A PTA Purge of Asians | Hacker News Reader

A PTA Purge of Asians

wsj.com

23 pointsrahimnathwani11 comments

Hey, that's my school. I graduated in 2020. This article isn't showing you the whole picture.

WRT the new admissions system, all I have to say is that the old admissions system wasn't that great either (the general consensus among my friend group and everyone else I talked to).

For the PTA stuff, I think it's worth noting that TJ has a PTSA (parent - teacher - STUDENT - association), not a PTA. I can't read the article but there's a large push from current TJ parents to completely replace the board with candidates focused on the school instead of pushing politics. You might think that all PTSA stuff is inherently political, but that's not the case. Concerned parents can push for/against admissions reform outside of the PTSA.

The issues here are playing out in California as well:

- removal of merit-based admissions for Lowell High School

- removal of SAT for admissions to University of California

- restriction of advanced math in the California Math Framework 2021

These will all reduce the link between ability/effort and measures of achievement.

So they will tend to reduce inequality of outcomes, by making outcomes more random. If you see university degrees as a scarce good (e.g. mainly a signalling device), to be allocated evenly among the population, then this may seem like a win.

For those who care about improved academic achievement, or more/better learning, these changes are a step back.

Anyone else think the math portion of SAT is too easy already? I wish they would add regular expressions in there.

Apparently 25% of students at Carnegie Mellon get a perfect score of 800 on the math portion of the SAT. They aren’t trying very hard to make all the questions count… I mean why not make the exam shorter / fewer questions if you don’t want the fine granularity.

Predictable result of the (actually) racist stuff that's being promoted and apparently isn't a problem anymore. This will get worse before it gets better.

except that placement in magnet schools and similar programs has been proven to have nothing to do with student intelligence or ability-- its parental lobbying and teacher bias. What is suspiciously absent from this opinion piece, is what exactly the changes are to the TJ admissions process. Previously, acceptance was blind to what school a student was applying *from*, so 1/2 or more of the students came from 5/25 middle schools. The new model takes geography into account. Additionally, only 2-3% of TJ students were in the FARMS program, in a school system where over 30% of the total population is in FARMS. Tell me how parents are equipped to navigate the insanity of trying to get their kids into a magnet program when they are at less than 130% of the poverty line? The starting line for admission for kids in Fairfax county is widely variable and nearly all of the factors that influence that are out of their control. The changes to the admissions process aren't about race-- they are about class and social status. These Coalition for TJ nimbys and the goons like McGurn who perpetuate these class divisions are twisting the facts to fit their narrative and victim complex.

>except that placement in magnet schools and similar programs has been proven to have nothing to do with student intelligence or ability

This claim sounds dubious to me. There absolutely must be examples of this, but it's a stretch to turn it into a generalization for all magnet schools. It may be the case for a "No. 1" school such as TJ, but as someone who attended two magnet schools, the process has always been unsurprisingly fair.

"placement in magnet schools and similar programs has been proven to have nothing to do with student intelligence or ability"

This is an extraordinary claim, and you have provided no evidence. Some magnet schools (e.g. Lowell in San Francisco) used to have purely merit-based admissions (you must exceed X on a test). Do you think this has 'nothing to do with student intelligence or ability'?

Anyone have a link to the full article?

https://archive.is/AptGn

Thanks.

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