Comment by Gatsky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gatsky | Hacker News Reader

As far as I know, there is no proven way to improve equality in a school system. Even in Norway, which has the highest GDP per capita in the world, the students from poor/less educated families still underperform [1]:

>Norway is a wealthy and egalitarian country with a homogeneous educational system, yet achievement gaps between students at the 90th and 10th percentiles of parental income and between students whose parents have at least a master and at most a high school degree are found to be large (0.55–0.93 and 0.70–0.99 SD), equivalent to about 2 to 2.5 years of schooling, and increasing by grade level. Achievement gaps by parental income, but not by parental education, increased over the time period, underscoring the different ways these two socioeconomic status components relate to achievement and the potential for policy to alter gaps.

Part of the answer could be that genetics play a larger role than anyone would like. Plomin for example claims that from twin studies a large part of educational attainment is heritable. I suspect the current school system will burn itself down before admitting that, however.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0013189X221142...

And also being poor dumbs you down real hard. When you have to worry about your food and don’t have steady sources of mood uplift, when your existence is just daily peppered by stress, your brain goes into power saving survival mode, not allowing you the luxury of deep perception, introspection or longer attention span, and most importantly, curiosity. By stress I mean such mundane things like your parents (or much more often your now single parent) being seemingly unhappy, or wearing the same old clothes and not being able to buy new ones. Why trying to learn anything if it’s just another chore in a life that sucks?

This is so much of the answer. Of the problem in fact.

> Part of the answer could be that genetics play a larger role than anyone would like.

In studies like the Norway study you cite this could be controlled for by adoptions. Though adoptees, of course, come with their own non-genetic baggage.

I would hope that, at the very least, IQ testing would be performed to try to match based on that.

>As far as I know, there is no proven way to improve equality in a school system.

What the remainder of your post argues is that there is no way to achieve complete equality in a school system.

But we need to be clear about what that means. Most people believe that success should be rewarded somehow. It's relatively uncommon even among socialists to argue that there should be no inequality of overall consumption opportunity. Most parents want to help their children succeed. It should naturally follow that the parents who have more resources will have more successful children. It would require a massive and likely endless society-scale project to counteract the combined parenting efforts of the whole professional class in order to achieve the questionable goal of literally equal opportunity, genetics notwithstanding. Even the Soviet Union had the nomenklatura.

The real goal should be to understand the process of education and remove all actual structural barriers while providing support to the disadvantaged in ways that are reasonably understood to be effective. Obsessing over romantic ideals that seem attractive from 10000 feet is not the way.

Funnily enough a pre-print paper was published just two days ago on this very subject, using a twin study, in Norway!

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/mncet/

TLDR:

> We show that class attainment is strongly influenced by genetics. Shared environmental factors play a modest role. Our study suggests that sociological theories explaining class outcomes in terms of social origins have little explanatory power, and should be reformulated to consider genetics.

Thanks, yes this adds even more data.

did you read that paper? it is absolutely terrible, the method section is a mess, the statistics are probably wrong, and there is very little actual natural science behind this.

Another "social studies" pre-determined study, hopefully wont make it past review

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