Documents show discrimination against Asian American students | Hacker News Reader

Documents show discrimination against Asian American students

thehill.com

40 pointssteelstraw13 comments

Outrage about this is 100 years late. The entire college admissions process as we know it today was designed intentionally to exclude jews from Harvard.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in

Edit: 2009 HN Discussion about this article... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=520836

Should we still be outraged about Harvard? What proportion of its students are Jewish, compared to the US overall? It seems the president of Harvard is Jewish*, so it can't be too antisemitic, can it?

*In fact, 5 of the 8 Ivy League universities have Jewish presidents, if one follows the links from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League

It can still be anti Semitic because you need to compare with the base rate of a peer institution that does not have anti Semitic recruitment practices. Comparing with the overall population is a fallacy.

Ok now do the same for all the rest of the minorities. But wait they dont have presidents representing their communities. What you said makes no sense.

I sometimes wonder what other Semitic cultures think about Jewish peoples claiming “Semitic” as their exclusive word. Antisemitic would mean being against not just Jews but also other cultures that fit into the Semitic definition.

>Jewish peoples claiming “Semitic” as their exclusive word

Antisemitic, as a term, was popularized by people who disliked Jews, who wanted a genteel euphemism for opposing Jews.

So what semitic really means or what Jews think it means is irrelevant.

Once upon a time, people self identified as antisemitic. It sounded nicer than "Judenhass" or whatever.

I think I've read that semitic is an obsolete language grouping, not a race or culture, but I'm not sure.

Interesting trick. The two whose text messages showed that the board was aware of discrimination were two who were against it but who ultimately voted for it.

This means the rest of them could deny discrimination and say that only those two were involved.

But if you kicked them out, you’d entrench the discrimination because they were the only ones who secretly opposed. Very neat.

When prized resources are made artificially scarce, it's no wonder factional struggles result over those resources. Markets and innovation are supposed to stop this, but K-12 education in the US is captured by the teacher's unions and other special interests. The productivity revolution w/technology has transform education in other countries, however:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrDfCy5Q9wI

> US is captured by the teacher's unions and other special interests.

As someone who both taught and studied educational systems abroad, this feels like such a weird take. The best schools in the world are found in the Nordic countries, Finland in particular. All have teacher's unions and schools are overwhelmingly public (even most private ones are heavily dependent on the public). The advances they're making in education are not primarily based in technology but rather in teaching methodology and curriculum design.

Generally, though, the superior outcomes should be attributed mostly to more structural differences in their approach to education:

1. Valuing teachers monetarily and culturally (probably the most important thing). Teachers are not so overstressed and overworked and are generally a higher caliber person than you'll find in US schools.

2. Taking a "whole child" approach, setting up services throughout the government to help stabilize children's homes. This really eases up teaching because there are fewer problem children.

3. Joining educators and educational researchers at the institutional level. If you've spent a few years teaching it becomes apparent to you that educational PhDs in the US, even from prestigious institutions like Stanford, have not interacted with children enough to have an intuitive understanding of student's emotional capacities or of classroom dynamics, which renders a lot of their work worthless. This stands in stark contrast to senior researchers from Finland who, so far as I can tell, all have that intuitive sense.

I studied in Finland. From a numbers perspective the schools are great, but individual experiences may differ.

If you’re doing well and understand the subject, the teachers are unlikely to give you the time of the day.

There’s a laser focus on students who perform poorly, and consequentially high performers are essentially penalized, ignored and left to die of boredom.

Great outcomes at scale, but also tons of missed opportunities. I certainly won’t be sending my kids there to study.

I might reconsider if your children aren't straight geniuses, the 2016 switch to what is being called Phenomenon Based Learning looks like it will be substantially better than what you experienced as a baseline and allow a lot more room for bright students to stretch themselves. I think it's worth looking into.

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