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?
This is why equity is a bullshit goal.