into their education, according to a study [..] factors studied were the parents' interest in their children's education, measured by, for example, whether they read to their children or attended meetings with teachers"[0]
(Full disclosure: my wife and I read - and have read - to our kids almost every single night)
I'm just stating that my kids' elementary school is nicer than those in our county and definitely from my hometown. They do receive a lot more money than what my hometown spent.
We no longer read to our kids, and it makes me both happy and sad. Happy because they are voracious readers on their own, but sad because damn, childhood goes by quick...
Reading to my two-year-old every naptime/bedtime is one of my favorite parts of parenting. Appreciate this comment reminding me to really enjoy these precious moments!
Having done a similar analysis myself, here is what I found. Schools in wealthier areas have better results primarily because the support system at home is much stronger. I.e. A wealthy family's kids do better in school no matter where they go. Another factor, mostly in elementary school, is that wealthier areas get noticeably more volunteer activity from parents.
Many of the higher end schools in the area here (Bay Area) require volunteer fundraising, bake sales, volunteer time contribution, etc. precisely because property taxes aren’t enough and they get less than the other schools.
And the parents do it because they can (they have the ability to get the time off), and because they know it’s important in many ways.
I think sometimes we are quick to discount the affect that home life has on children's school performance. Part of the reason school's are better in wealthy areas is because children in wealthy areas tend to have better home life than children in poor areas.
What about differences in teacher salary? All of my kids' teachers have been superb. I agree with you that the outcomes of wealthy areas would be better due to many reasons outside of schools.
You can conclude from this that the schools are not better because of funding differences. You can try to come up with other reasons why this might be so, but don't point to funding.
The fact that my school provides chromebooks (while other schools in the same county do not) seems to be from a funding perspective. I'm not focusing on outcomes because I would expect people who can afford homes in my town can afford tutors and other resources.
Teachers in my town make ~10% more than in the schools that are two towns over in a predominantly minority town.
>I chose a more expensive house with higher taxes because the schools are better.
The schools are better, but if you look at per pupil spending I'm willing to bet it's not due to spending. Typically the worst schools get the most most money from federal and state sources, far outstripping any differences in property taxes.
Better schools are a function of better parental involvement, everything else is a distant second.
Myth or not, it’s not all about money. But as Americans we love to always reduce it to this axis.
My father was a very successful/loved elementary school teacher for 40+ years. For many of those he worked for the same school in the same district. In 25+ years he watched the demographics drift from the wealthier families in the districts to one of the backwaters. They got as much money as the other schools in the district. But financially stressed families provide a lot less support for their kids’ education. They don’t have stay at home parents who improve the room experience. They’re not as able to provide the volunteer support to participate in extracurricular activities like field trips and competitions and after school enrichment things. Parents who are in “just survive” mode will telegraph that approach to their kids’ schooling efforts. Parents who have discretionary bandwidth and appreciate that more education got them there, telegraph that to their kids.
Knowing nothing about this topic other than hearsay and the opinions of my elderly parents… both of them teachers in public high schools…
Do these per-pupil funding numbers have any meaning when your home and community are broken and one or both of your parents is an addict or incarcerated? Because it seems to me we’ve been acting with intent as a society to keep the families, homes, and communities of everyone not white and already wealthy a complete and utter shambles.
How can we expect decent, equitable outcomes given that the home life of significant percentages of students is essentially a path right to prison?
Every group claims the same targeting. "Everyone not white" is just being divisive. Go to a poor white area and you'll see the same drug addiction, broken home, incarceration problems. Is this your job to fix? Do you think the government has the inclination or the possibility of success in addressing these issues?
All that shows is the natural tendency toward persecution complexes and blaming failure on factors out of your control. Finding ways to make society promote personal responsibility, atomic families, etc would actually help. But that is the opposite of current culture of hedonism and "smashing traditional family structure" that gets complete entertainment and political backing.
You see the same things in both places because people are poor in both places. Often due to structural issues that the government could absolutely influence. For example, they could not sign a deal like NAFTA and keep manufacturing jobs within their borders. The could also provide social housing, subsidize medical care and education, set a reasonable minimum wage, etc. The government has enormous potential to positively impact people’s lives, but it doesn’t. It used to, but not anymore, because we’ve all been infected with Reagan’s “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.” brain worm. This mythology is bone deep in our national consciousness, to the point that we can’t even imagine an alternative anymore, even though examples of other countries doing it are scattered around the world. Government intervention can absolutely address the nihilistic tendencies you’ll often find amongst the multi-generational poor! It can do so by actually giving them an opportunity (en masse, not as the one person who made it out) to be participants in a world where they have dignity and inherent value, which is not the world they live in today. They won’t be fixed overnight, but they didn’t get that way overnight either! It took decades of disinvestment and neglect, and it will probably take a generation to make a meaningful impact. But it can and should be done.
> Do these per-pupil funding numbers have any meaning when your home and community are broken and one or both of your parents is an addict or incarcerated?
It's a vicious cycle, which can only be broken by building strong communities in those places. And we've mostly forgotten how to do this, because "lifestyle anarchism" has been way more popular than a genuine community orientation among intellectuals and influencers, since the 1960s or so. School funding is a band-aid.
Do these per-pupil funding numbers have any meaning when your home and community are broken and one or both of your parents is an addict or incarcerated?
No, school budgets only help the schools, they don't solve any other problems.
it seems to me we’ve been acting with intent as a society to keep the families, homes, and communities of everyone not white and already wealthy a complete and utter shambles.
Maybe I'm older, but it seems to me the exact opposite is happening. Over the last 40 years there has been an increasing number of minority families that have moved to wealthier, historically white neighborhoods. I think this is because of education, affirmative action, and a general shift of society to be less racist.
How can we expect decent, equitable outcomes given that the home life of significant percentages of students is essentially a path right to prison?
nobody has ever expected that.
There is still a lot of work to be done, but things have been moving in the right direction for a while now. It took a few hundred years to get here, don't expect it to be fixed in just over half a century.
My parents (and one step-parent) were also public school teachers, and after the first round of parent-teacher conferences, they could usually easily tell which students would sail through and excel, which ones would try but struggle, and which ones were going to actively harm the classroom environment--simply by meeting the parents (or for the latter group, observe that the parents never even showed up). This heuristic had nothing to do with school funding or the race of the student or parent.
You're excluding the fundraising capacity and ancillary services funded and paid for by the PTA.
Wealthy neighborhoods have PTA budgets that are in the hundreds of thousands/millions. They pay for after school activities, language immersion programs, music, sports, you name it.
It is shocking the discrepancy between neighborhoods in NYC. Average donation per pupil might be $20 in a poor neighborhood and $5,000 in a wealthy one.
We saw this first-hand in San Diego. We luckily found a place to rent in a pretty well-off area (Point Loma) and our kids elementary school regularly raised >$250,000 a year for the school (1st through 4th grades). When we moved to a more "normal" school in another state, we found their stretch goal was more like $30,000 and it took all year to get there. The first school paid for multiple extra teachers and aides, as well as lots of other benefits.
I'm not sure where the difference comes from, but it's there.
When I visit some public high schools in suburban CT, they look nicer than my college campus.
When I visit public schools in rural VA, they're a cluster of trailers and dilapidated structures that don't even have air conditioning, let less modern amenities.
So, maybe it's the taxes, or the highly active parents, or donations, but there's a visible difference, more than "$200" per student. Of course, how far and effective each dollar is WRT to outcomes is a different matter.
The conclusion of the study you linked seems to paint a slightly more complicated picture:
"We found evidence that between-district racial segregation is associated with racial disparities in school district spending, while between-district racial socioeconomic segregation is not. We find that as Black–White racial segregation increases over time, total per pupil expenditures and other per pupil expenditures shift in ways that disfavor the typical Black student’s district relative to the typical White student’s district."
In order to determine how school funding affects student outcomes, you probably want to consider the funding per pupil at equivalent CPI. $5k goes a lot further in Elko, Nevada than it does in San Francisco.
In my county, the all white schools have extremely well-funded PTAs, parents willing to volunteer in the classroom, and students who receive at-home tutoring from an early age. A couple of miles away, Title I schools that serve predominantly underprivileged families do not have the same luxuries. The actual resources available to these schools remains significantly lower. Even in a county that ranks among the best-funded school systems in the country, federal funding does not bridge the gap between the north and south.
If you give a business $15,900 per student ($1.59million per 100 students), they can run much better than most public schools, especially than those public schools in crappy school districts.
If that's true why do private prisons have such higher recidivism rates? This is simply false.
> Mamun et al. (2020) report on studies that demonstrate that recidivism rates in private prisons are between 16.7% (Spivak & Sharp, 2008) and 22% (Duwe & Clark, 2013) higher when compared to public prisons. [1]
When providing services, private companies do worse because their charter is not to provide services per se, it's to make money. These are antithetical in the world of social services.
Private enterprise isn't a solution to every problem. It's a solution to a lot problems. However police, fire, healthcare, education, regulation and so on are services in the public interest and should be provided therefore be provided by the public.
- Private fire departments that used to show up at your house and demand payment in order to put the fire out, otherwise they'd just let your house burn to the ground. In Rome, they'd literally show up at your house, and buy it from you for pennies on the dollar before putting it out.
- Private prisons fail the people in the way I've described.
- Private healthcare fails Americans each and every day. 45,000 Americans die each year due to lack of access to care. One person dies every 12 minutes. Their goal is to deny you cover because each treatment they avoid paying for pads their bottom line and benefits their shareholders. It costs twice as much per capita as Canada, 60% as much as Norway - and yet fails to cover everyone and yields worse outcomes.
The generalization is simple: when your task is to provide services to the public, then profit must be secondary. In private enterprise, profit is primary. You fail the people when you provide core social services via private enterprise because you have fundamentally failed to align incentives.
Private social services are designed to fail the people.
These are still definitely a thing. Though I expect they must be regulated so we don't end up in a Rome-style situation.
Edit: Found it. If you're in an area with something like Rural Metro, they put out the fire either way. If you don't have an annual membership with them, then they will invoice you. Nobody offering to buy your home for pennies on the dollar or standing around waiting for your credit card to clear before hosing down the flames.
My understanding is there are very few, and each dollar profiteered off this basic service is not spent improving the fire department. Do you have statistics on this?
Why? The point of a public school is that they serve the public good, not shareholder value. The issue isn't that public schools are a money pit, the issue is whether they're educating students.
A business will seek a profit. That should not be a factor at all in public education. The costs of public education should certainly be considered, especially the question of how much is spent and the quality of the education. That should always be under careful review. However the purpose of public education is to spend our collective money educating the populace. It should be a cost, it shouldn't make money. It's not meant to, it's meant to educate.
I understand you have a strong believe that public good is not for profit, but this simplistic view is patently wrong. Public good and profit are not two things contradictory to each other. It is just very common in the market that businesses serve both profit goal and public good. It is 90% about how the world improves in a market dominant system. There is something fundamentally wrong in your worldview of the society and the market. But hay, I don't think I can change your mind.
Profit is not a goal of public education. Education is the goal of public education. It should be the singular goal.
Yes, my belief is that public education is a cost borne collectively by a society. We take some of our profit and spend it on public education, it does not produce profit.
Yes, we should care how our money is spent in pursuit of public education. I'm not advocating waste. But the question we should ask is whether the money we spend results in a worthwhile education for students.
It is my experience that public good typically loses to profit when contradicts the other.
Maybe in a competitive environment a private business could do better. But if you're creating a local private monopoly, you're just pouring a large chunk of the funding into the pockets of overpaid bosses or shareholders
Schools that charge under $15k/yr are mostly low-quality religious schools, with a few rare gems (mostly from the Catholics)
Full tuition at schools that people mean when they talk about how good private schools are, starts around $40k on the coasts (day rates, not boarding), and $18-20k at lesser-but-still-sometimes-decent schools in less-affluent areas.
[EDIT] Of course, per-pupil spending and tuition aren't entirely connected—on the one hand, many students don't pay the full rate (much like with private colleges) but on the other, the better private schools usually have other sources of funding of various sorts. Endowments, scholarship funds, lots of supplemental and sometimes quite-large donations from parents and alumni for various purposes.
How big is the business and how is it structured? How much administration is local and how much transparency into operations is given to the community?
Does it have profit responsibilities that need to be extracted from the funding, or is it a non-profit? In either case, does it receive funding from other sources besides the school's own community? What do those sources of funding expect for their contributions?
How big is the moat that allows or prevents competion from forming, and how healthy are the current forces of competition? Are there regulations that ensure market efficiency? Who's responsible for those regulations?
Does it have a formal responsibility to operate a school even when it can no longer do so profitably? Or might communities just be abandoned without any school at all until a new vision is capitalized?
Boarding schools exist, as do affluent areas next to poor ones.
Anyway, there are several ways to compare systems, some private schools operate in whole or in part on a lottery system so you can track students who do or don’t get in. But the most common method is to model parent education and income as a predictor of performance and then compare outcomes.
As you suggest poor students are underrepresented in private schools, but some do get in. The important thing to remember is a student who received a scholarship isn’t representative of the general population.
Eh, private schools right now have the parents as the customers. The parents generally have their incentives oriented towards well educated, well behaving kids and want it for not be too expensive. And can judge quality and make individual purchasing decisions, and have no incentive to waste funds.
If the public starts paying (blindly!) for it, the incentives change. Private schools would become more like private prisons probably, and we’d be back where we started.
>This is an oft repeated myth. In addition to property taxes, school funding is supplemented by state and federal budgets, in inverse proportion to property taxes, so that racial differences in per-pupil funding are negligible:
I don't have a great alternative in mind, but here is why it's not a good measure: suppose I take any school, then give the teachers a pay raise or a pay cut of X%. Nothing has fundamentally changed about the school, but per student expenditure has gone up or down, respectively, depending on which direction the salary adjustment was.
If you increase or decrease the pay of the teachers, I would expect to see an outcome on student educations over the long term.
For example, if District X pays better than neighboring district Z, District X will most likely have greater chance of hiring teachers in both districts, letting them choose the most qualified. Resulting in the school with higher salaries naturally getting more teacher candidates to choose from.
While some expenditures might not have a direct impact on student educations, they still have some effect. Another one would be - a school investing in a new Air conditioning and filtration system, students are probably going to have an easier time learning when they don't have to worry about being too hot or too cold in their classrooms.
I mean hypothetically all the money given to a school could be used to build a giant statue but does that actually happen? In your example, are we sure giving teachers a pay rise does not make them more motivated and hence leading to better outcomes?
The property tax leading to funding differences is part of the puzzle, but not all of the puzzle. In my random neck of the world we have roughly 4 school districts.
1) Public school 1. Covers most of the black and brown students of the area.
2) Public school 2. Covers most of the lower to middle class white students of the area.
3) Public school 3. Covers most of the higher class white students, especially families of a local high ranking private college.
4) Various private schools.
Options 1-2-3 have pretty much open enrollment, you can send your kid to any of them even if they are out of district, it just means you need to drive them (they won't qualify for bussing service).
If you look at public school 1, 2, and 3 - they have near identical spending per pupil. yes property taxes differ a little, but at the end of the day they are spending the same $ per pupil. However the test scores are vastly different. Test scores highly corelate with the % of students receiving free lunch, a fairly accurate proxy for poverty. The more kids in poverty, the worse test scores.
But because of this, many high achieving students that have money, are sent to option 4. Since this is the best education, if you can choose anything - you do this.
The next bucket of high achieving but wanting to save money send their kids to public school 3. It's reguarded as a "very good" free education. But this means the best kids are pulled out of the disticts for schools 1 and 2.
Schools 1 and 2 mostly just the people who are "left" in the district, without the inclination or money to go to choise 3 or 4.
Even when you have poorer families who value the better education their children could receive at option 3, the transportation hurdle can be huge. Often they may lack reliable transportation of their own or work at a job or jobs that don't offer the kind of flexibility in the workday that white-collar workers tend to have.
It isn't just the flexibility that accounts for the differences in education. Time spent by parents, with children, on education helps account for test scores and grades. Lower income parents often have to work more hours to meet the basic needs and have a lower educational background to help their children with schoolwork.
A study showed that even having a home library would be beneficial to children in a myriad of ways, which isn't as feasible to a low income family who isn't rent stable.
> you are saying school (1,2,3) get same funding per pupil. but test score for 1 is worse than 3.
Yes, and in fact its petty big jumps. 3 >> 2 >> 1. We are talking like 95th, 50th, and 10th percentiles statewide (percentiles picked for effect, did not pull up the data)
> Any idea how they could be compared in a data-drive way?
Right, and that is the hard part. If they don't do the same tests, you cannot have this data.
However, the more you look at layers of this data, you will find that the most important thing you care. Parents looking at school rankings have kids that perform much better than kids that have parent's who do not look at this data.
For me, I knew that 3 or 4 would give my kids a fine education. So I toured both (and actually had an older kid already in #3). The reason I sprang for #4 was
1) Smaller class size. Something like 15 kids per class, vs 30. All else being equal, you get way more chances for success the closer you are to the teacher.
2) Likeminded parents. People send kids there because they want the best. They are the high achievers. The college profressors and doctors of the area. #3 wasn't too far off, but you still got to see stuff like parents smoking in the carline with their windows up and the kids locked inside (grrrr).
3) More opportunities. #3 school starts music class at like 6th grade. #4 starts like 2nd or 3rd grade. It is something not reflected in test scores, so not important to public schools. But something shown to be good, so it's available for parents.
There are lots of reasons to choose a private school beyond test scores. Things like smaller class sizes, expectations about how students treat each other and staff.
My kids started at private school. A new public school with a STEM/STEAM concept opened near our house. At the public school, the goal of the administration is to fill seats (they get paid based on attendance) and to provide a safe environment - education was at least 3rd on their list if not lower. When covid hit the public school pretty much failed my kids. So we went back to the private school where the kids could actually get an education. My kids were ahead when they transitioned from private to public, they were behind when they transitioned back from public to private. The kids are much happier and tell me that 'everyone at public school is a bully'.
The private school uses different tests than the public school, so its hard to compare. A school where education is important and students are expected to be respectful seems like a great place to start from.
> 3) Public school 3. Covers most of the higher class white students, especially families of a local high ranking private college.
I live in a place like this, except its a mix of middle and higher class students. The secret is simple: the rich parents pay for tutors for their kids. I know many families who have paid for tutors for their kids since kindergarten.
Be very wary of pursuing good school districts in rich neighborhoods. If you can't afford the price of admission into that neighborhood your kid is going to have problems keeping up.
Perhaps that is your experience, but that is not mine. Tutors are only used in my areas for kids that are falling behind, not for the tip of the spear.
In NYC they also flatten all Asians into one group and say the “gifted” programs aren't diverse enough because a high percentage are Asian. As if implying Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, etc. all have the same life experience, cultures, advantages, disadvantages…
Also you nailed it on the property tax point. Often overlooked as the biggest issue with education. A similar sized home in a good school district can be 2 or 3x as expensive as one in a mediocre school district.
Edit: when talking about property tax, I am referring to most suburbs, not NYC.
Seems like a lot of people are posting evidence that the property tax point is correlated with better schools but the funding difference is made up for by the stare and federal government. Interesting.
By that same logic, they also flatten all Whites, Blacks, and Latinos into their own groups as well, even though all are comprised of people from many different countries and cultures.
I think the Asian and Pacific Islander one is interesting because it lacks a shared history of strife to support the amorphous grouping. (Latino should also be treated very differently, this post is about Asian-American and Asians in America)
Asian-American, especially in New York City (but somewhat replicated across the nation), is kind of a burgeoning identity which has now somewhat of a shared distinctly American culture, but is only kind of a self-fulfilling identity because everyone pigeonholes them, domestically and wherever their heritage was from. This makes individuals forced to attempt a shared representation. But it makes less sense compared to "white", "black" and pre-colonial civilizations here, given the lower population and the large time gaps in migration waves, and the large difference in why people migrated to the US at all during those migration waves.
The city and state fund the DoE and that money is disbursed to schools throughout the district without relationship to the geographic source of the funds. PTAs (especially in wealth neighborhoods) also contribute huge amounts of money to their local schools, often even paying for the salary of extra teachers or classroom assistants.
NYC schools are terrible for any number other reasons, but the property tax argument does not apply.
More than that, they also lump "Pacific Islanders" into the same category as "Asian", as if the Pacific Islands aren't on an entirely different continent.
I think it’s pointing out how absurd the system is for the people actually in it. If you dig deeper though, it’s just another way of trying to define blocs of power (or no power), and draw arbitrary lines to get benefits or avoid being singled out.
There is no objective definition for race or ethnicity I’ve ever found for instance, but to quote a controversial Supreme Court justice, everyone goes ‘I know it when I see it’.
> In NYC they also flatten all Asians into one group and say the “gifted” programs aren't diverse enough because a high percentage are Asian. As if implying Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, etc. all have the same life experience, cultures, advantages, disadvantages…
TBF that was originally something deployed by asian-american populations so they had enough of a cooperative block to make an impact: individual cultural groups were too small to be represented, but a pan-asian block had sufficient power to achieve representation and make political progress.
> As if implying Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, etc. all have the same life experience, cultures, advantages, disadvantages…
Though it's not as if Asian students are a perfect mixture of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino, etc. Given demographic trends most of them are going to be Chinese, with a smaller amount Korean.
They do it to White people throughout the country. They make no difference between White Americans and European-Americans. They ignore the differences among people from a huge continent spanning Western, Central, Eastern Europe, and the Slavic people from the ex-USSR.
> For the benefit of non-US readers, know that how the US funds public education (K-12) is rather unique. It's done through property taxes essentially. Depending on your state and city your property taxes can vary a lot with the same value property.
This is widely believed but no longer true. Federal and state funding have eclipsed local funding[0], and those funds are highly progressive. As a result, the highest-spending per capita schools are a mix of wealthy suburbs and failing urban districts. See this map[1] for examples, like the Philadelphia suburb of Lower Merion and the NJ city of Camden.
I've never been convinced that more money for schools produces better results. Sure, that means nicer buildings, but how does that improve education? In Washington State, the teachers finally got their "fully funding" proposal enacted, which was supposed to solve all the funding problems, including big raises for teachers.
My MIL is a teacher, and she's taught at wealthy schools and poor schools.
Wealthy schools have more money, but they actually often have less - if a school's average socio-economic class drops below a certain point, there's a slew of federal funding available and she often had more resources in a poor school than a wealthy one. The poorest schools are often the middle-class - those too wealthy to qualify for the funding but not wealthy enough to be rich.
The real benefit to wealthy schools, in her mind (anecdata) was the number of single income households. Students and classrooms do a lot better when there are a bunch of volunteers.
Schools used to have Teaching Assistants. Dedicated, low-pay non-teachers who could help in classrooms. We don't have these (in my state) any more.
But the wealthy schools do. Because there are a lot of volunteer parents (mostly moms) who don't work and are happy to come in one day a week. When my MIL taught at wealthy schools, she often had 2 parents in her classroom every day of the week helping prep. In the poor schools she had Chromebooks for every kid (before that was the norm), but no help so she didn't bother breaking them out.
Anec-datally this rings true to me. I think in wealthier neighborhoods there is also a lot more competitiveness for PTA and school board seats from parents who are very highly credentialed (i.e. MBA, former product managers, lawyers) that have electively taken time off/early retirement to have more quality time with their kids. There's some sort of institutional knowledge coming from the business world on how to run effective meetings, run a fundraiser, etc.
On the flip side, I have yet to see a really well-functioning PTA. Usually because it's a bunch of hyper competitive MBAs, CEOs, and lawyers who adore parliamentarian ceremony and only secondarily have any interest in marshaling resources in support of students.
I think it might actually work better if it were just properly educated average people running that show.
Agree! It can become a but political. It should be noted though that while that is less than perfect...
What I've observed in less well off neighborhoods is that in particular the school board becomes populated with professional administrators. Then the administrators get familiar with the process for procurement for supplies, facilities and contracted work and start getting cozy with the local providers of those services. And things start going down hill and there is little in the way of oversight since most parents/voters are too busy juggling multiple jobs, etc.
I grew up in a pretty wealthy area. The public school was good. The private school had this vibe of prestige but in practice performed a lot worse on things like AP tests
A weird state. I don’t think parents knew how to navigate it or even interpret the state of things. The marketing and formal dress code made it seem like the better choice. Suckers…
Makes me wonder how I survived public school - I never saw a volunteer in the classroom ever. They weren't poor schools, either, and this was back when moms didn't work.
> In Washington State, the teachers finally got their "fully funding" proposal enacted, which was supposed to solve all the funding problems, including big raises for teachers.
Are you referring to when the state finally complied with court orders that they were illegally and unconstitutionally underfunding public schools? (A lawsuit started over a decade before and decided over a half a decade before action was taken). Where the governor announced victory as "Today’s Supreme Court decision affirms that, at long last, our Legislature is providing the funding necessary to cover the basic costs of our K-12 schools. Reversing decades of underfunding..."
That basic level of funding? Or has something happened more recently.
> There's been zero change in results.
You mean the funding that impacted one year before COVID? Education funding isn't like spinning up a new instance in AWS. It takes time. And, given that educational results have slipped nationwide since COVID, I would say that "zero changes" should be interpreted as a victory.
To make a compelling case that funding matters to outcome you really need to detail how a lack of funding hurts the learning process.
Are the teachers bad teachers, and more pay will recruit better teachers? I'm not sure how many teachers enter the profession for the money to be honest. I'm sure they would like pay, but I'm not really of the mind that the curre nt crop of teachers are on average bad.
Do kids not have a suitable learning environment? Are they distracted by rodents, roaches, noisy equipment, uncomfortable temperatures, lack of seating or desks?
Do the kids not have educational material? Books, marker boards and markers for them, paper, etc?
If any of those things were lacking I would totally agree that learning could be impacted and change was needed. And I would be really curious how at current funding levels, which are not low compared to other countries, those deficits are occuring.
> are the teachers bad teachers, and more pay will recruit better teachers?
Quality of the teachers aside, there are insufficient teachers. The number of teachers required to effectively teach K-12 would benefit from increasing between 50-75% of current levels before reaching diminishing returns according to test studies. So more pay will recruit more teachers, which, makes them better.
Since you wanted to compare us to other countries, the US has the worst average classroom size in the western world. A decade ago we were closer to the middle of the pack. And it was the US classroom size that primarily changed, not a sudden drive in other countries.
> Do kids not have a suitable learning environment? Are they distracted by rodents, roaches, noisy equipment, uncomfortable temperatures, lack of seating or desks?
Beyond that, you should concern yourself with things like asbestos in the walls.
Certainly, a lot of US schools use trailers. Those are noisier and have less comfortable temperatures, require going outside to change classes, etc. Half of the classrooms in some areas are trailers. Moving those to a real building seems obviously better.
> Do the kids not have educational material? Books, marker boards and markers for them, paper, etc?
What about chem labs, frogs to dissect, computers to program, etc? Not everyone is a kindergartner. But a surprising number of schoolchildren have trouble with internet access, which I would argue is a basic requirement for education.
Further, the number of teachers required to spend their meager salaries on classroom supplies and the number of different nonprofits that popup if you search for "donate school supplies" indicates that even at a base level they lack educational material.
The only resources needed are books and chalkboards, pencil and paper. These are cheap.
My public high school installed a competition diving pool. Did that improve education there? Not a whit. It was nice for the diving team, though, which was 6 girls.
I wouldn't overlook people as resources. In addition to teachers, it's really valuable to have more adults around to help out. Otherwise keeping a room of 25 kids corralled is enough work on its own that it meaningfully reduces the time left to teach.
I have been teaching high school English for about ten years. My total comp (including pension matching, cost of employer healthcare contributions, etc) is about 52k.
Money isn’t the reason I will be transitioning into a different career after this school year, but I have friends and contacts floating opportunities that would offer me an immediate 50-80 percent bump.
My wife and I have been saving aggressively to allow for a patient, intentional transition. I don’t expect my next career to feed my values to the same extent, but I am excited to open a new door.
Edit: if you work in Product and would be willing to do a brief informational interview, please reach out. My email is in profile.
The most important thing money can buy is more teachers. I went to chicago public schools. In my elementary school each class had 32+ students and 1 teacher. I was accepted to a gifted high school which had very successful fundraising campaigns. That allowed the school to hire extra teachers, lowering the class sizes to ~25. Meanwhile private schools have class sizes < 20. It makes a huge difference. When there are 32 kids in a class there is 0 individual attention.
The idea that class size reduction is a highly effective educational intervention is at best ambiguously supported by the (many) studies of it. And it's a super expensive intervention.
We can treat them the same: hold someone accountable when their project over-spends and under-delivers. Maybe even fire them. It would happen naturally in successful companies, but (at least in the US) there's often no accountability in government for setting money on fire.
It alarms me that anyone treats them the same. Government programs are a last resort to correct market failures. They’re completely different entities with different goals and structures.
Identifying wasteful spending is expensive and inaccurate. An auditor will produce some number of false negatives (remaining wasteful spending) and false positives (useful spending that was cut). Both of these cannot be zero, and the closer you would like to get to zero, the more expensive the audit will be.
Additionally, the relative value of false negatives and positives, in something with as high a force multiplier as education, seems like it will probably fall on the side of false negatives.
That is an excellent question. I carefully did not answer it because as soon as I do, no matter how wasteful and useless the program someone will come to defend it and I don't want to get in that fight.
Yes, but if you cut out the wasteful spending, you can redirect that funding to not wasteful things. What spending is wasteful is another question entirely.
Well, take something like Google: considering its size and amount of money it invests into R&D, you'd expect it to generate more product and technological innovation than it has. It's a version of the resource curse: when you have so much money you don't know what to do with it all, there are no real competitive pressures and corporate politics and bureaucracy take over.
Schools need more funding, but less on faddish well-paid DEI officers who focus their time on axing algebra because it's too hard, and more on providing healthy school lunches, well ventilated and comfortable environments to work in, and a variety of classes tailored to students' individual needs.
You're about to see a bunch more interest in cutting wasteful spending at startups. The macro environment in the last 10 years basically let people (both startups and government) get a lot of money for free. That's no longer true, and cost-cutting is important now.
> It's so funny to me that people treat businesses and government so differently.
As we should. Businesses are rewarded for efficiency. Government is judged on effectiveness. It is a huge mistake to conflate the two and judge them on the same metrics.
So lets take your argument to the extreme and fund a 1000 person school with 1 dollar. Would adding some more dollars to the budget help? Yes, because at some point you can afford to turn on the lights, and if you keep adding money you can afford to hire a teacher. More realistically, more money can do things like fund free meals for needy kids so they don't have to go to class hungry. It can reduce class sizes, replace textbooks, put more books in the library, and add gifted/special ed programs. There are certainly useful things the money can be spent on.
At the other extreme, if we gave schools unlimited funding, you could afford to hire a teacher for every student in the school. Would that help learning outcomes? Probably. There is a huge space in the middle where admins eat up cash, sports teams eat up cash, for sure. But to say that "more money doesn't get better results" doesn't make any sense.
No surprise, in des moines all schools in the area get the same funding per student. This includes inner city schools, suburbs, and rural schools. Yet there is still a large difference in results with the inner city schools doing worse than the suburbs by far.
Either it is cities elect different people to school boards (seems unlikely but I can't prove it), or family background makes the biggest difference. Many others have pointed out family background as the key, I tentend to believe it.
My kid's HS has teetered on the edge of Title 1 status over the years but lately has trended better. The top 10% of kids have upper middle class backgrounds and a stable home life. They tend to have exceptional outcomes. The bottom 40% of kids come from families living near the poverty line. They tend to get shuffled along until they barely graduate or dropout.
The middle 50% have outcomes that are all over the place but tend to correlate with parental involvement and who the kids pair off with in their friends groups. Some get pulled upward to exceed expected outcomes and some get pulled towards the bottom. It's been fascinating to see how different two kids from very similar backgrounds can end up based on the randomness of who they sat with at lunch one day 4 years ago or who was assigned to be their lab partner in 10th grade.
One thing that clearly provides better results are smaller class sizes. That requires having enough teachers and enough rooms, both of which cost money.
Just spending a lot of money doesn't guarantee good results, just like some companies manage to spend a lot of money doing very little. But not having enough money is a great way to make it very difficult to achieve good results.
It's fair to say more money doesn't necessarily result in better results, but it would be absolutely incorrect to think that endemic budgetary shortfalls don't drastically impact results.
It's like money and happiness. Money doesn't make you happy but it damn sure does eliminate a lot of barriers on the way there.
I mean, even assuming they spend all the money on better buildings -- if the building is so poorly made that the heat or air conditioning don't work, then that will be distracting, resulting in worse education.
The public school in the town I grew up in had lectures in these shitty trailers that were supposed to be temporary (spoiler: they became permanent). They couldn't afford to hire enough teachers to do small classes, but if they had the money for that, there wouldn't be enough rooms put them in.
I went to public school for a couple years in those trailers. It didn't make any difference. Went to public schools with and without A/C (in Arizona). Didn't make any difference.
It's a hard topic, and it certainly is not made easier by repeating old cliches that has been proven false repeatedly. Throwing money at bad schools does not make them good. There are plenty of terrible schools spending as much money as the best ones, with no results. It's not a money question - at least not alone.
Yes, there are correlation between academic success and living in a rich neighborhood. Because yes, rich successful people often pass on their success to their children. But it's not solved by just dumping money on poor schools and hoping that would solve everything. It has been tried. Unions love it. Kids don't get any better. In fact, the whole "structural inequality" thing was roped in to explain this phenomenon - why tons of money are being spent with no observable result? Oh, it must be the invisible and immeasurable "structural inequality"! Which means we should shut down the gifted programs (so rare students that manage to overcome the awfulness of their schools have no recourse now), introduce race-based school policies and let students that barely can (and sometimes can't) read graduate. That surely will make them successful.
And, perhaps most unfortunately, it's schools in poor and disproportionately minority communities that are axing algebra and gifted programs in the name of equity, while schools serving children from more privileged backgrounds continue to offer them.
I'll add some additional color to the funding "uniqueness". At least in NYC, there are Parent-Teacher Associations that are private organizations that raise money for specific schools. These PTAs are, themselves, a great source of inequality within the public schools.
For extreme examples the PTA at PS 87, an elementary school in the Upper West Side raised 2 million dollars in 2019 (the last number I could find numbers for) [1]; our son's school (also in the UWS, where we live) raised a little shy of 1 million that same year, via an annual campaign, auction fund-raiser, and a few other events.
This money is used for many things, like capital improvements and enhanced services. At our son's school this was used to upgrade air conditioning in the building, pay for extra teaching assistants, and fund a library and librarian, amongst other things.
Numerous schools have no PTA fund-raising at all or raise a few thousand dollars, because they serve less-affluent areas. This kind of inequality is vexing because there isn't any taxing going on, just very active parent bases with money to give.
Intelligence as tested by IQ by several govts and organizations is mostly genetic[1].
It means that the "nurture" part is not so much important as people think.
Heck you can even see with brothers / cousins the differences.
When we say "gifted" it means we are selecting and optimizing for IQ. Thus the "inequality".
You will always see more Asians.
To make more equal we need to remove/disqualify asians.
If a profession/skill is very related to a characteristic/feature as IQ then I want the best there.
Not everyone is equal and not everyone has the same skills. If you check [1] you will see they studied TWINS adopted in families. There is no better "social intervention" than adopting someone, provide the same food/structure that all on family have.
Then you can see here the confirmation in a soft way [2] and [3].
"and we consistently find that considering performance on the SAT/ACT, particularly the math section, substantially improves the predictive validity of our decisions with respect to subsequent student success at the Institute."
I am not gifted but I do benefit from gifted people work.
"There are so many topics that are hard to talk about nowadays without getting into politics"
I suppose everyone says that since politics exist. Life in a society is politics, that's the very definition of the word. Politics is not a bad word or something to avoid, stop being afraid talking politics. The less you talk about politics, the more others do it for you.
Education funding has very little to do with outcomes. Your peers and culture of their family matters most, which will also correlate with wealth/income levels.
But it's correlation, not causation.
There was a complete test case of this in NJ a few years ago where a poorly funded school got a huge amount of extra funding as a result of a lawsuit, and it made 0 statistical difference to outcomes years down the line. They did a study on it.
https://edlawcenter.org/litigation/abbott-v-burke/abbott-his...
If you're surrounded by people who care and aim to excel, you'll probably care. And vice versa.
In that sense, forced integration is an unethical but probably effective way of homogenizing educational results. I think Singapore actually forces some cultural integration like this with demographic requirements per neighborhood block/district.
New York somewhat achieves this incidentally via their "affordable housing" being attached to expensive unit buildings, but most wealthy new yorkers send to private, so doesn't fix the cultural balance in public system.
>But what this means is the wealthier localities have more tax revenue and thus better schools. This can be a vicious cycle of improving property values by having better schools and thus generating more tax revenue and so on.
No. This is a complete red-herring. Every school in the US is good enough to provide quality education. Every school in the US is staffed by good, well-trained teachers. Every child gets free textbooks, notebooks, pens, pencils, paper, etc (which isn't as common in the world as you'd think). Sometimes free breakfast or lunch is provided as well.
That some school district provides high-end iPads and another doesn't makes no material difference to a quality education. That some parents want to optimize their child's education by sending them to another district, makes no material difference to a quality education. Put another way, we're dealing with kids graduating being functionally illiterate - and that problem does not stem from school or teacher quality. That's a parent problem (as in, what kind of a parent allows their child to not be able to read by the time they are ready to graduate).
> Every school in the US is staffed by good, well-trained teachers
Unfortunately, this really isn't the case. There are many good teachers, and most teachers are genuinely passionate, hard workers. But many teachers get into teaching not because of a mastery of their subject matter or even teaching but because they want to be paid babysitters, more or less.
E.g. in Canada, which has similar issues, Ontario recently axed its math certification test for public school teachers because too many teachers were failing it and because it had "a disproportionate adverse impact on entry to the teaching profession for racialized teacher candidates." And, for demonstrative purposes, a sample test that prospective teachers were failing:
But there's not an easy solution. ~25% of test takers were failing it (and more for "racialized" candidates), and most people don't want to become teachers because it's a terrible work environment.
>But many teachers get into teaching not because of a mastery of their subject matter or even teaching but because they want to be paid babysitters, more or less.
You're missing the forest for the trees. We're graduating kids who are functionally illiterate. That isn't a teacher problem. That isn't a school problem.
In Minnesota anyways, the schools in lower-income areas get more money per pupil than the "good area" schools. In some cases dramatically more. For example, the high school in north Minneapolis (a not-good part of town) get's $20k per student. Whereas the southwest Minneapolis high school (nice area) gets 13k. This is common across all grades.
So the disadvantaged area schools get 35%+ more money per pupil, and the outcomes keep getting worse. And the politicians keep doubling down on the same policies and wonder why things aren't changing. Money isn't everything, or apparently even most things. What a mess.
> Twenty years ago Bush (43) passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which many dubbed the No Child Gets Ahead Act. A lot of this was also in the name of "equity".
That was a very bipartisan bill. It was coauthored by Ted Kennedy, passed in the House 381-41, and passed in the Senate 87-10.
> But what this means is the wealthier localities have more tax revenue and thus better schools.
Poorer districts tend to have more industrial properties, so they are often better funded than wealthier districts. Especially since most state funding is distributed based on pupil units rather than pupils, and a low-SES student might count as something like 1.5 pupil units. (And a disabled student might count as 2.0 pupil units, etc.)
> But what this means is the wealthier localities have more tax revenue and thus better schools. This can be a vicious cycle of improving property values by having better schools and thus generating more tax revenue and so on. I say "vicious" because it is absolutely exclusionary to lower-income people who cannot possibly afford to live in these areas. And that's by design.
That's not really true. You can look at the per pupil spending in places like Washington, D.C. or Baltimore and they're well above the U.S. average (D.C. is one of the top spenders in the nation). A city's public school system sometimes largely serves lower income students even if it has a number of high earners in its tax base (urban yuppies with no kids, wealthy people who send their kids to private schools, etc. all paying into the system without adding to the load).
If we look at funding levels vs. outcomes, we can see many of the best funded school systems struggling. That's because school is a complex problem that doesn't simply get solved by more funding.
This is closer to the core of the problem and honestly it goes even deeper. We very frequently look at poor outcomes when it comes to things like education and employment and then scream at schools or companies for not supporting equity. And not to let them all completely off the hook because they have absolutely been part of the problem, but the roots of this stuff go way deeper. Trying to find diverse candidates for knowledge jobs is made harder when there are fewer diverse candidates graduating from good colleges because fewer diverse students are getting into gifted programs because diverse children are raised in neighborhoods with fewer resources and on and on.
We still have so much culturally ingrained bias that we can't update policy to set the stage for even the next few generations to close these gaps. And it's compounded by the current generation being asked to pay an unreasonable price (ie disappearing gifted classes) to put a band-aid on this gunshot wound of a problem which breeds resentment which sets progress back even further.
The same thing occurs in New Zealand, even though most schools are funded by the government (property taxes don’t pay for schools).
The government also tries to help poor students by boosting funding for schools that have poor parents. Schools are ranked into 10 deciles[3] depending on the income of the parents, with an equal number of schools in each decile. The government gives out more funding to schools with poor parents (decile 1), and less funding to schools with rich parents (decile 10).
The academic results of students are strongly correlated with how well-off their parents are[1]. Attendance and other factors are correlated as well[2].
I’ve always quipped that the idea that the highest property taxes fund the poorest areas, and vice-versa. While not feasible, the current situation is absurd.
Well, that's effectively what happens in European systems, where schooling is basically run entirely by the State and funding is mostly distributed on a per-pupil basis - higher-income taxpayers effectively subsidize poorer areas. So it is, in fact, feasible.
But Americans would probably call that illiberal or something.
That is what Texas does. Not 100 percent, but a majority of tax dollars for schools are paid to the state and redistributed to the districts based on attendance/enrollment. Rich areas might be able to use extra funds/donations for capital expenditures like fancier buildings or stadiums, but the tax money at largely redistributed.
I don't really know many details as I've only ever interacted with the school system here as a pupil, but I think the three major differences between here (NL) and the USA are:
Firstly, by not having extreme poverty. You can't solve at school the problems that exist at home. We have adequate housing and benefits systems, and a minimum wage that people can actually live on. In addition, we have local intervention teams (and budgets) that try to fix problems that children encounter in their home situations (such as violence, substance abuse, etc).
Secondly, by banning private schools: all schools are funded directly by the government based on number of pupils. This makes sure that the rich don't withdraw their children from society, and thus makes sure they have a stake in public education.
Thirdly, by investing heavily in teachers' education. Many teachers here have two degrees: one in their teaching subject, and one in pedagogy or psychology.
That said, I've heard many people say that our education system isn't what it used to be either, mainly because of two changes:
- a decade or so ago the government closed all special-needs schools (or at least the majority) and moved those children into the general school population. This put a lot of strain on the teachers, because they now had to deal not just with slow learners, but also children with learning disabilities and often behavioural problems. This put a lot of stress especially on the lower end of the spectrum.
- the recent appearance of many after-school tutoring programs. Since these are privately funded and operated, they bring a touch of the US' problems: since the rich now have a way to focus their money on only their own offspring, inequality in school achievements is rising.
In France, the problem isn't avoided. Public schools are roughly the same everywhere in term of resources and quality of teacher. But for the most part, kids go to a school near their home, and if they live in a rich area, they'll have better studying conditions than if they live in a poor area. It seems the government is always trying to improve this situation with very little success.
Australian public schools are funded by state and federal governments, not local. So all public schools tend to be pretty similar. On the flip side the government also partially funds private schools, which is an issue at the moment.
One polarizing topic at the moment is critical-race theory ("CRT"). There are a lot of false claims about what this is. Ultimately, CRT was something taught in law schools. Now CRT has become a catch-all for teaching the true (rather than whitewashed) history of the United States.
A lot of people are opposed to this because they're mistaken about what the goals are or are opposed to people being educated about historical and current inequality. A common argument is that CRT makes children "feel bad". But take slavery as one example. Did you directly participate in slavery? Of course not. No one is asking you to feel personally responsible for this.
But you can be taught the ramifications of slavery that continue to this day. Take something as simple as the GI Bill. This contributed to the White Flight. It allowed white Americans to build up generational wealth. In a system where property values are so entangled with educational outcomes, you should be able to recognize that slavery and segregation aren't just historical artifacts.
You can recognize how you benefit from generational privilege without feeling personally responsible for its origins. An awful lot of people don't want that to happen however.
So how did other countries avoid this? There are many factors here but ultimately the US founding is deeply tied to white supremacy. That continues to thi say. The language may have changed (eg propagandists might now use terms like "legacy Americans") but this belief has never gone away. We as a country have never had a serious reckoning with this past.
50+ years ago towns were racially segregated openly. The term "sunset town" came about for a reason. While those direct segregation laws might be gone they've been replaced with laws and institutions that have the same effect. For example: making housing expensive is exclusionary by design.
I say all this to point out that local funding of education is part of a deliberately exclusionary system. It may not be the reason other countries fund things at a national or state level. But our inequality in outcomes through local funding is deliberate for those reasons.
Not necessarily a universal recipe for avoiding this problem but public education standards, curricula, funding, etc tends to be more centralized at a national level in many countries. It's much more decentralized in the US with many more points of friction for competing interests.
Schools are funded by a State or Federation member (eg provinces and territories in Canada). Gifted programs just exist. In that sense - yes - rich areas subsidize less fortunate areas.
> wealthier localities have more tax revenue and thus better schools
This is not the issue. The real issue is that some wealthier localities defund their public school system through anti-taxation measures and the wealthy send their kids to thriving (well funded, large student population) private schools and those who can't afford the private school tuition (rivals private college tuition) are stuck with either parochial schools (middle class families, associated with their church) or public schools (poor kids, who graduate functionally illiterate if at all).
Tier 1: private school kids, whose parents control the local government and economy
Tier 2: middle class sending their kids to Christian schools where they can learn why the order of things is the way it is through divine writ
Tier 3: public schools, radically underfunded, basically holding cells.
Well why do you think those rich people are sending their kids to private schools?
Getting rid of gifted programs obviously makes the public school worse. Do people think that the wealthy are simply going to throw their hands up and say "Welp, guess my kid is getting a shitty education!"?
It doesn't, in ways which are eerily reminiscent of America's falling out of love with public parks and pools. Which completely coincidentally followed their desegregation.
"But what this means is the wealthier localities have more tax revenue and thus better schools."
This is largely a lie. It works like this in some states but not most. Most states, and the federal government allocate their funds in a way that balances that out by allocating more money to the poorer districts. In my state, the various quartiles recieve essentially the same overall funding (19k-20k per student).
This is a good example of why Wikipedia doesn't allow this kind of statement.
If you google this phrase, "No Child Gets Ahead Act", you get 4 pages of results ("About 84 results", which I don't know if I would call "many" in a country of 300 million plus people.
Didn't think about this much until later. The town I went to high school in they had two high schools about 2 miles apart and one had more minorities than the other (as in 80% vs. 20%) and yeah the former was poorer than the latter.
In Arizona, all school funding is from the state. Then local school districts can pass school overrides via voting which then can be additional property tax in their district. Richer areas tend to have more parent involvement (both time and financially). AZ also has open enrollment which means you can enroll your child in any public school, not just your district assignment.
It's probably time to stop letting people in our society that are not building up systems terrorize the rest of us with scarcely hidden threats of slandering your name as a racist. There is nothing racist about having a merit based system within education. If the problem is that it is not entirely merit based, the solution comes from improving the on ramp, not from destroying the program. We should treat people who want to tear down systems like this as radicals trying to cause harm, not well-meaning individuals trying to build equality. We have been increasing equality for decades by building up systems, and to act like everything in existence now is racist and invalid is absurd.
My experience with public school gifted programs was simple. The gifted program was not significantly better in what they taught, or how they taught it. The gifted programs only major advantage was that the people who were there wanted to be there, and worked to do well. This allowed us to move faster, and go deeper into topics. In non-gifted classes, students could not care less about what the class was doing that day and hated that they were trapped there. Some students definitely worked hard in non-gifted classes, but in my experience, that was the exception.
I always have the same question for people like this.
What do you want the world to look like 10, 20, 50 years from now, and how would the changes you're pushing for making immediately get us all closer to that?
I want the world to look look like a place where superficial racial difference is no more importantly regarded than differences in hair and eye colour are today. It seems rather clear to me that emphasizing these differences is taking us farther away from this world.
How well-represented are blondes in executive leadership or government? Well, no one cares and no one is really counting, are they? That's the world I want to live in.
Your comments sounds challenging to the parent comment. Why? The person is making pretty benign observations and opinions. Your comment seems to question their motives.
There are plenty of students (more than some) in non-gifted classes who genuinely want to learn and work hard.
But there are two issues that make those classes terrible:
1) Teachers dedicate 80% of their instructional time to the 20% worst performers, and every incentive pushes them in that direction.
2) More than that, it only takes one or two kids with behavioral issues to reduce teachers' instructional time from near 100% to near 0%, and there's no way to move them out of regular classrooms to classrooms focused on their needs. So if you're a regular student in a cohort with a couple students with behavioral issues, you're pretty much screwed.
I'm pretty nearly convinced that the primary signals derived from many private school interviews are "parents will pay the tuition" and "kid will not be a behavioral problem".
The general issue with merit-based systems is the definition of merit. In practice there are strong cultural aspects to it, favoring characteristics the dominant group likes. So merit-based programs end up conferring the most advantages to those best conforming to the ideals of the dominant culture, strengthening the dominant culture.
It's debatable (at least) whether that's a good thing... if you consider the dominant culture racist (or bad in some other way) then it's natural to consider the merit-based programs that support that culture a form a systemic racism.
Math isn't racist. Whether you can pass an Algebra exam is not racist. If Asian kids who can barely read and write English can ace the exam, then so can poor minorities who were raised in the US. You can't claim word problems are suddenly racist when people who can barely read English are still acing them.
> Black students are 66% less likely to be identified as gifted compared to white students with similar test scores.
Anyway, I believe your observation about the relative success that Asian kids have in merit-based programs supports my contention that they are significantly cultural in nature, right?
If hard work and persistence at school is cultural, then sure. Can you describe exactly what you mean by cultural in nature? That 66% number can entirely come from differences in what each culture values - black culture values athletics and music whereas Asian culture values education. And you see that play out in the end product - black people are "overrepresented" in sports and music while Asians are "overrepresented" in academia and STEM. None of these differences make the merit program cultural in nature.
So your issues with this is merit in and of itself? Please explain a better system for outcomes than putting in the work and earning the outcome. What is the alternative? My point wasn't that merit based systems are inherently flawless, it's that it's the best type of system we use and we should focus on improvements, not blindly calling it racist. There have been cases of cultural bias in merit based systems (word problems that assume some knowledge), but those end up being fairly obvious and now that is taken into account when developing standardized tests.
Even the use of the word racist here is nonsense. It implies malicious intent. For a test maker to not take into account every variation of culture is not racist, it's a negative side affect that can be improved on via iteration, not racist.
> Please explain a better system for outcomes than putting in the work and earning the outcome.
You are not understanding my point. It comes down to the criteria used to judge whether or not you've "earned" the outcome. You're assuming these are fair and I'm pointing out they are actually significantly tilted to favoring the dominant group.
Let's say my family runs the town and happens to be fast sprinters. The people of the town complain that they'd like some say in how the town is run and threaten chaos if they don't get it. We bow to pressure but we set the new rules, and say, "Fine. We'll have a town council to run things that anyone can be on. We'll hold a 100 yard-dash to determine the members." It's objective. It's based on merit. But it ensures my family says in control. If my family had been poor sprinters but strong long-distance runners we might have held a 20K race instead. Still objective. Still merit-based. You still "put in the work and earn the outcome". But it still ensures my family stays in control.
> Even the use of the word racist here is nonsense. It implies malicious intent.
It's probably useful to understand the distinction between "racism" and "systemic racism" here. Racism is the belief that one race is superior (or conversely, inferior) to another. That's someone's direct thought or intent. Systemic racism, on the other hand, is a system that hold one race down while holding another race above them. Systemic racism doesn't require anyone to have have any racist beliefs or intent. It's just a system that has a certain effect. However, once someone becomes aware of a system that advantages one race to the detriment of another, whether they decide to support it or look for a better way is where there is potential racism.
> programs end up conferring the most advantages to those best conforming to the ideals of the dominant culture
The definition of merit for any given school, is transparent. School work is relatively straight forward, in that they are designed by the teachers for students to complete, and at the end of the year you can see how students were rewarded or punished with numbers. Also, not all merit-based systems are good, some may reward bad behavior etc., but the solution is not to get rid of merit, but rather adjust what you're selecting for.
Also, I feel like "dominant culture" is an ambiguous term thrown around to justify the ideology of equity and how some groups of people are perpetually oppressed. Arguably the U.S. no longer has a dominant culture. There are many cities with neighborhoods where English isn't required (i.e. Chinatowns, Miami etc). This in turn affects the local schools and their curriculum, which means their merit-based system is for the most part under their control.
No schooling looks like study, do your homework, and behave?
So any selection of topics to study is unacceptable by your criteria. We live in a society, we have to have some form of education. In order to give students an education, we have to pick curriculum for them to learn. Some topics are not very important, so we shouldn't focus on teaching them.
What system would you prefer to have in place? Or would you rather jut pick the topics that are taught?
English, math and history? Like liberal arts educations aren't THAT newfangled. I realize it's not sophist philosophy but maybe a bit more well rounded.
The thing is that all behaviours carry cultural aspects to them. But clearly some behaviours lead to better economic outcomes than others right? Being sober, working hard, valuing education, cooperating well, these are cultural traits. This fact alone doesn't mean it's wrong to prefer them.
The gifted program helped me immensely in highschool, although the hour or two I actually spent in the gifted classroom was mostly wasted playing board games. However being in that program gave me the ability to switch classes/teachers whenever one wasn't working for me, usually because some teachers could maintain a civil classroom and other teachers let the students run wild and taught nothing. Because I was in the gifted program, the school permitted me to switch out of those classrooms into classes taught by competent/caring teachers.
This suggests to me that the advantage of the program could be conferred to students who score low on IQ tests but are nevertheless behaved in class. A better gifted program would be one that differentiates on the basis of civility, not IQ. Of course, deferring measurement of IQ to some licensed professionals is easier than objectively quantifying a student's civility, so I don't know how this would actually be implemented.
If you let students attend any classes they wanted, I bet they would sort themselves appropriately. The rowdy kids won't want to be in a classroom where everyone is quiet and the teacher is explaining the central limit theorem.
And even if that didn't happen, teachers can easily score "civility" themselves. They all know who the troublemakers are.
The problem would become, though, that nobody really wants the rowdy crowd. Even the laziest teacher would nope out, and as much as self-sacrifice is probably more prevalent in the teaching class than in the general population, there are never enough willing to self-immolate for hopeless causes. Which, in turn, is why we get the Hollywood fantasies with exactly those heroic characters: because they're actually very rare.
I think this works well for college, but at the highschool level you have the complicating factor of parents being involved in the decision making. How would you account for the parents who think their little monster is a perfect angel and place their kid in the best classrooms, despite his desire and intention to misbehave?
That's basically what my high school did. Students had a lot of flexibility to choose the classes they wanted to take, and had a lot of leeway if they wanted to choose the advanced or standard version of a class. Combine this with a lot of optional classes, and students at my high school could tailor their class schedule to their own needs and wants.
I recognize that my experience was no means the norm. My high school was large, well funded, and had a lot of resources at its disposal. And even then, there were absolutely students that weren't served well by the school. But its overall a system that seems to work pretty well, and I think its a model that more schools look at.
a lot of rowdy kids simply do not have the underlying personality to succeed in a classroom setting and thats perfectly fine. we need to do a better job of sorting kids earlier like they do in Germany for example.
I had a similar experience, not necessarily with being able to move around to different teachers. In general, the teachers for the gifted classes were leagues ahead of the normal teachers. By having access to better teachers, I for sure received a better education than non-gifted students. And honestly, I can see why that is a problem. Ideally all teachers would be competent and caring, but as a society we tend to treat the position as a glorified baby sitter
"Civility" sounds eerily close to a sort of social credit score. All it takes is one teacher to mark you down on civility and then you're ruined. This type of program sounds like it would lead to offering the best education and opportunities to the most docile and willing to accept authority.
Not great attributes to select for in a world where we desperately need independent thinking and problem solving.
As I said, I don't know how it should be implemented. I'm certainly not proposing the implementation of a social credit system. What I am saying is that I'm confident that the mechanism by which gifted programs help students is by allowing them to escape the poor classroom conditions of inadequate teachers and particularly, their misbehaving peers. Personally, I wasn't very good at learning when placed in classrooms with delinquient druggies who's idea of fun is to see how many times they can throw wadded paper at the back of my head.
I hate this woke nonsense about equity in students. Man I probably would have been so bored in school and settled for the status quo if I had to be in classes where the lowest common denominator was the average American student. Luckily all we had to do was pass an assessment to get into gifted classes. They really should change the name though, but keep the classes. We are equal in our human rights, not in our capacity to learn certain things. That said, obviously students in less academically strenuous classes shouldn't be swept under the rug and they should get as tailored an education as possible. Trying to squash all kids into the same politically correct group won't work and hurts everyone.
I'm OK with eliminating "gifted programs". I'm not convinced that "gifted" kids need them. I think that what they need is a library card and free rein to follow their curiosity wherever it leads them.
Gifted programs are "unacceptably white". WTF does that mean? I had to pass essentially an IQ test to get placed into those classes.
For me, it made a big difference in being engaged in schoolwork when every class consisted of reiterating content for days which I had mastered in minutes.
Edit: I removed "I don't see what race has to do with it." I do see how race can affect this when the gatekeeper is a teacher with biases choosing who takes the test to be in the program. This does not however make it ok to say "unacceptably white"
That's just one two-word phrase, and putting torque on it that distorts the gist of the whole article is not a good direction for threads. That's why we have this guideline:
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
I appreciate the rule and that is fair. I do think putting extremely inflammatory racial language front and center is notable. Particularly when it is so casual and so many people feel like it is unobjectionable as can be seen in the replies.
I will refrain from this sort of comment in the future though. Sorry dang!
It's only 'extremely inflammatory racial language' if you pluck it out of its context and misquote it.
The current population of students we identify as academically gifted and talented is unacceptably whiter and wealthier than the actual student population of academically gifted and talented students should be.
This is pretty vanilla, nearly tautological stuff unless you believe academic talent is some sort of inherent property of wealth or whiteness.
> Black students are 66% less likely to be identified as gifted compared to white students with similar test scores. Black, Latinx, and Native American students are far less likely to attend a school that even offers a gifted program.
Unacceptably white is still a horrible way to phrase this. Is the NBA unacceptably black? Why don't we remove basketball courts from inner cities and cut off black kid's feet /s eye roll
BTW, I realize he is arguing for the opposite of this.
edit: If you think I am racist or something let me spell it out as I did in another comment: It is not unacceptable when white children have opportunities. It is unacceptable when black children do not.
There were 49,400,000+ million children in public schools in 2020. There were 529 NBA players.
Whether the NBA is unacceptably racially biased is a problem so tiny that it is not worth spending any societal attention solving. That is not true of public schools.
Not even close to true. Going into a trade is a great way to get into a comfortable middle class life. And in those trades, you'll commonly find people who did horrible in school, and thought they were idiots because of it.
Not everyone is cut out to be a plumber or an electrician.
The ultimate goal should be to provide better education for everyone so that all students have as many available options by the time they're ready to pick a career path.
Also, I hate these comments from white collar folks about blue collar jobs being the answer to everything. Yes we need them, but we also need to be honest that the average plumber is going to have a harder time working until 65 than an office worker.
So we should accept that 98
0+% of people can or gave a successful life, yet should support the gifted <10% in their journey to extract the world's wealth?
I don't want to spend my tax money educating future bankers.
If you're talking about the top 10% of kids, you're obviously not talking about [just] the hyper-elite future bank executives (who are probably what, the top 0.0001%?) The top 10% of students is quite large would include all manner of engineers, doctors, etc. People who play vital roles in keeping our civilization going, not just parasitically leeching off interest rates or whatever it is banking executives do.
Most of those future executives are probably in private schools right now anyway.
You changed the subject from being in gifted to being gifted. You can exist outside of gifted and still have a high IQ and be a successful person. So, no.
That helps a lot but not necessarily required. If you require/aspire for radical social mobility being gifted is extreme help. If you're looking to have a modest life with family outside of expensive cities being gifted isn't much of a help.
As well, by definition, to be gifted you need to be an outlier. Most people get by and live a decent, if stressful, life.
One need not be in a gifted program in school in order to achieve a stable middle class life. In fact, the vast majority of those with stable middle class lives didn't participate in gifted programs.
>Unacceptably white is still a horrible way to phrase this. Is the NBA unacceptably black?
This statement is a textbook syllogistic fallacy.
It ignores the qualification context for being gifted vs. being in the NBA. There are a number of historically exclusive systems, prejudiced on socioeconomic and racial standards, that are required prerequisites for being in a gifted school, which do not exist for being in the NBA.
Put in simpler terms: open basketball courts != gatekeeping gifted schools
EDIT: Nobody here is calling you a racist. Your edit above reads like, "I'm not a racist, but..."
1. Make sure everyone has access to opportunities.
2. Get rid of all opportunities
People are going for the second one despite the fact that it doesn’t actually improve anyone’s life. Its like solving homelessness by burning down all houses.
It's like countering homelessness by enforcing that a portion of housing is accessible, affordable low-income housing. People sitting in high-income housing then make frivolous statements about all the houses being burnt down, or how we should also remove public basketball courts because of the NBA.
No, you’re talking about option #1, which I also agree is better. That’s not what’s happening here.
If you see a program that doesn’t have equal access, and instead of doing the hard work to get to equal access, you just get rid of the program… that’s the #2 option, the one I’m referring to, which is worse for everyone.
Nobody is saying "actively remove white children from gifted programs" they're saying, "when more people qualify for gifted programs than can fit in the program, consider including those who have fewer overall opportunities."
Those white kids will get other opportunities to be successful, and the non-white kids will get fewer of those opportunities, because society is racist as hell. Therefore, when you have a chance to give a non-white kid a shot at excellence, and they're qualified, give it to them.
My experience suggests that "when more people qualify for gifted programs than can fit in the program, consider slightly raising the qualification level, so you get exactly the class size you're targeting and no one who qualifies was excluded" is the likely path to be chosen.
How is qualification already being done today, such that the set of people qualified is larger than the available seats?
Is there no adjustment whatsoever possible to that process? If the people running that process had had a slightly tighter set of criteria, would the outward appearance be dramatically different than the path they took to get to the "slightly too many qualified" condition?
That's exactly my point. There's a system today that has some amount of arbitrariness to it. Tweaking that system slightly is almost surely arbitrariness-preserving, likely not increasing or decreasing it significantly.
My point is that it's increasing the arbitrariness by further constricting the qualified students pool.
Instead, accept they're all qualified insofar as they would maximally benefit from advanced lessons, and favor students for whom this may be their only opportunity to get ahead.
That would work better if things were more continuous. Having gifted classes imposes several practical barriers:
- Resource constraints (e.g. can only afford to teach sixty students)
- "catching up"; entering an existing gifted class stream after missing the first few years
- You'd want to select early in the school year. Joining a gifted class in the last few weeks of the year is pointless
- Kids in gifted streams want or are pressured to remain there
Modifications of the current distribution outside of the source and those factors above can result in zero sum outcomes. It's rhetorically useful to wave this off but still a practical concern.
Sounds like the problem might be with those who are selected to identify the "gifted" students. I am less interested in racial correlations to being identified as "gifted" and more interested in attributes such as whether the student is from a two-parent household, whether they are considered poor, whether they attend a local school or are transported to one outside of their neighborhood, etc. I suspect that we lose out on identifying many gifted children because issues at home and mere survival interfere with their ability to grow and develop academically.
A person with a latent talent which isn't identified and developed has no advantage over the person who doesn't have the talent at all. If we as a society can't do what it reasonable and prudent to identify and nurture such people then we all lose.
And then also click the provided link, which leads to a summary of the report, claiming that "this is unlikely to reflect teacher prejudice, but availability of 'gifted programs' in predominantly black schools".
In which case, the solution is "fund more gifted programs in schools that lack them", not "defund existing gifted programs".
Which is kinda what the article's author started to argue but never quite got there in the end.
What's interesting that is not mentioned is page 15: a black student with a black teacher is still much less likely to be identified as gifted. even less than a white student with a non-white teacher. internalized racism?
Probably more like black teachers with black students are more likely to exist in poor areas where identifying "giftedness" is lower on the list of priorities.
Forgive me if this seems all too simple to me. The solution is very clearly stop doing that then.
There's a lot of value in having a gifted track in schooling. Throwing that away because it is currently inaccurate at identifying students that are best suited to it is a stupid idea. Make it accurate at identifying the students that are best suited to it instead.
You can't self-select to be evaluated. Your parents can advocate, but they ultimately don't decide either. Although I think they can turn down the evaluation, I'm unclear on that though.
The first hurdle is getting the teacher to not only recognize that the child may be gifted, but to make the recommendation to administration. Then it is administration who ultimately makes the call on whether or not to evaluate the kid.
And teachers are more likely to recommend white students than black students.
And this may not even be something they're consciously aware of doing. Because a lot of this is based on the teachers' perceptions of students. If you have a good rapport with a student, you're more likely to recommend them to be evaluated. If you are constantly butting heads with a kid, or if the kid is just quietly doing their work, you're not going to be inclined to recommend them. Regardless of how well they are doing in class.
I was not evaluated until partway through my freshman year of high school and the only reason I was was because the teacher who ran the Quiz Bowl team got everyone who made it on the team who wasn't already in the gifted program evaluated.
Otherwise, I probably would not have been evaluated at all.
So you're implying that the conclusion of "unacceptable whiteness" is self-evident by simple examination of these two points... or what?
Perhaps "unacceptably lacking in Black students" is a less divisive way to say this, unless the decisiveness were intended and surely that's not the case.
When I was in grade 3 there was a standardized test for gifted. While standardized tests do have some racial disparity that disparity seems to be far smaller than letting teachers nominate students for a gifted evaluation rather than having it be universal.
That is not the quote from tfa. The quote is "The current population of students we identify as academically gifted and talented is unacceptably whiter and wealthier than the actual student population of academically gifted and talented students should be."
The author's focus on a particular racial classification seems incongruent with facts, given that students with another racial group are also over-represented in "Gifted Programs."
Which seems like it just is saying that the proportion assigned to gifted programs was lower than what the average test score would suggest (notable when compared to hispanics), but hispanics could have a wider distribution (or a bimodal one), so this seems like a shoddy test. The correct check of the hypothesis would be to find the test score threshhold above which 50% of students get into the gifted program and see if this threshhold varies by race... but I can't find anywhere this is done.
I have a very simple solution for LatinX group and it's also about equity. Like ALL other immigrants groups LatinX group should have to go through proper immigration process. Then we will see equity in immigration and equity in education.
Because the systems which identify students and enable them to meet the admissions requirements are massively unequal.
I'll give an example. I attended a gifted program starting in 3rd grade. I went to an elementary school for 1st and 2nd grade that was almost entirely white with some asian kids. Part of the mechanism for selecting students for the gifted program was a letter from the student's counselor, teacher, and principal.
My mom noticed that some schools were sending way more kids to the GT program than others. Several schools basically never sent any kids. No surprise, there were more black and hispanic kids at the schools. BUT these schools did not have a lack of students with high SOL scores or grades. It turned out that the process of identifying students and writing letters was letting these kids down. A few years of local activism to adjust the process and suddenly a bunch of kids from these other schools were being admitted to the GT program and succeeding.
Activists recently tried to adjust the admissions criteria for TJHSST, a magnet school in the area, to be a "merit lottery." This says that you set some minimum qualification (minimum GPA and accelerated math coursework) and then select students at random from that pool. This proposal was called racist against south and east asian students and activists were called enemies of excellence by various people like Scott Aaronson.
I was personally identified as having potential for going to TJ at age four. My parents paid a lot of money for me to have tutoring specifically for the admissions test.
In the above example, black and hispanic students with similar qualifications (test scores) are not receiving the same access to accelerated programs.
The point is that the mechanisms by which we define qualifications and select students really really matters and can encode all sorts of inequities.
The answer would be to improve the development of those students who are underdeveloped -- not change criteria for the identification of potential.
This is, of course, far more complicated, and involves difficult problems. Far easier to sweep it all under the rug by calling attention to qualifications "unacceptable".
In my personal experience agitating for change in this space, it is precisely the same people who resist change in admissions criteria and who resist change in grants for equitable early development resources.
And in the example I listed for early GT admissions, there was no need for developing "underdeveloped" students. They were already developed. They just had systems that didn't enable them to get through the gate to the GT program.
> In a world-historic irony, the main effect of this “solution” will be to drastically limit the number of Asian students, while drastically increasing (!!!) the number of White students. The proportion of Black and Hispanic students is projected to increase a bit but remain small.
The fun part about this is that TJHSST did edit the admissions process so we can actually test Aaronson's claim.
From class of 2024 to class of 2025.
* Economically disadvantaged students: 0.62% to 25.09%
* Black students: 1.23% to 7.09%
* Hispanic students: 3.29% to 11.27%
* White students: 17.70% to 22.36%
* Asian students: 73.05% to 54.36%
The raw increase in black students is larger than the raw increase in white students. But Aaronson predicted a "drastic increase" in white students and for the number of black students to increase by "a bit." Oops.
You can slice stats further. The number of asian students who are also on free and reduced lunch increased between years.
Average GPA of the class of 2025 admits was roughly identical (3.95).
We will obviously have to wait a few years to see how college admissions turn out and then we'll need to wait longer than that to see how their lives turn out. But early concerns about the students being "lower quality" are not panning out.
There is also the question of what "elite" means. Should TJ select for people that are extremely good at taking tests so they can have students take a mountain of AP classes and score a lot of 5s? Or is that not actually the best kind of education for gifted students? The most valuable material when I attended was not the testing but building weird software in the syslab. This value isn't encoded in grades and test scores.
> Average GPA of the class of 2025 admits was roughly identical (3.95).
This confuses me greatly. Are they using more generous grading for pandemic reasons? I've observed a noticeable difference between a top 5% student and a top 1% student, so the fact they're getting the same scores is odd... Wass the material/pace much lower than what the student body could cope with?
> This confuses me greatly. Are they using more generous grading for pandemic reasons?
Middle school GPA of the admits. Not their GPA in their freshmen year at TJ. I don't believe that TJ publishes this information. In a few years you'll be able to get a few proxies in average AP scores and college admissions information (though these metrics are flawed in their own ways).
But more and more evidence is stacking up that maybe your core assumption (the new class is full of worse students so that more white people get admitted) might not be true. Continuing to grasp for possible other explanations that allow you to keep holding this belief isn't good science. There are more than 500 very smart 8th graders in fairfax county (and prince william and fauquier counties) each year. Changing the testing procedure doesn't mean that less smart students are being admitted.
I had to look around for the source of this, and I can't find the "with similar test scores" part in the Vanderbuilt site article on the Vanderbuilt study this is based on.
It says 66% less likely, but the "similar test scores" part isn't in the same paragraph.
I really dislike that it is so difficult to find the source of these statements in modern media, as the news articles I read didn't even cite the study, I had to go googling for it.
Edit: I see where they pulled the line from. Misleading at best as the "tests" they are talking about are not gifted assessment tests, but rather standardized testing which I don't think is that great of an indicator. I was in the gifted program during middle school, and that was predicated by a few admittance tests, one of them being IQ.
If you read three paragraphs of the article you linked you can see the statement written in plain english:
> However, controlling for math and reading scores did not have the same effect for black students. In fact, black students continued to be assigned to gifted programs half as often as white peers with identical math and reading achievement.
> Misleading at best as the "tests" they are talking about are not gifted assessment tests, but rather standardized testing which I don't think is that great of an indicator.
I find this to be frustrating. How many times have we heard from people defending the existing systems that standardized testing is an appropriate method of stratifying people. When universities decide to minimize the relevance of the SATs we see howls of complaints. Now suddenly these tests are of minimal utility if they demonstrate that qualified black and hispanic students are being turned away?
The test matters. You don't find the top 2% of ability by a test designed to measure competency, for example. This distinction may or may not be relevant in the context of gifted programs within a single school, but it is certainly relevant when comparing the utility of state competency tests and SAT tests.
> Misleading at best as the "tests" they are talking about are not gifted assessment tests, but rather standardized testing which I don't think is that great of an indicator. I was in the gifted program during middle school, and that was predicated by a few admittance tests, one of them being IQ.
Yes, a student who studies hard may get good academic test scores, but may do poorly on gifted admittance tests. They're testing two different things. The former tests ability to understand class content, the other tests the ability to solve problems which are not part of school curriculum.
Yeah, it's very easy to draw conclusions that suit your agenda when you use slippery terms like "similar." A score of 90 and a score of 100 are "similar" in the sense that they're both an A, but one is a bit more impressive. And that's not even getting into the possibility that the author is using an even broader range of test scores, like "students who make all As and Bs on tests." For all you know, he could then be comparing white students making all As (and being accepted into a gifted program) with black students making all Bs (and not being accepted).
I realize it's just a blog post and not a scientific paper, but the author didn't even cite a source for that statistic. My gut reaction is that it's probably incredibly misleading if not outright false.
Presumably test scores are a not terrible proxy for qualification. So if black and hispanic students of similar qualification are not being admitted into these programs, then the programs are not actually equitably enrolling people.
Incredible. Not any statement, but left oriented, because of course lying and half-truths are limited to people with the political orientation you don't agree with...
EVERY uncited statement needs double checking. Even on non-contentious topics.
Cited statements also need double checking. Frequently there's a game of telephone going on and the original research has been distorted.
This is not just a left wing phenomena, it's a phenomena anywhere you get people who aren't completely dispassionate observers (this excludes all advertiser funded media as they are incentivized to make things interesting and engaging).
As I said in my other post, in my school you were taken out of regularly classes, but still had to learn those things and do that work. That means the student has to agree to work 20% harder, usually at home, where they may not have that luxury. There are probably other considerations that aren't coming to mind at the moment, too, that also affect the number of children in Gifted programs.
Asians are white when it's unhelpful to the narrative for them to be a minority. See also "underrepresented minority", which translates to: non-Asian minority.
Hate to suggest this but I was wondering if I was diversity hire lol, since my skills are definitely subpar but I still got in somehow. I can do soft skills but yeah. -- anyway I'll take it, I need it.
You are only scratching the surface here. Some places had a hard time "proving" their gifted programs were "too white" so they started using the term "white and white-adjacent" to include Asian kids as well (often from impoverished background but that's another issue) in these stats [0].
> I don't see why race has anything to do with it.
Buckle up. The SF school district is trying to include a lot more racial content at school [1]. Now even math is considered racist [2]. I wish I was making this up.
“Math is racist” is not what is being claimed in link #2. It’s math instruction that they claim to be racist. I have no idea if this is true but it’s at least plausible.
What's the "radical" concern with [0]? Why wouldn't we want students to think critically about uses of technology and how they impact society, or make access to computer science more inclusive?
If you read it you'll see it contains some gems "This focus on middle and high school, and on adolescents is intentional: 12-18 year olds are at a developmental stage where they are just beginning to comprehend their social worlds and their roles and positions in these social worlds. We believe that learning CS in social terms at these ages can not only help them integrate perspectives on computing into their new awareness of the world, but that the ideas in CS itself can help them better understand what it means to be human, to make decisions, and to have intelligence. Children in primary school may be too young for conversations about systemic social conflict. And while adults in postsecondary and beyond need to learn justice-centered CS literacy as well, many are less open to such learning, having hardened their political views as they enter adulthood. We likely need different methods for children and adults."
They know adults will be skeptical of what they teach (with reason). So they try to jam it down children’s throats where there’s little parental oversight. Disagree with it? Enjoy failing the class and the hit it will have on your GPA for college. And they aren’t even trying to hide it.
What is the sinister material that they’re trying to teach or jam down children’s throats? The fact that they’re preparing material for a specific age range does not seem sinister in itself
What do you mean by the veneer being quite thin? You mean that the surface-level claim that math instruction is racist is actually cover for a deeper claim that math itself is racist? Where do they come close to making that deeper claim?
You are correct, the general gist is they believe math instruction as racist, although they do at times make reference "Western math" and "Eurocentric math", whatever that is, and not math education, so it's a bit muddled. Regardless, take 15 minutes for yourself and you will see exactly how absurd the entire premise is. Here, on how word problems support white-supremacy:
> Often the emphasis is placed on learning math in the “real world,” as if our classrooms are not a part of the real
world. This reinforces notions of either/or thinking because math is only seen as useful when it is in a particular
context. However, this can result in using mathematics to uphold capitalist and imperialist ways of being and understandings of the world.
The way math is taught is quite often racist. I've seen entire math textbooks based around examples featuring American sports. If you don't know the rules of American football, you are not going to understand any of the examples in the book. I spent a lot of time in school and college explaining various American sports rules to friends.
That is the most trivial of examples, but it is a hugely impactful one for a lot of people. I have seen large amounts of frustration because some math book author couldn't keep his favorite sports jargon from littering the entire book.
You have other biases as well that can make students feel like shit. Story problems about a working father and a stay at home mother, sounds like nothing for many people, but for quite a few kids being reminded again and again that "not having a dad" is unusual, well, why the hell is the math book doing that? Just stick to problems involving trains.
I was in one of these programs in middle and high school (1985-1990). My experience was that only a very small subset were selected to be tested. Most of the "gifted" students were born to parents who knew how to advocate for them and get them tested. (Mostly white, mostly upper middle class, many children of teachers.)
I am certain that if every student had been tested, the composition of the gifted classes would have been very different. Many students who fell through the cracks would have been put in the higher level classes and many at the lower end of the gifted program would not have made the cut (given fixed class sizes for the gifted program).
Well, I was a dirt poor child of a single Puerto Rican mom in eastern Kentucky and I was accepted in gifted education the first year I went to public schools (which was the first year it was offered--the reason I went.)
But to your point, I was not able to take algebra until 9th grade due to reasons that felt a bit discriminatory as you'd described, but my mother was a maniac and no one liked her, so hard to say if that didn't add weight.
There are always individual cases that work out. Even in systems with extreme oppression, members of oppressed groups succeed. But it is still a problem if there is a large and observable statistical disparity between groups for no compelling reason.
Consider a toy admissions criteria where students go through the same process as today but students with black hair have to also win a game of rock paper scissors. There will surely be a large number of kids with black hair who are admitted and succeed. But the system would be plainly unfair and deserve to be fixed, despite many individual students with black hair being able to say "well I was admitted."
I think what I'm getting at is that the "rich White affluent people gave me a chance" and I "didn't behave" according to their standards, so they pushed me out. I was too young to understand, but perhaps they had a fair point?
I was well-behaved and bright, but coarse I suppose.
I was too poor to participate in the fancy science trips, couldn't afford class materials, constantly late, and homework never got done due to what I remember as "family issues". I was bright and gifted, but a high achiever I was not.
I don't blame them for pushing me out of the system, I didn't play by the rules. But from what you're saying, that's part of the problem and I don't disagree... but allowing me to persist and annoy those gifted kids with resources, encouraging families, and ambition wasn't really fair now was it?
I think it depends on what the rules are. A lot of rules encode social and class norms rather than actually achieve a pedagogical goal. Classic examples of this is forcing kids to use "proper" grammar rather than AAVE or forcing left-handed kids to write with the right hand.
I take your point but I had awful redneck grammar until I was 22 or so, and it's something everyone can fix if they just put the time in. I'm not a stickler for "correct" words because language evolves, but if you come to HN because you like programming, surely you'd understand why I'd appreciate semantics of grammar.
But forcing a child to use their non-dominant right hand could be considered a form of cruelty I suppose, so not seeing how they're really related.
When I go back home to Appalachia, I fall back into my old bad habits readily but if I got a call from my boss, I'm switching to "educated" and that's more than just ditching the drawl, it's modifying the entire way I structure my thoughts. I think that's very common and not unfair to expect from someone claiming that they desire education.
What you describe here is often called "code switching" and it requires nontrivial mental effort. The folks that don't need to code switch (because work culture matches their dominant culture norms) are at an advantage.
In my opinion the worst enemy of an intelligent student is boredom. Boredom causes underachievement and disillusionment. One reason to keep a gifted programme at school is to give intelligent students something to do that is actually interesting.
There is no intelligence test I know of that can perfectly control for advantages and disadvantages in education / home life.
Not everyone is as well-positioned as you might have been to excel at an IQ test. And to the extent that someone is disadvantaged, their race may indeed be an indirect cause.
It has become acceptable in society these days for people to bring down the white race any way they can through these sort of micro aggressions.
As a white person any success or benefit you enjoy can never be truly legitimate, it will always be stained by the original sin of your white ancestors. And if you happen to be straight, or male, or both you are even more guilty. The message is that the white race must not be allowed to progress any further than it has until all other races have caught up or even surpassed it. In the mean time, individuals suffer.
The only time you can be truly understood and seen as a unique individual and not a stereotype is amongst other whites.
you could theoretically have questions that rely on cultural background info to understand it. i imagine there are questions that a chinese student would understand and an american would not, but IQ tests and most other standardized test are rigorously tested to avoid this stuff.
they look for this and throw out offending questions on the SAT all the time
Give an upper class white kid a problem involving tennis scores, no problem. The kid will be able to easily understand what is being talked about, there isn't anything mentally jarring going on.
Give a poor black kid a problem involving tennis scores, boom, problem. Odds of a poor black kid knowing how tennis scoring works, much less likely.
My, largely well to do, neighborhood has tennis courts. The more diverse, and poorer, neighborhood I grew up in, didn't. I am still not sure how tennis is scored, but I am pretty sure the kids in the house next to me understand it.
Repeat this idea a few times with some of the other tests. Give some word recall lists using words poor/minority kids aren't accustom to. It is harder to recall words that you have never heard before, they are basically nonsense syllables, which is a very different test. If you had thrown "quiche" in the middle of a word list 8 year old me would have had no idea what you were talking about.
Modern day IQ tests have tried to correct for these biases, but school administrators can choose an "older" test to purposefully get biased results.
school administrators can choose an "older" test to purposefully get biased results
Do you have any evidence of school administrators choosing "older" tests with biased questions about tennis scores or whatever other cultural trivia rich white kids are most likely to know about? I took an IQ test when I was a kid (early 90's) and it was a bunch of abstract questions involving mental rotations of objects, determining the next number in a sequence, determining the missing object from a set of objects, and so on. There were no questions about vocabulary or trivia of any kind.
You can look at the history of IQ tests to see that older ones were indeed biased. New tests are designed to counteract those biases.
The point is that it is possible for corrupt administrators to bias test results, and the methods to do such are fairly easy to come across.
I'm not objecting to IQ tests, just pointing out that if a school wanted to create a test that only admitted certain students, that it is very possible to do such.
I know that old IQ tests (and other tests) were biased and used in racist ways. What I asked is whether there is any evidence of school administrators using those old biased tests in recent times. Otherwise this is just speculation.
I've seen plenty of problems involving scoring in various sports. I've seen stats taught using baseball batting averages and tons of problems involving football scoring.
Oh and poker hands.
I can easily imagine an IQ test 50 years ago involving scoring in bridge games.
At my school, everyone was tested... but you needed a recommendation along with a high score to get in. I scored highly on the test year after year but was never given the recommendation necessary. I can't for sure say it was because I am a minority, but it definitely disenfranchised me
I imagine this has it's roots in the demographic and population shift the city has seen starting in the 50s. Philly's population in 1990 was 75% of what it was in the 50s. I'm not an expert in this area, but I'm sure there was overhead in maintaining infrastructure, paying pensions, etc as the population shrunk.
At this point, maybe the federal government should just bail out city school districts in this situation. Why should an underfunded school district be paying a chunk of its budget on debts?
> I had to pass essentially an IQ test to get placed into those classes. I don't see why race has anything to do with it.
Simply put, we don't know how to make objective IQ tests yet.
The questions in IQ tests tend to bake in a bunch of cultural assumptions, often in ways you don't expect. So the test measures a combination of IQ, and affinity with a specific cultural background.
First, let me be clear about this: The issue is friction. Even at the same difficulty, a question that's more accessible is less stressful and less mentally taxing. Especially when you're dealing with kids. This matters more at the cut-off than the extremes of the bell-curve, but has statistical impacts.
I just searched for "Fourth Grade IQ Test" and clicked a random link. Four of the ten questions are about sharing cookies. Baking cookies and sharing cookies are typical middle-class-white activity, but I don't know how that shakes out in other cultures. Maybe they share other foods? Maybe sharing food is offensive because it implies the other kids' parents can't provide for themselves? Maybe the kids aren't in charge of food division? The underlying math is, of course, objective. But the math is being framed through a perspective which is more or less familiar to different backgrounds.
Any further reading recommendations? It's unclear why the cultural example of baking and sharing food would cause significant differences in test results but that's picking at an example. Were the six other questions also stereotypical of white middle class families? I imagine they were more abstract (lacking cultural context?). Would the solution here be to remove cultural context, or have culturally tailored exams? It would be interesting to take IQ tests from other countries and compare results.
I imagine other factors such as home life, economic status, and cultural emphasis on education would be much, much stronger predictors on IQ test performance.
A few straight arithmetic questions, one about the alphabet, a few about parts of speech. These don't immediately jump out to me as cultured, although anything involving letters or grammar will be sensitive to the linguistic background of the students.
Certainly home life, economic background, etc have an impact on educational outcomes. But I'm making a narrower claim here. A student with a poor home life is likely to test poorly regardless, although the difference might be larger in some tests than others. But a student with the same educational aptitude may test better or worse depending on if they're being tested on topics that are familiar or unfamiliar to them.
Removing cultural context is certainly a solution. I'm not sure it's the best solution. Excessively-abstract problems are only one aspect of intelligence. Anything involving reading comprehension is going to have some linguistic or cultural elements, but I'm not sure it's valid to just remove reading comprehension altogether.
If you want to see a standardized test from a different culture, here's one that's made the rounds a few times. This is for eight-graders in Kentucky in 1912. The sections on Geography & Physiology certainly stand out, but even the math section has a notably different emphasis than modern education.
The Cattell Culture Fair III (CFIT-III) is really good.
If we are talking IQ scores within the same western country, we know now to make culture fair fluid intelligence test (it's not the same as future achievement score)
There's usually gifted programs in poor schools as well. This isn't a private vs public education thing. It's more about keeping bright students stimulated and not bored to tears and have their potential stunted.
"Black students are 66% less likely to be identified as gifted compared to white students with similar test scores. Black, Latinx, and Native American students are far less likely to attend a school that even offers a gifted program. These are just some of the issues with which the gifted education field must grapple. "
I would actually say that my gifted classes probably brought my grades down, at least in those same years.
But at the same time, they gave me a broader education and I learned more than I would have otherwise.
At my elementary school, you were taken out of normal classes 1 day per week. You still had to do all the work from that day, but you didn't actually attend those sessions for those classes. Instead, you spent the whole day in a different classroom that was solely for "gifted" students.
Of course, this meant that it really was only the top students that could handle it.
Prior to being tested and accepted into Gifted, I was a pretty constant disruption in my normal classes. I would finish all the work in class, even the stuff that everyone else had to take home because it took them so long. That left me constantly bored, and clued them in that I needed more.
TBH, I probably would have said I preferred being given a book and let sit in a corner and learned or just read fiction. But instead I was forced to be social and learn about things not usually taught in school, such as puzzle solving. I'm still very much an introvert, but I have to wonder how much more introverted I'd be if it weren't for that? Perhaps cripplingly so.
I'm a huge fan of gifted classes for obvious reasons, but not at the expense of other students. If there isn't enough budget to teach everyone to a basic level, gifted classes are not a great idea.
In fact, we should probably restructure everything so that everyone who isn't being taught at their full potential can learn more in school. I'm sure there were students around me that were almost in my same situation, but they weren't in Gifted. They were probably also bored and could have been both educated and entertained during those times, if we had the programs for it.
Gifted programs and advanced classes were what kept me in school, the only things that got my grades up tho were classes with rigid rules. I had one class and where if you showed up late once / didn’t hand in one assignment you failed.
I got straight As that semester. The rest of school was just min/max’ing to average out with a C and not do any homework.
I don't know whether Algebra I is above or below what eighth graders can be expected to do, but raising the difficulty of every class to what the most advanced student is capable of is not the answer either. Everybody knows someone else that is better at math than they are, and someone who is not as good. It is universal common knowledge that the ease with which one takes to math is different for different people. Why can't we just admit it and quit trying to make people who are unique the same?