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Comment by gkop | Hacker News Reader

Polemics gonna polemic. Yes, we should invest in gifted students. But, ignoring the larger context of how public education is funded in the United States and the consequential giant gaps between school districts, where many poor ones don't even competently provide fundamental baseline services to their students, is not going to elevate the discourse.

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the ultra-ghetto urban public schools here have money upon money, and yet the teachers do not get funds directly. I have seen piles of new computers in a locked room with my own eyes, assisting a well-meaning engineer who placed the equipment. Meanwhile, I heard two middle-aged men talking on the bus alone at night, one was the driver. They both gave up as public school teachers due to lack of effort and interest by the students, year after year. The level of complacent sloth within administration is not to be underestimated, and outright graft does occur from time to time.

You know what else ain't gonna elevate the discourse? Use of phrases like "ultra-ghetto".

And yet replacing it with something that sounds harmless will not change the underlying reality.

Coming with the right attitude and perspective definitely helps in coming with solutions and not complaints.

1788 - Retarded

1846 - Simpleton

~1876 - Feeble-minded

1910 - Moron

1900s Special Ed

1900s Intellectually Disabled

The label is useful. The condition is lamentable. Changing the label every few years doesn't make children not use the new one as an insult.

Using a new or old label doesn't positively imply that you hate the group or person you're applying the label to.

The context of this discussion was kids in "ultra ghetto urban districts"

Not sure why we are talking about intellectually disabled kids. Someone else did this juxtaposition, and it is quite concerning that people tie poverty with lack of ability in this thread.

> The label is useful.

The labels have changed for a reason.

That reason is largely the euphemism treadmill, but I would grant that saying "ultra ghetto" is deliberately insensitive and no professional would use it to describe impoverished areas.

George Carlin - Soft Language (shell-shock bit)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n2PW1TqxQk

1788? I thought retarded replaced moron in the 50s

Origin was 1788 from my little research. Point is that all of these words start out as high-minded words from well-meaning people and then some ninny comes along and tries to change the word, telling everyone that their words are bad instead of looking at the problem square in the face, however ugly or bad the problem may seem.

after you have a gun pointed at you, or a crowd of young men chasing you alone, you can correct my grammer

> the ultra-ghetto urban public schools here have money upon money, and yet the teachers do not get funds directly

Any statistics or citations to back this up? In my experience, one cannot characterize thousands of schools this way because they have different governance and spending formulas across states, county lines, city limits, and even multiple districts within cities (which is especially true in urban cities).

yes, plenty of statistics.. the school administration is required to collect statistics.

>plenty of statistics

I think you know very well that you're being asked to cite them, not merely say they exist.

The very worst schools in my city pay significantly better than the ones out in the "good" districts. They can do that because they get a ton of extra funding from the state and (I think) feds. I think the only schools that pay better than them are a small minority of the private schools.

It doesn't help much, because working conditions are so bad that anyone with options still doesn't want to work there. More funerals for kids. More 2nd-graders threatening teachers. More lockdowns over gun threats and such. More drug problems. More chronically-absent kids. More turnover among students. More horror-stories about home life. Most teachers who can afford to turn it down decide that their sanity & safety is worth more than an extra $8-12k/yr. Idealists who go in hoping to make a difference get their attitude adjusted fast. It's brutal, and money—at least, money spent on education per se—does not seem to be the solution.

> The level of complacent sloth within administration is not to be underestimated, and outright graft does occur from time to time.

Heh, yeah, and that's in most districts, not just the poor ones :-(

"Idealists who go in hoping to make a difference get their attitude adjusted fast."

I have a friend who completed his teaching degree. He said the policies at the school where he student-taught were so bad that he decided not to apply to teaching jobs. Stuff like you weren't allowed to give less than a 50% as long as they put their name on the paper, and ineffective discipline options. Basically, the school was just passing kids through the grades without the kids really learning and some kids wouldn't even try. I guess if you just graduate them, they're no longer the school's problem...

Yeah, kids don't fail grades anymore but are just passed ever upward, and many schools have incompetent admin (of all the things I was wrong about as a kid, turns out school administrators are, on average, even dumber than I thought they were back then—it's shocking, really) who insist on completely worthless discipline schemes, among other bad ideas. Can confirm all that's true.

So then you're a teacher with a bunch of 6th graders, say, 2/3 of whom are one or more grade levels behind on at least one subject, but that material's not what will be on the test that'll be used to evaluate your performance. The right thing to do is to go back and fill in the gaps for those kids, but you don't have the time, and showing them enough of this year's material that they might at least get a few answers on the standardized test correct is safer for your career anyway.

It sucks.

For the absolute worst of schools, perhaps extending online learning might be best. That way disruptive students can just be muted. And then provide some physical location where students can do online classes when they don't have a suitable home environment.

attendance is how funding is determined. Most won't show up to the zoom and then the school can't mark them as present.

This is because it’s really about the parents. Everything hinges on the parents. No amount of money will enable a school system to completely compensate for poor parenting (whatever the reason is). I don’t understand why it’s not openly discussed.

I think it's just an uncomfortable discussion to have. No amount of social engineering will fix this. As a group, children who come from good home with a mother and a father - who have jobs and aren't on public assistance - are better prepared for many aspects of life including education. There's no shortage of talent and intelligence that will go wasted because of this fact and that is sad and it makes us feel bad. San Francisco's efforts here are meaningless sacrifices to the altar of equity that bring us one step closer to a Harrison Bergeron style dystopia that makes the problem (of wasted talent and education) much worse. But doing _something_ feels better than doing nothing, so I'm not expecting the situation to improve.

It's because there is almost nothing that can be done. IQ is largely genetic, with a few social levers that can be pulled. We shouldn't expect from people what they are not capable of doing.

This applies to everyone.

The rationalist gwern-types once again overestimating the predictive power of IQ. Also coming in with assumptions that people in poorer districts cannot have members of "remarkable enough" IQ that warrant distinction and treatment.

Disappointing thread all around. Enough HN for today.

You aren't trying. We know IQ is predictive of success. No one is saying an individual from a poorer community can't be intelligent/academically successful.

What we're saying is that we shouldn't hold someone born without the ability to be academically successful to unreasonable standards.

> What we're saying is that we shouldn't hold someone born without the ability to be academically successful to unreasonable standards.

How does this relate to improving performance at schools in poor or de-stabilized districts? There are "high IQ" individuals there that merit attention.

Yes we should address the amount of waste that these poor performing districts generate, but there is idea of a zero sum game in this thread between poorer and richer districts that encourages dismissal of solutions.

Nobody has talked about intergenerational poverty yet in this thread. Just wild.

IQ is probably the most predictive factor of success in our knowledge-first society. The catch is that IQ is a fuzzy variable: its measurements heavily depend on one's mood, the particular IQ test, the food one's eaten that day, hours slept and so on. However the highest measured IQ in ideal conditions is pretty stable.

More predictive than being wealthy? Strongly doubt.

This is basically an argument against education in general.

No one learns anything useful. "Education" is just a set of credentials that prove your IQ test wasn't a fluke.

To me, that is just an absurd view of reality.

I don't think people are advocating that education itself is just a signaling of inherent ability. This would be like saying it's pointless for an athlete to train because their maximum athletic ability is pretty much determined.

The success of given schools has nothing to do with IQ.

> ultra-ghetto urban public schools

It is always disappointing, to come from one of these districts and then having obtained social mobility through talent and luck, to see what my new peers (since I assume most of us here have gone to a top tier school and work somewhere in tech/finance) think of my neighborhood. No care for how these situations happened.

I can see that. The language choice is certainly distracting and inappropriate.

I would hope that people discussing the issues in education would be some evidence that they do care. Maybe misguided in some instances, but at least trying to identify root causes and solutions. If we don't talk about the problems, then they won't get fixed.

my language choice is specific and well-earned; the city I am describing is consistently top ten in murder rates in the general population, and has some of the lowest graduation rates in the USA.

Ghetto is generally derogatory. You could easily use other words to describe it.

my advanced placement programs were evaporated and replaced with "no child left behind".. there were more than forty languages spoken at home in this school district. You can read for yourself the other parents' comments about the results. Good on you for getting the benefits of this society and escaping the slums and their ways.

It is always disappointing, to go into any thread anywhere on the internet, and have some language police clutch his pearls and feign offense where clearly none exists.

The exceedingly rude response that I expected when I wrote that comment.

Happy I could oblige, I'm ultimately just your little puppet here to serve and prove what you already know.

Regressing the mean and shrinking the margins between high performers and low performers doesn't elevate the performance of the bottom. It just lowers the performance of the entire system. You could even argue it disenfranchises the lower but forcing more top tier talent into their employment tiers.

I think you said it better than me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30546204

Yes! 100%. The argument in the article isn't wrong, but the way it's made is highly unlikely to win people over to the cause (and could actually deepen the disagreement).

In most places, the majority of the funding is at the state and federal level. And that generally uses policies that give a larger share of funds to underserved schools.

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