Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg | Hacker News Reader

asdfasgasdgasdg

As a parent of white and asian children, this type of thing does cause visceral concern for me. Are public programs that benefit my children going to be cancelled because they tend to include disproportionately more children from our group than other groups? Will I be forced to go private to get the teaching I need for my children?

At the same time, I also recognize that there is scant evidence that gifted and advanced learning programs are beneficial. Selection bias is extremely hard to control and is the driving factor behind most deltas in education statistics. Are the kids coming out of the program better equipped because of the program? Or were the better equipped kids selected into the program? I'm inclined to guess that typically it's more of the former than the latter.

So for now I'm delaying judgment on these moves. We will be watching carefully to see whether the quality of the teaching slips when our gifted programs are cancelled. If that happens, and if I believe we can get better teaching elsewhere, we will go private and it will be fine. But my guess is that the gifted program is really not that important and we will be fine continuing without it.

As a parent of Bangladeshi-Irish children, I’m not delaying judgment. Whether or not gifted programs are valuable is besides the point. I’d welcome a concrete debate about the utility of gifted programs, and whether the benefits are worth the resources spent on them.

But the gifted program here wasn’t eliminated because of cost-benefit reasons. It was eliminated because administrators felt that too many kids in the program looked like our kids. They’ve taken a page out of the Old South playbook and there is no reason to reserve judgment on that.

I recognize that the terms of the debate might not be what I would choose. But I'm more concerned about the practical impact on my children than the ideological content of the debate. If the gifted programs are not actually having a causal positive impact on my children, I don't care so much if they are cancelled, no matter why they are cancelled. I am less interested in the ideology of the two sides of the debate, although I respect that other people feel differently and I don't wish to foreclose on other people arguing that aspect of things.

Ideology drives policy, and this won’t be the only policy decision made based on ideology. Virginia recently eliminated the admissions test in the science/tech magnet high school I attended because the school had too many Asian kids: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/thomas-jeffer....

Standardized testing has been a huge equalizer for Asian Americans vis-a-vis whites. My family came to America from Bangladesh—we were fortunate to be solidly middle class, but we lacked the social connections and cultural capital of even the average middle class whites around us. Standardized testing allowed my brother and I to stand out and break into professions that just a generation ago were reserved for the children of elite white families. Getting rid of those opportunities strikes me as ill-advised at best and motivated by anti-Asian sentiment at worst.

If ideological and at the whim debates are determining outcomes in a school, organization or a company; it's time to move.

No place exists where this isn't happening to some extent or another. Where are you going to move to? No place I'd want to be is free from other human beings.

> Are public programs that benefit my children going to be cancelled because they tend to include disproportionately more children from our group than other groups? Will I be forced to go private to get the teaching I need for my children?

Well yes, this is what they mean when they talk about "combating privilege".

And it's totally fine and fair

I think the most efficient and ethical way to combat privilege is to spend more resources to bring underprivileged people up, rather than taking away resources to bring privileged people down. In many respects that is the only viable option. For example, kids who have been abused are going to need more support to reach the level of achievement of kids who live in homes free of abuse. You can't solve this by taking away the advantages of the more privileged group (i.e. abusing the children who haven't been). You can only address this issue by providing more support for victims of abuse.

You're free to believe whatever you want and it's really none of my business, but what you're saying is just not going to happen. It has been tried many times before and it's a Herculean task. Way too hard, if not virtually impossible and it always ends up like this. If you support combating privilege, just be prepared to lose everything. It's fine by me, but let's not get disillusioned about what it actually means.

Privilege is like the emperors clothing. Once you reject the meta-narrative the hyper-realty crumbles.

> I think the most efficient and ethical way to combat privilege is to spend more resources to bring underprivileged people up

In the context of primary education, and I mean this in the most sincere way possible, what if they don't want to? You're ignoring the agency of the students. A lot of children, occasionally my younger self included, see it as their duty to rebel against the educational system. So how can you improve someone's educational attainment against their will?

Students, even in gifted programs, push back on the demands that are placed on them. I did too when I was in school, and I was in gifted and advanced placement programs throughout my schooling. I'm not sure to what extent this is specific to privileged or underprivileged groups.

There is nothing a school can spend money on to fix this problem.

Likewise, there is nothing the occupying US army can spend money on to solve extremism in Iraq.

They would have to entirely reinvent their organization to be something that it’s not. This is the NAACP unwisely putting pressure where it’s not needed (schools) instead of where it is needed (legislators). Blame the NAACP for failing at the governmental level and trying to backdoor into the schooling level.

That is exactly what combating privilege is. Instead of bringing people up it is about bringing people down.

The funny thing is that if they really tried to combat the privilege - the rich families connected to the ruling class - the privilege would combat them into the ground, so they wisely chose a weak opponent that vaguely resembles the rich (common skin color).

Yes, yes, and yes... this is happening in California already. As a future parent of Asian kids, I’m preparing to have to spend through the nose on private education.

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