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Comment by BobbyJo | Hacker News Reader

> Just decide on household income

Why not just decide on a test scores? Or just grades? Or just sports? Because there is no silver bullet measurement for "how deserving is this kid?"

I'd venture to guess that if you asked 50 people how to measure someone's worth with regard to some goal you'd get 50 different answers.

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Test scores and income are enough, as they are objective measurements. Grades, as mentioned in another comment, are not consistent across different high schools, and they favor people with more resources. Sports, as in play in the university team, which demands high performance, is also fair, and probably doesn't demand a lot of places, as you can't have a sports team with hundreds of people.

The issue is that also, generally speaking, anyone who was legally discriminated against probably lives in a jurisdiction performing poorly in test scores, since all schooling in the US are based on geographic districts funded by local property tax, and due to historic discrimination the formerly discriminated groups also live in areas with lower housing wealth. (A lot of people also moved out of districts with large minority populations when integration was mandated, taking their taxes and wealth with them.)

Want to make a bunch of people very angry? Propose a metropolitan-area wide school district.

> areas with lower housing wealth.

So, in other words, lower income.

Not quite, because you can be house-poor due to luck with owning, and also owning a ‘bad’ house in, say, New York City would give you a high paper net worth when comparing to the entire country.

That’s why I mentioned income, not net worth.

There are also large differences in salaries and income across the country due to variance in cost of living. Poor in New York may be a decent wage in Gary or Biloxi.

> Want to make a bunch of people very angry? Propose a metropolitan-area wide school district.

By that you mean that kids can not choose their school on the US?

No they can't. That's why Republicans are a big proponent of school vouchers so that parents can choose which school a child can go to, but Democrats say that is racist.

Correct. If you live in [poor high-percentage African-American town in Alabama] you cannot choose to go to high school in [wealthy mostly-white town in Massachusetts].

(Setting aside private schools...)

The commute distance would put a hamper on it even for private schools.

But you can move to a better school district but that requires money.

There are however many areas with decent schools and decent prices which could be a destination. And some minority families do move there.

Some jurisdictions jail parents who send their children to neighboring better districts. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/for-some-parents-s...

>since all schooling in the US are based on geographic districts funded by local property tax

Not true at all. There are many places like California where School funds are distributed Statewide. The results are relatively predictable. California passed the Serrano decisions in the early '70s mandating local taxes be spent Statewide on schools. This was followed immediately by a prop 13 where residents decided that if their money doesn't go to Local Schools they won't pay. As a result California dropped from top five in the nation in school funding to the bottom five.

https://edsource.org/2022/californias-prop-13s-unjust-legacy...

https://publicadvocates.org/our-work/education/access-qualit...

Are test score objective? If your school doesn't prepare you for the test doesn't that skew things just as much as schools inflating grades?

Good thing that you don't have to rely on school and start putting effort yourself

Skew the odds

If you don't put any independent effort, then the tests would match whatever the school taught. However, you do have the opportunity to apply yourself and put all the extra effort you need to get a higher grade, independent of your school. The things that would matter there are family support, not in economical sense, but in moral support that your extra effort is right.

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