Hacker News Reader

Comment by derac | Hacker News Reader

Gifted programs are "unacceptably white". WTF does that mean? I had to pass essentially an IQ test to get placed into those classes.

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"

View on HN

That's just one two-word phrase, and putting torque on it that distorts the gist of the whole article is not a good direction for threads. That's why we have this guideline:

"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."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I appreciate the rule and that is fair. I do think putting extremely inflammatory racial language front and center is notable. Particularly when it is so casual and so many people feel like it is unobjectionable as can be seen in the replies.

I will refrain from this sort of comment in the future though. Sorry dang!

It's only 'extremely inflammatory racial language' if you pluck it out of its context and misquote it.

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.

Yeah, that's fair. Maybe I was being overly sensitive.

Just read what he wrote?

> 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.

How is that an answer? If someone isn't meeting the qualifications they aren't in. What's "unacceptable" about that?

Are there qualifications other than test scores?

Apparently race given the assertion of similar test scores

There are unwritten ones, at least.

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.

In my experience you are nominated to take an IQ-ish test and let in based on that score. I assume they mean test scores on regular coursework?

> compared to white students with similar test scores

> with similar test scores

> with similar test scores

> WITH SIMILAR TEST SCORES

Your point?

Presumably test scores are a not terrible proxy for qualification. So if black and hispanic students of similar qualification are not being admitted into these programs, then the programs are not actually equitably enrolling people.

I had to look around for the source of this, and I can't find the "with similar test scores" part in the Vanderbuilt site article on the Vanderbuilt study this is based on. It says 66% less likely, but the "similar test scores" part isn't in the same paragraph. I really dislike that it is so difficult to find the source of these statements in modern media, as the news articles I read didn't even cite the study, I had to go googling for it.

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.

If you read three paragraphs of the article you linked you can see the statement written in plain english:

> 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...

> 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 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?

The goalposts will be moved until the desired outcome is achieved.

The test matters. You don't find the top 2% of ability by a test designed to measure competency, for example. This distinction may or may not be relevant in the context of gifted programs within a single school, but it is certainly relevant when comparing the utility of state competency tests and SAT tests.

> 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.

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.

I realize it's just a blog post and not a scientific paper, but the author didn't even cite a source for that statistic. My gut reaction is that it's probably incredibly misleading if not outright false.

Yeah, it's very easy to draw conclusions that suit your agenda when you use slippery terms like "similar." A score of 90 and a score of 100 are "similar" in the sense that they're both an A, but one is a bit more impressive. And that's not even getting into the possibility that the author is using an even broader range of test scores, like "students who make all As and Bs on tests." For all you know, he could then be comparing white students making all As (and being accepted into a gifted program) with black students making all Bs (and not being accepted).

Having the raw data matters.

The raw data is publicly available: https://nces.ed.gov/ecls/dataproducts.asp

Because the systems which identify students and enable them to meet the admissions requirements are massively unequal.

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.

The answer would be to improve the development of those students who are underdeveloped -- not change criteria for the identification of potential.

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".

In my personal experience agitating for change in this space, it is precisely the same people who resist change in admissions criteria and who resist change in grants for equitable early development resources.

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.

For those interested in what what Scott Aaronson said:

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.

The fun part about this is that TJHSST did edit the admissions process so we can actually test Aaronson's claim.

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.

I wonder how his other predictions like it becoming a much less elite school with a lower quality student body have held up.

Average GPA of the class of 2025 admits was roughly identical (3.95).

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.

> Average GPA of the class of 2025 admits was roughly identical (3.95).

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?

> This confuses me greatly. Are they using more generous grading for pandemic reasons?

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.

Unacceptably white is still a horrible way to phrase this. Is the NBA unacceptably black? Why don't we remove basketball courts from inner cities and cut off black kid's feet /s eye roll

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.

That is a bad analogy because the NBA is not the only accessible path to a stable middle class life while school, for many people, is.

Not even close to true. Going into a trade is a great way to get into a comfortable middle class life. And in those trades, you'll commonly find people who did horrible in school, and thought they were idiots because of it.

Yes, some trades pay way more, have more available jobs, and have better working conditions (work hours, etc) than PhDs in a variety of sciences.

Not everyone is cut out to be a plumber or an electrician.

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.

I never said blue collar trade was the answer to everything. I said that the school system is not the answer to everything.

You used 'many' in your second part, which is the same 'not only'.

Qualitatively yes, but not quantitatively.

To me, "not only" can mean any quantity other than only. I have never heard it used any other way, though I fully admit you may have.

So to me, many and not only equate.

School is, gifted programs are not.

So you have to be in gifted to have a successful life?

IQ correlates extremely heavily with having a successful life by western civilization standards, yes.

So you can't have a high IQ and not be in gifted?

What?

You changed the subject from being in gifted to being gifted. You can exist outside of gifted and still have a high IQ and be a successful person. So, no.

any time you feel your hands touch your hips, and your sentence begins to start with the word "so", just stop what youre doing and go have a snickers.

At least my post is relevant to the topic, not just critiquing someone for being hangry

how are your hands both simultaneously on your hips and the keyboard at the same time?

Zing! keep em coming!

So we should accept that 98 0+% of people can or gave a successful life, yet should support the gifted <10% in their journey to extract the world's wealth?

I don't want to spend my tax money educating future bankers.

If you're talking about the top 10% of kids, you're obviously not talking about [just] the hyper-elite future bank executives (who are probably what, the top 0.0001%?) The top 10% of students is quite large would include all manner of engineers, doctors, etc. People who play vital roles in keeping our civilization going, not just parasitically leeching off interest rates or whatever it is banking executives do.

Most of those future executives are probably in private schools right now anyway.

That helps a lot but not necessarily required. If you require/aspire for radical social mobility being gifted is extreme help. If you're looking to have a modest life with family outside of expensive cities being gifted isn't much of a help.

As well, by definition, to be gifted you need to be an outlier. Most people get by and live a decent, if stressful, life.

In our present economy? Yes.

One need not be in a gifted program in school in order to achieve a stable middle class life. In fact, the vast majority of those with stable middle class lives didn't participate in gifted programs.

>Unacceptably white is still a horrible way to phrase this. Is the NBA unacceptably black?

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..."

No. It is not unacceptable when white children have opportunities. It is unacceptable when black children do not.

Nobody is saying "actively remove white children from gifted programs" they're saying, "when more people qualify for gifted programs than can fit in the program, consider including those who have fewer overall opportunities."

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.

That would work better if things were more continuous. Having gifted classes imposes several practical barriers:

- 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.

My experience suggests that "when more people qualify for gifted programs than can fit in the program, consider slightly raising the qualification level, so you get exactly the class size you're targeting and no one who qualifies was excluded" is the likely path to be chosen.

That presumes some quantifiable, precisely and accurately measurable metric, which does not exist in any context.

For example, there is no test in existence that accurately measures "giftedness" in children.

How is qualification already being done today, such that the set of people qualified is larger than the available seats?

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?

There is no adjustment whatsoever possible that will accurately further qualify/disqualify students from a gifted program, that is correct.

Simply "tightening" the existing fuzzy criteria will only further arbitrarily limit qualified students.

That's exactly my point. There's a system today that has some amount of arbitrariness to it. Tweaking that system slightly is almost surely arbitrariness-preserving, likely not increasing or decreasing it significantly.

My point is that it's increasing the arbitrariness by further constricting the qualified students pool.

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.

There’s two ways to equity.

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.

False dichotomy.

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.

No, you’re talking about option #1, which I also agree is better. That’s not what’s happening here.

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.

There were 49,400,000+ million children in public schools in 2020. There were 529 NBA players.

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.

Are they less likely to be identified because they they are treated differently or because they go to schools that don’t offer those programs?

Sounds like the problem might be with those who are selected to identify the "gifted" students. I am less interested in racial correlations to being identified as "gifted" and more interested in attributes such as whether the student is from a two-parent household, whether they are considered poor, whether they attend a local school or are transported to one outside of their neighborhood, etc. I suspect that we lose out on identifying many gifted children because issues at home and mere survival interfere with their ability to grow and develop academically.

This assumes being gifted is something innate and simply needs to be brought out. I don’t think that’s the case.

A person with a latent talent which isn't identified and developed has no advantage over the person who doesn't have the talent at all. If we as a society can't do what it reasonable and prudent to identify and nurture such people then we all lose.

I dug up the study, in case anyone is interested https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Gris...

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?

more like different schools, the difference reflecting the sociodemographics of the reflected areas rather than racial IQ differences.

Probably more like black teachers with black students are more likely to exist in poor areas where identifying "giftedness" is lower on the list of priorities.

How conveniently that the writer omits Asians.

And Jews.

ppl keep overlooking this part. it shows how important it is to read slowly and carefully.

When I was in grade 3 there was a standardized test for gifted. While standardized tests do have some racial disparity that disparity seems to be far smaller than letting teachers nominate students for a gifted evaluation rather than having it be universal.

And then also click the provided link, which leads to a summary of the report, claiming that "this is unlikely to reflect teacher prejudice, but availability of 'gifted programs' in predominantly black schools".

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.

No fair actually reading the source material, we're just here to yell at each other fruitlessly and solely on the basis of our preexisting ideas.

So you're implying that the conclusion of "unacceptable whiteness" is self-evident by simple examination of these two points... or what?

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.

Forgive me if this seems all too simple to me. The solution is very clearly stop doing that then.

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.

The problem, as always, is people.

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.

That is exactly what the article says...

Yes, that is why the SP was written.

That is not the quote from tfa. The quote is "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."

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."

I have a very simple solution for LatinX group and it's also about equity. Like ALL other immigrants groups LatinX group should have to go through proper immigration process. Then we will see equity in immigration and equity in education.

Got a link to the specific paper and description of how it was done?

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.

> Gifted programs are "unacceptably white"

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.

Asians are white when it's unhelpful to the narrative for them to be a minority. See also "underrepresented minority", which translates to: non-Asian minority.

Hate to suggest this but I was wondering if I was diversity hire lol, since my skills are definitely subpar but I still got in somehow. I can do soft skills but yeah. -- anyway I'll take it, I need it.

> Gifted programs are "unacceptably white".

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...

“Math is racist” is not what is being claimed in link #2. It’s math instruction that they claim to be racist. I have no idea if this is true but it’s at least plausible.

The veneer is quite thin.

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...

What do you mean by the veneer being quite thin? You mean that the surface-level claim that math instruction is racist is actually cover for a deeper claim that math itself is racist? Where do they come close to making that deeper claim?

What's the "radical" concern with [0]? Why wouldn't we want students to think critically about uses of technology and how they impact society, or make access to computer science more inclusive?

If you read it you'll see it contains some gems "This focus on middle and high school, and on adolescents is intentional: 12-18 year olds are at a developmental stage where they are just beginning to comprehend their social worlds and their roles and positions in these social worlds. We believe that learning CS in social terms at these ages can not only help them integrate perspectives on computing into their new awareness of the world, but that the ideas in CS itself can help them better understand what it means to be human, to make decisions, and to have intelligence. Children in primary school may be too young for conversations about systemic social conflict. And while adults in postsecondary and beyond need to learn justice-centered CS literacy as well, many are less open to such learning, having hardened their political views as they enter adulthood. We likely need different methods for children and adults."

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.

What is the sinister material that they’re trying to teach or jam down children’s throats? The fact that they’re preparing material for a specific age range does not seem sinister in itself

You are correct, the general gist is they believe math instruction as racist, although they do at times make reference "Western math" and "Eurocentric math", whatever that is, and not math education, so it's a bit muddled. Regardless, take 15 minutes for yourself and you will see exactly how absurd the entire premise is. Here, on how word problems support white-supremacy:

> 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 can result in using mathematics to uphold capitalist and imperialist ways of being and understandings of the world.

This explains why soviet mathematicians were (and still are) considered among the best in the world.

I grew up with a diverse group of friends.

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.

I was in one of these programs in middle and high school (1985-1990). My experience was that only a very small subset were selected to be tested. Most of the "gifted" students were born to parents who knew how to advocate for them and get them tested. (Mostly white, mostly upper middle class, many children of teachers.)

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.

Well, I was a dirt poor child of a single Puerto Rican mom in eastern Kentucky and I was accepted in gifted education the first year I went to public schools (which was the first year it was offered--the reason I went.)

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.

There are always individual cases that work out. Even in systems with extreme oppression, members of oppressed groups succeed. But it is still a problem if there is a large and observable statistical disparity between groups for no compelling reason.

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 think what I'm getting at is that the "rich White affluent people gave me a chance" and I "didn't behave" according to their standards, so they pushed me out. I was too young to understand, but perhaps they had a fair point?

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?

I think it depends on what the rules are. A lot of rules encode social and class norms rather than actually achieve a pedagogical goal. Classic examples of this is forcing kids to use "proper" grammar rather than AAVE or forcing left-handed kids to write with the right hand.

I take your point but I had awful redneck grammar until I was 22 or so, and it's something everyone can fix if they just put the time in. I'm not a stickler for "correct" words because language evolves, but if you come to HN because you like programming, surely you'd understand why I'd appreciate semantics of grammar.

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.

What you describe here is often called "code switching" and it requires nontrivial mental effort. The folks that don't need to code switch (because work culture matches their dominant culture norms) are at an advantage.

In my opinion the worst enemy of an intelligent student is boredom. Boredom causes underachievement and disillusionment. One reason to keep a gifted programme at school is to give intelligent students something to do that is actually interesting.

> every class consisted of reiterating content for days which I had mastered in minutes

literally the same experience for me; many people in urban school never became literate in their entire adult lives, let alone math.

So just schools in general, because the teacher has to take care for the whole class and can’t cater to every student.

There is no intelligence test I know of that can perfectly control for advantages and disadvantages in education / home life.

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.

You know what it means.

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.

> I had to pass essentially an IQ test to get placed into those classes.

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.

Ok, I'll bite, how are IQ tests racist?

you could theoretically have questions that rely on cultural background info to understand it. i imagine there are questions that a chinese student would understand and an american would not, but IQ tests and most other standardized test are rigorously tested to avoid this stuff.

they look for this and throw out offending questions on the SAT all the time

Let's take a math story problem.

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.

>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.

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?

I've seen plenty of problems involving scoring in various sports. I've seen stats taught using baseball batting averages and tons of problems involving football scoring.

Oh and poker hands.

I can easily imagine an IQ test 50 years ago involving scoring in bridge games.

school administrators can choose an "older" test to purposefully get biased results

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.

You can look at the history of IQ tests to see that older ones were indeed biased. New tests are designed to counteract those biases.

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.

I know that old IQ tests (and other tests) were biased and used in racist ways. What I asked is whether there is any evidence of school administrators using those old biased tests in recent times. Otherwise this is just speculation.

How about a poor white kid? My family certainly could not afford rackets so we never had an interest in the game.

Step 1 is divide rich and poor.

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.

At my school, everyone was tested... but you needed a recommendation along with a high score to get in. I scored highly on the test year after year but was never given the recommendation necessary. I can't for sure say it was because I am a minority, but it definitely disenfranchised me

philly school district schools are 14% white. the school district i went to in the philly burbs is 79% white.

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?

> I had to pass essentially an IQ test to get placed into those classes. I don't see why race has anything to do with it.

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.

Any further reading recommendations? It's unclear why the cultural example of baking and sharing food would cause significant differences in test results but that's picking at an example. Were the six other questions also stereotypical of white middle class families? I imagine they were more abstract (lacking cultural context?). Would the solution here be to remove cultural context, or have culturally tailored exams? It would be interesting to take IQ tests from other countries and compare results.

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.

A few straight arithmetic questions, one about the alphabet, a few about parts of speech. These don't immediately jump out to me as cultured, although anything involving letters or grammar will be sensitive to the linguistic background of the students.

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...

IQ tests are incredibly predictive nowadays.

The Cattell Culture Fair III (CFIT-III) is really good.

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)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com