Wow, using a word such as segregation, which has connotations of 'by design' sure lays bare their hand.
Just to be clear, there is no segregation(of any kind) amongst the students in the program.
In fact, there is no segregation at all. There's just not equal representation of the makey-uppy USA racial classifications.
But why let facts and clarity rule over emotional clickbaity sub-headlines?
If you start from that perspective, it naturally follows to label G&T education as segregated if we observe that one group being overrepresented in it and another group being underrepresented.
Of note here, it's the assumption that the distribution of gifted and talented eligibility attributes is uniformly distributed among different groups of students and that somehow the system is not picking up eligibility signals for specific students. There is some emerging evidence that this is the case for Black students, as the identification gap between Black and White students closes when the G&T assessor is Black (I think that Grissom has a recent paper on this). If we reject the uniform distribution assumption, we end up assuming that the G&T eligibility traits are unevenly distributed among students, which I believe is one of the longest lasting beliefs of racist thought in education.
> This movement has moved away from labeling racist a policy that was implemented with racist intent (like segregated schools during Jim Crow) towards labeling racist a policy that has unequal outcomes based on race, regardless of policymakers' intent.
> If you start from that perspective, it naturally follows to label G&T education as segregated if we observe that one group being overrepresented in it and another group being underrepresented.
> If we reject the uniform distribution assumption, we end up assuming that the G&T eligibility traits are unevenly distributed among students, which I believe is one of the longest lasting beliefs of racist thought in education.
Would that reasoning hold when applied to spaces where black people tend to be more successful than whites? Sports being a big one here. Would you call sports racist? Would you argue that the equivalent of G&T eligibility traits for sports are evenly distributed among students, regardless of their race? I can see how racist people would push the idea that these traits are unevenly distributed, but when I put things in another context, all of that doesn't make any sense. We don't have a problem accepting as a society that some people are really ahead of the pack when it comes to sports, but when it comes to intelligence (whatever that means, you could probably separate it in academic and work success but most of these are not as clear cut as "who was the fastest to run 100 meters?") we have a hard time talking about it.
I guess my question behind this is: what is the aim of the current anti-racist movement? Is it equality in a "colorblind" way, as in the ultimate goal is that race is never a factor in the success and failures that people achieve? Or is it a movement trying to replace negative discrimination with positive discrimination? Is it a movement that's interested in scientific truth, whatever the outcomes may be? Or it is a movement that would hide inconvenient truths if this would help the "cause"?
The amelioration for this is equity, or as you call it "positive discrimination". That means -- yes, holding whites back so that blacks have an opportunity to step forward. Blacks need greater advantages in order to achieve social parity with whites. It is also exceedingly shameful that one of the easiest ways to repair the damage caused to blacks' pool of social capital -- slave reparations -- was never considered by the U.S. government.
> Even without Jim Crow laws and segregation, even assuming everyone is perfectly colorblind, the historical context where there were slavery and Jim Crow laws for hundreds of years means that whites wield considerably greater social capital than blacks, and that means they have a significant social advantage.
How do you reconcile this view with the fact that asians were also discriminated against, but now do better than whites? The way you described it, there is a perverse incentive for people at the bottom to stay at the bottom. Is that considered a problem? That perverse incentive might trap them even more at the bottom, is that being considered? Are those views, in a way, close to universal income? As in, the idea is that you raise the absolute bottom at which you can fall in society? Some kind of glass floor, as opposed to the glass ceiling?
Again, no judgement on those views or any others. I'm thankful for your straightforwardness.
There are places where blacks do better than whites. In the Bronx, New York, the standard of living went up because of an influx of Afro-Caribbean immigrants who made more than the local white population. But minorities with an earned advantage are outside consideration of equity policy, which is focused on providing unearned advantage for certain minority groups to compensate for centuries of unearned advantage held by whites.
> The way you described it, there is a perverse incentive for people at the bottom to stay at the bottom. Is that considered a problem?
No. Iron rule of 2020s American politics: Statements that may give power to "the enemy" if they were true are always to be considered false, and even taboo to talk about. To give an example, consider the following statement: There exist cisgender biological men who are very willing to put on a dress and pose as transgender women, for the purpose of creeping on women in ladies' restrooms. Without even an accusative reference to a particular purported transgender woman, this statement MUST be considered false, and even transphobic hate speech, because if true it would make policymakers hesitate to pass laws mandating that transgender people be permitted to use the facilities that match their stated gender identity.
Here's another one: The risk of serious side effects from getting the COVID vaccine is far less than the risk of serious complications from catching COVID. Watch the right squirm at that one, and even shout you down for proposing it, because to them accepting it means implicitly legitimizing Biden's vaccine mandates.
"Perverse incentives for people to stay at the bottom" sounds an awful lot like Reagan's "welfare queens" rhetoric from the 1980s, which was widely considered racist and even a "dogwhistle" (a coded statement designed to appeal to far-right racist without raising alarm among decent people), so discussing such perverse incentives is pretty much off the table in American policy discussion.
Skin color is probably not how we would choose to classify people if we were starting from scratch today, but if poor white people always got to use the front door and well-to-do black people had to use the side door, to say "we're fighting for the right of everybody both rich and poor to be allowed to walk in through the front door" is a true statement that misses the problem.
Said disparity would grow as the kids would be then denied said opportunity on the basis of their parents' failure. The kids' kids would then suffer the same, and so forth.
In other words, how would you "punish" (if that's even necessary) the parents without punishing the kids?
Have them break out of a bleak culture. They are the PARENTS, it's their responsibility to rear their kids, not the state's responsibility. They made the decision to have kids.
Absolutely. I don't have any reference right now, but numerous studies have shown that schools in poor, minority neighborhoods are significantly worse than other schools.
What can make a big difference is having higher levels of expectation for student performance and backing that up with tools to increase it. But it's pretty clear that many teachers and school administrators in those poorly performing schools don't have those high expectations, nor do they make the effort to encourage those who would benefit from G/T programs and get them into those programs.
When the people who are charged with educating you don't make the effort, then why should the students?
The solution is to make the bad schools better, not destroy the programs that could benefit those students just as much as those from other schools.
Could you provide details on this? My impression had been that for magnet high schools the only admissions evaluation was made on the basis of test scores, but you make it sound like admissions are more subjective, with an "assessor".
> Students of color are underrepresented in gifted programs relative to White students, but the reasons for this underrepresentation are poorly understood. We investigate the predictors of gifted assignment using nationally representative, longitudinal data on elementary students. We document that even among students with high standardized test scores, Black students are less likely to be assigned to gifted services in both math and reading, a pattern that persists when controlling for other background factors, such as health and socioeconomic status, and characteristics of classrooms and schools. We then investigate the role of teacher discretion, leveraging research from political science suggesting that clients of government services from traditionally underrepresented groups benefit from diversity in the providers of those services, including teachers. Even after conditioning on test scores and other factors, Black students indeed are referred to gifted programs, particularly in reading, at significantly lower rates when taught by non-Black teachers, a concerning result given the relatively low incidence of assignment to own-race teachers among Black students.
Let's presume that intelligence is heritable. Given the difference between humans and other species I do not see how this can be argued.
Let's also presume that intelligence varies between humans. If there is no variation across a population, then it cannot be selected for, unless you argue a stepwise change that's completely uniform, for which I don't see any other evolutionary proxy.
Let's NOT presume that intelligence varies between races.
My question to you is this:
Can the children of a group of humans selected for intelligence (e.g. completed enough education despite a cultural revolution, had enough finances, etc. -- Asians; escaped systematic genocide, etc. -- Jews) be, on average and not uniformly and with lots of overlap, smarter than the children of a group of humans not selected for intelligence (e.g. sold by other Africans into slavery, so presumably disadvantaged in the original African society, lower-educational-barrier illegal immigration as with many Central and South Americans)?
Note for the purposes of this question that reproduction within each group (Asian immigrants : Asian immigrants; Jews : Jews; African-Americans : African-Americans; Hispanics : Hispanics) is much larger than reproduction between groups, preventing admixing over time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_health_in_the_United_...
Some of it is but there is also parental responsibility and small/immediate culture which has greater effect.
If you have parents that come from poor backgrounds and despite that produce kids who overrepresent in achievement, people in some corners like to brush that under a rug and anyone who highlights that is guilty of falling for the "model minority". Problem is, that's a cop-out and veers on crab mentality. Some subpopulations simply push their kids to study more and play less than others. That's just how it is. The parents may have two jobs, but still manage to instill an education mindset into them --a minority of these kids will look back and say that their childhoods were not fun, and that is likely true, but I don't think they'd be have a better life trudging away as a HS dropout or similar. And surely some parents overburden their kids to study "respected" professions. But that's a different problem.
Within a particular ethnicity or "race" some subpopulations have dedicated parents and others don't.
If I were born in the south to "hillbillies" my odds for landing in talented and gifted would go way down, not because of race, or ethnicity but because the culture of the parents and the immediate culture.
But take South Koreans 1st gen and compare them to Philippine 1st gen or Pole and Romanian and that's a no-no.
I can scream whatever I want about people being equal and have equal capabilities.
But that is a lie.
Genetics is a huge factor in disease, skills and behavior.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
The proper term is bigotry.
Very BLM article.
Whole medicine has know for years that diseases and treatment differ by race. Saying that it does not matter will only make things worse for other races.
Several labs are actively pursuing black and other minorities as volunteer for their clinical trials for this reason. If that does not matter we will never see studies looking for African americans or Asians.
Species do not exist genetically /s
Of course, predictably, saying something true but anti-narrative was obviously a "counterrevolutionary activity" and got fired.
It looks like they'll be replacing this with a more finely-designed system featuring "accelerated" learning for those students who are doing well at any given time in some specific subjects, which seems more appropriate to current needs.
Segregation/segregate is defacto used as a noun/verb with intent behind it.
This is the whole "rising tide lifts all boats" thing, but in reverse. We should raise the tide further rather than draining the water so everyone can be equally stuck in the mud.
There are also problems inherent with breaking this down along racial lines. Removing gifted programs from public schools doesn't affect people who have the means to seek out additional tutoring, private schools, etc. Rich kids will still get extra education. But surely there are plenty of kids in these programs who _aren't_ from a privileged background, who are now having their opportunities to compete with wealthy kids reduced.
This whole idea seems incredibly poorly thought out, and the focus on race as the most important factor seems, to my eye, to be a big part of the issue.
Your entire comment rests on a false premise.
My entire comment does not rest on a false premise.
1) My comment commented on the use of the word segregation and it's implications. *
and
2) the fact that the program is not racially segregated using any dictionary definition of the word.
> Segregation is defined by the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance as "the act by which a (natural or legal) person separates other persons on the basis of one of the enumerated grounds without an objective and reasonable justification, in conformity with the proposed definition of discrimination
This program is not that, no matter how hard you try and squint to make it seem so.
> separated or divided along racial, sexual, or religious lines.
Perhaps the NYC editor was using that definition. If you use any of those definitions, then yes your comment is objectively incorrect.
Obviously an uncharitable read can lead one to dismiss the intentions of everyone involved.
The NYTimes article isn't an 8 year old writing their first newspaper article using the dictionary to form sentences.
Their usage of the word is inflammatory and incorrect on multiple levels including your definition.
Many of the parents I know who has kids that were accepted in the gifted and talented program had very expensive tutoring in order to be accepted. We are talking thousands of dollars for toddlers. That's tutoring that most Black and Latino New Yorkers simply cannot afford. And their parents paid these obscene amounts in order to avoid that their kids were stuck at the mostly Black ordinary public schools with kids from the projects.
I don't think NY Times claims that the parents are racist. But the fact remains that they try to get their kids from mostly Black schools into mostly white schools.
And yes, I know those countries are in Asia.
School antisegregation laws care nothing for intent, only for effect.
No, it is literally not "by definition" segregated. Using the phrase 'by definition' is not that powerful a modifier that every word that surrounds it suddenly becomes true.
That's the most nonsense thing ever. Secondly, read the line I quoted:
> highly selective and racially segregated program
The program is not racially segregated. The NYTimes just needed to sneak in the word segregation because it's a very strong explosive word. To do that, it hammered it incorrectly to a place in a sentence which gives the impression the program itself is racially segregated.
This was in 2006. Not last century.
The school district didn't, of course, test people by race or have a Colored Students High School or whatever. What they did was to put schools and school zones in ways that happened to line up with strong demographic differences in swaths of the city. My elementary school was in a white part of the city, and I can remember maybe two black classmates. My middle school (because that's where they put the gifted and talented program, as it happens) was in a black part of the city, and from my memory it felt like a majority of the students who were zoned to be there were black.
This school district was, once again, "racially segregated" in the eyes of the law. The law didn't ask whether the school district officials were motivated by racism in how they drew the lines; that's simply not what the term means.
> What they did was to put schools and school zones in ways that happened to line up with strong demographic differences in swaths of the city.
Using geographic lines which correspond with race to determine entry to a school for which geographic location isn't a determining factor in success is racial segregation.
Giving the same standardised test and using the result of that test to gain access to a gifted and talented program is not.
from a linked ny articles in the OP article:
> On the exam, they are asked to finish patterns: For example, if children are shown a triangle, a square and a triangle in sequence, they are asked to name what shape comes next. They are also asked to solve simple arithmetic problems and define words.
I dont have the full test but any of the test parts I've seen do not in any way disadvantage native English speaking African-Americans.
This is devolving into California's "maths is racist" because black kids in California don't score as well as non black kids.
That's true of many of the gifted-and-talented programs in the US. That's not fundamental, and not true of many of the gifted-and-talented programs worldwide. Worldwide, such programs are meritocratic pathways to socioeconomic mobility. In the US, the story is much more complex.
Most such programs were explicitly structured to keep African Americans and immigrants out. This was structured in admissions exams (which were often designed, for example, around mastery of one dialect of English, even in contexts like math, where that's irrelevant), in geographies of such programs, and in many other elements.
That this intent is no longer present today is irrelevant. Those structures remain, perpetuate, and in many ways, become self-reinforcing.
The current politically popular fix? Throwing the baby out with the bathwater and nuking the programs from orbit. At that point, no one without wealth can get ahead.
We need something more nuanced, but we're not going to get that if we don't first acknowledge the issue.
Refs: You can look at documents like this one, from over two decades ago, citing references well before then, talking about how to reduce some of the intentionally segeregatory impacts of gifted-and-talented admissions testing: https://www2.ed.gov/offices/OCR/archives/pdf/TestingResource... (and it's worth noting how little has happened in the intervening decades)
Can you be a little more precise, please?
A set of concepts popularized goes under the names of cycle of poverty, culture of poverty, and generational poverty. Simply being poor seems less predictive of outcomes than multiple generation being poor. If your parents, your grandparents, and your great grandparents were poor, it's very difficult to break out.
In this case, "culture" isn't a euphemism for laziness or something crass like that; for example, there's a certain body of knowledge that goes with knowing how to move into the middle class. If no one in your family has that, it's very, very hard. That goes for everything from knowing what's required to apply for college, to knowing how much you're expected to learn when, to having the background to know how to support your kids' schooling.
Intervention programs which provide that background are effective. Even something as simple as letting parents know to read to little kids, how to make sure kids do homework, what supports are available, etc. Beyond that, having a guidance counselor who can let you know what schools you're likely to get into, what you need to apply, and what is and isn't appropriate to have in an admissions essay. These things aren't rocket science, but if neither you nor anyone around you has done them, they're very, very hard.
And to say "Well, my kid is winning now so don't touch the system" is a weak argument.
How decisions made in the eighties and sixties impact families in 2020 is sort of complex. Now, I move away from fact to my perspective. My perspective is that many Asian immigrant families are more likely to:
- Come from a culture which values education, and especially measurable outcomes in education (e.g. math, rather than creativity)
- In some cases, come from cultures with 2000+ year histories of civil service exams and meritocracy
- Often lack the same sorts of wealth or support networks as American families, which puts a lot more pressure on having kids become self-supporting and independently successful
- Are less likely to be successful in fields which rely on having strong US-based social networks than white families, which also pushes towards areas like STEM.
... a plethora of effects like these leads to immigrant (and especially Asian immigrant) families being heavily over-represented within the system which was resulted.
On the other hand, if my family was on the Mayflower, and my uncle can get my kid a job at his law firm, my aunt can hook him up with a management position in her marketing firm, and if neither does that, at least we own the house and he can always live here, there's a lot less pressure. I have a lot more incentive to let kids be kids, let kids play more, and school less.
So immigrants, and especially Asian immigrants, now tend to do well in this system. It continues to discriminate against blacks, though.
Why is this hard to accept?
I mean, the majority of your prose comes after your description of facts, and details your pet theory on how advantageous Asian culture and parenting is an adequate explanation for the effect sizes we're seeing — that a very poor demographic in NYC would come to fulfill the plurality of NYC's gifted and talented program.
And something about how Asians come from 2000 years of test taking, so they're really good at tests (but not necessarily "good")?