Hacker News Reader

Comment by sixo | Hacker News Reader

Equity really isn't the ideology doing this, except in a few cases, it's something else. I'd speculate the dominant effect is that people tend to dislike and resist what they have a hard time imagining: there's a strong bias towards easily-administrated uniformity, and ppl tend to enforce what they know and what they were brought up in themselves

View on HN

I work in education and you're probably right that it's not THE thing, but it does enter the conversation. Teachers are supposed to provide what's called differential instruction but the quality and fidelity really depends on the teacher.

yeah, it's there, but I tend to think that "equity" is what people end up reaching for as a rationalization of the emotional need for uniformity / conformity / familiarity

It sort of "fits" but it just doesn't explain very much on its own

As an aside, I'm not really sure whether equity in the schools is simply being used as a buzzword folks think they need to include in their statements about various topics, or whether people really adhere to what it means and entails. Probably a little from column A and a little from column B.

Agreed, and that strong bias is likely driven by cost, not the equity boogeyman that causes many a jerked knee.

Not really. Equity is a philosophy (of many; none perfect) that describes how to spend money.

Do you spend money (mostly) on bringing kids up to average, and any kid average or above average basically stays where they are, as far as the school's efforts are concerned?

Do you spend equally per child, aiming to uplift each of them by the same amount?

...

Many options. Equity is the first one.

Can you name any examples of gifted programs being shut down, citing any reason other than equity?

The examples I've seen, in New York, Seattle, and LA, all cited equity as the reason.

Edit: I'm responding here to the comment "It's easier to keep the top kids down than it is to lift the bottom kids up."

OP said:

> It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating. .... Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade

This sentiment that "they shouldn't be" learning advanced things is not an equity argument—it's probably the kids' OWN parents complaining! I certainly agree that the equity-based shutdowns in highly-progressive cities are a problem, but that's really a very limited case; this thread is really about an entirely different phenomenon.

LAUSD has gifted programs. As do the dozen other districts in LA County. NY also still has gifted programs...

Yes, some of these were shut down. It wasn't because of "equity". It was because of something called "budget cuts."

That's not the way it was sold by politicians or reported by the media. For example:

"NYC to eliminate gifted and talented school program that opponents say segregated students"

"this new, equitable model"

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/08/us/new-york-gifted-and-talent...

If you had actually read the article you would have learned that NYC did not actually get rid of the gift and talented program. It just changed how the gifted students were identified and actually...expanded...the program. Quite dramatically.

And indeed, the CNN article is the only actual reporting claiming that NYC was eliminating this program.

You would think that something of this magnitude would have been reported in the hometown paper if it were true...But the NYT reports that NYC actually expanded the program by over 1100 seats...(https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/nyregion/nyc-gifted-talen...)

If you had actually read the article you would have learned that the new program you're talking about is not a "gifted" program at all. It's a new curriculum for all students.

"instead implement an accelerated instructional model in Fall of 2022 that will serve all approximately 65,000 kindergartners"

"Officials plan to train all 4,000 kindergarten teachers in this accelerated learning instruction"

Cost is a reason, but also there's social concerns. In the standardized system, all classmates share the same material, at the same speed. This shared experience disappears when every student is going at their own place, looking at a computer. This leads to the students being a bit more alienated from each other, and comparisons that go way past just a grade.

When a classmate at the same age is covering material that someone else did three years ago, you will get the tension from both sides, in the same way that it's not all that great socially to be on a traditional school and take classes 3 years ahead.

This issue disappears with all adult students, but around puberty, we are short tools whenever we don't have large enough cadres that we can just put all the kids fast at a given class all together.

American high schools (grades 9+) already give each student customized schedule, so there is no single set of "classmates" anymore - a Computer Science class might have 9-th graders and 11-th graders sitting side-by-side. This does not reflect their knowledge levels, it only means that one student decided to take CS first, and other student decided to leave CS for later and take some other class (like Physics) first.

This is why parents are unhappy: it's OK to skip most math classes entirely and only do state-mandated minimum... but skipping _basic_ math classes and jumping straight to advanced ones is not allowed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com