The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)
teachforamerica.org
teachforamerica.org
I don't know whether Algebra I is above or below what eighth graders can be expected to do, but raising the difficulty of every class to what the most advanced student is capable of is not the answer either. Everybody knows someone else that is better at math than they are, and someone who is not as good. It is universal common knowledge that the ease with which one takes to math is different for different people. Why can't we just admit it and quit trying to make people who are unique the same?
America keeps conflating equity for equality.
This is why equity is a bullshit goal.
You just can't do that, no matter how much you want it. Some teachers are better than others, they can't all be elite. The teachers union wouldn't let you sack all the mediocre teachers, and even if you somehow could fire them, where would all the new elite teachers to replace the mediocre ones come from? If you just sacked the bottom 50% of teachers and doubled the class size of the better half, I think classroom conditions would certainly deteriorate.
Gifted students (at least up to middle school) don't need special teachers (an 8th grade math teacher could teach gifted 6th graders), they just need challenging material and peers to keep them motivated and study with.
The well-behaved students. Good teachers are wasted on troublemakers and class clowns, regardless of their IQ. And if a dim student who scores poorly on IQ tests knows how to sit quietly and behave themself, I think good teachers will help them a lot.
It is entirely natural for children to “clown around” in a boring setting, and their lack of interest / trouble focusing reflects a societal (and school) failure to make school engaging and give them the appropriate challenges and direct feedback to keep their attention. Many of the greatest human breakthroughs were made by people who were squirmy and distractible as children, who had difficulty with the formal school curriculum, or who were ostracized by their classmates for one reason or another.
Every child deserves attention from good teachers. Good teachers with enough resources can provide a significant benefit to these students and integrate them into a smoothly functioning classroom. Assigning troublesome students to weak or unsympathetic teachers is a tremendous “waste” of human talent.
That's backwards. A school that doesn't engage its students has failed at its most important goals, and the very best schools have always striven to be engaging. Often this was done in unconventional ways, such as directing the youngest students to memorize their pre-set "lessons" word for word and be able to literally chant them back to the teacher. Similarly "direct" yet effective instructional methods were just as common wrt. practical exercises and problem solving. There was no space for the modern fashionable truism that "constructing" one's education from scratch, with practically no involvement from an outside educator, is the only possible source of engagement.
Given that society itself doesn't bend much, I'm inclined towards the latter.
Or, what do you think of Montessori education?
Sure, for the same reason that adults take coffee breaks. This doesn't seem to contradict what I said. In fact it's a very clear delineation between recreation and work. The problem is when children (or adults) behave as though they're on recess when they're supposed to be working.
> Or, what do you think of Montessori education?
I'm no expert, but it doesn't seem as though the educator/pupil ratios required to make it work are scalable.
Why do people always mention this like it isn't a niche educational experience that already self-selects for the children of well-off, white parents? Montessori is almost as relevant to the public education discourse as Catholic schools imo.
Forcing children to spend the majority of their lives working against their will leads to problems, especially among non-conformists.
Locking a child in their room is imprisonment, yet is widely used punitively at the whim of parents. Beating children is assault, yet operant conditioning is effective and also widely practiced towards children. It's also permitted in most jurisdictions if undue harm is not caused.
> among non-conformists
Why do we need these, exactly? What benefit are individuals who have not been appropriately conditioned to work, suffering, and self-sufficiency?
This ideology sounds an awful lot like fascism to me, or maybe some kind of psychopathy.
If you start looking around at the highest-leverage contributions to humanity throughout history, a disproportionate number of them come from people who weren’t “appropriately conditioned to work, suffering, and self sufficiency” (typically without getting anything for their trouble beyond satisfying their own curiosity). So if all you care about is some kind of personal benefit, then someone (often a teacher) nurturing and encouraging those people has been directly responsible for a significant part of your material well being.
But many of us recognize humans as ends in themselves, rather than tools for our personal aggrandizement or slaves to the collective.
If you take a harder look at the disproportionate contributors you mention, you'll find that they were motivated to persist at problems for very long hours, often for many years without respite, and for very little reward beyond satisfying their own impulses. None of this indicates poor work ethic, or a reluctance to take responsibility for one's own actions and their consequences.
There are plenty of geniuses who did terribly in work/academia, etc, or who were literally outcasts from society.
There is proof of this everywhere. The vast majority of humans throughout history never engaged in such a system, and plenty of contemporary humans don't either.
What is your ideology?
It's true, in previous eras children were put straight to work as soon as they were useful. This has been true in every agrarian society across all cultures. Society increased in complexity to the point that it's quite hard to become an independent adult if you go straight to work as a young child, hence the need for an education. However the goal has always been the same: condition yourself (skills, mindset, habits, behaviour, etc.) as required to become a functional, independent contributor to society.
What is new and unusual is the idea that children should have a "childhood" of recreation, protected from the realities of work and life.
Attending an educational institution as a child is much preferable to working on a farm, or in a mine, don't you think?
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Libertarians are all about individuals making their own choices regardless of whether or not that's the optimal outcome for society as a whole.
This dude is the opposite, a total collectivist.
Why do we need non-conformists? I don't care about what you need or what society needs. You lack compassion for the individual.
They aren't hurting anyone by choosing a different life path. They can survive the world just fine without having the official educational path shoved down their throat.
Not really? They don't get to make their own decisions about any meaningful aspect of their lives, and can be lawfully imprisoned, punished, and controlled by their parents. Children have just a few more rights than pets. This has been true for all of history.
> And children / adults aren't a binary thing
Yes, they are. Off the top of my head: once you are legally able to make and be held responsible for your own decisions, can't be punitively confined against your will without due process, are able to enter into legal agreements, and do not need a guardian, you are an adult. Until then, you are a child. These things normally happen around the age of majority, which is 18 in most places [1].
I'm not suggesting that children never be given the opportunity to make their own choices, quite the opposite in fact. I'm suggesting that children be conditioned to the realities of work and life from an early age. The capability to tolerate dull, monotonous, boring work is essential to accomplish just about anything. This is the skill of delaying gratification, and its importance can hardly be overstated.
> They can survive the world just fine without having the official educational path shoved down their throat.
Just how much education do you think is optional to "survive in the world just fine"? Literacy? Numeracy?
If it aims to be effective at education, it should.
> It's not recreation, it's work.
That's very true of what a lot of schooling is, largely because it evolved from a model aimed at indoctrination of a compliant population rather than education. But, nominally at least, the goal of the modern system is not to be work as a means of indoctrinating people to work.
> The problem seems to be that we've lost the value of working hard and pushing through things we find dull and uninteresting
Or, maybe, the problem is that while it is easy to make material dull and uninteresting, that's far from optimal from an educational perspective.
> Real world success is not like that - it's work
Real world success is mostly been born on third base and constructing a narrative about the hard-work of hitting a triple.
It would be ideal if each class was so engaging as to enrapture each student but that just isn't realistic.
Murder, rape, and eating your children is natural. That's not a good justification. Perhaps there is a way to help children rise above these base instincts instead of giving into them?
The idea that you should stimulate kids to the point where boredom is impossible, or that we should excuse harmful behavior if the kid was bored / upset, is just silly. It only sets the kids up to fail; to live a life where they can't focus on tasks and they lash out whenever they are in a bad mood.
In general, you should not impose external rewards and punishments in education, to the extent possible. They block students’ focus, creativity, and problem solving, and undermine learning, literally interfering with memory formation.
This is a subject of incredible amounts of research in psychology and education, and has been demonstrated over and over in a wide variety of contexts.
> idea that you should stimulate kids to the point where boredom is impossible
Nobody ever suggested this. Only that class should be engaging and teachers should try to earn students’ attention instead of demanding it under threat.
> excuse harmful behavior [...] sets the kids up to fail
Nobody ever suggested “excusing harmful behavior”.
The proposal was that students who are wiggly or have trouble focusing should be thrown out of class because it is a “waste” for good teachers to teach them. I think this would be harmful, would be failing those students, and misses the point of education.
What sets kids up to fail is being treated as though they are worthless or being told so. Having access to good teachers does not “set kids up to fail”.
Both “gifted” (well prepared) and “remedial” (poorly prepared) students benefit dramatically from expert teaching. The well prepared students can continue to progress very quickly through challenging material. The poorly prepared students can get help finding and correcting their weaknesses and misconceptions, and practicing underdeveloped prerequisite skills.
The ideal is for everyone to get significant weekly 1:1 attention from a dedicated tutor/coach, who can help the student to deliberately practice. This significantly outperforms even the best classroom, and students with direct coaching improve probably 2–3 times faster than students without. Essentially all world-class performers in competitive events (sport, music, chess, math contests, ...) have significant amounts of 1:1 coaching.
Unfortunately as a society we don’t have the budget/manpower to provide hours per week of skilled tutoring for every student for every subject. So we try our best to balance available resources with students’/society’s needs.
Preparation is not the only relevant factor that goes into what gets called academic “giftedness”, but it’s the vast majority of it.
It’s similar for other fields. Nobody can compete in sport at a world-class level nowadays without significant amounts of excellent coaching. Etc.
For instance, the reason my kid learned to read before he was 4 and most of his peers did not is because we spent many hundreds of hours reading books together aloud, and maybe 50 hours over 6 months on direct instruction in reading per se. Not because he’s biologically any different than his peers. The reason he’s really good at making stuff out of Legos is that he really likes it and spends hours per week doing it, not because he’s some kind of Lego prodigy. He’s not particularly skilled at drawing or dancing or playing the guitar or sewing, because those are things he did not practice very much yet.
This is a huge amount of “preparation”, as far as I am concerned. It’s not as effective as working with an expert tutor/coach, but it still adds up over time. (And good job preparing yourself without much help!)
The wealthier kids in your town who spent their time on whatever else were less well prepared than you (academically; they might have been better prepared for schmoozing or playing sports or whatever).
But if you had wanted to be a child prodigy or world-class competitor in something as a teenager, you likely would have needed significant expert help.
> No matter how much time you spend preparing the dumb kids they will struggle
If the kids are dramatically struggling, they are likely significantly under-prepared for the work they are expected to do. But it is not true that no matter how much time you spend you cannot make a difference. Kids testing in the 10th percentile can if tutored 1:1 for a year or two surpass the 80th percentile kids taught in an ordinary class. Regular 1:1 tutoring is extraordinarily much better than other methods of instruction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
Mozart wrote his first symphony at 8. He was also playing piano for courteseans at age 3. All at the behest of his father, to support the family. If you, you personally, played piano professionally for the next ~5 years, do you think you could write a quick and dirty symphony? Of course you could.
Anyways I find this basic truth to be incredibly liberating and hopeful. There really aren't any superhumans, just people who've spent more time playing guitar, learning about + coding , racing motorcycles etc. (there are but statistically irrelevant to me)
I’m sorry to call you out on this but that is very much not a good thing to do. The mind is much more plastic so one can probably start teaching very advanced subject to their child soon, but the body does need plenty of support strength before it will be able to hold itself up, and holding hands is shown to not be too good for the child. Nonetheless, not ideal is far from harmful, so don’t worry, I’m sure they are wonderful children.
If you hold them from the top they will be passively stable, but if you hold them from the bottom they will need to actively stabilize themselves using their back/abdominal muscles. If you start with just 1 joint they need to stabilize, they figure it out reasonably quickly. (Babies start out surprisingly strong; what they completely lack is coordination.)
After about a month of that, you can carry them around on your shoulders and they will be able to hold up their torso and stay upright. This is great core strength/balance training, while also being a lot more convenient than any other way of transporting a baby, for a moderately healthy parent.
What outcome are you seeking from schooling? The answer to that determines which student needs the better teacher, in order to achieve the desired outcome.
As is typical, the concept get confused because one assumes that gifted programs correctly track students based primarily on ability, whereas in my personal experience and looking at the data, they primarily track students based on socioeconomic status.
It’s not about denying that some students have the ability to excel in subjects in comparison to their peers. The question is whether or not the current system actually achieves it’s stated goals.
People point out disparities as evidence that there aren’t equal opportunities in society.
The conservative position is simply to assert that equality of opportunity exists cuz America, and if you question that you are a communist who just wants everyone to be the same.
That’s a very low bar if you take population level disparities and assume it’s a lack of equity causing this. You’re talking about having a deep understanding of incredibly complex systems layered on top of one another.
Equality of opportunity is never possible. We’re all born with different genetics. Anything less is just arbitrary line drawing as to what’s ok and what isn’t (ie tribalism).
Are racial disparities socially determined or not?
In sports, the rules are whatever we say they are, that’s the part that’s socially determined. Lebron James is a amazing basketball player, due to a combination of his genetics and his hard work. But there’s a parallel reality wherein basketball was never invented. And people enjoy sports like horse racing or marathon running, where he would never be able to be world class given his frame. What sports are popular is based on culture and happenstance, and up to the whims of society, not genetics or hard work of individuals.
For several hundred years, America literally constructed a society where it was decided that white people were considered more valuable than black people. That had nothing to do with what individual black people did, those were just the rules of the game.
You may say “but that’s not how it is anymore”, and yes things have certainly changed. But at the same time, there are people who are alive today who weren’t allowed to attend the same schools as whites, weren’t allowed to drink from the same fountains as whites, etc.
The argument that is being made, is that society continues to favor people based upon the color of their skin. Certainly, individual talents and hard work contribute to one’s place in life, but that does not mean that the playing field is level.
Reading the intent behind that statement, though, that Nigerians have succeeded in America despite any hinderances they may have faced due to wider societies treatment of black people, that would be somewhat outside of the framework of what I am talking about.
The construction here is, do Black Americans have worse outcomes, on average, because of themselves, or because of societies treatment of them. Culture would fall into the bucket of “they are the reason for their own problems”.
Obviously Nigerians do well on average, but they are also a small fraction of the population. Pointing to Nigerians and saying that race isn’t a contributing factor is making an argument after having found the statistical outlier that proves your argument, how do Nigerians compare to the top cohort of white Americans based on ethnicity or whatever? Is it possible that Nigerians would actually be doing better were there not racial barriers?
> having found the statistical outlier that proves your argument
Well, why are they a statistical outlier? If you ask Nigerians, they'll tend to credit their culture. Do you have a different explanation?
> Is it possible that Nigerians would actually be doing better were there not racial barriers?
I suppose it's more possible that they should be doing much worse than they are, because of the racial barriers.
I was under the impression that it did add clarity, so I find your question odd.
What would be the charitable interpretation of the statement “socioeconomic disparities between black Americans and white Americans are due to their respective cultures”?
What’s problematic is the degree to which people can’t even entertain the idea that racism is the primary driver of these disparities, rather than things that are specific to POC, such a culture or genetics, especially given the clear and obvious precedent that is firmly established within this country.
What is a reach, is your reaction to this suggestion.
We no longer deny people opportunities based on their race. If your SAT score is high, you'll be admitted anywhere you want. If you study hard, your score will be high. The reach is constructing the SAT, or any other similar test, as racist because the scores are not evenly distributed by race.
The reason why many people cannot accept this is because many other groups experienced problems from racism as well, but they were eventually able to overcome these barriers. Moreover, the system has already changed to be more accommodating, maybe even putting most of their focus and resources on the bottom 20% of students at the expense of everyone else. Yet, we still have people stating that it’s still unfair.
Black Americans do not have worse outcomes.
Specifically, given the distribution of individuals in the group "Black Americans" across all socially relevant dimensions—including culture—individual Black Americans have identical* outcomes to similarly-situated individuals of every other group in America including Whites, Asians, etc.
As you would expect in a country with equal opportunity for all, both legally and culturally.
*Black Americans actually do better than expected because there's an enormous cultural push to promote Black Americans whenever possible—college admissions, management, etc. not to mention Black Americans being so over-represented in media that most Americans think the country is around 40% Black whereas the actual number is ~13%, i.e. they're off by a factor of 3.
Perhaps the hypotheses should be "maybe there is something in Nigerian/pre-industrial culture that allows children to thrive more than in American/industrialized culture"?
Obviously yes.
I’m sorry, but this simply doesn’t follow.
The premise: that there are a multitude of things that lead to to disparities (even just random chance). If disparities are random then yes, that’s not a problem I’m going to get tussled up about.
But it’s not a matter of “it could be anything”. We have strong evidence that it is oppression, and when that is the case, that I do have reason to care about, and it’s about opportunity not outcome.
But let's be clear, you just claimed that the mere existence of disparities is evidence of oppression. That only follows if group outcomes would be equal in the absence of oppression, but that is a completely invalid assumption that has no basis in historical fact.
It’s not nor us it ever been about the disparities alone, but the disparities in conjunction with the long history of racial oppression in America. People are alive today who grew up under Jim Crow. People are alive today who were threatened with violence for attending elementary school.
Regardless, in practice people do treat it as proof. Before I move on to the other arguments supporting oppression as an explanation I want to drive home that point: there is hardly ever a serious attempt to rule out other possible explanations for disparities, and to suggest that anything other than racism/oppression might explain those differences opens one up to accusations of racism.
Merely referencing Jim Crow is not enough. It ignores both all the ways in which Jim Crow was ineffective at its aims at the time, as well as the seismic cultural and legal changes that have occurred within the intervening years.
It also fails to account for the success of various other minorities (Jews, Nigerians, descendants of Caribbean slaves, various Asian groups) - many of whom also have faced very serious oppression (including outright attempts at elimination) in the very recent past.
None of this is to say that racism does not occur, but I have yet to see a (non-circular) causal explanation for how that can account for a significant amount of present disparities.
Well, for the oppressor, sure, but why should the oppressed accept it?
I said that there are differences due to things other than oppression, and that those aren't a problem unless you think equality of outcome should be goal
People in this thread are up in arms about the principle, but the reason that they are being challenged is based on how they operate in practice.
Do all children have equal access? Nominally, maybe. But that’s de facto not the case.
But I feel it is very unfair, outright evil to take away an opportunity from gifted people (both from privileged families and a few from very bad families that would have been lifted up by said programs!! The aforementioned example could perhaps break the cycle and get a much much better life than any of his/her relatives) on the basis that the statistics on the enrolled will be biased. It is not the task of such a small-scale program to solve a huge, complex problem that probably can only be solved in decades if ever.
They actually say that it is - have you seen the famous comic where the three guys are watching the baseball game but the short guy can't see through the fence? They literally are saying the equity of outcome is the beginning and the end of their goals.
The point is to demonstrate agency over the systems we create. What’s the flip side of that scenario? People aren’t given stools to stand on and tall people get to watch while short people don’t? Who built the fence? Why is it that height? Why aren’t there bleachers?
Is just sitting there doing nothing equality of opportunity somehow?
I think reading "head height" as the outcome, is a very short-sighted interpretation.
Like anything else, interpretation has nuance and you could read it both ways. On HN we're supposed to address "the strongest possible interpretation" in our comments, so I would try to apply that principle here as well...
Edit: a long take on all the variations, by the meme's originator! https://medium.com/@CRA1G/the-evolution-of-an-accidental-mem...
They say they don't believe that any children are more talented than any other children, and are advocating eliminating standard "advanced" courses, such as calculus, from the high school curriculum. The only classes that would be available in their proposal are the current remedial math track.
I think you've confused "straw man argument created by its detractors" with "the actual concrete plan being established by its proponents".
The (successful) proponents of equity based teaching are so far outside the mainstream that it's an honest mistake. (I made it, and now I'm furious.)
People who disagree with the basic concepts around equity tend to view the entire discourse as a monolith, but people are actually allowed to have different opinions on what is actually equitable and what isn’t.
Personally I wouldn’t support doing away with advanced math courses either. But just because someone does that in the name of equity, doesn’t mean I think equity itself is bad. I’m able to separate the two.
The question in a school context, though, is whether socioeconomic status for children determines ability.
As I stated in my original list, what I observed was that gifted classes were filled with children from high social status backgrounds. They certainly didn’t create the conditions for their socioeconomic status, their inherited it.
But it begs the question, do you believe that racial disparities are primarily due to social factors or genetic ones? Because the whole point of equity is that advocates are arguing that it’s due to social factors, and that we should seek to change that.
Why should a child suffer simply because they were born into a less supportive family environment?
I don't know. I'm no expert and definitely don't have the answers.
One of the hardest pills for education policy advocates to swallow is how important parental involvement is. Instead of bitching about equity, people should be hammering parents to be more involved and actively, daily, participate in their child’s education.
And people shouldn't complain about the cost of gas, they should just buy EVs. The fact is, what you're asking for is really expensive. I imagine that the number of parents who would love to be reading to their kids or helping with homework but instead are working to feed and shelter them are quite high. In the US, I'd guess it's the millions or even tens of millions.
(People in those days didn't eat candy, cookies and desserts every day like today.)
Wow. Wrong answer.
Socioeconomic status tracks with academic ability because wealthy people are smarter then poor people and their offspring do better because academic ability is genetic!
We know IQ is highly predictive of socioeconomic status. We know that IQ is almost entirely heritable barring things like nutrient deficiencies and disease.
So why would it be surprising to see that kids of higher economic status people are themselves more able than kids of impoverished people?
Among the prerequisites for excelling at study are a stable home life and parents (or guardians) that value education. If the kids don't have that, they aren't going to do well.
Historically, at least in the United States, one of the means of selecting for "parents who value education" was those parents scraping everything they had to move to a school district that provided a better education.
In other countries, this was sometimes achieved by scoring students into tiered schools. The higher your score, the better the school you got to go to. High-achieving students landed in a peer group of like-minded students that were fellow high-achievers and school was difficult.
Granted, that last solution was more typical of Asian education than Western education, and in some parts of Asia (China, for example) they have slipped into the location-based schooling to worse results.
Aiming for equity with the assumption that we just need to teach harder is foolish. Aiming for equity in the form of outcomes is equally foolish, because again, various outcomes have various hard prerequisites that, if missing, no amount of effort can overcome.
Solving for the prerequisites, not by attempting to ignore them, but by finding ways to help supply them can be far more productive in the long run. But it really starts with the values of the parents.
That is not obvious to me. It is a known psychological phenomenon that children will meet external expectations, high or low. In sports it's commonly referred to as playing up or down to your opponent. Other countries have much higher standards and have not seen an explosion in children struggling. What is most likely to happen is... nothing. The percentage of kids exceeding and struggling will stay largely the same.
This doesn't seem to be much of a problem in countries like Russia, Ukraine, Hungary, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, etc. which have much tougher cirricula for their average students than the average American public school. And before someone makes the funding argument, the US pays about double the cost of education that Japan does for dismal results.
The alternate view is that we should very much do this as a meaningful challenge to K-12 math teachers. People throughout the Western world, at all levels of underlying aptitude (whatever might be meant by that), manage to learn their basic intro to algebra in junior high. It's not rocket surgery, FFS!
When I went to high school, the expected path from Freshman year (9th grade) to Senior year (12th grade) was Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, MATH ELECTIVE (IIRC, that last could have been Trigonometry).
My middle school didn't have 8th grade Algebra I. But another middle school that fed the high school I went to did have it. And from what I remember, it was available to honor students as well as those in gifted programs.
So I don't agree that it should be mandated, that seems a step too far, but it's probably a good option to have for those who can handle it. And the number of students who can handle it is probably greater than the number who it is being offered to currently. So I don't agree with removing it entirely either.
a definition of exclude is “deny (someone) access to or bar (someone) from a place, group, or privilege.”
no one is barring access to these classes on the basis race. can you even imagine that? “sorry, you’re not allowed to take this class; you’re black.” it’s like everyone who writes this lives in their mom’s basement and has never gone outside and thinks if they just make the boring and tired declaration that non-black/non-brown people are evil/racist, that it absolves them of every other sin they commit, like not caring about homeless people or the fact that everything they own is made by chinese children. in reality it accomplishes nothing except complacency and it helps the people raping the world continue their work of exploiting everyone.
If the same people wouldn't complain about disparate failure rates, I'd even support making them open enrollment, but weeding people out based on performance. But we all know, people would just claim the classes are racist.
> no one is barring access to these classes on the basis race. can you even imagine that?
A test for a gifted class that measures _knowledge_ rather than the _ability to learn_ will create an "elite" class full of students whose parents had them study the advanced topics. Even if they were not "good" at it. In this case high SES -> advanced knowledge -> good test scores -> elite class that excludes Black students primarily because the entrance test results are predicted by SES.
Somehow, though, I passed a test in 7th grade to qualify to take algebra in 8th grade. Suddenly stuff started making sense, and I could see a point to it. You could actually solve an interesting problem. It wasn't just regurgitation of facts. It became more about thinking and connecting concepts and even being creative. I started getting As in math, and continue to do well in High School with geometry, trig, and calculus, but up until algebra was introduced I would certainly not have demonstrated a gifted ability in "math".
For what it's worth, I struggled with math in elementary school and especially high school -- I failed algebra I, then passed it with a D; then I failed algebra II before passing it* with a D. It wasn't until I was forced to take a business calculus class in my 20s that it started clicking, and I assure you the quality of instruction wasn't any better at the college level than it was in high school. (I did eventually graduate with honors with a math degree.)
Mathematics_education#Methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_education#Methods :
> [...] Rote learning: the teaching of mathematical results, definitions and concepts by repetition and memorisation typically without meaning or supported by mathematical reasoning. A derisory term is drill and kill. In traditional education, rote learning is used to teach multiplication tables, definitions, formulas, and other aspects of mathematics.
If you do not memorize small things that you frequently need, it will slow you down.
But if keep memorizing things without understanding, at some moment your memory will return an incorrect result, and you will be unable to notice it.
‘Literally memorize’ as opposed to what? Counting your fingers?
Our entire society is organised so that even university graduates are very rarely called upon to sum two single-digit numbers.
Adding up purchases in a shop? The till does it automatically. Admittedly, the cashier will need to be able to make up change promptly - but a customer needn't check their change.
Paying for parking? There will be a sign listing how much money you need to put in for 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours and so on.
Picking 14 items in a warehouse? You only need to count one at a time. There's a chance to speed things up by picking 2 packs of 6 plus 2 singles? Then the computer will print that on the pick list. No computer? Then the boss will print a sign with a lookup table like "14 items -> 2 six packs + 2 singles" and tape it to the shelf.
Trying to figure out whether you can get 9 people to lunch in two cars, one of which is kinda small? Add it up on your fingers, or keep your mouth shut and one of the other 8 people will figure it out.
Just don't get into board gaming :)
Then if the maximum parking time is 3 hours, it's 10:15 and you want to know at what time you need to leave you take out a cardboard clock, set the current time, and advanced the small hand one, two, three steps. And to know whether you can afford both the parking and a coffee with the money you have on you you make two piles and keep the parking money in one pocket and the coffee money in another pocket. I got it. [I'm joking, our society is organised in such a way that you don't need to be able to read a clock or handle money.]
Not at all - you simply count hours using your fingers.
A jaw-dropping moment. Maybe school education is more important than we though.
If you are renting a hotel room by the hour, it is highly likely that the staff are poorly educated
The arguments against schools are generally made[1] by people who do not remember how it was before compulsory education.
[1]At least in Europe.
They tend to have a surprisingly good handle on the specific topic being studied that they're failing. I can have them tell me what to do on a problem on the whiteboard, and do all the arithmetic and simpler things for them, and they're flawless.
They also tend to have problems in arithmetic and in getting confused on simpler concepts. Context switching is expensive and they lose working memory of the higher order task, and then make silly mistakes.
Most outside tutors work to try and solidify the higher level topic even further, by drilling the heck out of it... this conceals the problem for it to reappear on next unit. (And, it ossifies the new knowledge in a way that compounds the problem for next year).
I don't like the whole "layer cake" model of teaching math that "builds" upon other math in the way we do in the US. But to some extent, it is justified in places. If you struggle with basic arithmetic and integers, algebra is much, much harder.
The most advanced students will find one way or another to educate themselves. I think our school systems should focus on the middle: the students who could realize their full potential if they are sufficiently challenged. They are the group that do not always get STEM naturally but can eventually get it if pushed enough with the right material and exercises. Watering down curriculum means the students in the middle would lose the chance to truly grow, or their parents resort to tutoring and we get back to the discussion of how social-economic status matters in education.
If schooling doesn't matter for the brightest students, why does everyone think Caltech is such a great school?
The assumption can be challenged, of course.
Case in point, this problem on Stackexchange was from a high-school homework. I think it's advanced enough for students: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/711174/calculati...
My daughter is in the high school math club, so she frequently talks with math teachers and they reveal what state or county school districts are intending for future high school students. Earlier this week, a teacher was ranting to the club about new guideline goals that either the state/county was pushing, that all (most) incoming 9th graders take Algebra 1.
I understand they're attempting to narrow the achievement bandwidth in public schools on the basis of race, but this appears to be creating societal inefficiencies and decreasing equity overall. Sort of like, how someone could have a PhD in physics and working as a middle school science teacher, they'd effectively be underemployed or underutilized in society due to lack of demand for particle physicists; however, unlike limited particle physicist positions, in the students case, they don't have to be limited or underachieving in classes. Further, the additional problem this push for public school equity is decreasing equity, without imposing the same limitations on private school, homeschool, or charter school students, this mechanism is increasing the divide between the haves and have-nots. Either lens you evaluate this from, either equity or utilitarian perspective, this is a poorly executed plan that isn't going to achieve success in equity; unless, equity strictly means racial categories and doesn't include wealth/income inequality.
I hate to say it, but Algebra 1 by 9th grade is NOT a very high bar. In my area, the majority of students should be studying algebra no later than this. IMO, if most of the students aren't making it this far, something is wrong in the system.
Maybe the bottom 20% shouldn't, but talking about algebra 1 in 9th grade like it's a stretch goal is a danger sign to me.
In my experience tutoring remedial math students just had a hole somewhere or never practiced. Once both of those were addressed (with lots of hard work) they passed just fine.
I'm 95+% sure that basic exponentiation was also part of Algebra I.
The other thing is related to tracking. That is where Algebra comes in. Not all students will take it at the same time. Instead, students are segregated into separate tracks, one of which will start with Algebra in middle school and eventually end up taking Calculus by the end of high school. The other won't get to Algebra until high school and will never take Calculus at all.
These are separate phenomena, but the author here is drawing an analogy between the reasons given for eliminating both GATE programs and educational tracking systems (as in, both are seen as being racially biased).
I disagree with this statement, especially at the level of arithmetic and basic algebra. While math "ability" is likely a bell curve I would wager that it is centered well above Algebra I, and whether a kid at that age is "Good" or "Bad" at math is much more mindset/perception.
Because this sentiment is exactly opposed to a dominant philosophical framework built upon the axiom that, because all people are exactly identical, any difference in outcome is necessarily the result of hidden power structures.
The replacement of “equality” with “equity” is a dead giveaway that you’re dealing with Marxism. Equality before the law and equality of opportunity are American principles, but they are fading as equality of outcome is held up as the only acceptable standard.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an outspoken Soviet dissident, famously wrote: “Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”
Much greater energy and intelligence is required to advocate for equal opportunity as compared to equal outcomes, and much greater worldly experience is required to value equal opportunity as compared to equal outcomes. It will always be easy for politicians to set people against each other and dilute the common good by pushing Marxism. It is the path of least effort and greatest personal return for low quality leaders.
Because we are dealing with a group which is motivated by ideology. It's a religion to them. Some of them have doubled down on woke-speak around "equity" for so long, that they cannot backtrack and accept that merit and performance exist. Doing this would put them at odds with their current in-group and likely their only source of meaning and "friendship" with anyone.
It's the same crowd of people who just lost their very progressive DA in San Francisco during last night's recall election outcome. They keep doubling down on their policing strategy (see: no policing strategy) and being soft on crime and consequently crime has increased significantly. The same group of people that plugs their ears to reason and reality on why policing is necessary are the same group of people that are always trying to drag everyone down to their same floor level.
There really is no simpler way to say it than this, and it raises the question: how do you even make progress with a group who bases decisions on dogma rather than reason?
If someone were to not have read the above comments, this argument could be very easily used to support the opposing (political) stance as well. I suppose most humans are just emotion driven - though this need not be a bug.
The reason that "reason" often wins is because it often works. Of course, sometimes it either doesn't work, or takes a long time to work, and we can conveniently ignore it. Eventually reality catches up, but not always in a way that illustrates the cause.
The best way to make reason work is to expose people making decisions to reality, such that they benefit or lose based on the quality of their reasoning. The most unreasonable people will all of a sudden become very reasonable.
Alternatively stated, prevent people from hiding from reality. There are many places to hide, and these are often the most unreasonable places. National politics is one: your ideas probably won't happen (even if you're in Congress), and if they do, and something bad happens, there are enough other factors to make it easy to blame something else. Academia is another such place. So is extended adolescence.
And in the workplace, by gutting the types of roles that are just about being "thought leaders" in this direction. Technical people are afraid of those thought leaders because they don't want to get in trouble or fired for speaking against the cult. It's understandable since people need to get paid so they can provide for their families. But if companies just start dropping the negative weight that just encumbers everything and doesn't contribute code or design, it'll improve the bottom line and also gradually resolve this problem in the corporate workplace. The silver lining of a tech correction is that it may actually help make this decision more simple since companies can just start shedding the weight that is not actively making the product better.
So fire them, stop filling those types of roles, recall them in recall elections like San Francisco did last night with that terrible DA, vote in general, and let's stop associating with toxic people. It's effective if enough people do it.
For all the flaws in reasoning that are being highlighted in this thread, progressive have very clear and concrete goals: Equity, removing discrimination, improving opportunities, raising the floor for the social safety net, closing the wealth gap, improving housing affordability, etc.
You may disagree with their methods and have criticisms. That is valid. But are you opposed to their goals or their means?
Do you have alternative goals?
I ask you because most of the internet and media that criticizes "woke ideology" does not seem to have it's own perspective. I genuinely need to understand what is the alternative that people are proposing. Because certainly "Things were just fine before we started talking about racism, and the world was already a meritocracy that we shouldn't try to fix" doesn't resonate with me either.
Many on this site complain about Woke SJWs and all their focus on ideology, but what do people seek here instead? Just pure free market libertarianism?
It has not. https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/San-Francisco-crime-Che...
Consider why you think that it has, and whether you are also getting your information from an in-group that is primarily motivated by ideology and not reality. (Just a different one from the one you criticise)
I went to school in Eastern Europe in the eighties. We had algebra (and separately geometry) since 7-th grade. Also physics, chemistry and biology. And it was an ordinary secondary school. Some kids were struggling, also depends on how good/bad the teacher was. But majority was coping with the load alright.
Because that would be an admission that we can't just pile 30 students in the same class and in doing so would mean that we need more teachers and nobody wants to spend the money to do that.
A more reasonable school, after the elementary level, should mix and match kids, so that older kids with more advanced skills could help those who hasn't still advanced as much. It should allow to take courses, much like a college does, in whatever order a kid (and their parents) find most beneficial, independent of the age, with the goal to pass a GED test by the end of the school. Even better, it should be possible to pass a basic or an advanced level of a test for a subject, independent of the age. The presence of several parallel tracks for a subject solves the issue with gifted kids and struggling kids alike.
I don't think I have all the answers, but the standard school education system was invented in Prussia in the middle of 18th century, and is pretty obviously inadequate for today; ask teachers, students, or parents. Though maybe for some parents it looks adequate because it functions as a storage facility for kids for the day. But kids could spend their time much better than that.
Athletics should be separate from schooling and run by the community (as is Europe).
Individually you feel pressure to move into the best school districts. Yet collectively it falls into racial boundaries because of decades of systemic racism.
Forced busing suddenly fixes a lot of the funding biases, but is very unpopular because fear of the other is hard to overcome.
This was not an argument for school athletics. It was an observation that age quantization-- whether by schools or by private athletic leagues-- makes a big difference on the trajectory of athletes. In turn, you have from age quantization alone pretty big physical differences in students of the same nominal age.
Your comment is completely orthogonal to what you replied to.
It may not be inevitable. Personally I had pretty great experiences with multi-grade clubs, camps, sports teams, classes, academic competitions, after school programs, etc. (not to mention the neighborhood/real world.) The older kids were usually pretty nice, often really helpful, and provided a kind of role modeling.
Sports teams can sometimes be kind of hilariously unbalanced due to the drastic difference in sizes of some kids though. Perhaps some sports should be sliced into height or weight classes rather than age classes, but that's probably only practical for large leagues.
That’s a nice thing to wish, but at least in the public school system in the US, it’s no longer something that you can expect depending on the region. There are many reasons for this both including indifference and / or just being overwhelmed.
"Zone of Proximal Development" [1]
Montessori schools do this.
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development
Even trying to rely on outside media, it's still much more labor intensive for teachers.
And you need a more motivated student body than the typical middle school or high school student. The small quizzes you include to make sure that students consumed the flipped content beg for exploiting and cheating, even with randomization.
Finally, it's not really clear how well it works. In general, K-8th work away from teacher supervision shows no evidence of benefit, and the educational research we have on the flipped model is mostly of poor quality except for a couple of good studies of undergraduates.
Education tends to have big "trendy ideas" that have some plausibility that they'll work and excitement around them and a whole lot of administrator support and profe$$ional development services spring up around them. And then you have people endlessly debate the merits based on personal experience.
(I'm about to teach a microeconomics class where I'm going to flip 1/3rd of the lessons in a private high school environment with a relatively motivated student body; the motivation is so that I can fit more simulations into an already-very-dense AP curriculum without an infinite homework load. I've become a relatively successful middle school teacher of engineering and mathematics enrichment classes over the past couple of years and I struggle to see how I can flip much successfully-- so much of my success is around social pressures that come from interaction of students with each other and their teacher).
> My greatest concern? The admirable but demonstrably false notion that school systems can fully implement an “all kids are gifted” framework that attempts to address the issue of eliminating the need for specialized gifted programming.
There a number of large benefits to gifted, not the least of which is it changes the character of a program/school. If you are surrounded by bright students with nerdy academic interests it's suddenly acceptable to nerd out on things. This single fact may be more valuable to the development of the student than the entire program itself. Outside of gifted, schools have substantial challenges with creating environments where academic excellence is encouraged and rewarded not only by the schools grading system but also by social behaviour of peers. While bullying has gone down, and acceptability of geeky interests have improved in the past 30 years there is still nothing close to a gifted program from encouraging and accepting academic excellence.
As someone who just barely missed the gifted cutoff, my schooling was much too easy and I basically never had to study for tests or exams. I ended up developing poor academic habits that ultimately hurt me when the difficulty got hard enough that intellectual horsepower needed to be combined with hard work. I think being challenged early and often would have changed this behaviour substantially. Even creating an environment where I wanted to be around other students enough to participate in more extra-curriculars could have helped. I worry that we are going to create a lot of bright but unmotivated students by offering years of programs that are too easy for them. There are consequences far beyond just having these students occasionally act out out of boredom and I think it's a very bad idea to create an educational culture that suggests bright people should be lazy. This is ultimately what the removal of gifted programs do because classroom teachers generally aren't given adequate prep time or other resources to properly offer enrichment. I've even known some principals who encouraged their teachers to not offer enrichment as it created problems in later grades when other teachers didn't offer similar enrichment and parents expected it.
When you're little, you self-learn that if it's easy, it's not worth doing. If it's hard, it's probably impossible anyway. Your life is good and filled with fun. As you get older, when things get hard in school, you avoid or fail them with no strategies or habits around completing difficult schoolwork (which often feels as rewarding as easy schoolwork). Who would want to stop having fun? This is sometimes referred to as, the curse of the gifted.
I was randomly pulled from normal classes in order to hang out with a few other gifted students and do weird puzzles or whatever. Then later I’d have to figure out from classmates what I missed, including what homework to do etc. My social skills already sucked, and being labeled as special to the classmates whom I’d have to spend most of the day with certainly didn’t help.
I’m sure there a ways to do it better, but having no gifted program is better than a bad gifted program.
Well, yes, if by equity you mean the race composition of every class equals the race composition of the school as a whole. But shouldn't equity in education mean that every student gets the instruction and support they need to achieve their potential, insofar as the school is able to provide it, without respect to their race, class or sex?
There were no gifted programs or classes when and where I attended school (6 decades back, in a very rural part of the Great Plains). But there was a teacher in my school who took it upon herself to run a reading lab that you could get into with the blessing of the school principal. Mostly she taught remedial reading to those who needed extra help, but one of her 5 periods each day was called "advanced reading lab" and into that group she took students who showed exceptional or nascent exceptional intellectual capability. In the guise of teaching us to read better and faster, she exercised our brains with science, history, and even math. She's the only teacher I remember by name, and she did more to launch my success in life than any 5 other teachers combined, behind only my parents. Because she made going to school worthwhile - interesting, exciting, and mind-expanding. (She also taught me to read 2000 words per minute with retention, which was a hell of a useful skill, but only a skill - the world of knowledge and thinking was her real gift).
You’re taking about equality. Equity is always just a euphemism for equality of outcome. Which can only ever be achieved by lowering the outcomes of top performs to the same level as the lowest performers.
Can you expand upon this and/or link to any resources related to the method?
So, I can tell you a little about the methods, but that's all. First, we spent a small, but meaningful amount of time each day in drills to train our eyes and brains to rapidly recognize and interpret increasingly longer strings of symbols. This was done by flashing a sequence of numbers (first) or letters (as we got better) on a screen for a set period of time, and having students transcribe them onto paper. As we achieved accuracy for a given flash (say 5 numbers for .1 second), the flash interval was incrementally reduced, and the length of sequence increased. I don't recall the flash intervals, but I do recall that at the end of a year of doing these exercises for a few minutes each school day, I was routinely reading 15 or more digit sequences accurately in a single, very short glance.
We also used machines (entirely mechanical) that built on that ability by scanning lines of text we were to read in multi-word chunks on a timed basis. The idea was to take the sight interpretation skill and extend it to reading phrases in a single glance, rather than reading and interpreting single words.
And finally, there was application of these skills to real texts, for comprehension. Comprehension was of course focused on getting the meaning of a text, but also on vocabulary. New vocabulary was introduced in relatively simple texts, and re-enforced over time.
I have no idea how well all this worked for average students. It worked beautifully for me, though.
Gifted programs are used to advance and maintain the status-quo of segregation in our schools. The correlation between medium household (of which Black americans are at a disadvantage) and acceptance into the gifted program is much stronger than the correlation between merit and acceptance. I've spent my life in this system and I can tell you with one hundred percent confidence that the reason many if not most of my black peers don't get into these programs is not due to any lack of merit or intelligence.
Now lets look at the second assumption, that the gifted programs provide a higher level of education. This is not true. What happens is that gifted programs get significantly higher funding than other schools and so the gifted programs can afford to give a good well rounded education, which is a good thing! The problem is that so many of our schools, especially in Brown and Black neighborhoods) are completely underfunded, without enough teachers or resources. This of course perpetuates the systemic inequities that begun this cycle in the first place thus repeating the whole cycle.
When we are calling for an end to "gifted" programs in New York, it is not because we "hate smart kids" but because we want resources to be evenly divided so that everyone can get a well funded well rounded education, not just the rich kids in gifted classes. This is not a single issue but is a larger component of an attempt to dismantle segregation in public schools. It drives me crazy to no end to see smart people fall into the ideological trap of believing gifted programs are something they aren't.
I am saying that. "Gifted" programs and the schools that house them eat up a sizable chunk of funding.
There's no relationship between gutting gifted programs and either alleviating inequality or improving outcomes of all other students. If you want to do the latter, that requires it's own intervention.
This basically apes the rhetoric of the right-wing on the part of social spending. "We can't afford it, it should be spent on other things". Same mentality.
It's puzzling why you won't lend credence to an important factor: poverty has cognitive consequences. Yet rather than trying to improve the lot of those students, you're fixated on taking things away. This is how socialists think: some people have it too good and need to be punished.
OR for that matter, how about the inverse?
I later found out that test scores didn't entirely determine placement. Many of my peers were put in the gifted program after a parent advocated for them.
So yes, I appreciate these efforts to equalize opportunity. I'd like that the lessons offered in gifted programs can be offered to all students
I was wondering why it seems to be such a big topic for the US. Where I’m from, gifted classes are for 1% of the kids and about socializing and keeping them engaged - their life outcomes are not statistically likely to be better than the “normal” children either way.
This, to me, seems very different from being a better path to success as it apparently is in the US, in some kind of segregated system where millions of children are enrolled, up to 15% in some states.
Most studies I've seen also show that over the long term, gifted education does not result in better life outcomes, and does not eliminate differences in background (like being poor vs rich).
When I read "gifted programs" I certainly would think that race or social background has zero influence on acceptance (even though they do influence kids access to education before getting there).
Reading what you said it seems logical that removing these programs is overall a good thing. But the way I see it the discussion about supporting kids that are truly gifted shouldn't be dismissed.
Maybe the solution would be to actually replace that program with something that's not perpetuating this segregation.
Disclaimer: I don't live in the US, so take it with a big grain of salt :)
Sure! Yes! We are looking for a fair allocation of resources to actually give schools the ability to meet every student where they are and to engage them wherever that is. All teachers want to be able to meet kids where they are, wherever they are, but they don't have the resources to.
Ok, then that's what you should ask for. Ask for a more even distribution of resources.
If you single out the elimination of a specific program as a proxy for what you really want, you shouldn't be surprised when the discourse fixates on your targeting that program -- especially when it's a program for gifted students. By doing that you've made it very easy for your opponents to portray you as someone who would rather bring all students down to the same level than allow differences in ability to be cultivated.
The problem is that in New York at least the gifted programs are the direct mechanism by which rich parents uphold the status quo of segregation. The gifted prgrams are not a proxy, they are a symptom. As I said elsewhere in this thread: we are looking for a fair allocation of resources to actually give schools the ability to meet every student where they are and to engage them wherever that is.
The fact that gifted programs would be needed at all is a failure of our public school system. Every school should have the resources to adequately engage and educate every student regardless of their academic starting point.
More funding doesn't solve the problem. If that were case, the whole country could have spent it's way out of special education. At an median of $24K per student, New York has plenty of funding. Kansas city once tried an unlimited funding model to disastrous results (https://www.cato.org/commentary/americas-most-costly-educati...).
And when gifted programs become screeners of affluence then there are going to be financially involved parents in the PTA which benefits the whole school. But if all of those parents end up at the "good" schools then those schools have considerably more funding (on top of the additional funding from the DOE) to allow them to actually educate their students. It is all a self reinforcing cycle that benefits a few and disadvantages many.
To compare, Stuyvesant High School, the best in NYC, is $18k per student.
The money evaporates before it reaches them.
Putting limits on how much a parent can help and support their child is a much more difficult ethical and political argument to make
>Now lets look at the second assumption, that the gifted programs provide a higher level of education. This is not true. What happens is that gifted programs get significantly higher funding than other schools and so the gifted programs can afford to give a good well rounded education, which is a good thing!
You can't have it both ways. Is the education better or not?
This means if you hear "eliminate this program because equity," and you grew up in the midwest where the gifted program didn't function at all like you describe or require much funding at all, this sounds completely nonsensical because we're not talking about the same thing.
I don't have an answer to this except that it's best discussed on a local case by case basis.
You assert that the programs exist to segregate the school, with no evidence.
You assert that more resources are spent on gifted programs without any evidence.
You assert that gifted program both do and do not provide better outcomes. Evidence is not needed here since these statements oppose each other.
The only "evidence" you present is your opinion, anecdotal evidence of what you believe you saw in attending a NYC school.
Why should I have a worse outcome just to raise the mean scores in a place where everyone else isn't capable (due to harsh environment) or willing to learn? In addition, I think it hurts arguments for affirmative action. When people think of affirmative action / need-based approaches, they think of these other kids and not me. (You wouldn't be able to tell that I benefitted from those programs if you met me given my high school achievements from over a decade ago).
Russia, 1917. A commotion on the street. A lady asks a servant to find out what's going on. The servant returns:
- Revolution!
- That's fabulous. My grandfather was a revolutionary too. What do they wish to achieve?
- They want to make sure nobody is rich!
- That's odd... My grandfather wanted to make sure nobody is poor.
P.S: A sad irony is that Soviet education system was pretty good at maintaining gifted programs.
(edit: formatting)
Unfortunately, in Oregon, Kate Brown and her acolytes think that it is "equitable" to get rid of all basic learning requirements for high school graduation, because they are "white supremacy" or something.
The soft bigotry of low expectations.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/dumbing-oregon-down-kate-brown-...
Were most of my gifted classmates wealthy? Yes. But being among them did more for my social mobility than anything else the school ever did.
To enforce this, you need to do two things: fire underperforming teachers, and their administrative overseers if the problem is pervasive, and pay teachers competitive salaries to attract the best talent to the job. Teaching is a skill, and highly skilled people should be well-compensated for their work. This is just labor market 101. If you don't value education, you pay low salaries to educators and you scrape the bottom of the talent barrel. If you do value education, then you make the job competitive by offering high salaries and eliminating underperformers.
Of course, maybe the politicians and bureaucrats and corporate executives don't actually want a highly educated competent population? Perhaps they'd prefer dumb sheep who believe whatever propaganda they're fed and whose consumption habits can be easily directed by skilled advertisers and marketers. Herds of compliant consumers who do as they're told, that's perhaps what elite leadership is after. Might be a conspiracy theory but there's some truth to it I think.
What it really looks like is one set of schools for the aristocrats, and another set of schools for the serfs, and it's more about maintaining a certain class structure, just as in late 19th / early 20th century British schooling systems.
"unacceptably white" is probably the most triggering thing in here but it actually represents the core of this conflict. The people trying to eliminate gifted programs are recognizing that many forms of power in society are zero sum. There are plenty of ways to get a great education but there is only one Harvard. Access to higher education opportunities is not only a pathway out of poverty but also to power within the institutions that hire grads.
The supporters of this form of affirmative action recognize that in a system where black/latino/indigenous students have structural disadvantages (poverty, prejudice, health, etc) but also operates as a pure meritocracy leads to a system where their racial group possesses disproportionately less power vs their population. Less kids in these groups in gifted programs means less of these kids going to top universities and on to top positions in government and business.
Many of you may see this as tribal or even perpetuating divides on race. But I'd respond that you fundamentally are underestimating how much marginalized communities distrust communities outside of their own. I'll use the black community because I'm a member of it. There is very little trust (myself included) that the white individuals who attend these programs and (hopefully) go on to succeed in higher education will use their influence for the benefit of blacks. I don't believe that because I think white people are racist, just self interested (like most people). That thinking extends to other groups like east and south Asians.
Personally my views on this are not to eliminate gifted programs, I benefited from one myself and know how important they are. Ideally we'd do what many others here suggested and just build more programs. If there is this much of a fight about it obviously there is a lot of demand for schools where Algebra I is taught in the 8th grade. So let's make more of those. That won't solve the issue at the college level though. There is a reason there are not 50 Harvards and its because the access/power/influence that degree offers is zero sum. Until we figure out a way to ration out that power in a way that people think is fair we're going to see constant contention over it.
I would wholeheartedly support removing limits on high school sports participation. The free market can suck away the elite athletes if they don't feel that high school sports are adequate for their professional development - that's fine, high school should cater to the majority, not an infinitesimal minority.
Everyone in school studies math and reading. Everyone is participating, simply on different levels.
I guess I don't understand your comment at all.
The absence of "Black and brown children" doesn't mean they were _excluded_, it means they weren't _selected_, or never applied in the first place.
If they were deliberately not selected because of their race, that's wrong and should be fixed pronto. And what are the odds of that? If they were not selected because they didn't meet the qualifications, well, that isn't the fault of the gifted program.
Emphasis mine. The likely thing going on is something subconscious or unintentionally discriminatory, or somehow related to the home family life.
But it could be the fault of the government, the school administration, and an entire culture of systemic racism.
And so there could be several problems to address.
Does removing the gifted program solve any of the problems? No. Does it make some people feel as though they're doing good by equalizing everything? Yes.
They also only placed me in the math/science gifted sections and would only be placed in the english/social studies gifted sections after much arguing as well.
Guess what? I excelled there too. Now to get away from anecdotes:
> If they were deliberately not selected because of their race, that's wrong and should be fixed pronto. And what are the odds of that?
between 50 to 70% on an individual basis if some studies are to be believed.
The New town we moved to is great. Oldest kid in accelerated programs, accelerating. Younger kid got the support she needed to catch up. :chefs_kiss:
Taking a step back, I don’t know how ‘equity’ got twisted into creating a lowering tide for all vs. a rising tide for all. So confusing.
This stratified structure also impacts how students view social interaction. Each grade is separate and therefore a different social entity. Sure, there are interactions across grades but it's still quite funny to see a sophomore make fun of a freshman when they're 15 and 14 years old respectively. To this day I know people who find it weird that I'm friends with someone who's 18 when I'm 23. I don't see why. We have the same interests and similar personalities. A few years difference doesn't matter.
Another is that equality is more important than progress. “Take from the rich and give to the poor.”
It seems mostly universal that we really want to raise the floor, not lower the ceiling. But so far history suggests that lowering the ceiling is easier.
Since the decision to value progress or equality higher is ultimately a personal moral choice, I don’t see this debate ever being resolved.
Happily, we don't live in a "one world government". So, if a society insists too much on silly ideas, it will be left in the dust by others.
There's a degree of nobility in the ideal of "no child left behind" - but childhood potential is not democratically distributed.
The smartest kids in schools should not be left to flounder on account of those who can't keep up.
A typical IQ threshold for a gifted program is 130. The average IQ overall is 100 with standard deviation 15. For black Americans the average score on IQ tests is about 85, which explains why blacks will be under-represented in gifted programs unless racial preferences are used. The makers of IQ tests would like to reduce racial differentials while maintaining the predictive abilities of their tests, but they have not been able to.
Those have very different solutions.
Additionally it identified that 83% of black students had access to a gifted program as opposed to 91% or something of white students.
Additionally the study cited says that they had several gaps in their data and used some statistical regressions to fill in those gaps. All this leads me to believe that we need to provide more access to gifted programs, and the problem isn't that we have a herd of racist teachers on the loose.
Just "make" everyone qualified / good at algebra?
I feel like that glosses over the ALL the challenges with education ...
Kids should be placed in the gifted/magnet track because of performance, and performance alone. I don't believe that a meritocracy is racist, sexist, or biased in an unfair way. Placing students in classes where they may under perform, and excluding kids who would perform well in an accelerated program are unfair, and a meritocracy mitigates both of these problems.
The article raised a good point about schools that marginalized groups would attend don't have a gifted program, precluding them from even participating. That can be addressed a couple different ways. Either redirect high performers to a school where there is a gifted program present, or mandate the presence of a gifted program in all schools. There will, of course, be differing quality of the program from school to school, which would favor the former course of action.
Having gone through the "gifted program" through elementary and middle school, I can say that the only real differences I felt weren't related to curriculum, we were taught essentially the same things, with slight differences.
1. Smaller class size. In a class of 4th, 5th, and 6th graders, there was maybe 25 kids. 2. Less rowdy/troublemaking classmates. Made for less distractions. 3. Less busywork. The routine of getting a packet every night for homework was not something I had to suffer through like many friends I had that weren't in an accelerated program.
I don't believe you will ever truly eradicate inequities within public services, and the cost of private services, especially in education, preclude many from participating. That said, we should strive to mitigate them. My fear is that the steps taken to mitigate inequity will just move the availability of opportunity from one group to another, where the true solution is increasing the availability for all groups, and let performance be the selector of who is admitted to gifted/accelerated programs.
I am a bit hesitant of this. One valuable thing you get by having geographical schools is the same friends in and out of school. If you have friends at school but they are too far to hang out with or do homework with it can be bad for the kid learning social skills.
Mandating gifted classes as you mentioned seems better.
It's hard to take anyone who uses this term seriously. Latinos can't even pronounce it or care for it.
The broader issue is that having grammatical noun classes/gender serves an important purpose: not enforcing the patriarchy, but instead disambiguating different words and antecedents (basically adding an extra bit or two of information to a word).
I guess Teach for America assumes their readers are too dumb to notice?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001698629303700...
> Results indicated that parents perceived that their children were experiencing a decline in energy, curiosity, and intrinsic motivation to achieve at high levels and were beginning to disengage from the traditional curriculum [after elimination of the gifted programs].
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10416...
> This review also found that the needs of many gifted and talented students are not addressed in many regular classroom settings across our country... A large body of research supports the finding that various forms of acceleration result in higher achievement for gifted and talented learners.
They are different concepts.
Equal Opportunity is a universal goal that as a society we continue to strive towards even though is impossible to fully achieve.
Equalized Outcomes (Equity) Is a dystopian nightmare.
The idea that all possible differentials between humans can and should have the same outcomes is ludicrous.
I work in education and will give you an example of this nonsense. In a well to do district in Chicago they found that Black students do not do as well in AP Calculus. After years of intervention the district achieved growth and had a record number of black student now enrolled in AP Calculus. However after five years and despite the increase of black students it was still found that white and asian students got higher scores on the AP exam.
The district solution was to cancel AP Calculus and now it is only offered as a third party online course not taught by the school district.
Why was the goal for all groups to have the same test scores? Just absolute rubbish.
I do. Or rather, I doubt the good intentions of the decision makers. I don't think educators are making these decisions. The more I experience the public education system through my child (I did not experience it myself, as I was homeschooled), and the more stories I hear from parents, the more it looks like school administrators are politicians looking to cut costs and get on a track to end up in city council. The actual welfare of the children doesn't really look like it ends up a part of the equation.
By high school I'd learned to read the textbook, ace the tests and do fuck-all for homework to the frustration of every educator at the school trying to teach me hard work alongside the actual material. There were actually AP classes in high school that I never qualified for because I never learned to actually work at school, and by high school I didn't really care. I was completely unprepared when Junior year in college, it actually got so hard that I had to study. I almost flunked out.
I can empathize with the gifted kids that are just a different shade, not getting challenged, basically getting the small town experience I got. It is a ton of potential being wasted. I agree with the article, throwing away gifted programs and just lowering the bar is a mistake, but raising everyones bar to the gifted level... that's going to leave some of the most vulnerable behind which I don't think should be done either.
Maybe working to shore up the problem of black/brown kids having equal test scores and not getting into a gifted program is the first hurdle, and then we can look around and see what to do next.
The IQ distribution is different across race groups, therefore you expect to have more representation of certain groups relative to others.
It's obvious that Asians --I am not Asian-- perform extremely well in IQ tests compared to other groups. Same with Ashkenazi Jews. These groups would have, relatively speaking, a higher representation. It would also be more male than your typical classroom.
Just like we have "physically gifted programs" in sports, and in some Blacks are overly represented. People don't seem to bat an eye for such "inequity", because it is understood that, on average, Blacks have superior athletic ability in some sports.
People really have a hard time understanding basic statistical facts, and they take these things personally. When we compare average heights across countries, nobody gets offended because everybody is aware of their own height. A 6'4 American is just as tall as a 6'4 Indonesian, so people don't take personally. Somehow average IQ is this thing that people take personally as if it was an indictment on their intelligence.
Besides, there is much more than IQ. Plenty of people with average IQs are successful. Sure, the premium on IQ increased in our society, but there is so much variance in activities and other inherent or acquired characteristics, it is really not that big of a deal.
With that being said, it is important for a nation to identify exceptional talents --including intelligence-- and nurture these individuals so they maximize their potential. It's good for them, it's good for society as well. Recognizing that people should have different educational experiences is the right thing to do.
When different groups have different home and social environments, it is expected that there will be IQ differences.
It is strange that people can be vocal about the harsh conditions difference groups are subjected to, but in denial about the damage done by those conditions.
Basically if only 2% of student taking algebra 1 are black then the solution is : 1- not to Remove algebra 1 completely. 2- not to force a % of the algebra 1 student to be black by accepting student that are not ready for this level of Math 3- not too invent a new (non-racist) version of algebra 1 that is easier to understand .
The solution is simply to embrace asynchronous development!
If one student test score below average in English and Geography but above average in math. He should still be allowed to take Algebra 1.
Also algebra 1 should be offered as an option in all neighborhood (including poor one) even if only a single student in that neighborhood would like to take it.
I see being allowed to take the class if you qualify as a Right similar to the right to Vote. So the parent should not be forced to drive the student to another school because the local school prefer to not offer the class.
When I was growing up in NYC I was in a gifted program, and the average family was donating several thousand dollars a year per child. There were benefits such that if one child was in the program, other siblings automatically got in. This allowed us to have privately funded music program alongside privately funded teaching assistants in every classroom.
Source? It's certainly not the case for me individually, having been an immigrant child who got through on my own since my parents didn't know enough English to help me on homework and we were too poor to afford tutoring.
According to several studies, the greatest predictor of early academic advancement is the financial status of the parents. While scientific hubris and narcissism tend to quickly dominate competitive environments in colleges, the irrational pretense of a meritocracy quickly degenerates when you enter the faculty area. Note that most academically successful students will do well regardless of the curriculum or instructor, and the funding they bring in later makes anyone popular with staff.
I speculate one could likely outrun a one-legged physicist or a one-legged golden retriever just as quickly… but not escape their own cognitive biases.
Is that what you suppose gifted programs do?
Have a happy and glorious day.
"the irrational pretense of a meritocracy"
and this:
"most academically successful students will do well regardless of the curriculum or instructor"
Are contradictory - if the smarter students do well regardless, then it's not something in the school, home, or environment, that are making them do better. They are simply smarter, and that's not something you can create in other people.
A paradox can be tricky... and makes our biases perceivable.
Each of us was born into this world through a randomized process that was not created by humankind: the genes you were born with, the environment you were given before you could manage your own affairs, the accumulation of genetic mutations over the course of countless millennia that resulted in who you are today. This is the opportunity you were born with.
To think that we can compensate for this random process with any level of precision is to wage war with nature, and I'd bet that nature will win.
It is an admirable goal, and certainly we can take steps to reduce inequality of opportunity. But true equality of opportunity, or anything close to it, is unattainable in this universe.
Your next paragraph focuses on inevitable natural inequalities. Fine. Not everyone is Einstein, Picasso, or Jordan.
But what about SOCIETY is natural? Is society itself fair? Or does it include inevitable unfairnesses created to perpetuate "natural inequalities"?
I think this is the key. Obviously eliminating gifted programs and just tossing those resources into the wind is bad. But if instead we eliminated gifted programs, shifting those resources into remedial programs and then made the normal classes more difficult that seems like a solution that would satisfy almost everyone.
I pity the actual researchers in these fields. Must be tough to work in an area that everyone has an opinion on.
- former children
- attended public education
- hated or loved aspects of that education
Of course they're going to discuss ideas.
The teachers at the well-funded, near-apex "Magnet" school in North Carolina were generally better and had more time with students... especially in Science/Math. Teachers had more adult expectations of kids, but most importantly they were _consistent_ with their expectations and cadence of material presented.
Teachers at the under-funded, near-loss of state funding school in Tennessee were kind, "normal" people who happened to go to college at some point in the past. Primary detractors from the classroom were that student's low-expectations often led to large portions of uncontrolled "worksheet" tasks. Work was not graded well, inspected well or feedback given in a timely manner. I personally graded all the science teacher's Junior level homework as a Senior. She often didn't appear to understand the subject and was doing her best to not let the bottom students fall through the cracks.
Elimination of gifted programs, in my opinion, is the best option. The best students will learn what they need to, their parents will make sure of it, and the best teachers need to work with the worst students at this age group.
A very similar debate can be in sports. Should we have a single league or a tiered league?
I've seen siblings with very different performance and outcome from the young age. Obviously they are both genetically close and were raised by the same parents.
There are certainly differences in people but the reason might not always be some "genius" gene. It could be very circumstantial. For example they were grouped with people who happened to do poorly in whatever was being measured so they were always the top of their group (academically or athletically) in their formative years. That provided them with a lot of self confidence throughout childhood which led them to believe they can achieve anything and always spent countless hours making sure that's true unlike their sibling who never developed the self esteem and settled for less all their lives. Maybe they didn't get too stressed when faced with challenges due to genetic or childhood differences.
So IMO there should be separate leagues (just like sports teams) but also some mobility across these clubs in case someone possesses the skills and has the motivation to compete at the higher level.
I've heard this a lot - it's always someone else's fault. In my experience in school, the disruptive students were not the gifted ones. They were the ones who never experienced negative consequences for their disruptive behavior. Neither the teachers, administration, nor parents ever disciplined them.
The unchallenged gifted students would read a book during class, or draw art in their notebooks, etc.
This essentially creates a two-tiered schooling system, and since it's very tightly tied to income, this further exaggerates economic disparity, which is closely tied to race.
My city's school system is comprised mostly of minorities (~80% black, hispanic, and asian) and the gifted programs are predominantly serving wealthy white kids (~50%).
We also have exam schools. The most popular exam school in my area receives tens of millions of dollars in private donations. If you combined the private fundraising of the bottom 90% of schools in the district, it's still less than this one school. This school is also 50% white in a school system where only 15% of the kids are white. So we've essentially created a private school in a public system.
I understand why people don't want to eliminate gifted programs, but they are further exaggerating economic (and racial) disparities. I have not seen any good solutions for this, but it does feel incredibly unfair.
Having been someone who was poor and happened to be in a gifted program, I personally don't think the benefit is worth the divide.
Of course, the shell game has continued. Recall how often you used to hear about equality and not equity, and yet somehow those goalposts have shifted in the last five years. Equity has somehow come to mean that you'll get "your share" of the pie even if you haven't contributed, or despite being completely untalented.
We should sort (not segregate, never that) students by race (self-reported, of course), and then grade such that only a certain percentage in each bucket get As, a few more get Bs, and so on. This ensures a perfect equity balance. If we do this for each grade and each subject within a grade, well, we ought to have very equitable outcomes. Diana Moon Glampers will shotgun down the grades of the Asian "Schroedinger's Minority" group to be in line with everyone else's.
Can't imagine that this won't work out.
This is why equity programs are controversial. When skeptical people hear "equity," they think of the allegory about crabs in a bucket. Too often, instead of helping more crabs escape the bucket, our society creates policies that make it harder for any of them to escape the bucket, or pick and choose which crabs get to escape the bucket.
Just black and brown, the rest of children are on their own, right?
1. Students identified as gifted who do well because of their gifted program/who would have done well if they were in a gifted program. 2. Students identified as gifted who would do well regardless of whether they had a gifted program, even if they might do marginally better in a gifted program. 3. Students not identified as gifted who would benefit from additional resources/gifted peers in their non-gifted program 4. Students not identified as gifted who would not particularly benefit from gifted peers/already have adequately resourced classrooms.
I would have a hard time believing that the number of students in any of those categories is negligibly small. So then the question becomes how do we, as a society, best balance the tradeoffs between them. For any given student, we don't generally have the ability to try it both ways and see what would have been better, and of course any given parent will tend to prefer to take any tiny marginal improvement in opportunity for their children, regardless of whether it's net beneficial for society. But some of the role of society is to not allow people to take actions with mismatched externalities.
If there are more #3 students than #1 students (and/or the benefits to society are larger), and if we cannot distinguish between #2 students and #1 students, then yeah, let's get rid of gifted programs.
For myself, I think I was probably a #2—I had affluent, educated parents, benefited from significant extra-curricular enrichment, and could probably have had more enrichment with several tens of thousands of extra dollars per year of saved tuition. At what point could my parents have known that I was a #2?
This doesn't seem logical at all. It sounds like sweeping under the rug. I'm assuming that what is obvious here is that these programs reproduce inequity, and are not a cause of it.
[...] As these scholars argue shutting down gifted programs only deepens the inequities for brilliant, underrepresented students of color and adds another barrier to unlocking their genius.
Does one really need scholars for this?
Its antithetical to the American dream (i.e. an equal starting point for everyone) but we must provide different paths better suited to acknowledging reality and providing reasonable outcomes. Staff them with job descriptions fitting the actual need, and work from there.
It's rare that a Gifted Program simply gets eliminated due to inequity with no replacement. The school district almost always proposes an alternate program to replace it. (The author is the CEO and Founder of one, though he does acknowledge this near the end.)
The author also links to two examples of districts with reduced or eliminated Gifted Programs. But one article says the Anchorage program was cut because of a budget shortfall, and the other (Boston) said they suspended their advanced learning program only at the city-wide level mainly because COVID made it hard to administer!
OTOH I have seen students unwilling to attend a particular school b/c it has a reputation for behavioral problems and also low testing scores. So best spend money on improving education for all.
I would like to see more usage of an old tradition: better students helping others during class. This promotes cameraderie and provides different perspectives for both parties. It always helps to "stand in another man's shoes" and see the world from that new perspective.
Kids should be able to form friendships with those at different levels and help their friends, but shouldn't be asked to be their teachers or mentors. it's incredibly unfair to require students in the class to function as teachers. They are there to learn, and if they've learned everything on the curriculum, they should be able to learn more.
Teachers used to handle this by letting the kids have 'free time' after assignments to go to the library, or whatever. Gifted programs do this even better by putting them in a class with kids at a similar level so they are less likely to need special treatment or to be called 'smart'. This can actually help them realize early in life that they aren't automatically special because they're at the top of their class.
Promote that camaraderie all the way down. Let them see what it's like in another's shoes. Etc. All of your arguments for putting the gifted in normal classes, but applied to normal students and children with learning dysfunctions.
Gifted students are special needs students. They exist on the entire other end of the spectrum than those with learning dysfunctions.
Sure, that's fine.
>"Gifted students are special needs students. "<
Gifted students can usually take care of themselves.
What you are advocating is to essentially make every class a special education class serving the students with the lowest abilities. This won't bring those with learning dysfunctions up, it will only serve to bring the rest down while also building resentment towards those with dysfunctions.
And even gifted students need guidance. While they may be able to learn material on their own, knowing what material exists isn't something that is granted to one at birth. And it's not a guarantee that their interests will always align with what is necessary to learn.
Your statements are also kind of contradictory. You want to eliminated gifted education and put those students in normal classrooms. When I ask if you'd be fine with putting normal students in classes with those with dysfunctions with the explicit goal of helping those students, you said fine. But then you said gifted students can take care of themselves. So why would they go to class in the first place.
So, by your answers, you want to eliminate resources for children with learning dysfunctions and allow gifted children to skip school if they want.
There's no way to reconcile the disparity between acknowledging that children with learning dysfunctions need additional resources and ignoring that gifted children are also a special case of student that need additional resources.
Either you wind up advocating for the complete elimination of additional resources, acknowledging that not all students need all the same resources, or trying to pretzel yourself in a way where you can knock the gifted children down a peg while keeping the children with dysfunctions away from the general classes.
I think people hear "gifted" and think they are being left out, but that's not supposed to be the case. Sort of the difference between classroom and home school, sometimes one works better for a kid than the other, not that one is necessarily better than the other.
This sums up my concerns with detracking.
I'm hoping the SF DA recall election is a sign that we're going to see the pendulum swing in the other direction as more people realize that the progressive platform is toxic trash.
Anecdotes, I know, but I was terrible at math compared to the kids in high school who could all just memorize and regurgitate (I have ADHD & very poor working memory, and no random-access). These kids also regularly looked up answers to future quizzes they found online and bsed their way through. But, in college, which involves a more abstract and rigorous (and dare I say meaningful) understanding of the material, I excelled while many of my former colleagues fell behind as these were 'new problems' they couldn't just look up because they didn't have answers.
My point is intelligence is not a scalar axis in which some people are 'gifted' and some people are not, it's a multidimensional series of mental configurations that must be adapted to in the classroom and outside. Hire better teachers and pay them more is the only concrete thing I can think of. Gifted programs aren't the way as they're entirely arbitrary to a specific environment. The wrong teacher for the right student will ultimately make the student worse for it, and these programs don't account for how truly uninspired some teachers can be. Not to mention parents, or availability of learning materials, quality of libraries, etc etc.
That said, HN has historically done a very good job in policing this through the vigilance of its admin team. I wouldn't be surprised if this discussion pales in comparison to the stuff they've axed.
As a father of a decently-gifted son who gets bored to death at school and who's bombarded with brainless homework to stay "out of trouble" when not in school, I can tell the California education is the worst I can imagine in a civilized country!
> Black students are 66% less likely to be identified as gifted compared to white students with similar test scores
But even if we supposed that the top 10% of Black students were slightly less qualified than the top 10% of White students (say, due to socioeconomic factors), the program would simply adjust towards the mean student. So maybe the program slows down a bit, but it's still an accelerated program, and now it's helping to correct those socioeconomic disparities.
The only case where this argument would break down is if the top 10% of Black students were _severely_ less qualified than the top 10% of White students, in which case the program would likely fail. But it seems pretty clear that this isn't the case.
That gifted students are disproportionately white or Asian reflects the value placed on education not racism. Outcomes will never be equal in a fair society. Provide equal opportunity. Those that take advantage will thrive. Those that don't, will not.
I think it’s grotesque how many privileged people are happily destroying the lives of others (often, those they pretend to care about) so they don’t have to think critically about or be uncomfortable thinking about race.
Seattle is the epitome of “privileged White liberals hurt everyone for their comfort”:
The bourgeois have become the baizuo.
It's very tempting (edit: for me) to lazily rest on the caricature, "I don't care how many people I hurt, as long as I can help just one!"
Despite that, or maybe because of that, I make a conscious effort to understand where the other side is coming from. I figure there's little chance of finding a compromise if I can't even comprehend their viewpoint.
So far I haven't been very successful. Maybe it's because the chasm is so large regarding values, understandings of human nature, predictions about how things will play out, etc. Or maybe I have blind spots that get in the way.
I wish I were better at this. It seems like at a very zoomed-out level we want similar things.
I understand it just fine, but there’s a fundamental disagreement, in that I don’t support racism nor view people in terms of “racial tribes” — while proponents of equity do. That’s the frame they’re working from when they say denying an Asian student a place at Harvard in favor of a less qualified black applicant is “good”: that it’s okay to harm that person because they’re yellow and we need to balance between yellows and blacks — to accomplish their Utopian vision. Collectivism when applied to race inevitably leads to institutional racism.
I don’t believe that’s something we need to “compromise” on: institutional racism was a disaster when we tried it before and modern attempts (eg, Netflix and Disney catering to those views) show that bigotry is widely unpopular and a poor way to run a company.
Sometimes you just have to say “bigotry is wrong and we’re not trying it again — no matter how you dress it up in the language of civil rights or how righteous you feel about being a bigot”.
The reason you see that as "racial tribes" is that you fundamentally are underestimating how much marginalized communities distrust communities outside of their own. Black people do not trust that if Asian students go to Harvard and gain positions of power that those adults will protect their interests. They want their own in those positions.
We had only one Harvard when the country's population was quite a bit smaller. Perhaps, instead of the zero-sum struggle for Harvard attendance, we should be working to create new Harvards. We have the oversupply of academics.
That takes not dis-investing in public higher ed to the degree we did during the 2008 recession. It takes decades to build a new R1 research institution, and a commitment of large sums of money over that time. Rockefeller created the University of Chicago, Leyland Stanford his namesake, where are Buffet, Bloomberg, Walton, Mars, and Gates Universities? That could be a good use of some of the modern billionaire money, if we're not going to spend tax dollars on new R1 institutions.
> where are Buffet, Bloomberg, Walton, Mars, and Gates Universities?
That's a very good point.
Disinvestement is the exact reason tuition has increased. The discount funded by state legistatures is being reduced, so tuition has to go up to balance the books.
You’re describing why you believe it’s okay to discriminate against that Asian student because there’s “too many yellows, not enough blacks”.
You’re also ignoring that they’re choosing to engage in institutional racism rather than utilize programs such as meritocracy + individual aid, which automatically counter any “structural disadvantages” — that is, they’re choosing racism when better alternatives exist.
> The reason you see that as "racial tribes" is that you fundamentally are underestimating how much marginalized communities distrust communities outside of their own. Black people do not trust that if Asian students go to Harvard and gain positions of power that those adults will protect their interests. They want their own in those positions.
You just described racism and a belief in racial tribes — exactly what I said was driving this.
> They aren't saying that.
You start off disagreeing — and then go on to describe exactly what I said.
Not really. If intelligence is equal between races and a system is an actual meritocracy, then the balance between groups should be the same. One group outperforming indicates a difference in circumstances. If you believe those circumstances aren't because of disadvantages then you either believe one group is inherently more capable than the other, one group works harder than the other, or that one group has a more effective culture. Generally, there is a lot of animosity within the black community toward ̶A̶s̶i̶a̶n̶ people who tend to believe any of the above (because it is pretty common amongst racist).
> You’re also ignoring that they’re choosing to engage in institutional racism rather than utilize programs such as meritocracy + individual aid, which automatically counter any “structural disadvantages” — and is in sharp contrast to their proposed racist system that rewards privileged blacks ahead of poor Asians. One of the many reasons such racist systems fail, in practice: they don’t confront the issue you claim they address.
Are you arguing structural disadvantages are not real? are you arguing that the issue in the black community is effort? if the issue isn't structural disadvantages, what do you think they are?
> You just described racism and a belief in racial tribes — exactly what I said was driving this ... You start off disagreeing — and then go on to describe exactly what I said.
I'm disagreeing with the policy as an effective way to address a set of issues. I never said I disagreed with the idea that there are tribes. Tribes are going to exist as long as we live in a society that offers members of different tribes different opportunities and experiences within society. The way to fix that is not to just pretend that doesn't exist. A meritocracy can't exist until everyone within a society believes they have a fair chance to participate in it and it is not controversial to say most black people do not believe that is the status quo. You are choosing to see this as people trying to take something away from you when its really a bunch of people lashing out over the fact that the system was never fair in the first place.
> Generally, there is a lot of animosity within the black community toward ̶A̶s̶i̶a̶n̶ people who tend to believe any of the above
In my experience, there is much, much discourse within the black community regarding culture, and how it affects success.
Responsibility for culture is an interesting issue. Very few individuals can claim any significant responsibility.
People tend to look askance at outsiders coming in to fix their culture.
Further, I don't think American mainstream culture is in any position to evangelize its greatness right now.
> not fixing by simply pushing people to adopt the cultural norms of another group of people.
I don't know, I see culture as evolutionary. Everyone should adopt the practices they see succeeding, and abandon they ones they see failing, no?
The more blindingly obvious conclusion is study time among asians is far higher than all other races. [0]
> Generally, there is a lot of animosity within the black community toward ̶A̶s̶i̶a̶n̶ people who tend to believe any of the above (because it is pretty common amongst racist).
Congrats for outing yourself as a racist?
[0] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/2012026/tables/table_35.asp
I can't adopt this level of cynicism, or else I'd have to conclude that multi-ethnic societies are doomed to fall apart like Yugoslavia, or remain together using synthetic means like the Lebanese National Pact⁰, which specifies power sharing with agreements like
* The Prime Minister of the Republic always be a Sunni Muslim.
* The Speaker of the Parliament always be a Shia Muslim.
* The Deputy Speaker of the Parliament and the Deputy Prime Minister always be Greek Orthodox Christian.
Maybe more effort needs to go towards identifying these children earlier. A bright child is obvious, regardless of race.
That's a bit annoying since it doesn't take me directly to the source, but that's fine. Then I read the article and it says: "...found black students were 66 percent less likely to be assigned to a gifted program as white students. A black student whose test scores were on par with a white peer was still half as likely to be assigned to a gifted classroom." So, immediately the author of this original article saw the statistic 66% and the phrase "on par with test scores", and immediately conflated the two. According to this statement, it sounds like black students are actually 50% less likely to be identified as gifted with similar test scores.
I'm going to assume that's just an artifact of non-diligent research and not a blatant lie. Well, I'm still curious where these stats come from, so let's see where this article in the Tennesseean is sourcing this stuff from. They've got several links on this article and... every single link, with the exception of the link to a randomly named professor at Vanderbilt, lead to other articles on the Tennessean. Let's see if we can find where they obtained these stats from.
Alright, it looks like this is where they got it from[1], but I can't be 100% sure. This actually has a link to the paper as well[2]. It also has a nice disclaimer at the bottom of the article:
> One such additional factor impacting minority assignment to gifted programs is the availability of these programs in schools attended by minority students. Black students are less likely overall to attend schools that provide gifted programs. Ninety percent of white, 93 percent of Hispanic, and 91 percent of Asian elementary students attend schools with gifted programs, while only 83 percent of African American students do.
In other words, when the researchers took test scores into account for Hispanic students vs white students, the differences in the probability of being selected for a gifted program based on race reduced to 0%. With black students, they (seemingly) did not take into account whether a school even offered a gifted program. So they lumped together all the students who may not have had access to a gifted program, and then used that to conclude that teachers are racist and ignoring test scores.
Right off the bat I'm done with this article. If you're going to cite research, then cite the actual paper first of all. Second, look at how they gathered the data. Once you take the anomalies into account, it looks like we may not have racist teachers, but rather incomplete data. I wish we could just have an honest conversation about this stuff instead of all this stupid indirection and trying to hide the actual research being done because it doesn't fully support your claims.
The big issue here is a lot of black students don't have access to gifted programs, but instead we're fighting "racist" teachers that don't exist.
[0]: https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/education/2016/01/19/v...
[1]: https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2016/01/18/teachers-race-affects...
[2]: https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Gris...
... Which would indeed be explained by the lack of gifted program at schools (can't assign a kid to a class that doesn't exists).
But there's also something the authors are omitting here: parental involvement. It's still the parent's decision to place their kid in a gifted program. And if there's no gifted program at the child's current school the parent will have to take the initiative to transfer his child to another school (and the child will probably object to it seeing as it means losing all his friends).
Parental involvement seems to be a large problem, as well as the lack of access to gifted programs in this case.
I suspect some of the students who weren't "getting it" were sandbagging it so they wouldn't be taught new material.
Uplift the individual first, trying to tweak things just to pump your numbers up seems like missing the point. I would rather treat education on a more personal outcome level than to treat it like a retail shop where I’m just trying to boost sales to meet some number/category goals.
(I think something similar can be said about this concept when it comes to politicians on TV recommending medical treatments or vaccines “for everyone” which I think is worth mentioning to help frame what I am getting at here but that’s another story.)
https://boingboing.net/2013/01/05/pedagogyofthedepressed.htm...
Boing Boing never ended up importing the comments from back then, and when I reached out to a contact about writing a follow up, the entire site was DDOSed.
Too many teachers purposefully abuse the gifted, then react irrationally to perfectly reasonable responses.
(I wasn't paid, and they put it out without my opt in, though to be fair, the editor did quite a bit of editing and free graphics work when they could have thrown the text up as is - a few of the wording changes were probably a good thing, looking back with the wisdom of a 30 something.)
On the other hand, never once have the folks who abused me ever apologized, and they continue to gaslight me and obstruct me to the point I'm considering moving to Italy.
I'm really sick of rude people, and I know it's hypocritical given some of the comments I make on the internet, but from early on in life I've had perpetual issues with folks who have a very high standard for my behavior, but not their own.
I have literal scars from some of what they did, but I also have enemies in the education and medical community who continue to engage in illegal, retaliatory behavior for my first amendment protected free speech.
I cannot emphasize enough how badly it backfired that neoliberals engineered society around the idea that you can't interact with people without permission, then melted down when my response, due to COVID, was basically "Fine, you're right, I have anger issues. I'm also not your caregiver, so keep back six feet."
I live in one of those top 100 zipcodes of USA with very small school district. It's plenty diverse racially but completely homogenous financially (i.e. pretty much everyone is rich). I have two kids just a year apart. One just barely didn't make it into gifted & talented program at grade 3, and another one definitely did, and has been in one since then. [Edit] oh and I was in gifted/advanced class myself from grade 7 on, but not here, but in Russia.
Plenty of parents pushed very hard for the kids to test into the gifted program, getting kids tutors and repeatedly testing in. There was one kid I remember who was bright as all get out but a complete asshole in social circumstances that apparently tested 3 times by his parents until he made it (2 highly focused doctors). My kid that tested in actually didn't start in it, but then about a month into 3rd grade complained that he was bored and we were able to move him in.
We've been involved with the teachers on both regular and gifted track. We - and every parent with child in gifted class - are not happy about our school sunsetting it for the district. No teachers - certainly no teachers of advanced classes - were consulted on this effort. None of them are getting any additional help in now trying to teach to all levels, and result will be (already is) a dilution of quality all around.
As with many schools everywhere, and with covid helping, there are some kids departing towards private education where your money talks and you do whatever. Where I live is increasingly unaffordable, too, so we have reduced enrollment because there are just less kids. I do fine but am not at economic place to afford private education, my offer to kids is where I live, which even with the dilution is still excellent education.
We (and almost every parent around us) are very engaged with schools with volunteering and additional funding. In fact I am a treasurer of the schools foundation that donates up to a $1 million/year to school for all kinds of things, mostly general funding. That tends to help but really, even our little district needs like extra ~$20mil to fund what we're supposed to.
Anyhow, on cleverness nd equity, what it boils down to me is that the world is becoming just one big lake now with talent being increasingly able to accrue huge benefits. This talent needs education and people who want best for their kids (including me) will do whatever is necessary to get that. This is why there is extra tutoring in china and private schools in USA and fancy boarding schools in UK for $$$. If public schools do remove this equity stuff, it'll just float via money to those other areas. It isn't bad/good, it just is.
Anyhow, a bit of a rant/laundry list, but here you have it.
For the benefit of non-US readers, know that how the US funds public education (K-12) is rather unique. It's done through property taxes essentially. Depending on your state and city your property taxes can vary a lot with the same value property.
But what this means is the wealthier localities have more tax revenue and thus better schools. This can be a vicious cycle of improving property values by having better schools and thus generating more tax revenue and so on. I say "vicious" because it is absolutely exclusionary to lower-income people who cannot possibly afford to live in these areas. And that's by design.
Twenty years ago Bush (43) passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which many dubbed the No Child Gets Ahead Act. A lot of this was also in the name of "equity".
I know people who send their children to public schools in NYC. NYC seems to be in the mood to eliminate these "gifted" programs because of "equity" too. The result? Those who can afford to send their children to private schools will. For those who are left, there are no more gifted programs.
How does that help anyone?
Well, that's effectively what happens in European systems, where schooling is basically run entirely by the State and funding is mostly distributed on a per-pupil basis - higher-income taxpayers effectively subsidize poorer areas. So it is, in fact, feasible.
But Americans would probably call that illiberal or something.
Most Americans would call that pretty much how things actually happen here, too.
Also you nailed it on the property tax point. Often overlooked as the biggest issue with education. A similar sized home in a good school district can be 2 or 3x as expensive as one in a mediocre school district.
Edit: when talking about property tax, I am referring to most suburbs, not NYC.
Seems like a lot of people are posting evidence that the property tax point is correlated with better schools but the funding difference is made up for by the stare and federal government. Interesting.
Asian-American, especially in New York City (but somewhat replicated across the nation), is kind of a burgeoning identity which has now somewhat of a shared distinctly American culture, but is only kind of a self-fulfilling identity because everyone pigeonholes them, domestically and wherever their heritage was from. This makes individuals forced to attempt a shared representation. But it makes less sense compared to "white", "black" and pre-colonial civilizations here, given the lower population and the large time gaps in migration waves, and the large difference in why people migrated to the US at all during those migration waves.
Not to mention: 4th generation versus new immigrant.
Though it's not as if Asian students are a perfect mixture of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino, etc. Given demographic trends most of them are going to be Chinese, with a smaller amount Korean.
The city and state fund the DoE and that money is disbursed to schools throughout the district without relationship to the geographic source of the funds. PTAs (especially in wealth neighborhoods) also contribute huge amounts of money to their local schools, often even paying for the salary of extra teachers or classroom assistants.
NYC schools are terrible for any number other reasons, but the property tax argument does not apply.
TBF that was originally something deployed by asian-american populations so they had enough of a cooperative block to make an impact: individual cultural groups were too small to be represented, but a pan-asian block had sufficient power to achieve representation and make political progress.
The US has never been without race laws, so I see how it's hard to imagine not having them, but that is what I think is needed.
There is no objective definition for race or ethnicity I’ve ever found for instance, but to quote a controversial Supreme Court justice, everyone goes ‘I know it when I see it’.
There's been zero change in results.
Want results from your start up? Find someone to invest in it.
Want results from a government program? Well, we need to cut out all the wasteful spending.
If nothing else a tax break (even if it is only a few cents per resident) is a better use than some programs
Very likely so, but which programs exactly? (Are you uniquely well-qualified to make that determination? If not, who is, and how can we know that?)
Additionally, the relative value of false negatives and positives, in something with as high a force multiplier as education, seems like it will probably fall on the side of false negatives.
If a business is not doing well, it will be defeated and shut down. If a government program is not doing well, it usually asks for more money.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/08/07/why-its-import...
Schools need more funding, but less on faddish well-paid DEI officers who focus their time on axing algebra because it's too hard, and more on providing healthy school lunches, well ventilated and comfortable environments to work in, and a variety of classes tailored to students' individual needs.
government: when it doesn't get results, budget gets increased
As we should. Businesses are rewarded for efficiency. Government is judged on effectiveness. It is a huge mistake to conflate the two and judge them on the same metrics.
Can’t solve behavioral issues with money, but you can solve behavioral issues of other kids by moving them out of the school.
Are you referring to when the state finally complied with court orders that they were illegally and unconstitutionally underfunding public schools? (A lawsuit started over a decade before and decided over a half a decade before action was taken). Where the governor announced victory as "Today’s Supreme Court decision affirms that, at long last, our Legislature is providing the funding necessary to cover the basic costs of our K-12 schools. Reversing decades of underfunding..."
That basic level of funding? Or has something happened more recently.
> There's been zero change in results.
You mean the funding that impacted one year before COVID? Education funding isn't like spinning up a new instance in AWS. It takes time. And, given that educational results have slipped nationwide since COVID, I would say that "zero changes" should be interpreted as a victory.
Are the teachers bad teachers, and more pay will recruit better teachers? I'm not sure how many teachers enter the profession for the money to be honest. I'm sure they would like pay, but I'm not really of the mind that the curre nt crop of teachers are on average bad.
Do kids not have a suitable learning environment? Are they distracted by rodents, roaches, noisy equipment, uncomfortable temperatures, lack of seating or desks?
Do the kids not have educational material? Books, marker boards and markers for them, paper, etc?
If any of those things were lacking I would totally agree that learning could be impacted and change was needed. And I would be really curious how at current funding levels, which are not low compared to other countries, those deficits are occuring.
Few enter for money, but many leave because of it.
Money isn’t the reason I will be transitioning into a different career after this school year, but I have friends and contacts floating opportunities that would offer me an immediate 50-80 percent bump.
My wife and I have been saving aggressively to allow for a patient, intentional transition. I don’t expect my next career to feed my values to the same extent, but I am excited to open a new door.
Edit: if you work in Product and would be willing to do a brief informational interview, please reach out. My email is in profile.
My public high school installed a competition diving pool. Did that improve education there? Not a whit. It was nice for the diving team, though, which was 6 girls.
Quality of the teachers aside, there are insufficient teachers. The number of teachers required to effectively teach K-12 would benefit from increasing between 50-75% of current levels before reaching diminishing returns according to test studies. So more pay will recruit more teachers, which, makes them better.
Since you wanted to compare us to other countries, the US has the worst average classroom size in the western world. A decade ago we were closer to the middle of the pack. And it was the US classroom size that primarily changed, not a sudden drive in other countries.
> Do kids not have a suitable learning environment? Are they distracted by rodents, roaches, noisy equipment, uncomfortable temperatures, lack of seating or desks?
Beyond that, you should concern yourself with things like asbestos in the walls.
Certainly, a lot of US schools use trailers. Those are noisier and have less comfortable temperatures, require going outside to change classes, etc. Half of the classrooms in some areas are trailers. Moving those to a real building seems obviously better.
> Do the kids not have educational material? Books, marker boards and markers for them, paper, etc?
What about chem labs, frogs to dissect, computers to program, etc? Not everyone is a kindergartner. But a surprising number of schoolchildren have trouble with internet access, which I would argue is a basic requirement for education.
Further, the number of teachers required to spend their meager salaries on classroom supplies and the number of different nonprofits that popup if you search for "donate school supplies" indicates that even at a base level they lack educational material.
It's like money and happiness. Money doesn't make you happy but it damn sure does eliminate a lot of barriers on the way there.
Wealthy schools have more money, but they actually often have less - if a school's average socio-economic class drops below a certain point, there's a slew of federal funding available and she often had more resources in a poor school than a wealthy one. The poorest schools are often the middle-class - those too wealthy to qualify for the funding but not wealthy enough to be rich.
The real benefit to wealthy schools, in her mind (anecdata) was the number of single income households. Students and classrooms do a lot better when there are a bunch of volunteers.
Schools used to have Teaching Assistants. Dedicated, low-pay non-teachers who could help in classrooms. We don't have these (in my state) any more.
But the wealthy schools do. Because there are a lot of volunteer parents (mostly moms) who don't work and are happy to come in one day a week. When my MIL taught at wealthy schools, she often had 2 parents in her classroom every day of the week helping prep. In the poor schools she had Chromebooks for every kid (before that was the norm), but no help so she didn't bother breaking them out.
I think it might actually work better if it were just properly educated average people running that show.
What I've observed in less well off neighborhoods is that in particular the school board becomes populated with professional administrators. Then the administrators get familiar with the process for procurement for supplies, facilities and contracted work and start getting cozy with the local providers of those services. And things start going down hill and there is little in the way of oversight since most parents/voters are too busy juggling multiple jobs, etc.
That is a very interesting anecdote and conclusion - thank you.
All of the lefts “tax the rich” and welfare state initiatives end up hurting the middle class.
A weird state. I don’t think parents knew how to navigate it or even interpret the state of things. The marketing and formal dress code made it seem like the better choice. Suckers…
At the other extreme, if we gave schools unlimited funding, you could afford to hire a teacher for every student in the school. Would that help learning outcomes? Probably. There is a huge space in the middle where admins eat up cash, sports teams eat up cash, for sure. But to say that "more money doesn't get better results" doesn't make any sense.
The idea that class size reduction is a highly effective educational intervention is at best ambiguously supported by the (many) studies of it. And it's a super expensive intervention.
Just spending a lot of money doesn't guarantee good results, just like some companies manage to spend a lot of money doing very little. But not having enough money is a great way to make it very difficult to achieve good results.
The public school in the town I grew up in had lectures in these shitty trailers that were supposed to be temporary (spoiler: they became permanent). They couldn't afford to hire enough teachers to do small classes, but if they had the money for that, there wouldn't be enough rooms put them in.
Either it is cities elect different people to school boards (seems unlikely but I can't prove it), or family background makes the biggest difference. Many others have pointed out family background as the key, I tentend to believe it.
The middle 50% have outcomes that are all over the place but tend to correlate with parental involvement and who the kids pair off with in their friends groups. Some get pulled upward to exceed expected outcomes and some get pulled towards the bottom. It's been fascinating to see how different two kids from very similar backgrounds can end up based on the randomness of who they sat with at lunch one day 4 years ago or who was assigned to be their lab partner in 10th grade.
The answer is always more money!
https://www.dese.gov.au/quality-schools-package/fact-sheets/...
Firstly, by not having extreme poverty. You can't solve at school the problems that exist at home. We have adequate housing and benefits systems, and a minimum wage that people can actually live on. In addition, we have local intervention teams (and budgets) that try to fix problems that children encounter in their home situations (such as violence, substance abuse, etc).
Secondly, by banning private schools: all schools are funded directly by the government based on number of pupils. This makes sure that the rich don't withdraw their children from society, and thus makes sure they have a stake in public education.
Thirdly, by investing heavily in teachers' education. Many teachers here have two degrees: one in their teaching subject, and one in pedagogy or psychology.
That said, I've heard many people say that our education system isn't what it used to be either, mainly because of two changes:
- a decade or so ago the government closed all special-needs schools (or at least the majority) and moved those children into the general school population. This put a lot of strain on the teachers, because they now had to deal not just with slow learners, but also children with learning disabilities and often behavioural problems. This put a lot of stress especially on the lower end of the spectrum.
- the recent appearance of many after-school tutoring programs. Since these are privately funded and operated, they bring a touch of the US' problems: since the rich now have a way to focus their money on only their own offspring, inequality in school achievements is rising.
One polarizing topic at the moment is critical-race theory ("CRT"). There are a lot of false claims about what this is. Ultimately, CRT was something taught in law schools. Now CRT has become a catch-all for teaching the true (rather than whitewashed) history of the United States.
A lot of people are opposed to this because they're mistaken about what the goals are or are opposed to people being educated about historical and current inequality. A common argument is that CRT makes children "feel bad". But take slavery as one example. Did you directly participate in slavery? Of course not. No one is asking you to feel personally responsible for this.
But you can be taught the ramifications of slavery that continue to this day. Take something as simple as the GI Bill. This contributed to the White Flight. It allowed white Americans to build up generational wealth. In a system where property values are so entangled with educational outcomes, you should be able to recognize that slavery and segregation aren't just historical artifacts.
You can recognize how you benefit from generational privilege without feeling personally responsible for its origins. An awful lot of people don't want that to happen however.
So how did other countries avoid this? There are many factors here but ultimately the US founding is deeply tied to white supremacy. That continues to thi say. The language may have changed (eg propagandists might now use terms like "legacy Americans") but this belief has never gone away. We as a country have never had a serious reckoning with this past.
50+ years ago towns were racially segregated openly. The term "sunset town" came about for a reason. While those direct segregation laws might be gone they've been replaced with laws and institutions that have the same effect. For example: making housing expensive is exclusionary by design.
I say all this to point out that local funding of education is part of a deliberately exclusionary system. It may not be the reason other countries fund things at a national or state level. But our inequality in outcomes through local funding is deliberate for those reasons.
I suppose everyone says that since politics exist. Life in a society is politics, that's the very definition of the word. Politics is not a bad word or something to avoid, stop being afraid talking politics. The less you talk about politics, the more others do it for you.
This is an oft repeated myth. In addition to property taxes, school funding is supplemented by state and federal budgets, in inverse proportion to property taxes, so that racial differences in per-pupil funding are negligible:
on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724...
That's a ~$200 difference compared to $6000 per pupil, the 4th highest in the world: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Education/Sp...
Students/families at higher performing schools have far lower need for support systems.
Blame education schools and their failing "every student can simply learn their math on their own!" approach. Total self-serving garbage, devised to cater to the ego of naïve prospective teachers and their expectation of not doing any real teaching work.
Sure, that's a factor too, but I'd still call it a social service issue since it ultimately results from the historical disinvestment in the communities that today have low performing schools.
There are reasons that the roofs didn't get repaired and the lead pipes didn't get replaced in those schools: because middle income people took their lives, businesses, and tax dollars out of those communities starting in the late 1960s, both by migrating to newly built suburbs, and also by ensuring their tax dollars never went toward the communities they left.
Look up the opposition to "Robin Hood" school funding from the 80s and 90s. Where I grew up it was largely about keeping suburban tax dollars out of inner-city school districts.
"there are substantial disparities in abortion rates in the United States, with low-income women and women of color having higher rates than affluent and White women"
- in higher performing schools, parents fund a number expenses directly through a very active PTA, so those expenses don't show up in the school's official spending per pupil, while
- at lower performing schools with less active and more impoverished PTAs, those same expenses must be funded by school budgets, driving up their official per-pupil spending.
At the low performing school, the extra public funds received are often paying for support staff for serious social issues. There is little budget for the "nice to haves", and even when there is, the school staff has it's hands full managing the basics, so it's not always effectively utilized.
People still usually prefer not to work at them, if they have options, because the work environment is terrible.
Credible threats of gang violence on a regular basis. School-wide lockdowns with some regularity due to threats of violence, or violence that has actually occurred. Admin with extremely limited options to deal with any of this, and having to triage their discipline pretty hard, plus having little to no support from home to back any of it up (this is why the stuff in the first paragraph happens constantly—no time or community/parental willpower to deal with it, given the rest of what's going on). Watching the kids suffering from the same shit day after day, plus all the usually-awful stuff they have going on at home, and not being able to do much about it. Seeing kids die or end up in the hospital with alarming regularity. Distressingly young kids plainly high or drunk in class.
Not many people can do that without burning out or giving up and half-assing everything, very quickly.
So I think by extending the current system to areas in poverty that do not have an established culture of obedience means we have to either change the system or start beating kids again imo. I vote for the former, obviously.
Why don't I live there, even though the location would be more convenient and has far more nearby parks and businesses, the housing is dirt-cheap, they have better access to public transit than we do, the area's more walkable/bike-able, et c? The schools are bad.
Why are the schools bad? Because people like me (that is, people whose kids have a low-stress life outside of school) won't move there. Digging out of that hole is nearly impossible. It amounts to "gentrify things all to hell" (which just shifts the problem around rather than actually solving it) or "fix huge social and economic problems the US has".
In either case, you can't do much about it by focusing on the schools themselves.
Even worse, imagine being a child growing up in that environment. Actual fistfights were happening every few hours in school where I grew up.
And yeah, it's a red state. Even the blue areas are red enough to get plenty of obnoxious assholes harassing teachers.
[EDIT] Downvoters: go talk to some teachers about this topic. I'll wait. It may be a while, because they'll have a lot to say.
As kids get older, they fall into drugs and / or have kids of their own and / or are told they'll never get into higher education and / or they don't need higher education, they'll just get a low skill job like everyone else in town.
Education for the sake of education really isn't strongly valued by a lot of parents, who have their own struggles and can't really help with homework much past middle school.
Compare all of this with teaching in an area that is more middle or upper class- kids are usually more eager to learn, have fewer discipline problems, and as they get older many know they need to try so they can get into a community college or university.
PS: I think putting education on such a high pedestal has demeaned the integrity and honor of working with your hands. I also believe it was a panacea given to the poor as a carrot, and is not the only way out of poverty. Hard work counts!
Basically, the students frequently don't do their homework, students would just not show up to class or outright just drop out, students misbehave more frequently (including violent behavior), parents care less (or at least act like it). The schools also tend to be in more dangerous areas. They had to lock the teachers' cars in a special lot to prevent vandalism and theft.
Basically it was demoralizing and dangerous.
> According to Amato’s research, sociologists warn that many children of single parents are born into undesirable circumstances. These children have a higher likelihood of being poor, committing crimes or using drugs. Many sociologists agree that childhood’s adverse effects outlive youth.
[1] https://www.everydayhealth.com/kids-health/what-are-effects-...
Certainly, the first time someone told me they had 12 kids through 8 women, with more kids on the way, I was completely shocked. Even more shocked when I realized he was bragging about his masculinity, not lamenting "What have I done?!"
I'm not saying that these things are inherently "wrong" (save the violence), only that they can't be expected to produce the same outcomes as cultures which highly value education, nuclear family, sobriety, and hard work. This holds true no matter how much money you add. Any attempt to equalize outcomes without confronting this core reason is doomed.
That and the school-to-prison pipeline are contributing to the overall problem of—at the heart of this issue—multi-generational, persistent slums. The justice system is far from the only problem, which is why I listed others and left things open-ended to account for the huge list of other things that contribute, but it's part of it. However, I don't think much can be done about it by addressing only issues with the justice system, absent broader social reforms.
Cool. I never called for that, so we're not disagreeing.
> Nor does it follow that the solutions are not found in changes to individual behaviour.
This is one of those things that's both true and useless.
I'm not sure it is useless. If the problems are individual, not systemic, then the solutions lie with individual accountability, not systemic change, right?
My grandmother would call a student's parents on their home and work numbers multiple times over multiple weeks. She would even provide her home number and say they could call anytime, day or night.
Do you think she frequently got calls back? If you can't even take 20 minutes to call your kid's teacher then you don't care about getting your kid out of an area with bad policing and justice system, racism and bad jobs.
Past a certain not-that-high point, giving schools more money doesn't help them much.
There's probably some astronomically-high level of funding that would help, past some tipping point, by enabling things like single-digit class sizes, tons of social workers and counselors, extensive home-outreach programs, et c., to the point that the staff-to-student ratio is 1:5 or better, but AFAIK no-one's tried that in public schools (that's not too far off from how lots of elite private schools, operate, though, except that they don't need the army of social workers or home-outreach or any of that)
And though they have few resources and a bad football team, the students have a chess club, robotics club, various study groups and college prep groups.
There is also a big difference in what the kids here are focused on. In SF there was so much chatter about politics, protests, gender identity, and sexuality. Out here kids just seem to be focused on studying and after school activities.
I much prefer this environment
> decadent bourgeois values
Values that produce measurably better life outcomes for participants.
> would rather do their rightful part
Refusing to participate thereby harming their own future and the community surrounding them. Or worse, actively encouraging others to reject values aligned with success.
> fighting structures of oppression and injustice
Fighting the most meritocratic system of governance we’ve had thus far in human history, whereby following values of success leads to success, whether you’re born here or elsewhere, and whatever your color, creed, or gender.
I am not sure if you’re being serious, but if you are, you should know advocating for crab bucket mentality does nothing to help the impoverished.
One of the great things about America is that we can separate ourselves into different communities and run our experiments. If your way is better you will have a better life.
I've just decided to choose a different path for my family. I truly wish you the best without sarcasm. I do hope the SF experiment succeeds, but after 20 years living there I feel, at least for me, its a total failure.
Today, the crappy school district near me pays $15,900 per student and the good school district near me pays $19,800 per student.
> Mamun et al. (2020) report on studies that demonstrate that recidivism rates in private prisons are between 16.7% (Spivak & Sharp, 2008) and 22% (Duwe & Clark, 2013) higher when compared to public prisons. [1]
When providing services, private companies do worse because their charter is not to provide services per se, it's to make money. These are antithetical in the world of social services.
Private enterprise isn't a solution to every problem. It's a solution to a lot problems. However police, fire, healthcare, education, regulation and so on are services in the public interest and should be provided therefore be provided by the public.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.6721...
- Private fire departments that used to show up at your house and demand payment in order to put the fire out, otherwise they'd just let your house burn to the ground. In Rome, they'd literally show up at your house, and buy it from you for pennies on the dollar before putting it out.
- Private prisons fail the people in the way I've described.
- Private healthcare fails Americans each and every day. 45,000 Americans die each year due to lack of access to care. One person dies every 12 minutes. Their goal is to deny you cover because each treatment they avoid paying for pads their bottom line and benefits their shareholders. It costs twice as much per capita as Canada, 60% as much as Norway - and yet fails to cover everyone and yields worse outcomes.
The generalization is simple: when your task is to provide services to the public, then profit must be secondary. In private enterprise, profit is primary. You fail the people when you provide core social services via private enterprise because you have fundamentally failed to align incentives.
Private social services are designed to fail the people.
These are still definitely a thing. Though I expect they must be regulated so we don't end up in a Rome-style situation.
Edit: Found it. If you're in an area with something like Rural Metro, they put out the fire either way. If you don't have an annual membership with them, then they will invoice you. Nobody offering to buy your home for pennies on the dollar or standing around waiting for your credit card to clear before hosing down the flames.
Schools that charge under $15k/yr are mostly low-quality religious schools, with a few rare gems (mostly from the Catholics)
Full tuition at schools that people mean when they talk about how good private schools are, starts around $40k on the coasts (day rates, not boarding), and $18-20k at lesser-but-still-sometimes-decent schools in less-affluent areas.
[EDIT] Of course, per-pupil spending and tuition aren't entirely connected—on the one hand, many students don't pay the full rate (much like with private colleges) but on the other, the better private schools usually have other sources of funding of various sorts. Endowments, scholarship funds, lots of supplemental and sometimes quite-large donations from parents and alumni for various purposes.
There are some world class private schools in the US and some terrible private schools it’s really a mixed bag, just like public schools.
Anyway, there are several ways to compare systems, some private schools operate in whole or in part on a lottery system so you can track students who do or don’t get in. But the most common method is to model parent education and income as a predictor of performance and then compare outcomes.
As you suggest poor students are underrepresented in private schools, but some do get in. The important thing to remember is a student who received a scholarship isn’t representative of the general population.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-selection-bias-is-t...
A business will seek a profit. That should not be a factor at all in public education. The costs of public education should certainly be considered, especially the question of how much is spent and the quality of the education. That should always be under careful review. However the purpose of public education is to spend our collective money educating the populace. It should be a cost, it shouldn't make money. It's not meant to, it's meant to educate.
Well, they do if public good is as a daycare to let the parents work. Which is something.
Yes, my belief is that public education is a cost borne collectively by a society. We take some of our profit and spend it on public education, it does not produce profit.
Yes, we should care how our money is spent in pursuit of public education. I'm not advocating waste. But the question we should ask is whether the money we spend results in a worthwhile education for students.
It is my experience that public good typically loses to profit when contradicts the other.
Does it have profit responsibilities that need to be extracted from the funding, or is it a non-profit? In either case, does it receive funding from other sources besides the school's own community? What do those sources of funding expect for their contributions?
How big is the moat that allows or prevents competion from forming, and how healthy are the current forces of competition? Are there regulations that ensure market efficiency? Who's responsible for those regulations?
Does it have a formal responsibility to operate a school even when it can no longer do so profitably? Or might communities just be abandoned without any school at all until a new vision is capitalized?
If the public starts paying (blindly!) for it, the incentives change. Private schools would become more like private prisons probably, and we’d be back where we started.
>on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724...
Difference in expenditure per is a particularly shit way to measure this.
For example, if District X pays better than neighboring district Z, District X will most likely have greater chance of hiring teachers in both districts, letting them choose the most qualified. Resulting in the school with higher salaries naturally getting more teacher candidates to choose from.
While some expenditures might not have a direct impact on student educations, they still have some effect. Another one would be - a school investing in a new Air conditioning and filtration system, students are probably going to have an easier time learning when they don't have to worry about being too hot or too cold in their classrooms.
$6k for white pupil in NY $5k for black pupil in NY
$3k for white pupil in Ohio $2k for black pupil in Ohio
Clearly that's more money for white pupils regardless of location
Now imagine that there's 60 black students in NY and 10 in Ohio, but 10 white students in NY and 60 in Ohio
That means total funding is 320k for 70 black pupils and 240k for 70 white students
So you can spin the figures to say that black pupils get more funding, but the truth is the opposite.
Do these per-pupil funding numbers have any meaning when your home and community are broken and one or both of your parents is an addict or incarcerated? Because it seems to me we’ve been acting with intent as a society to keep the families, homes, and communities of everyone not white and already wealthy a complete and utter shambles.
How can we expect decent, equitable outcomes given that the home life of significant percentages of students is essentially a path right to prison?
No, school budgets only help the schools, they don't solve any other problems.
it seems to me we’ve been acting with intent as a society to keep the families, homes, and communities of everyone not white and already wealthy a complete and utter shambles.
Maybe I'm older, but it seems to me the exact opposite is happening. Over the last 40 years there has been an increasing number of minority families that have moved to wealthier, historically white neighborhoods. I think this is because of education, affirmative action, and a general shift of society to be less racist.
How can we expect decent, equitable outcomes given that the home life of significant percentages of students is essentially a path right to prison?
nobody has ever expected that.
There is still a lot of work to be done, but things have been moving in the right direction for a while now. It took a few hundred years to get here, don't expect it to be fixed in just over half a century.
It's a vicious cycle, which can only be broken by building strong communities in those places. And we've mostly forgotten how to do this, because "lifestyle anarchism" has been way more popular than a genuine community orientation among intellectuals and influencers, since the 1960s or so. School funding is a band-aid.
All that shows is the natural tendency toward persecution complexes and blaming failure on factors out of your control. Finding ways to make society promote personal responsibility, atomic families, etc would actually help. But that is the opposite of current culture of hedonism and "smashing traditional family structure" that gets complete entertainment and political backing.
This is not my experience. I chose a more expensive house with higher taxes because the schools are better. They are better funded than those in the surrounding areas. Sure the Federal Government gives free meals but my kids' books and chromebooks are always nice and new.
Teachers in my town make ~10% more than in the schools that are two towns over in a predominantly minority town.
There's plenty of evidence that parental attitudes are a big factor:
"Middle-class pupils do better because parents and schools put more effort into their education, according to a study [..] factors studied were the parents' interest in their children's education, measured by, for example, whether they read to their children or attended meetings with teachers"[0]
(Full disclosure: my wife and I read - and have read - to our kids almost every single night)
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/oct/29/middle-cla...
Much of our intelligence is from our parents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
I'm just stating that my kids' elementary school is nicer than those in our county and definitely from my hometown. They do receive a lot more money than what my hometown spent.
Heh, our daughter (who doesn't start school until September) knows all the Numberblocks and Alphablocks episodes...
State & local funding is less important, by far.
And the parents do it because they can (they have the ability to get the time off), and because they know it’s important in many ways.
The schools are better, but if you look at per pupil spending I'm willing to bet it's not due to spending. Typically the worst schools get the most most money from federal and state sources, far outstripping any differences in property taxes.
Better schools are a function of better parental involvement, everything else is a distant second.
It's interesting to me that you are using this as a proxy for funding.
Schools in low income areas are going to have crappier books and laptops because they're spending their money on things other than books and laptops.
Low income brings with it all sorts of problems. That's why it sucks to be poor.
> Yet race remains related to funding disparities and schooling experiences in ways that raise concerns about the role of school finance in perpetuating racial opportunity gaps.
What you are pulling out seems to be narrowly-focused and highly-contextualized.
Consider [1]:
> Property taxation and school funding are closely linked in the United States. In 2018–2019, public education revenue totaled $771 billion. Nearly half (47 percent) came from state governments, slightly less than half (45 percent) from local government sources, and a modest share (8 percent) from the federal government. Of the local revenue, about 36 percent came from property taxes. The remaining 8.9 percent was generated from other taxes; fees and charges for things like school lunches and athletic events; and contributions from individuals, organizations, or businesses.
[1]: https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/2022-04-pu...
It's the most straight-forward and objective measure. That the main result of a paper would be omitted from the abstract and "highly-contextualized" is not surprising, given social science's bias. If a study gets the 'wrong' findings, it tends to be rejected:
The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...
Ceci et al. (1985) found a similar pattern. Research proposals hypothesizing either "reverse discrimination" (i.e., against White males) or conventional discrimination (i.e., against ethnic minorities) were submitted to 150 Internal Review Boards. Everything else about the proposals was held constant. The "reverse discrimination" proposals were approved less often than the conventional discrimination proposals. - https://jsis.washington.edu/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/...
Compare California and Massachusetts. It seems to demonstrate the point of the poster you replied to. Despite MA relying nearly twice as much on property tax, as state revenue versus California, it seems to have better outcomes. Mostly because as the article discusses, MA appears to use targeted transfers from state revenue to poor districts.
https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/greater-la/california-props-...
Late edit: the Wikipedia article would also be something to read up on - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
"We found evidence that between-district racial segregation is associated with racial disparities in school district spending, while between-district racial socioeconomic segregation is not. We find that as Black–White racial segregation increases over time, total per pupil expenditures and other per pupil expenditures shift in ways that disfavor the typical Black student’s district relative to the typical White student’s district."
At least not in California...
"State-Provided" funds are calculated by the LCFF (Local Control Funding Formula), which is a combination of both State and Local funds.
Depending on the district, if local funds is not enough to fund the district, then yes, state tax revenue steps in to provide the rest.
However, for districts where local funds is enough or exceeds the district need, then these these districts (referred to as "Basic Aid" or "Excess Revenue" districts) aren't provided state revenue, and they are able to keep the excess local revenue for their needs. (https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/ and https://www.saratogausd.org/Page/519)
For a more specific example, one of the top school districts in Silicon Valley is the Fremont Union High School District (https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1626711559/fuhsdorg/...)
In 2021, their total revenue was $169M, where $156M (92%) came from property taxes. This resulted in spending per pupil of $23,491, far exceeding the state medium of $16,042.
Wealthy neighborhoods have PTA budgets that are in the hundreds of thousands/millions. They pay for after school activities, language immersion programs, music, sports, you name it.
It is shocking the discrepancy between neighborhoods in NYC. Average donation per pupil might be $20 in a poor neighborhood and $5,000 in a wealthy one.
When I visit some public high schools in suburban CT, they look nicer than my college campus.
When I visit public schools in rural VA, they're a cluster of trailers and dilapidated structures that don't even have air conditioning, let less modern amenities.
So, maybe it's the taxes, or the highly active parents, or donations, but there's a visible difference, more than "$200" per student. Of course, how far and effective each dollar is WRT to outcomes is a different matter.
My father was a very successful/loved elementary school teacher for 40+ years. For many of those he worked for the same school in the same district. In 25+ years he watched the demographics drift from the wealthier families in the districts to one of the backwaters. They got as much money as the other schools in the district. But financially stressed families provide a lot less support for their kids’ education. They don’t have stay at home parents who improve the room experience. They’re not as able to provide the volunteer support to participate in extracurricular activities like field trips and competitions and after school enrichment things. Parents who are in “just survive” mode will telegraph that approach to their kids’ schooling efforts. Parents who have discretionary bandwidth and appreciate that more education got them there, telegraph that to their kids.
This is widely believed but no longer true. Federal and state funding have eclipsed local funding[0], and those funds are highly progressive. As a result, the highest-spending per capita schools are a mix of wealthy suburbs and failing urban districts. See this map[1] for examples, like the Philadelphia suburb of Lower Merion and the NJ city of Camden.
0: https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/an-overview-of-the-f... 1: https://www.aaastateofplay.com/school-districts-ranked-by-th...
1) Public school 1. Covers most of the black and brown students of the area.
2) Public school 2. Covers most of the lower to middle class white students of the area.
3) Public school 3. Covers most of the higher class white students, especially families of a local high ranking private college.
4) Various private schools.
Options 1-2-3 have pretty much open enrollment, you can send your kid to any of them even if they are out of district, it just means you need to drive them (they won't qualify for bussing service).
If you look at public school 1, 2, and 3 - they have near identical spending per pupil. yes property taxes differ a little, but at the end of the day they are spending the same $ per pupil. However the test scores are vastly different. Test scores highly corelate with the % of students receiving free lunch, a fairly accurate proxy for poverty. The more kids in poverty, the worse test scores.
But because of this, many high achieving students that have money, are sent to option 4. Since this is the best education, if you can choose anything - you do this.
The next bucket of high achieving but wanting to save money send their kids to public school 3. It's reguarded as a "very good" free education. But this means the best kids are pulled out of the disticts for schools 1 and 2.
Schools 1 and 2 mostly just the people who are "left" in the district, without the inclination or money to go to choise 3 or 4.
You know who can easily transport their kids 30 mins to another school? Rich, stay at home moms.
You know who can't transport their kids 30 mins to another school? A single mom working 2 jobs.
A study showed that even having a home library would be beneficial to children in a myriad of ways, which isn't as feasible to a low income family who isn't rent stable.
https://www.jcfs.org/blog/importance-having-books-your-home#....
So why send you kid to school 4 instead of school 3 ? Is the test score at school 4 significantly better?
I am a parent of a 4 years old, and we recently moved from Canada to USA. Option (4) in Canada is almost non-existent so this is new to me!
I have been trying to compare test-score between private schools and public school to decide if private school is worth it.
But found that most private school do not publish their test score and it's extremely hard to compare them side-by-side.
Any idea how they could be compared in a data-drive way?
Yes, and in fact its petty big jumps. 3 >> 2 >> 1. We are talking like 95th, 50th, and 10th percentiles statewide (percentiles picked for effect, did not pull up the data)
> Any idea how they could be compared in a data-drive way?
Right, and that is the hard part. If they don't do the same tests, you cannot have this data.
However, the more you look at layers of this data, you will find that the most important thing you care. Parents looking at school rankings have kids that perform much better than kids that have parent's who do not look at this data.
For me, I knew that 3 or 4 would give my kids a fine education. So I toured both (and actually had an older kid already in #3). The reason I sprang for #4 was
1) Smaller class size. Something like 15 kids per class, vs 30. All else being equal, you get way more chances for success the closer you are to the teacher.
2) Likeminded parents. People send kids there because they want the best. They are the high achievers. The college profressors and doctors of the area. #3 wasn't too far off, but you still got to see stuff like parents smoking in the carline with their windows up and the kids locked inside (grrrr).
3) More opportunities. #3 school starts music class at like 6th grade. #4 starts like 2nd or 3rd grade. It is something not reflected in test scores, so not important to public schools. But something shown to be good, so it's available for parents.
My kids started at private school. A new public school with a STEM/STEAM concept opened near our house. At the public school, the goal of the administration is to fill seats (they get paid based on attendance) and to provide a safe environment - education was at least 3rd on their list if not lower. When covid hit the public school pretty much failed my kids. So we went back to the private school where the kids could actually get an education. My kids were ahead when they transitioned from private to public, they were behind when they transitioned back from public to private. The kids are much happier and tell me that 'everyone at public school is a bully'.
The private school uses different tests than the public school, so its hard to compare. A school where education is important and students are expected to be respectful seems like a great place to start from.
I live in a place like this, except its a mix of middle and higher class students. The secret is simple: the rich parents pay for tutors for their kids. I know many families who have paid for tutors for their kids since kindergarten.
Be very wary of pursuing good school districts in rich neighborhoods. If you can't afford the price of admission into that neighborhood your kid is going to have problems keeping up.
Nit: They don't highly correlate, they inversely correlate
Yes, there are correlation between academic success and living in a rich neighborhood. Because yes, rich successful people often pass on their success to their children. But it's not solved by just dumping money on poor schools and hoping that would solve everything. It has been tried. Unions love it. Kids don't get any better. In fact, the whole "structural inequality" thing was roped in to explain this phenomenon - why tons of money are being spent with no observable result? Oh, it must be the invisible and immeasurable "structural inequality"! Which means we should shut down the gifted programs (so rare students that manage to overcome the awfulness of their schools have no recourse now), introduce race-based school policies and let students that barely can (and sometimes can't) read graduate. That surely will make them successful.
For extreme examples the PTA at PS 87, an elementary school in the Upper West Side raised 2 million dollars in 2019 (the last number I could find numbers for) [1]; our son's school (also in the UWS, where we live) raised a little shy of 1 million that same year, via an annual campaign, auction fund-raiser, and a few other events.
This money is used for many things, like capital improvements and enhanced services. At our son's school this was used to upgrade air conditioning in the building, pay for extra teaching assistants, and fund a library and librarian, amongst other things.
Numerous schools have no PTA fund-raising at all or raise a few thousand dollars, because they serve less-affluent areas. This kind of inequality is vexing because there isn't any taxing going on, just very active parent bases with money to give.
--
[1] https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2019/12/2/21113658/find-out-how-muc...
Poorer districts tend to have more industrial properties, so they are often better funded than wealthier districts. Especially since most state funding is distributed based on pupil units rather than pupils, and a low-SES student might count as something like 1.5 pupil units. (And a disabled student might count as 2.0 pupil units, etc.)
That was a very bipartisan bill. It was coauthored by Ted Kennedy, passed in the House 381-41, and passed in the Senate 87-10.
We still have so much culturally ingrained bias that we can't update policy to set the stage for even the next few generations to close these gaps. And it's compounded by the current generation being asked to pay an unreasonable price (ie disappearing gifted classes) to put a band-aid on this gunshot wound of a problem which breeds resentment which sets progress back even further.
But it's correlation, not causation.
There was a complete test case of this in NJ a few years ago where a poorly funded school got a huge amount of extra funding as a result of a lawsuit, and it made 0 statistical difference to outcomes years down the line. They did a study on it. https://edlawcenter.org/litigation/abbott-v-burke/abbott-his...
If you're surrounded by people who care and aim to excel, you'll probably care. And vice versa.
In that sense, forced integration is an unethical but probably effective way of homogenizing educational results. I think Singapore actually forces some cultural integration like this with demographic requirements per neighborhood block/district.
New York somewhat achieves this incidentally via their "affordable housing" being attached to expensive unit buildings, but most wealthy new yorkers send to private, so doesn't fix the cultural balance in public system.
It doesn't, in ways which are eerily reminiscent of America's falling out of love with public parks and pools. Which completely coincidentally followed their desegregation.
Intelligence as tested by IQ by several govts and organizations is mostly genetic[1].
It means that the "nurture" part is not so much important as people think.
Heck you can even see with brothers / cousins the differences.
When we say "gifted" it means we are selecting and optimizing for IQ. Thus the "inequality". You will always see more Asians.
To make more equal we need to remove/disqualify asians.
If a profession/skill is very related to a characteristic/feature as IQ then I want the best there.
Not everyone is equal and not everyone has the same skills. If you check [1] you will see they studied TWINS adopted in families. There is no better "social intervention" than adopting someone, provide the same food/structure that all on family have.
Then you can see here the confirmation in a soft way [2] and [3].
"and we consistently find that considering performance on the SAT/ACT, particularly the math section, substantially improves the predictive validity of our decisions with respect to subsequent student success at the Institute."
I am not gifted but I do benefit from gifted people work.
[1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
[2] - https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-suspending-our-...
[3] - https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our...
No. This is a complete red-herring. Every school in the US is good enough to provide quality education. Every school in the US is staffed by good, well-trained teachers. Every child gets free textbooks, notebooks, pens, pencils, paper, etc (which isn't as common in the world as you'd think). Sometimes free breakfast or lunch is provided as well.
That some school district provides high-end iPads and another doesn't makes no material difference to a quality education. That some parents want to optimize their child's education by sending them to another district, makes no material difference to a quality education. Put another way, we're dealing with kids graduating being functionally illiterate - and that problem does not stem from school or teacher quality. That's a parent problem (as in, what kind of a parent allows their child to not be able to read by the time they are ready to graduate).
Unfortunately, this really isn't the case. There are many good teachers, and most teachers are genuinely passionate, hard workers. But many teachers get into teaching not because of a mastery of their subject matter or even teaching but because they want to be paid babysitters, more or less.
E.g. in Canada, which has similar issues, Ontario recently axed its math certification test for public school teachers because too many teachers were failing it and because it had "a disproportionate adverse impact on entry to the teaching profession for racialized teacher candidates." And, for demonstrative purposes, a sample test that prospective teachers were failing:
https://www.mathproficiencytest.ca/#/en/sample-questions/1
But there's not an easy solution. ~25% of test takers were failing it (and more for "racialized" candidates), and most people don't want to become teachers because it's a terrible work environment.
You're missing the forest for the trees. We're graduating kids who are functionally illiterate. That isn't a teacher problem. That isn't a school problem.
So the disadvantaged area schools get 35%+ more money per pupil, and the outcomes keep getting worse. And the politicians keep doubling down on the same policies and wonder why things aren't changing. Money isn't everything, or apparently even most things. What a mess.
That's not really true. You can look at the per pupil spending in places like Washington, D.C. or Baltimore and they're well above the U.S. average (D.C. is one of the top spenders in the nation). A city's public school system sometimes largely serves lower income students even if it has a number of high earners in its tax base (urban yuppies with no kids, wealthy people who send their kids to private schools, etc. all paying into the system without adding to the load).
If we look at funding levels vs. outcomes, we can see many of the best funded school systems struggling. That's because school is a complex problem that doesn't simply get solved by more funding.
This is largely a lie. It works like this in some states but not most. Most states, and the federal government allocate their funds in a way that balances that out by allocating more money to the poorer districts. In my state, the various quartiles recieve essentially the same overall funding (19k-20k per student).
This is not the issue. The real issue is that some wealthier localities defund their public school system through anti-taxation measures and the wealthy send their kids to thriving (well funded, large student population) private schools and those who can't afford the private school tuition (rivals private college tuition) are stuck with either parochial schools (middle class families, associated with their church) or public schools (poor kids, who graduate functionally illiterate if at all).
Tier 1: private school kids, whose parents control the local government and economy
Tier 2: middle class sending their kids to Christian schools where they can learn why the order of things is the way it is through divine writ
Tier 3: public schools, radically underfunded, basically holding cells.
Getting rid of gifted programs obviously makes the public school worse. Do people think that the wealthy are simply going to throw their hands up and say "Welp, guess my kid is getting a shitty education!"?
Make the public schools good again.
This is a good example of why Wikipedia doesn't allow this kind of statement.
If you google this phrase, "No Child Gets Ahead Act", you get 4 pages of results ("About 84 results", which I don't know if I would call "many" in a country of 300 million plus people.
The government also tries to help poor students by boosting funding for schools that have poor parents. Schools are ranked into 10 deciles[3] depending on the income of the parents, with an equal number of schools in each decile. The government gives out more funding to schools with poor parents (decile 1), and less funding to schools with rich parents (decile 10).
The academic results of students are strongly correlated with how well-off their parents are[1]. Attendance and other factors are correlated as well[2].
[1] https://keithwoodford.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/socio-economi...
[2] https://figure.nz/search/?query=Deciles
[3] https://www.education.govt.nz/school/funding-and-financials/...
My experience with public school gifted programs was simple. The gifted program was not significantly better in what they taught, or how they taught it. The gifted programs only major advantage was that the people who were there wanted to be there, and worked to do well. This allowed us to move faster, and go deeper into topics. In non-gifted classes, students could not care less about what the class was doing that day and hated that they were trapped there. Some students definitely worked hard in non-gifted classes, but in my experience, that was the exception.
But there are two issues that make those classes terrible:
1) Teachers dedicate 80% of their instructional time to the 20% worst performers, and every incentive pushes them in that direction.
2) More than that, it only takes one or two kids with behavioral issues to reduce teachers' instructional time from near 100% to near 0%, and there's no way to move them out of regular classrooms to classrooms focused on their needs. So if you're a regular student in a cohort with a couple students with behavioral issues, you're pretty much screwed.
It's debatable (at least) whether that's a good thing... if you consider the dominant culture racist (or bad in some other way) then it's natural to consider the merit-based programs that support that culture a form a systemic racism.
Study, do your homework, behave? What "strong cultural aspect" do you see?
Study the topics we think are important in the ways we think are important behaving in the ways we think are important.
No schooling in human history looks like the schooling you're describing, yet you treat is as some concequence of nature.
So any selection of topics to study is unacceptable by your criteria. We live in a society, we have to have some form of education. In order to give students an education, we have to pick curriculum for them to learn. Some topics are not very important, so we shouldn't focus on teaching them.
What system would you prefer to have in place? Or would you rather jut pick the topics that are taught?
> Black students are 66% less likely to be identified as gifted compared to white students with similar test scores.
Anyway, I believe your observation about the relative success that Asian kids have in merit-based programs supports my contention that they are significantly cultural in nature, right?
Even the use of the word racist here is nonsense. It implies malicious intent. For a test maker to not take into account every variation of culture is not racist, it's a negative side affect that can be improved on via iteration, not racist.
You are not understanding my point. It comes down to the criteria used to judge whether or not you've "earned" the outcome. You're assuming these are fair and I'm pointing out they are actually significantly tilted to favoring the dominant group.
Let's say my family runs the town and happens to be fast sprinters. The people of the town complain that they'd like some say in how the town is run and threaten chaos if they don't get it. We bow to pressure but we set the new rules, and say, "Fine. We'll have a town council to run things that anyone can be on. We'll hold a 100 yard-dash to determine the members." It's objective. It's based on merit. But it ensures my family says in control. If my family had been poor sprinters but strong long-distance runners we might have held a 20K race instead. Still objective. Still merit-based. You still "put in the work and earn the outcome". But it still ensures my family stays in control.
> Even the use of the word racist here is nonsense. It implies malicious intent.
It's probably useful to understand the distinction between "racism" and "systemic racism" here. Racism is the belief that one race is superior (or conversely, inferior) to another. That's someone's direct thought or intent. Systemic racism, on the other hand, is a system that hold one race down while holding another race above them. Systemic racism doesn't require anyone to have have any racist beliefs or intent. It's just a system that has a certain effect. However, once someone becomes aware of a system that advantages one race to the detriment of another, whether they decide to support it or look for a better way is where there is potential racism.
The definition of merit for any given school, is transparent. School work is relatively straight forward, in that they are designed by the teachers for students to complete, and at the end of the year you can see how students were rewarded or punished with numbers. Also, not all merit-based systems are good, some may reward bad behavior etc., but the solution is not to get rid of merit, but rather adjust what you're selecting for.
Also, I feel like "dominant culture" is an ambiguous term thrown around to justify the ideology of equity and how some groups of people are perpetually oppressed. Arguably the U.S. no longer has a dominant culture. There are many cities with neighborhoods where English isn't required (i.e. Chinatowns, Miami etc). This in turn affects the local schools and their curriculum, which means their merit-based system is for the most part under their control.
What do you want the world to look like 10, 20, 50 years from now, and how would the changes you're pushing for making immediately get us all closer to that?
How well-represented are blondes in executive leadership or government? Well, no one cares and no one is really counting, are they? That's the world I want to live in.
Your comments sounds challenging to the parent comment. Why? The person is making pretty benign observations and opinions. Your comment seems to question their motives.
We should all be asking the question you posed.
This suggests to me that the advantage of the program could be conferred to students who score low on IQ tests but are nevertheless behaved in class. A better gifted program would be one that differentiates on the basis of civility, not IQ. Of course, deferring measurement of IQ to some licensed professionals is easier than objectively quantifying a student's civility, so I don't know how this would actually be implemented.
The problem would become, though, that nobody really wants the rowdy crowd. Even the laziest teacher would nope out, and as much as self-sacrifice is probably more prevalent in the teaching class than in the general population, there are never enough willing to self-immolate for hopeless causes. Which, in turn, is why we get the Hollywood fantasies with exactly those heroic characters: because they're actually very rare.
I recognize that my experience was no means the norm. My high school was large, well funded, and had a lot of resources at its disposal. And even then, there were absolutely students that weren't served well by the school. But its overall a system that seems to work pretty well, and I think its a model that more schools look at.
Not great attributes to select for in a world where we desperately need independent thinking and problem solving.
For me, it made a big difference in being engaged in schoolwork when every class consisted of reiterating content for days which I had mastered in minutes.
Edit: I removed "I don't see what race has to do with it." I do see how race can affect this when the gatekeeper is a teacher with biases choosing who takes the test to be in the program. This does not however make it ok to say "unacceptably white"
> Black students are 66% less likely to be identified as gifted compared to white students with similar test scores. Black, Latinx, and Native American students are far less likely to attend a school that even offers a gifted program.
As I said in my other post, in my school you were taken out of regularly classes, but still had to learn those things and do that work. That means the student has to agree to work 20% harder, usually at home, where they may not have that luxury. There are probably other considerations that aren't coming to mind at the moment, too, that also affect the number of children in Gifted programs.
> with similar test scores
> WITH SIMILAR TEST SCORES
What I found: https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2016/01/18/teachers-race-affects...
and of course the link to the gov data source in that article is broken: http://https//nces.ed.gov/ecls/
Edit: I see where they pulled the line from. Misleading at best as the "tests" they are talking about are not gifted assessment tests, but rather standardized testing which I don't think is that great of an indicator. I was in the gifted program during middle school, and that was predicated by a few admittance tests, one of them being IQ.
> However, controlling for math and reading scores did not have the same effect for black students. In fact, black students continued to be assigned to gifted programs half as often as white peers with identical math and reading achievement.
If you read to the end, the paper is literally linked: https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Gris...
I find this to be frustrating. How many times have we heard from people defending the existing systems that standardized testing is an appropriate method of stratifying people. When universities decide to minimize the relevance of the SATs we see howls of complaints. Now suddenly these tests are of minimal utility if they demonstrate that qualified black and hispanic students are being turned away?
Yes, a student who studies hard may get good academic test scores, but may do poorly on gifted admittance tests. They're testing two different things. The former tests ability to understand class content, the other tests the ability to solve problems which are not part of school curriculum.
Having the raw data matters.
I'll give an example. I attended a gifted program starting in 3rd grade. I went to an elementary school for 1st and 2nd grade that was almost entirely white with some asian kids. Part of the mechanism for selecting students for the gifted program was a letter from the student's counselor, teacher, and principal.
My mom noticed that some schools were sending way more kids to the GT program than others. Several schools basically never sent any kids. No surprise, there were more black and hispanic kids at the schools. BUT these schools did not have a lack of students with high SOL scores or grades. It turned out that the process of identifying students and writing letters was letting these kids down. A few years of local activism to adjust the process and suddenly a bunch of kids from these other schools were being admitted to the GT program and succeeding.
Activists recently tried to adjust the admissions criteria for TJHSST, a magnet school in the area, to be a "merit lottery." This says that you set some minimum qualification (minimum GPA and accelerated math coursework) and then select students at random from that pool. This proposal was called racist against south and east asian students and activists were called enemies of excellence by various people like Scott Aaronson.
I was personally identified as having potential for going to TJ at age four. My parents paid a lot of money for me to have tutoring specifically for the admissions test.
In the above example, black and hispanic students with similar qualifications (test scores) are not receiving the same access to accelerated programs.
The point is that the mechanisms by which we define qualifications and select students really really matters and can encode all sorts of inequities.
This is, of course, far more complicated, and involves difficult problems. Far easier to sweep it all under the rug by calling attention to qualifications "unacceptable".
And in the example I listed for early GT admissions, there was no need for developing "underdeveloped" students. They were already developed. They just had systems that didn't enable them to get through the gate to the GT program.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4979
> In a world-historic irony, the main effect of this “solution” will be to drastically limit the number of Asian students, while drastically increasing (!!!) the number of White students. The proportion of Black and Hispanic students is projected to increase a bit but remain small.
From class of 2024 to class of 2025.
* Economically disadvantaged students: 0.62% to 25.09%
* Black students: 1.23% to 7.09%
* Hispanic students: 3.29% to 11.27%
* White students: 17.70% to 22.36%
* Asian students: 73.05% to 54.36%
The raw increase in black students is larger than the raw increase in white students. But Aaronson predicted a "drastic increase" in white students and for the number of black students to increase by "a bit." Oops.
You can slice stats further. The number of asian students who are also on free and reduced lunch increased between years.
We will obviously have to wait a few years to see how college admissions turn out and then we'll need to wait longer than that to see how their lives turn out. But early concerns about the students being "lower quality" are not panning out.
There is also the question of what "elite" means. Should TJ select for people that are extremely good at taking tests so they can have students take a mountain of AP classes and score a lot of 5s? Or is that not actually the best kind of education for gifted students? The most valuable material when I attended was not the testing but building weird software in the syslab. This value isn't encoded in grades and test scores.
This confuses me greatly. Are they using more generous grading for pandemic reasons? I've observed a noticeable difference between a top 5% student and a top 1% student, so the fact they're getting the same scores is odd... Wass the material/pace much lower than what the student body could cope with?
Middle school GPA of the admits. Not their GPA in their freshmen year at TJ. I don't believe that TJ publishes this information. In a few years you'll be able to get a few proxies in average AP scores and college admissions information (though these metrics are flawed in their own ways).
But more and more evidence is stacking up that maybe your core assumption (the new class is full of worse students so that more white people get admitted) might not be true. Continuing to grasp for possible other explanations that allow you to keep holding this belief isn't good science. There are more than 500 very smart 8th graders in fairfax county (and prince william and fauquier counties) each year. Changing the testing procedure doesn't mean that less smart students are being admitted.
BTW, I realize he is arguing for the opposite of this.
edit: If you think I am racist or something let me spell it out as I did in another comment: It is not unacceptable when white children have opportunities. It is unacceptable when black children do not.
The ultimate goal should be to provide better education for everyone so that all students have as many available options by the time they're ready to pick a career path.
Also, I hate these comments from white collar folks about blue collar jobs being the answer to everything. Yes we need them, but we also need to be honest that the average plumber is going to have a harder time working until 65 than an office worker.
So to me, many and not only equate.
I don't want to spend my tax money educating future bankers.
Most of those future executives are probably in private schools right now anyway.
As well, by definition, to be gifted you need to be an outlier. Most people get by and live a decent, if stressful, life.
This statement is a textbook syllogistic fallacy.
It ignores the qualification context for being gifted vs. being in the NBA. There are a number of historically exclusive systems, prejudiced on socioeconomic and racial standards, that are required prerequisites for being in a gifted school, which do not exist for being in the NBA.
Put in simpler terms: open basketball courts != gatekeeping gifted schools
EDIT: Nobody here is calling you a racist. Your edit above reads like, "I'm not a racist, but..."
Those white kids will get other opportunities to be successful, and the non-white kids will get fewer of those opportunities, because society is racist as hell. Therefore, when you have a chance to give a non-white kid a shot at excellence, and they're qualified, give it to them.
- Resource constraints (e.g. can only afford to teach sixty students)
- "catching up"; entering an existing gifted class stream after missing the first few years
- You'd want to select early in the school year. Joining a gifted class in the last few weeks of the year is pointless
- Kids in gifted streams want or are pressured to remain there
Modifications of the current distribution outside of the source and those factors above can result in zero sum outcomes. It's rhetorically useful to wave this off but still a practical concern.
For example, there is no test in existence that accurately measures "giftedness" in children.
Is there no adjustment whatsoever possible to that process? If the people running that process had had a slightly tighter set of criteria, would the outward appearance be dramatically different than the path they took to get to the "slightly too many qualified" condition?
Simply "tightening" the existing fuzzy criteria will only further arbitrarily limit qualified students.
Instead, accept they're all qualified insofar as they would maximally benefit from advanced lessons, and favor students for whom this may be their only opportunity to get ahead.
1. Make sure everyone has access to opportunities.
2. Get rid of all opportunities
People are going for the second one despite the fact that it doesn’t actually improve anyone’s life. Its like solving homelessness by burning down all houses.
It's like countering homelessness by enforcing that a portion of housing is accessible, affordable low-income housing. People sitting in high-income housing then make frivolous statements about all the houses being burnt down, or how we should also remove public basketball courts because of the NBA.
If you see a program that doesn’t have equal access, and instead of doing the hard work to get to equal access, you just get rid of the program… that’s the #2 option, the one I’m referring to, which is worse for everyone.
Whether the NBA is unacceptably racially biased is a problem so tiny that it is not worth spending any societal attention solving. That is not true of public schools.
What's interesting that is not mentioned is page 15: a black student with a black teacher is still much less likely to be identified as gifted. even less than a white student with a non-white teacher. internalized racism?
In which case, the solution is "fund more gifted programs in schools that lack them", not "defund existing gifted programs".
Which is kinda what the article's author started to argue but never quite got there in the end.
Perhaps "unacceptably lacking in Black students" is a less divisive way to say this, unless the decisiveness were intended and surely that's not the case.
There's a lot of value in having a gifted track in schooling. Throwing that away because it is currently inaccurate at identifying students that are best suited to it is a stupid idea. Make it accurate at identifying the students that are best suited to it instead.
You can't self-select to be evaluated. Your parents can advocate, but they ultimately don't decide either. Although I think they can turn down the evaluation, I'm unclear on that though.
The first hurdle is getting the teacher to not only recognize that the child may be gifted, but to make the recommendation to administration. Then it is administration who ultimately makes the call on whether or not to evaluate the kid.
And teachers are more likely to recommend white students than black students.
And this may not even be something they're consciously aware of doing. Because a lot of this is based on the teachers' perceptions of students. If you have a good rapport with a student, you're more likely to recommend them to be evaluated. If you are constantly butting heads with a kid, or if the kid is just quietly doing their work, you're not going to be inclined to recommend them. Regardless of how well they are doing in class.
I was not evaluated until partway through my freshman year of high school and the only reason I was was because the teacher who ran the Quiz Bowl team got everyone who made it on the team who wasn't already in the gifted program evaluated.
Otherwise, I probably would not have been evaluated at all.
The author's focus on a particular racial classification seems incongruent with facts, given that students with another racial group are also over-represented in "Gifted Programs."
Trying to chase it down just got me to this: https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Gris...
Which seems like it just is saying that the proportion assigned to gifted programs was lower than what the average test score would suggest (notable when compared to hispanics), but hispanics could have a wider distribution (or a bimodal one), so this seems like a shoddy test. The correct check of the hypothesis would be to find the test score threshhold above which 50% of students get into the gifted program and see if this threshhold varies by race... but I can't find anywhere this is done.
literally the same experience for me; many people in urban school never became literate in their entire adult lives, let alone math.
You are only scratching the surface here. Some places had a hard time "proving" their gifted programs were "too white" so they started using the term "white and white-adjacent" to include Asian kids as well (often from impoverished background but that's another issue) in these stats [0].
> I don't see why race has anything to do with it.
Buckle up. The SF school district is trying to include a lot more racial content at school [1]. Now even math is considered racist [2]. I wish I was making this up.
[0] https://www.asian-dawn.com/2020/11/17/school-district-catego...
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Sa...
[2] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
There are even more radical proposals [0] they are trying to introduce in High School classes.
It's hard not to see the real agenda past the shallow arguments against gifted programs [1]. This was an enlightening read to say the least.
[0] https://criticallyconsciouscomputing.org/
[1] https://unherd.com/2022/02/anti-racism-betrays-asian-student...
They know adults will be skeptical of what they teach (with reason). So they try to jam it down children’s throats where there’s little parental oversight. Disagree with it? Enjoy failing the class and the hit it will have on your GPA for college. And they aren’t even trying to hide it.
> Often the emphasis is placed on learning math in the “real world,” as if our classrooms are not a part of the real world. This reinforces notions of either/or thinking because math is only seen as useful when it is in a particular context. However, this can result in using mathematics to uphold capitalist and imperialist ways of being and understandings of the world.
Repeat that for 83 pages. It's utterly surreal.
This explains why soviet mathematicians were (and still are) considered among the best in the world.
The way math is taught is quite often racist. I've seen entire math textbooks based around examples featuring American sports. If you don't know the rules of American football, you are not going to understand any of the examples in the book. I spent a lot of time in school and college explaining various American sports rules to friends.
That is the most trivial of examples, but it is a hugely impactful one for a lot of people. I have seen large amounts of frustration because some math book author couldn't keep his favorite sports jargon from littering the entire book.
You have other biases as well that can make students feel like shit. Story problems about a working father and a stay at home mother, sounds like nothing for many people, but for quite a few kids being reminded again and again that "not having a dad" is unusual, well, why the hell is the math book doing that? Just stick to problems involving trains.
IQ tests are notoriously and historically pretty racist.
They can be useful in certain contexts but they aren't very good as an academic gatekeeper or a measure of individual intelligence.
they look for this and throw out offending questions on the SAT all the time
Give an upper class white kid a problem involving tennis scores, no problem. The kid will be able to easily understand what is being talked about, there isn't anything mentally jarring going on.
Give a poor black kid a problem involving tennis scores, boom, problem. Odds of a poor black kid knowing how tennis scoring works, much less likely.
My, largely well to do, neighborhood has tennis courts. The more diverse, and poorer, neighborhood I grew up in, didn't. I am still not sure how tennis is scored, but I am pretty sure the kids in the house next to me understand it.
Repeat this idea a few times with some of the other tests. Give some word recall lists using words poor/minority kids aren't accustom to. It is harder to recall words that you have never heard before, they are basically nonsense syllables, which is a very different test. If you had thrown "quiche" in the middle of a word list 8 year old me would have had no idea what you were talking about.
Modern day IQ tests have tried to correct for these biases, but school administrators can choose an "older" test to purposefully get biased results.
Over around 18 years of having various maths topics in schools
The only thing that required some "non-math" knowledge were cards related questions and maybe dice
but what is that tennis counting example? do they actually appear on IQ questions?
how about maths exams?
Oh and poker hands.
I can easily imagine an IQ test 50 years ago involving scoring in bridge games.
Do you have any evidence of school administrators choosing "older" tests with biased questions about tennis scores or whatever other cultural trivia rich white kids are most likely to know about? I took an IQ test when I was a kid (early 90's) and it was a bunch of abstract questions involving mental rotations of objects, determining the next number in a sequence, determining the missing object from a set of objects, and so on. There were no questions about vocabulary or trivia of any kind.
The point is that it is possible for corrupt administrators to bias test results, and the methods to do such are fairly easy to come across.
I'm not objecting to IQ tests, just pointing out that if a school wanted to create a test that only admitted certain students, that it is very possible to do such.
Step 2 is divide the poor against each other.
Step 2 is important so people who are poor won't ever band together and demand change.
It is sad that the "left" has forgotten this, while those in power continue to use the same tactics decade after decade, century after century.
Not everyone is as well-positioned as you might have been to excel at an IQ test. And to the extent that someone is disadvantaged, their race may indeed be an indirect cause.
Curious if they're also "unacceptably asian" - the author doesn't seem to think so, or at least didn't feel the need to say so.
I am certain that if every student had been tested, the composition of the gifted classes would have been very different. Many students who fell through the cracks would have been put in the higher level classes and many at the lower end of the gifted program would not have made the cut (given fixed class sizes for the gifted program).
We should test every student.
But to your point, I was not able to take algebra until 9th grade due to reasons that felt a bit discriminatory as you'd described, but my mother was a maniac and no one liked her, so hard to say if that didn't add weight.
Consider a toy admissions criteria where students go through the same process as today but students with black hair have to also win a game of rock paper scissors. There will surely be a large number of kids with black hair who are admitted and succeed. But the system would be plainly unfair and deserve to be fixed, despite many individual students with black hair being able to say "well I was admitted."
I was well-behaved and bright, but coarse I suppose.
I was too poor to participate in the fancy science trips, couldn't afford class materials, constantly late, and homework never got done due to what I remember as "family issues". I was bright and gifted, but a high achiever I was not.
I don't blame them for pushing me out of the system, I didn't play by the rules. But from what you're saying, that's part of the problem and I don't disagree... but allowing me to persist and annoy those gifted kids with resources, encouraging families, and ambition wasn't really fair now was it?
But forcing a child to use their non-dominant right hand could be considered a form of cruelty I suppose, so not seeing how they're really related.
When I go back home to Appalachia, I fall back into my old bad habits readily but if I got a call from my boss, I'm switching to "educated" and that's more than just ditching the drawl, it's modifying the entire way I structure my thoughts. I think that's very common and not unfair to expect from someone claiming that they desire education.
Simply put, we don't know how to make objective IQ tests yet.
The questions in IQ tests tend to bake in a bunch of cultural assumptions, often in ways you don't expect. So the test measures a combination of IQ, and affinity with a specific cultural background.
First, let me be clear about this: The issue is friction. Even at the same difficulty, a question that's more accessible is less stressful and less mentally taxing. Especially when you're dealing with kids. This matters more at the cut-off than the extremes of the bell-curve, but has statistical impacts.
I just searched for "Fourth Grade IQ Test" and clicked a random link. Four of the ten questions are about sharing cookies. Baking cookies and sharing cookies are typical middle-class-white activity, but I don't know how that shakes out in other cultures. Maybe they share other foods? Maybe sharing food is offensive because it implies the other kids' parents can't provide for themselves? Maybe the kids aren't in charge of food division? The underlying math is, of course, objective. But the math is being framed through a perspective which is more or less familiar to different backgrounds.
I imagine other factors such as home life, economic status, and cultural emphasis on education would be much, much stronger predictors on IQ test performance.
Certainly home life, economic background, etc have an impact on educational outcomes. But I'm making a narrower claim here. A student with a poor home life is likely to test poorly regardless, although the difference might be larger in some tests than others. But a student with the same educational aptitude may test better or worse depending on if they're being tested on topics that are familiar or unfamiliar to them.
Removing cultural context is certainly a solution. I'm not sure it's the best solution. Excessively-abstract problems are only one aspect of intelligence. Anything involving reading comprehension is going to have some linguistic or cultural elements, but I'm not sure it's valid to just remove reading comprehension altogether.
If you want to see a standardized test from a different culture, here's one that's made the rounds a few times. This is for eight-graders in Kentucky in 1912. The sections on Geography & Physiology certainly stand out, but even the math section has a notably different emphasis than modern education.
https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam191...
If we are talking IQ scores within the same western country, we know now to make culture fair fluid intelligence test (it's not the same as future achievement score)
It has become acceptable in society these days for people to bring down the white race any way they can through these sort of micro aggressions.
As a white person any success or benefit you enjoy can never be truly legitimate, it will always be stained by the original sin of your white ancestors. And if you happen to be straight, or male, or both you are even more guilty. The message is that the white race must not be allowed to progress any further than it has until all other races have caught up or even surpassed it. In the mean time, individuals suffer.
The only time you can be truly understood and seen as a unique individual and not a stereotype is amongst other whites.
philly school district is in a bad place financially. https://www.inquirer.com/news/pa-school-funding-trial-philad.... A district with more money will have more resources for gifted programs.
I imagine this has it's roots in the demographic and population shift the city has seen starting in the 50s. Philly's population in 1990 was 75% of what it was in the 50s. I'm not an expert in this area, but I'm sure there was overhead in maintaining infrastructure, paying pensions, etc as the population shrunk.
At this point, maybe the federal government should just bail out city school districts in this situation. Why should an underfunded school district be paying a chunk of its budget on debts?
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
I will refrain from this sort of comment in the future though. Sorry dang!
The current population of students we identify as academically gifted and talented is unacceptably whiter and wealthier than the actual student population of academically gifted and talented students should be.
This is pretty vanilla, nearly tautological stuff unless you believe academic talent is some sort of inherent property of wealth or whiteness.
My hunch is that the typical school district is looking for a palatable excuse to reduce funding needs.
I got straight As that semester. The rest of school was just min/max’ing to average out with a C and not do any homework.
Project based learning.
Being with other students that actually gave a shit.
If anything, children should be offered more opportunities to seek this kind of free form enrichment.
But at the same time, they gave me a broader education and I learned more than I would have otherwise.
At my elementary school, you were taken out of normal classes 1 day per week. You still had to do all the work from that day, but you didn't actually attend those sessions for those classes. Instead, you spent the whole day in a different classroom that was solely for "gifted" students.
Of course, this meant that it really was only the top students that could handle it.
Prior to being tested and accepted into Gifted, I was a pretty constant disruption in my normal classes. I would finish all the work in class, even the stuff that everyone else had to take home because it took them so long. That left me constantly bored, and clued them in that I needed more.
TBH, I probably would have said I preferred being given a book and let sit in a corner and learned or just read fiction. But instead I was forced to be social and learn about things not usually taught in school, such as puzzle solving. I'm still very much an introvert, but I have to wonder how much more introverted I'd be if it weren't for that? Perhaps cripplingly so.
I'm a huge fan of gifted classes for obvious reasons, but not at the expense of other students. If there isn't enough budget to teach everyone to a basic level, gifted classes are not a great idea.
In fact, we should probably restructure everything so that everyone who isn't being taught at their full potential can learn more in school. I'm sure there were students around me that were almost in my same situation, but they weren't in Gifted. They were probably also bored and could have been both educated and entertained during those times, if we had the programs for it.