An interesting thing I see here is that no one seems to be discussing the needs of the kids themselves in all this. It's all about races, politics, ideologies.
However, one of the main positive motivations behind gifted/advanced education is that if you put those kids in a class with 30 randomly selected children and force them to move at the pace of the slowest kid in the class, they become so bored they either disengage from education or become problem students.
At the same time, if you took the median student and constantly compared them to one of two of the advanced kids, who will look like they "just know everything (since prior work is invisible to the class), that's just disheartening.
A priori, I'd say the goal of an idealized education system is to continuously provide learning challenges at the optimal difficulty for each student. Since that's far from possible right now, the very least we can do is bracket kids in 3 categories so they don't drive each other insane.
Not having an gifted program is like having wrestling matches without weight classes. It's no fun and no good (for anyone).
> Equal opportunities should exist. Equal outcomes won't likely exist, purely because of different abilities, different environments, etc.
Thomas Sowell puts an even finer point on this:
"If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected — or assumed — when conditions are not nearly so comparable?"
If you don't have equal outcomes that is prima facie evidence of structural racism (or some other ism). It's like solving an integral and setting C at whatever value makes the equation work for your preferred solution value.
First, there may be biological differences. Asians tend to be shorter, while africans tend to be stronger. Similarly men tend to be taller.
Second, the ism may be classism. Poor students with less access to education might perform worse. Classifying classism as racism and solving it that may be wrong.
Third, the ism may be cultural too. If asian parents drive their kids harder by their parenting technique, that's not racism either.
It does not help to call all differences as only racism. The truth is differences are caused by a variety of reasons, of which racism is one.
I think the issue is where you draw the line between inputs and outputs. If you are judging being in the advanced class the outcome; then you are right to look at biological and social/cultural differences. But when you look at the wealth prospects of these kids beyond 5th and 6th grade, you see that an African-American with a college education has as much wealth as a "white" high school dropout. There has to be more going on here than just biologies and bell-curves.
You also have to ask, statistically, who is educating the children? Mainly white women. Who does the worst in school? Black boys. The 2 groups with the least amount of things in common. Being able to effectively communicate with someone who doesn't come from your culture seems to be important when it comes to education, right? You click on the article and you are looking at a big picture of a white lady. I didn't have a single male teacher (besides for gym) until my sophomore year (I think AP Trigonometry?). At the very least, we need a 50/50 mix of male and female teachers.
Trust me, though. I don't agree with them getting rid of gifted programs. I don't think you can deal with racism with feel good platitudes and policies. The issue is the wealth gap; that's it. If African-Americans had similar wealth prospects as other groups besides latinos, most of these issues would disappear. African Americans built the country and weren't paid for any of it. We are talking about a group who has been financially shackled for hundreds of years via federal laws; and now we are living in a hyper-capitalistic society. How can you "move out" the hood without money? Heck, can blacks from the hood even get jobs picking fruit on farms like "illegal" workers. Fighting racism against blacks is about a debt that is owed and has never been paid; not about reliving Jim Crow or throwing racists in jail or making white people feel bad about themselves. You can't legislate a man's heart (1st amendment and all).
You are mostly making my point. My second point was classism, which was saying precisely what you are saying.
I was replying to someone who was arguing that everything was solely racism. That doesn't make sense to me. In fact, you argue that white women have not been doing a fair job teaching black men. But why are Asian americans excelling in school then? I don't think it's just racism to blame.
> Fighting racism against blacks is about a debt that is owed and has never been paid
And that's one bad argument. Reparations? Look, I'm from India and india was for a long time ruled by the british, and an even longer time ruled by muslim rulers who became the elite in india. So, if one tells me that britain needs to return the stolen 45 trillion (yup somebody estimated this bullshit number), or that muslims need to pay reparations, I'm pretty sure they would be called racist nationalists.
The law should only make sure that the people right now have equal opportunities for them, regardless of their history, skin color, ethnicity, and even wealth. Everything else is a illiberal idea that can only make things worse
India has a caste system. That's more comparable to African American and White American relations than the British rule of Indian. No one is asking Britain for anything. When your own country has put in you in a caste system; then all of a sudden end the caste system via the law; but don't do anything to fix the damage done; that's a problem.
And the real issue is, you can't have a fair society if we have different castes of people. This is not about class; because if it were you would see different results in the wealths of even first generation immigrants to America compared to African Americans. People who have been in America for 200 years or more have as much wealth as people immigrate illegally. You forget, that people who are able to LEGALLY immigrate to America are people who have the money to do it. Even Africans (NOT African Americans) come to American with more money than African Americans. And Africans don't see themselves as "black". Another reason it's not about skin color, many people from India can be much darker than your average African American. We are talking about a specific group of people that has been caste on the bottom. This is about lineage.
People aren't living in the hoods because they statistically fall on the part of a bell curve that makes them dumber than most; which is why they can't succeed. You can't draw a direct line between IQ tests and how much money someone makes; so that point doesn't matter.
Also, I don't think it's about blaming white women or saying they are doing a "bad" job; especially when you see that many of the black boys are coming from single mother households. This starts to get into uncomfortable territory; but let's just say this isn't about putting the blame on "white people" or "women" or any particular group of people. This is about shame on the American Government for not finding the will to make this right. This is an investment into a large portion of untapped potential in America.
In terms of Asians being able to learn from white teachers; anecdotally many of the Asian Americans I grew up with were forced to learn English very well and were very respectable. Furthermore, they had parents that made sure they excelled in school. It wasn't about them being smarter; it was about them having a disciplined environment. I think cultural, specifically Chinese and Japanese cultures, fitting in is more favored. African American culture is based on attention and being unique. Not understanding the culture will make it hard to understand the person.
Finally, as a side note, I respect where you are from and all; but your country has literally very little rule of law. I'm not saying every single place, but we aren't going to use India as any measuring stick for democracy or restorative justice. Most people I know from India would concur. America has so many flaws, but I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. Having been to many countries, I love them all, but there is a reason the world is being "westernized"; for good or for bad. Cheers mate!
Your argument is all over the place, and it literally says that i said originally. That the differences are caused by a variety of reasons and not just racism.
For example, you started with saying that white women are racist for not teaching black men properly. But then changed it to say that it is cultural because black men are in single households. Said the same thing for asian americans, and pretend to say that i said that asian americans do better because they are genetically smarter. No i didn't mean that. The strictAsian american parent is a stereotype for a reason.
In the end, reparations are a bad and illiberal idea. I can probably never give any example of how it can go bad because you'll just dismiss it like you did.
> It does not help to call all differences as only racism. The truth is differences are caused by a variety of reasons, of which racism is one.
This is where the neo-liberals fall down. They like to blame, or over-blame, racism for all the world's ills as it has the convenient side effect of allowing them to sides-kirt any / most of the blame.
Fundamentally, we have no idea how to educate kids at scale. This is especially true of disadvantaged youth who have difficult home lives with their own myriad particularized challenges.
Is the solution to hold back those who are advantaged and just toss them into unaltered "normal" classrooms? That doesn't really seem correct. It's difficult to understand how it might help anybody.
However, maybe there's something we haven't figured out yet. Something that isn't the de facto racial segregation we currently accept, that also isn't so painful and counterproductive for the advantaged students.
This problem seems to require a creative solution that we are unable or unwilling to identify. Addressing wealth inequality would be an obvious start, but this is out of the purview of educators.
Sadly, dismantling one system that has known defects (but also obvious benefits for the advantaged students) without having any idea how to address the underlying problem seems to be putting the cart before the horse.
The ideal school lets every student learn at their own pace, using a tablet with pre-recorded lectures and computer-graded quizzes. Instead of lecturing, teachers tutor small groups that did poorly on the same quiz, to help them understand the material and progress. This is the mastery learning model [0]. Classroom experiments have shown that mastery learning students learn much more with the same time spent with teachers [1] [2].
This shows that society knows how to educate children equitably and at scale. Unfortunately, it doesn't do it.
I have an idea how to educate kids to scale: don't.
Unfortunately, the American genius is for replacing labor with machinery. When we encounter a field in which that simply doesn't work, we are thrown for a loss.
>Not having an gifted program is like having wrestling matches without weight classes. It's no fun and no good (for anyone).
Agree.
My company had a Diversity and Inclusion series, and the one thing that resonated most with me was the concept of Equity vs. Equality. It was accompanied by a picture of two kids trying to watch a ballgame over a fence, where one kid could not quite see over the fence and the other was far too short.
In the part labelled "Equality", each kid has a 6" tall box to stand on. They get the same things, but the result is that the too-short kid still can't see the game, and the taller kid simply gets a better view. For the part labled "Equity", the tall kid gets a 2" box and the short kid gets an 8" box, resulting in each having an equal view.
Now, that's a pretty simplistic presentation, but does highlight that simply giving every person the same thing is not a solution. Needs will vary across the population, and that's what we should be targeting.
The same should apply for the baseball game they are watching.
The less able players should get 4 strikes, the better players maybe 2.
Correct?
I’m familiar with the illustration you referred to. It’s sad how so few miss the fact that the kids are trying to watch a Competition! And, if the rules were as set forth above, the game wouldn’t be worth watching in the first place.
I'm somewhat confused by what the point you are trying to make here. Are the kids here supposed to be competing on height? Or ability to obtain a taller footstool?
The more I think about this the more absurd it seems. The situations are so entirely different that conflating them this way is just strange.
No, the issue is not zero sum but the trade off of equity versus equality of opportunity.
* In your class are 30 kids, one of which screams and interrupts the the teacher. Do you kick the bad actor out so the other 29 kids can learn, or do you keep the bad actor in so that no one can learn?
* In your class are 10 slow kids and 10 fast kids. Does the teacher go at a slow pace so that everyone learns the same amount or does the teacher go at a pace so that the fast kids learn the most and the slow kids are frustrated by things being over their heads?
The problem is that we have too many blank slate utopians who believe it is the respnsibility of teachers to ensure that everyone leaves school with the same knowledge, and simply don't recognize that different students have different abilities and tempers and different suitability for learning.
This fanatical belief, to which they cling despite all evidence, is absolutely devastating for our educational system and causes it to be grossly inefficient:
* We do not have a trade school system in the US because we hate "tracking", or the idea that some kids should go into a more academically focused track and others should go into a less academic/more hands on track. Thus everyone goes to a school that is chartered as college prep which just means that there are no good college prep schools and there are no good vocational schools. It sucks at both tasks, but at least everyone gets to pretend that they have the same possibilities at college as everyone else. Thus we have a shortage of skilled craftsmen and vocational work, which then forces businesses to import these even as more of the native population slides into poverty while immigrants, who were spared the US secondary educational system, do well.
* Given that there are wide and persistent academic differences between groups, yet the teachers have convinced themselves that differences can only be the result of lack of funding or racism, accelerated classes are being cancelled all across the country and testing regimes that show differences are being cancelled as well, which leads to more misallocation of resources as students are not routed to the education appropriate to them and then universities lack reliable information to make admissions decisions. Thus university education in the US is extremely inefficient as they must do remedial courses to catch up what students should have learned in high school. This inefficiency creates a shortage of high skilled workers, which again forces the businesses to import them as more of the native population slides into poverty while immigrants who attended more rational tertiary regimes do well.
* the idea that "everyone can be X if they just try hard enough" leads to enormous self-loathing on the part of students who are being lied to and forced to participate in classes not suited to them, all so teachers and administrators can cling to these utopian delusions. At the same time the notion that "everyone can be X if they try hard enough" is a mockery to gifted students who are intentionally denied the chance to maximize their potential because educators don't approve of their race or would rather eliminate gifted programs entirely than have their illusions of equity shattered.
>* We do not have a trade school system in the US...
That may be a regional/state thing, then. My high school was adjacent to the vocational school for the region, where high school kids on a trade track would learn trades like carpentry, plumbing, electrical, culinary, etc.
> the idea that "everyone can be X if they just try hard enough
Agree on this as well, and the goal shouldn't be that everyone gets X on the state math test, it should be that every kid has the opportunity to achieve their maximum potential. That's really what it should be, but as you note, nowhere is setup for that and people abhor things that can't be directly measured.
If your class has 30 kids, that is too many kids. Doesn't matter whether your in an advanced class or regular class, your spreading the teacher too thin and they likely can't do more than a light skim of student work, let alone in depth corrections of errors, open tutoring hours, etc
> The problem is that we have too many blank slate utopians who believe ...
This sounds like a personal attack. Next time, talk about the merits of the idea, and leave the out judgement of the people who hold the idea. The phrasing is excessively aggressive. "We have too many X" sounds like you want to get rid of some X. People have a right to participate in society and influence the structure of society through democratic processes. If you think the problem is that too many people hold idea Y, then say that.
Categorization of people based on their beliefs around the topic at hand is not a "personal attack", much like how in a discussion about the merits of condiments, calling someone a "ketchup fan" ain't a personal attack.
> If you think the problem is that too many people hold idea Y, then say that.
That's precisely what the GP did. How you misconstrued it so badly is beyond me.
To me it seems that most miss that the three different kids are watching a competition from back of a fence, without paying, while others paid for the game...
If naming victims is important, than we should also name the students who are victims of their parents being systematically excluded and oppressed as well I would imagine?
I think the smarter thing to do would be to stop demanding everyone complete the same tasks. Let the quicker students skip the repetitive exercise and give them something challenging.
See also the recent discussion on same-age vs mixed-age classrooms. By mixing age groups, the kid who is advanced in history can hang with a grade or two above her own. But she might be a grade below in writing, and that should be 100% ok.
I was a poor kid that attended a gifted program in first grade, the majority of the parents were upper middle class doctors and lawyers. It was lord of the flies classist bs. I clearly wasn't supposed to have been let in and went back to normie classes. It wasn't again until 6th grade that I was back into a one class a day advanced program.
I don't think there should be separate classes for advanced or gifted students. Many of the aspects of gifted programs are just better funded less shitty versions of regular classes. Just like the startup within a corp trope, the gifted programs are often just cover for a private school within a public school.
Now you introduce a new social aspect where you could have freshman in senior classes and via versa. Would that encourage more relationship between 14 and 18 year olds friendship or otherwise and does matching maturity matter?
Does that mean some are finishing in 2 years and others in 6. In some places you have a cutoff of 21 years where you need to go to adult school at that age.
That already happened when I dropped out at 16 and attended community college with 16-60 year olds, as it should be. Maturity lessons would certainly help a whole lot of folks, myself included.
Who said we had to have grades at all? And why there needs to be a split and a set progression? I think some might leave at 16 and some at 28, both could be fine and ideal.
A big factor is that not every teacher is capable of teaching gifted students.
The gifted public school I went to recruited college professors to teach our middle school classes. I met a lot of HS teachers that couldn't keep up with the math the gifted students where doing as early as 7th grade.
It's silly to expect for the average teacher to be able to teach every kind of student. Some teachers are better at challenging gifted students. Some teachers are better at teaching large groups of "average" students. Some teachers are better at teaching basic concepts to students that the educational system has failed.
My experience in school (and now with my kids in school) was that there was no such thing as a group of "average" students. There's a huge variation in most grades.
Sure, you could pick the smartest kid in each class and put them in a gifted program, und give extra help to the slowest learners. But that wont help the rest of the class that still spans a huge range.
That's why I think that education should move away from the "everyone does the same thing" type.
I took some extra physics classes in high school. And guess what, in those extra classes every student got their own exercises. Because we were all at different levels and had different interests.
Well, one problem is that practically every teacher wants to teach the easy, gifted students that already know most of the material anyway. No one wants to deal with the not-so-easy ones, where teacher quality and proper discipline actually makes a huge difference to quality of education. That's why explicit tracking is so unpopular - it exposes these not-so-comfortable dynamics.
I think the challenge is it's pretty difficult to be customizing instruction to 30 different students at wildly different levels.
Having some students help instruct others can work, and when it works, I think there's a lot of positives. But, it can also be socially akward, and lead to a lot of negatives (especially outside the classroom).
I think there are real issues with equal access to advanced classes, but making it equal by ending the program seems like the wrong thing to do.
I think a great strategy would be to allow students who are done with the daily lesson early to have the freedom to be let lose on Khan Academy or other sites which aren't necessarily focusing on getting farther ahead but instead they are given the freedom to explore applications of topics being taught (i.e. mathematics as applied to bird migration patterns or cryptography, etc.).
It's a good idea, except... It would defeat the main purpose of education, which is to teach obedience to authority and that knowledge and subsistence comes only from authority figures, not ones' peers.
> School Committee member Lorna Rivera said at a January meeting that she was disturbed by the findings, noting that nearly 60 percent of fourth graders in the program at the Ohrenberger school in West Roxbury are white even though most third graders enrolled at the school are Black and Hispanic.
> "This is just not acceptable," Rivera said at a recent school committee meeting. "I've never heard these statistics before, and I'm very very disturbed by them."
I’m not sold on gifted education to begin with. It’s a complicated issue for sure, with pluses and minuses. But suspending gifted education programs expressly based on the racial makeup of the kids in the program is illegal discrimination, plain and simple.
I can only speak for myself, and my experience as a rather low income kid in the public school system.
Without advanced learning, I'd have learned at a much slower pace and felt held back and bored. I started in regular classes, and the amount of disruptors and time teachers spent babysitting was absolutely absurd. Luckily I was able to be placed in advanced classes, and all that disappeared.
As for curriculum, we were doing calc 2 while the standard classes ended at about an intro to trig, for example.
I don't know how to fix the disparity, and unfairness, if it exists. But please don't throw out the whole program.
These days no one is ready to talk about cultural and behavioral differences that lead to different outcomes, but it is the most obvious cause of disparities in education and career success between ethnicities. The reason policies like affirmative action or gutting gifted education are discrimination to me, is that students from certain backgrounds are being punished for their cultural and behavioral differences. For example, most Asian cultures emphasize a focus on hard work, academic success, respect for your elders, etc. Anyone who has spent any time in the American schooling system knows that Asian students have remarkably different behavioral patterns from white or black American students. They make choices that lead to their success, and now they’re being discriminated against by those claiming there are “too many” successful Asians. A similar argument can be constructed for other groups.
The 30% of black and Hispanic students who were already in Boston's gifted program by virtue of their intelligence are now also going to be discriminated against in order to pack the advanced classes with their less intelligent peers. This will push the black and Hispanic students already qualified for the program out.
It can at least sound like a statement the school will invest more in some kids than others. At least that what it can sound like outside the gifted bubble.
Probably the solution is to have high standards for all students and classes they all can participate in.
Why would there be more investments in the “gifted” program? In its simplest form, it’s the exact same classroom, exact same teacher, just different stuff being taught - less repetition, less simple exercises, progressing faster through concepts, learning harder stuff.
I think my life would be very different if I was challenged more in school.
I strongly suspect that per-student spending is heavily biased towards special education programs at the not highest-achievement end of the spectrum.
I support the necessity of those programs, but the idea that money is flowing upwards on the achievement curve is probably contradicted by the data, given the intense needs of special education programming.
I think there may be some truth to that, I think some gifted programs pay the teachers a bit extra.
But, often, it may just be the appearance of extra things; if the gifted class does more 'enrichment' activities, it's often because they've got more time left after doing the required curriculum. Or, in my district, the gifted program had busing (which costs money) to get enough kids together to run one class per grade.
If the issue is money though; maybe it could be addressed through demonstrably worse conditions in the gifted program. Maybe a cap of 35 students per class in gifted, and 25 in mainstream. Then there's a tradeoff. My district had bussing as a negative characteristic for the gifted program as well (although my neighborhood school was the bus destination for four out of six years, so it wasn't bad for me)
>It can at least sound like a statement the school will invest more in some kids than others.
Schools already do this ever since No Child Left Behind. It's just in the opposite direction. Kids below the average get far far more money than the median student. Why not have gifted classes as well to support those who excel?
Gifted class don't just “support those who excel”, they support those who perform poorly and disrupt the class because they are not engaged because the mainstream coursework is targeted well below their capacity.
It also mitigates the way which this has gotten worse since NCLB and it's successor policies because schools strongly prefer not to advance students (pre-NCLB, this was an issue because of somewhat legitimate developmental/emotional concerns, but since NCLB and ratings based on the distribution of performance vs. grade level on standardized tests, preventing advancement is now also a way of juicing metrics.)
Of course both forms of special ed are blunt instruments to deal with not doing better by-student calibration across the board to students, incliding those in the wide middle of performance.
Because those kids who are below average will suck up way more state and federal money in the long run if left to their own devices than anyone will benefit because Gifted Greg got to take Linear Algebra in high school.
I think its more about segmenting based on aptitude and interest. The gifted classes consist of children that can move at a quicker pace with less distraction. I don't think its about giving more resources to that set of children, but be able to alter the curriculum to challenge them more.
>Probably the solution is to have high standards for all students and classes they all can participate in.
Well, one could propose that "AP Calculus" should be the high standard for a high-school diploma for _all_ students but neither the parents nor teachers would support that.
EDIT to reply: the "AP Calculus" was just a placeholder that people are familiar with and not intended as a tangent into any hidden self-serving agenda of The College Board revenue generation. We can just call it "Calculus 101" for purposes of this discussion. The parents would not universally support passing "Calculus 101" as a mandatory requirement for their child to get a high-school diploma.
It’s no surprise that parents and teachers would not support “AP Calculus” as a standard, as it is run by the College Board with no oversight. The school has to pay for each child enrolled and pay again if the child doesn’t take the exam at the end of the class, the exams are graded but offer zero feedback to the teacher or student.
They have annual revenue >$1B with over $100 million in “excess revenue” (you can’t call it profit because they are a non-profit). The CEO earns over $1 million per year, sold his education consulting company to a huge education textbook publisher, claims that he “had” to get a job at McKinsey because he couldn’t find work as a high school English teacher, etc.
I was lucky to test into the gifted program in high school in the mid-late 80s in poor rural US nowhere, it worked exactly like that - kids demonstrate ability to get selected (not race/status), as the resources were very slim. It allowed me to use/learn the TRS-80/3 and Apple ][e and make a career in tech - there is absolute value in these programs for the kids as an anecdotal story from one of them decades later. ;)
Different students have different needs. It doesn't make sense to provide the same experience to every student. Homogenizing the experience is a disservice to all students, not just the gifted.
I'm not. There were approximately 30ish "gifted" students in my graduating class. By that, I mean they were identified as gifted early on and attended gifted classes until middle school when there were other minor accelerated learning classes (like taking Algebra a year early).
For the vast majority of "gifted" children, the reason they were gifted at all has a ton to do with the amount of time their parents spent with them outside of the classroom. Usually, "giftedness" is about a parent's ability to focus their child in a way that the child would likely not focus on their own.
Just look at the science fair projects that get national recognition. It takes no effort at all to determine the difference between a project produced by a kid and a project created by a parent who guided the kid through the steps necessary to produce a scientifically valid conclusion.
I'm all for high schools pairing with universities to let high school students knock out college classes and get high school credit for them, though. English III and English IV are particularly useless classes which do nothing for most kids. Replace them with college classes.
None of them became medical or PhD doctors. One became a lawyer. Two have Master's degrees.
Their classmates? 7 PhDs. 4 MDs. About 10 MBAs (that I am aware of), 8 lawyers, 2 psychologists, 3 SLPs, at least 5 with MEs, and several self-made millionaires.
Gifted doesn't mean genius. For most, it simply means they have a head start. Head starts don't last once your peers have a reason to compete.
This is why I don't care whether gifted programs live or die. Place the child in the system where he needs to be, but stop pretending that little Bobby with the parents who have been trying to teach him to read since he was crapping his diaper is a genius simply because people spent time forcing him to learn something. For many kids, telling them they're gifted compared to their peers simply inflates their egos past their talent.
I was with you initially, but after thinking about it could be argued that creating classes that are overwhelmingly white in an overwhelmingly non white district are something approaching segregation. In the end, all that is being done to the “advanced” students is that they’re being offered the same education that their peers are getting. Resources spent on the advanced learning program could have been spent on offering a better quality of education for the entire school. I’m sympathetic to both sides of this issue but I don’t find it simple.
It’s not segregation because the school doesn’t place students in these classes based on their skin color.
Oftentimes these disparities arise from communities being economically mixed along racial lines. It’s not even the case that these economic disparities arise from what’s called “systemic racism.” In urban school districts many kids are immigrants or children of immigrants, and have lesser economic circumstances because of recent migration. Treating them differently based on skin color doesn’t help erase some historical injustice. For example, Bangladeshi Americans, a group I belong to, have a household income in New York City much lower than whites. Indian Americans, by contrast, have incomes much higher than whites. These disparities aren’t due to differing effects of “racism” but recency of immigration and characteristics of the immigrants. This is true for Latinos as well. They have lower incomes now because a large number are recent economic migrants. But their incomes are converging with those of white people over time: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. (In fact, after three generations, half of Latinos don’t even identify as such.)
The data shows that, apart from Black and Native American people, other ethnic groups in the US are similarly situated to how Polish people, Italians, etc., were during the early 20th century. Or how Cubans or Vietnamese were in the later 20th century. They’re in the process of economic integration. It’s not a situation where government discrimination is required now to erase the effects of past government discrimination.
For similar reasons, it makes no sense to discriminate between kids based on race to address present (rather than systemic) economic disparities. For purposes of dismantling gifted programs and test-based admissions, whites and Asians are typically lumped together. But in NYC, for example, most Asian kids in the gifted programs are actually fairly poor, because they’re the children of recent immigrants. It’s irrational to lump them together with whites in the “advantaged” group.
"The data shows that, apart from Black and Native American people, other ethnic groups in the US are similarly situated to how Polish people, Italians, etc., were during the early 20th century. Or how Cubans or Vietnamese were in the later 20th century. They’re in the process of economic integration. It’s not a situation where government discrimination is required now to erase the effects of past government discrimination."
That will end the narrative of systemic racism and then all the "diversity" officers and quote will be blown away.
Call what you want but America is the least racist country.
That's a pretty wide exception, and it's worth addressing why they remain an exception. Why are these groups so slow to economically integrate?
The simplest (and therefore most Occam's-razor-friendly) explanation for the black population is that they can't usually pass as "white" as easily as other demographics. But this doesn't really explain much for Native Americans, who could pass as "white" about as easily as Latinos and/or Asians.
> It’s irrational to lump them together with whites in the “advantaged” group.
Why?
The “advantaged” here isn't about transitory economic status but systematic racism, and the durable effects of historical racism.
The material you are citing, taken at face value, justifies lumping not only Asians, but everyone but Blacks and Native Americans, into the “advantaged” group with Whites, rather than providing an argument against lumping recent Asian immigrants into that group.
In the paragraph you’re quoting, I’m talking about what you call transitory economic status above. The point is that if you’re trying to address that, it makes no sense to lump poor Asian kids in NYC together with wealthy white kids. Or to treat poor white or Asian kids differently than poor Black or Latino kids.
I address systemic racism in the second to last paragraph above, and I agree that in that context, everyone but Blacks and native Americans should be in the advantaged group.
Did you miss that part of the article or have you intentionally excluded the presence of Asian students in your reply because it makes your argument stick better? I don't think it meets the definition of segregation when a subset of multiple groups are given special treatment due to their aptitude on topics that are inherently race-agnostic. Yes, those with money and power can better educate their kids compared to the poor, but so can those without money who simply value education higher (speaking as a 1.5 gen immigrant who grew up extremely poor). Why are we always the first ones to be penalized in the name of racial equality?
> In the end, all that is being done to the “advanced” students is that they’re being offered the same education that their peers are getting.
This is generally not what advanced students get. They are usually taught different, more advanced curricula. Not all kids are capable of learning quickly, so the whole point of a separate program is to provide quick learners with advanced curricula and others with the support they need.
>Resources spent on the advanced learning program could have been spent on offering a better quality of education for the entire school.
This assumption rests on the false supposition that all children have the same intelligence and learn at the same rate, and the only difference is environmental factors. While environmental factors are certainly important, they aren't everything, despite how wonderful that would be towards realizing the fantasy of a "fair and just" world. The fact is that people are different - innately. Just as a proper schooling system allocates resources for students that learn at a slower rate, so should a proper schooling system allocate resources for students who learn at an advanced rate.
> Resources spent on the advanced learning program could have been spent on
Segregating students who would fail to be engaged by mainstream coursework unless disproportionate effort and attention was focussed on them is “offering a better quality of education for the entire school.”
> But suspending gifted education programs expressly based on the racial makeup of the kids in the program is illegal discrimination, plain and simple.
If they were selected based on their race, it's racial discrimination. If the classes were suspended based on the student's race, it's racial discrimination, plain and simple.
It would only be a legal risk if they were putting kids in the program based on race. This does not seem to be the case. It just so happens to be that a disproportionate amount of whites and Asians made it into the program.
Why do you conclude that it doesn’t seem to be the case? There are a ton of known second-order causes of education inequality like redlining, tax disparities, etc. It’s highly likely that the disparities in this program happen because of racism, even if no one sat down and said “we should admit mostly white and Asian kids”.
But if the rationale is compensating for things like redlining, then it doesn’t make sense to count Latinos in the “disadvantaged” category while counting Asians in the “advantaged” category. (The majority of the kids in the groups that the administrator deemed underrepresented were Latino, not Black.) Racist policies like redlining in the 1950s-1970s were not applied to Latinos any more than to Asians, and in fact were applied less so. (There was never anything comparable to the Asian Exclusion Act applied to immigrants from Latin America.) Moreover, Latinos have similar income mobility to whites. Latino families who have been in America since the 1960s and 1970s would have quite small income gaps compared to whites by now: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353.
It’s true that economic disparities can be caused by historical racism. But that’s not a basis for distinguishing Latinos from Asians, or really Latinos and Asians from Italians, Polish people, etc., who are similarly situated to each other.
I think trying to look at this through the lens of a single issue is doomed to fail. And frankly, the full scope is beyond what can be covered in a single HN discussion. Because there are a ton of intertwined issues, and many of them don’t have a neat line straight to “underperformance in schools”. It’s the “systemic” part of “systemic racism”.
If there is systemic racism then which system is racist? I think 99% of people nowadays would be fine fighting against such a system. Is it the school system, bank system, the government?
"Which system is racist?" is the wrong way to look at this. The point I'm trying to make is that there are many intertwined factors in play, and it may not be immediately apparent how some of them impact the issue.
Let me expand a bit on the two factors I mentioned above, redlining and taxes. In the US, schools are generally funded by local taxes. On its own, that wouldn't seem to cause racial education disparities. But the neighborhoods in which people congregate are affected by the legacy of redlining, in which Black people were segregated into neighborhoods with lower property values. As a result, children in those neighborhoods receive worse educations, which makes them appear less "gifted" when combined with other students in higher grades.
Those are of course not the only factors in play. But hopefully they illuminate how a seemingly benign program can entrench disparities created elsewhere.
> Let me expand a bit on the two factors I mentioned above, redlining and taxes. In the US, schools are generally funded by local taxes
That’s not true. Only half of school funding comes from local taxes. The other half comes from state and federal sources, and are targeted to level the differences in local funding. Including state funding, many school districts have progressive funding (with poor districts getting more per student than rich ones). https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-...
> Only half of school funding comes from local taxes.
That still leaves a lot of wiggle room for school revenues, and a lot of influence on those revenues (and, correspondingly, student education) by residents' economic class.
And further, just because the state/federal spending is "targeted to level the differences" doesn't mean it actually does so.
As a general rule, minority-heavy urban districts spend ~2x the $/student than middle-class white exurban districts in the same state. Definitely true in MA. Go check the numbers for your state, maybe it's an outlier, I don't know.
Money goes less far in the city and they have more issues to deal with, but the $/student is not "inequitable" to borrow a word.
I am a bit confused. You said it is systemic racism but can't provide a system (or systems) that are racist. I looked up the definition of systemic to ensure I wasn't missing something and it is "relating to a system, especially as opposed to a particular part." This clearly sounds to me that there needs to be a system involved. Perhaps systemic is not the correct word?
In relation to taxes: I don't think you read tne article. It says the standards are determined at the school level. That means how well students do at a school in a wealthier area is irrelevant to how they do in a school in a poorer area.
As for redlining, it is illegal. Even if you want to say there are historical issues that are still around today because of redlining, it wouldn't matter since the standards are school based not district widd based.
If it was district wide or statewide I would generally agree with you that there could be issues related to that. I do think that funds should be distributed based on number of students (and perhaps a bit of a difference due to cost of living for teachers) rather than based on property tax rates in that area. I don't know how Massachusetts (or Boston specifically) handles this so it could already be done how I described.
All three of those are subsystems of a broader overall system that makes up American society. It's that overall system that perpetuates systemic racism through a combination of factors in the myriad subsystems.
Addressing economic inequality along class lines would go a long way, since it's the economic system that has the strongest (or at least most tangible) impact right now. That doesn't do much to address lingering cultural issues, however.
> There was never anything comparable to the Asian Exclusion Act applied to immigrants from Latin America.
You mean other than ICE crackdowns just so happening to target Latinos? Or the exact same "they're stealing our jobs" rhetoric once used against Chinese immigrants now being applied to Latino immigrants? Do we wait until after Latino work crews are executed and buried in mass graves before we acknowledge there are some problems? Or maybe we wait until Latino neighborhoods get torched by populist mobs?
There is no evidence that there was any racism involved. I wouldn't say with 100% certainty there was no racism, but until anyone can show any evidence of racism I will not jump to that conclusion.
There is a perfectly logical (and non-racist) reason for blacks and Hispanics to not make it into the gifted program as frequently as their white and Asian peers and that is they, in average, have lower grades.
People see the outcome is disproportionate and assume racism. Instead of looking at the evidence to see why it happened they look at the outcome and try to fit their preferred narrative into it.
If there is racism which causes students to have a difficult life which then causes them to do worse in school and doing worse in school means the student won't be accepted into the gifted program then I do not consider the gifted program admission to be racist. The solution should be to help those in a bad situation (regardless if it was caused by racism or something else) so anybody who is disadvantaged can be on an equal playing field and meet the requirements.
There are a lot of poor white students. They likely struggle in school because of that. I don't think the solution would be to make it easier for those poor whites to make it into the gifted program just because they are poor. And yet many people would make that argument for blacks and Hispanics.
Removing the gifted program because you don't like the races who make it in is racist.
The problem is that the people who benefit from the situation are never interested in identifying and fixing the "bad situations" until things like this happen. They're fine accepting a system that privileges their own children at the expense of others, and only when their children might be affected do they become ostensible advocates for looking at the situation holistically.
Most people support things that aid themself or their family. I don't think that has anything to do with racism. Supporting more objective standards like grades and test results are the only fair way to determine who goes into the gifted classes. Determining gifted class placement by race is racist.
Helping people in a bad situation is a different issue and should be treated as such. Even if there were no poor people, uneducated parents, single parent homes, etc we still don't know that blacks and Hispanics would make it into gifted classes at a higher rate then they are now. Whites and Asians also have those issues and they would likely do better if they didn't have to deal with them.
Is your goal educating students to the best of their individual abilities? Or correcting for societal inequalities that aren’t that kid’s doing or fault, meanwhile using the kids as pawns in the pursuit of that goal of equal outcome?
I’m heavily biased toward meeting the needs of the individual students. If you don’t, affluent parents will nope out of your school anyway (and possibly out of the neighborhood altogether), as they reasonably should.
We are heavily pro-public schooling, attending and volunteering often at the elementary school and intending to attend the high school, but grades 6-8 schools are a mess in our town, so we’re going to private schools for those years. It’s not worth sacrificing our kids’ academic outcome at the altar of fairness and equality pulled down to the lowest common denominator.
My point is that the status quo is not educating students to the best of their individual abilities. It's neglecting the education of some — in ways that heavily correlate with class and race — and then, when those students unsurprisingly do worse, saying "well, they're not as smart, so they can't have the gifted education."
If anyone (regardless of race) went into a class that was too difficult for them they would do worse in school. This will result in them not getting into as good of a university (or not getting into any university) and would result in them doing worse in life.
> A district analysis of the program found that more than 70 percent of students enrolled in the program were white and Asian, even though nearly 80 percent of all Boston public school students are Hispanic and Black.
I'm having a hard time trying to understand what the acceptable outcome they want is. Proportional enrollment based on race?
This possibility bothers me, since I never identified myself by race. So would I be lumped into a generic "Asian" category in their statistics based on my skin colour? Why is this the correct form of human categorization?
EDIT: This is the opening paragraph. It says it all:
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
I thought the original was a bit over the top a bit ridiculous almost. Bergeron's some kind of god being almost. The movie kept it a little more realistic and was darker i felt.
Every time people talk about the real problem of so-called "gifted" classes containing disproportionately large numbers of white students, this story gets trotted out as an ominous warning of "where this could go". This is the slippery slope fallacy; who is suggesting that we attach bags of lead weights to people who are stronger than average or play loud noises to disrupt the thinking of people smarter than average? No such measures, or anything like them, is proposed in the article. Actually, no measures are proposed at all because the school hasn't decided what to do yet (beyond temporarily suspending gifted classes).
So how is this story at all relevant or illuminating to the article, beyond as an exercise in fearmongering?
You can't apply a literal interpretation of the story when no such interpretation was intended by Vonnegut. Of course he never expected actual lead weights would be strapped to people by legal decree. That's not the point.
How it relates to the article is the "lead weight" of removing the availability of AP classes from White and Asian students is a severely misguided attempt at making Black and Hispanic students equal, as if they weren't already. It's actually a terribly wrong message to the Black and Hispanic students.
It seems to me that a better approach is try to understand the reasons why more Black and Hispanic students aren't enrolling while continuing to provide these classes to any student who qualifies, regardless of race.
It is a common trick of managers to only measure things that make them look good. Is the number of regressions going up? Remove the isRegression checkbox from your bug tracking system.
They just don't understand that Asian families work their kid harder? It's a different world. When I was a kid, there were only 3 acceptable outcomes: becoming a lawyer, a doctor, or a professor. Then I discovered coding - sorry mom :)
So I went to a bottom of the barrel districts for school, but still aced it. I got admitted in a great US school, and a semester later I had proved my worth enough to get a full scholarship. What if you had put me in a better system? I would have only excelled more!
The problem is not the school environment, but the families. From what I have seen, only military-style schools, with the students living in, can provide better chances for disadvantaged students. The best school environment will do nothing against a toxic family and toxic friends that use racist monikers to attack those that have a chance to succeed ("crab mentality").
And BTW the comment below "I miss the days when the schools in the wealthier part of town had things like advanced classes and air conditioning, and the rest of us just sucked it up and didn't whine" makes no sense. I went to school in a tropical country, with no AC. Yes I did sweat a lot in class and I took 2 showers per day minimum, but I didn't die.
Since the lack of amenities like AC or computers will do nothing to prevent people that are pushed up by their family, I think they will likewise do nothing to help people succeed when they are held back by their social group. Amenities are just a highly visible distraction, correlated, but not causal.
> "Diversity substantively means fewer whites and asians."
So here's what I fail to understand: why punish Asians? They (or perhaps I should say we) had nothing to do with the history of white vs black oppression in the United States. Many of us weren't even here until well after the civil rights movement of the '60s and '70s. This sort of "diversity" is basically progressives being willing to be racist to Asians to compensate blacks for the past injustices perpetrated by whites, which is basically robbing Peter to pay Paul any way you look at it.
So here's what I fail to understand: why punish Whites? The students had nothing to do with the history of white vs black oppression in the United States. None of them were even here until well after the civil rights movement of the '60s and '70s. This sort of "diversity" is basically progressives being willing to be racist to Whites to compensate blacks for the past injustices, which is basically robbing Peter to pay Paul any way you look at it.
If I wanted to take a critical view of your comment, you're basically saying "Sure, punish white people.. but how dare you punish Asians!"
The goal of any diversity program - ignoring whether or not that goal is good - is to increase representation among historically under-represented groups. At least as far as academics and education are concerned, Asians are objectively not under-represented. If you're looking at diversity programs in the urban United States, this translated pretty directly into "more black and brown kids."
It's hard to ride that line between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. But it seems to be that just saying "wow there's not enough black and brown kids in these classes, so we better cancel them rather than see what went wrong (or if anything actually went wrong)" is a pretty ass-backwards way to handle things.
Because Asians broadly speaking do not depend on favors from the ruling elite for their position, thus they are politically unreliable (although currently mostly aligned with them).
Because Asians perform better and that would contradict the narrative that without systemic racism the outcome would reflect the overall demographics of the population, so 50% men/women, 60% whites, 18% latinos, 13% blacks, 6% asians etc.
Because Asians blow up their entire "critical race theory". If racism is truly the cause of certain minorities poor outcomes, then why are Asian outcomes as good or better than whites?
How in the space of seventy years or so did equal rights go from 'Stop Segregation' to 'Everybody Should be Segregated Based On Race or Other Physical Factors'?
"Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we've got to stay together. We've got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh's court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity."
-MLK, I've Been To The Mountaintop, last speech given the night before assasination
“Antiracist” doesn’t mean “not racist”; it’s a Marxist ideology focusing on racial identities and purposeful systemic racism to “balance” the power between racial tribes.
It’s extremely racist.
Anti-Asian racism will become normalized as long as “antiracism” is part of the Democratic agenda. They’re literally fighting to overturn civil rights laws in CA and WA so the government can discriminate based on race again.
> “Antiracist” doesn’t mean “not racist”; it’s a Marxist ideology focusing on racial identities and purposeful systemic racism to “balance” the power between racial tribes.
Why do you say this is "Marxist ideology"? What makes it Marxist, precisely?
“Antiracism” is another name for “critical race theory” which inherits from the general Marxist body of philosophy, of which “critical blah theory” tends to be a common name. Like “people’s republic” — it’s a fashion thing.
In sociology and political philosophy, "Critical Theory" means the Western-Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, developed in Germany in the 1930s and drawing on the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Though a "critical theory" or a "critical social theory" may have similar elements of thought, capitalizing Critical Theory as if it were a proper noun stresses the intellectual lineage specific to the Frankfurt School.
This is true, antiracism is active in the presence of racism, “not racist” may or may not be.
> it’s a Marxist ideology
No, it's not. I suppose if you met “Marxist” metaphorically in that, like Marxism, it posits the existence of a status quo struggle, and calls for consciousness of that struggle and activity within it rather than indifference to it or denial of it, it would be accurate, but that's kind of a weak basis for such an emotionally-loaded metaphor.
> purposeful systemic racism to “balance” the power between racial tribes.
Antiracism does not call for “purposeful systemic racism” for any purpose.
>They’re literally fighting to overturn civil rights laws in CA and WA so the government can discriminate based on race again.
Source? From a reputable location, the only ones I'm finding are sites with headlines like:
“If I wanted America to fail”
Capitalism Explained
George Soros
Honest News
How Do You Kill 11 Million People?
Joe Biden in Five Minutes
Lara Logan’s Warning to America
Make Mine Freedom
Obama Admin Caught Sending Guns to Drug Cartels
Rules for Radicals
SCOTUS: Government Can Force You to Buy Anything
The Iron Lady
The Socialist’s Camoflage
Trump Admin Accomplishments
Vote Fraud
What is a Constitutional Moderate?
and even Breitbart says
Prop 209 prevents race-based affirmative action in state contracts, government jobs, and university admissions
If you take a random sample from a population, then you'd expect the sample to be representative of the population. All else being equal: if you categorize a population in some arbitrary way, and there's a particular distribution of those categories in that population; you should expect the same distribution in your sample.
In this case the distribution in the population was not identical to the distribution in the sample.
Why would you expect the sample of gifted children to be representative of the population. By almost every measure Hispanic and Black students fall behind other students. The achievement gap is very well studied.
The challenge is fixing the problem, not pretending it doesn’t exit by making white and Asian students educations worse.
This is like the Boston PD issuing orders to shoot more unarmed Asians since black and Hispanics are shot more disproportionately.
In combination with other indicators, a strong gender/racial skew relative to the underlying population can be a predictor that your program or organization will be in trouble soon.
Indeed, it seems to be in trouble at this time: The article states: "Cassellius says interest in the program had declined over several years[...]". So there are clearly more issues.
My understanding of the article is that they're going on a one year hiatus to figure out the issues and fix them.
The populations in these urban school districts are very skewed due to middle class Black and Latino populations migrating to the suburbs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_flight. So the district comprises rich white yuppies, and lower income people of color, often recent immigrants, with little in-between.
So according to you, it's due to demographics, where people are actually becoming more affluent!
That does seem rather hopeful for the future.
Thank you for taking the time to explain.
Are you predicting that schools will have a rough time for the next generation or so, until the current generation (or the one after) become parents themselves?
Yes and no. Immigrants are constantly coming in, and cities like Boston will probably continue to be a first waypoint for immigrants getting their legs under them. So in that sense, school districts in cities will continue to face these disparities. Apart from that, even as the Black middle class grows, there is persistent multi-generational poverty among Black people in urban areas that has proven nearly impossible to improve. Schools will continue to deal with that as well.
Two other Asian kids and I were at a public school of several hundred kids of mostly minority groups. We three were consistently in the top 5 ranks and none of us were especially well off.
Intelligence being shown in schools isn't random: it's a result of who can afford better education in the lower grades, education materials in pre-school, a baby sitter who can teach basic math before school begins, private school, pre school, etc. This makes perfect sense, and the smart thing to do is to implement a program below this at the younger grades to try to give the entire lower grade levels a better chance at getting that advanced learning. "Something isn't right" doesn't mean kill the whole damn program. Maybe evaluate their on-boarding process in addition.
In my elementary school, I was lucky enough to not miss the one day they were testing for advanced learning (if you missed it, tough luck: that was the only onboarding year) and it changed my school experience forever. I don't think I would be the person I am today, at all, if I had been sick that one day. If there are similar restrictions or barriers for entry that are not related to intelligence, they need to be looked into.
I couldn’t agree more. I benefited greatly from a gifted track in my otherwise fairly mediocre public school system. Now seeing my kids and their peers, the differences in starting point of kindergarten and 1st graders was shocking. Many kids came in knowing how to read Dr Suess, do basic math, and take turns in games/crafts/conversation. Others couldn’t even manage any of those basics. We’re in a controlled choice district (where there is cross-city busing but some bias towards the two schools closest to you and to where an older sibling attends). I think I could watch a kindergartner for 90 minutes and predict the family economic status with high accuracy. (Cambridge, MA has plenty of affluent people of all races; this breaks down on economic lines much more than on any other dimension.)
I can’t even really “blame” the families for whom they need to have all adults working outside the home and often more than one job. How can you do that and expect to give the kids a level of attention that a family with a full-time adult in the house (whether a parent or nanny)? Kids are exhausting; so is working multiple jobs and worrying about money all the time.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I think it’s terrible to kneecap the successful and promising students just because not everyone is one or because you find a socio-economic discrepancy in the makeup. If you do that, you accelerate the flight of better students out to better public districts, to private schools, or supplemental experiences, which does nothing to lift the majority of the student body. (I suppose private schooling means you get some money from the parents who didn’t leave your town without having to bother to serve them. But you also lose all that role modeling.)
Sure. It's just my district's extended learning program though, I am not in the Boston program.
It was a program that started in elementary school (https://ycsd.yorkcountyschools.org/EXTENDCenter). In second grade they tested us for it, I don't remember a whole lot about it. I do remember it was logic-based and math-based. Every Wednesday from 2nd grade to 5th grade (then in middle school on a different schedule) we would spend in the extended learning program's building (a very small wing). We learned French (though looking back it was more preparing us to learn other languages than actually learning French), did science projects, wrote stuff about a random topic selected out of an encyclopedia, etc. It really is my most fond memory of school and I still keep in contact with the teacher.
Over in the middle school side, we did more advanced topics. We studied the Ebola virus and how it affects the body, we wrote papers about an unknown John Doe in Yorktown in 1770's (then we literally walked to it, separate tangent below), we had a "socratic seminar" where we debated topics, we built a Rube Goldberg machine, all sorts of stuff.
It actually changed my life. Anyone who says advanced education doesn't help simply doesn't see the changes a well-designed, thought out program has. And this was all in a public school. I checked their site recently and they are still running it even through the pandemic, which warms my heart.
I mentioned the one-day, one-time onboarding process. They have since remedied it, instead scheduling tests with students chosen. This is a good solution and I'm glad they implemented it.
Tangent: I lived in Yorktown Virginia, which is probably my second favorite thing about my childhood. The pre-school I went to was a 30 second walk down a hill to Yorktown Beach. In middle school, we read about the Revolutionary War, then took a field trip consisting of walking outside the doors, through the forest and 5 minutes of walking, and just like that we were where it actually took place, with monuments, statues, historical signs, etc.
No problem. And I do agree with you: there is a problem that needs to be addressed with their system. I just don't think "let's not let new students in" is the answer.
The lack of offering for good students is already a major issue at every step of the education system as it is, closing these classes is a major step backward and "fuck you" to good students (especially with such a lame justification).
If you have a rock in place of a brain there's always some program to keep you in the education system but at the other side of the spectrum if you reach the top 10% of students "that's it you won the game" and you're doomed to utter boredome until university. This is enormously demotivating.
I was in this situation all the way until university (consistantly achieving the best grade without putting any effort into it) and the lack of mental stimulation took a massive toll on my mental health, especially during high school but also middle school to a lesser extend.
Looking back at my scholarity I think it was mostly fine until age ~12 because until then school is mostly a fun daycare to meet friends so it's no big deal if the educational content is low or trivial, but then the next 7 years (which corresponds to middle and high school in my country) could have easily been compressed into 4 as far as I'm concerned. But the possibility to do it simply doesn't exist.
Just curious - would you guess Asian students were under or over represented among those classes? I haven't seen any data on it, but I know how I'd bet...
Reason I bring it up is, you seem to be implying the classes were favoring white students, and if that were true presumably you expect they disadvantage Asian students. Is that what you think?
> A district analysis of the program found that more than 70 percent of students enrolled in the program were white and Asian, even though nearly 80 percent of all Boston public school students are Hispanic and Black.
Just from these two numbers you can see that a white/asian student is ~10x more likely to end up in the program than a black/hispanic student.
So to me it definitely looks like the classes are favoring white and asian students. (Can't say much about white vs. asian because the article doesn't say much about them)
The article doesn't explain why this difference is there, and I don't think there's an easy explanation, but it's defintely something where you should look closely at the criteria for picking students, because it sure looks like some students are at a systemic disadvantage.
I also read the article and I don't understand why you're asking. As you yourself elaborate the article doesn't clarify the breakdown between Asian and white students. It's possible that Asian students are under or over represented based only on the text. Of course, I think it's reasonable to assume that Asian students are over represented because Asian students are usually over represented in academic achievement.
The comment I'm replying to suggests that the system favors white students. I'm pointing out that a system that favored white students probably wouldn't over represent Asian students in advanced programs, as, I assume, Boston Public Schools probably do.
In general, I get annoyed at the pretense that there is something strange, mysterious, or maybe racist going on when the explanation is obvious and well understood. Asian people typically outperform white people on standardized tests. White people typically outperform black and Hispanic people on standardized tests. What a shock that on systems based on or like standardized tests (schools) Asians do better than whites who in turn do better than blacks and Hispanics! I wonder what incredibly complicated "systemic disadvantage" explains this? Or, maybe, it's just the simple, observable, and widely documented fact I alluded to before.
"It's defintely something where you should look closely at the criteria for picking students, because it sure looks like some students are at a systemic disadvantage" - The article explains the process. There is a test given to third graders. Students who score highly on the test are placed in a lottery to randomly select students who will be allowed to apply and join the program. Most of the students (116/143) who applied after the lottery were accepted.
I agree that it is worth checking on racial demographics on each of the steps of the process. For example, if 70% of high scores on the test were earned by black and Hispanic students but only 20% of black and Hispanic students were admitted to the program, with the remainder being rejected due to "losing" the lottery or having their applications denied for some reason - that would be an enormous red flag, and, without some explanation I cannot imagine, likely evidence of a terrible racist act by the people organizing the system. Would you agree though, that if the proportion of black and Hispanic students ultimately admitted to the program roughly corresponded to the proportion who achieved high scores on the admissions test, that racism was likely not the explanation for what is observed here?
I never said anything about racism. You are putting words in my mouth. Systemic disadvantage doesn't mean someone is actively trying to harm these students.
A 10x difference needs a bit more explaining than some handwaving about racial stereotypes.
If there's a program, and it only helps the high achievers of a group that is likely already very privileged, it's a good idea to ask if that program is really working as intended.
And no, I don't think that explaining results with some arbitrary test scores is enough. Tests results often strongly depend on how well students were prepared for them, so they might just exacerbate previous inequality.
Earlier you wrote "Not useful for the many gifted students who are not white" and "it sure looks like some students are at a systemic disadvantage". What is a systemic disadvantage for non-white students but racism? For what it's worth, I would categorize a system that disadvantages people based on their race as racism/racist. I don't mean to be putting words in your mouth, but I do understand you as claiming that this is a system that is disadvantaging people based on their race (privileging white students, harming black and Hispanic). If that's not what you mean, then I apologize because I have misunderstood.
I'm not relying on handwaving and racial stereotypes here. There are plenty of measurements pointing out the difference in standardized tests. For example, this document[1] shows SAT scores and percentiles divided by race. Assuming I'm not misreading this, it shows that 23% of Asian students score a 1400+ on the SAT compared to 1% of black students with the same score. That's more than a 10x difference. That seems a little hard to believe, but wikipedia[2] also has some illustrative graphs that suggest 10x+ differences. For example, figure 1-9 shows the difference in perfect math scores by race.
I don't think it's really a stereotype but a well documented fact that Asians outscore white and black students both on standardized tests. I also think that tests are kind of like school. Tests are similar to how you are graded, they are about similar content, classes are meant to prepare you for tests, etc. It seems straightforward to me to say that if Asian students are good at the kind of standardized tests they encounter in school, we should also expect them to be good at the standardized tests that gate high achievement programs, and that we should expect them to enter and perform well in those programs.
I'm not familiar with any evidence showing the efficacy of test prep and I'd be really surprised if it was as large as the differences between groups that I've pointed to in the sources mentioned above. Perhaps you could share something to read on the topic?
Regardless, students who take test prep courses are probably a better fit for advanced classes that require students to do more work. Doing more work is how you prepare for tests and how you perform in the advanced classes. As I mentioned before, I think it is absolutely worthwhile to check and see if racism is happening here - and I think you could do that by checking what percentage of students by race pass the test, win the lottery, and are admitted. If there are unexplainable discrepancies between those steps, that would be good evidence of racism, the fact that different racial groups perform differently on the tests seems just like a recreation of a well known and oft-observed and documented phenomenon.
> checking what percentage of students by race pass the test, win the lottery, and are admitted. If there are unexplainable discrepancies between those steps, that would be good evidence of racism
Yes, I agree that this would be evidence of racism. But you can't turn the argument around. The lack of any discrepancies does not mean that black or hispanic students aren't at a disadvantage, because the disadvantage might be something that lead to the worse test results in the first place.
> What is a systemic disadvantage for non-white students but racism?
Parental income or education could be a systemic disadvantage that is not racist. Or a lack of role models. Or different amount of support by families.
This seems to really stretch the word "system". A "systemic disadvantage" would be something like the test being rigged against you, or people of your racial group needing higher scores to get admittance (incidentally that's a systemic disadvantage Asians often face). In other words, there is an organized set of rules that give you a disadvantage, a system, if you will.
What you're describing seems less systemic and more naturally occurring. Nobody forces Asian families to put more emphasis on academics or black families to put less, that just tends to be the way things happen. If there is a system that encourages it I think it would only be the kind of "system" that could be anything.
Something like parental situation likely has a great deal to do with this and that's important to point out. For example, suppose that children raised by a single parent did worse academically, and suppose that 2/3 black families had only one parent compared to 1/5 Asian families. That's important to know because it means that to fix the problem we would need to encourage black people to stop creating single family homes rather than to force schools to stop educating white and Asian advanced students. I think this approach would result in a culture that spends less "D&I energy" on things like making sure school programs are exactly the right color and more on encouraging good behavior and explaining the problems of single parent families and how they can be avoided.
In this case I used the word "systemic" to mean "relating to the system as a whole" as opposed to just a small part of the system. I don't know if there is a better word. Maybe "societal" would work better?
In any case, I don't really care much about the distinction between "natural occurring" or "caused by some system". Of course it's important to search for the underlying reasons for inequality, but you can still do things even if you don't know what exactly is ultimately causing the inequality.
If you discover that a school program only benefits some races, because your tests tend to select only certain races, you don't need to change everything about society to make sure all races have similar test results.
You could also just change the admission criterion -- and I'm not talking about quotas. Maybe personal interviews with teachers or social workers would work better for selecting students? Or maybe you should just select the best students from each class, to avoid putting students at a disadvantage if they happen to have a bad teacher? Or maybe you could even change the whole program in a way that doesn't limit it to a few lucky kids who managed to get selected by some arbitrary process?
For example, you could just offer advanced classes open to anyone after school! Just let the kids decide for themselves if they want to try some more challenging things, without first testing them to make sure they really are worthy of your time.
Why wouldn’t black and brown kids get any use out of these classes? Are you saying only white and “white adjacent” kids can learn faster? If so you might want to rethink your preconceptions.
There is a lot of research showing lower scores for tests for BIPOC, even from kindergarten where there isn't a clear education gap already established.
There's also a lot of history of using these types of tests to discriminate - at the worst Nazi's killing children with low scores.
Clearly black children are not achieving at the rate that white children are, but that’s no reason to suspend the gifted program. Yes, the white kids are getting more academic and overall support at home, and this can only be fixed by getting all of the kids this kind of support, not by kneecapping the white children (who are not super privileged or they wouldn’t be in Boston Public Schools to begin with).
Ridiculous policies like this are why we sold our house in the city and left for a $2 million house in the suburbs, where the price of admission means that every kid has lots of support at home, depleting the city schools of one more kid and dragging them down even further.
Arguably the overall societal gains are higher from turning a future accountant into a future scientist than improving the 25th percentile student’s outcome anyways.
This is the first comment I’ve seen that is in touch with the reality of Boston Public Schools. The Boston public system was destroyed by forced integration that caused people with financial means to withdraw and move to the suburbs and/or put their children into private school. The racist motives for the initial split may have faded, but the legacy of that public/private split continues in a way that is self-reinforcing. No matter how woke you are now, nobody who can afford to do otherwise wants to send their kid to a public school that is failing based on every available measure.
Almost every major American city has the same story of a stripped city core where even as young professionals gentrify the real estate in the area they don’t do the same to the schools by sending their kids to private school. A family will live in a neighborhood with a gang reputation (eg San Francisco’s Mission or Viz Valley) before they send their kids to a bad school.
I remember times when the equality rhetoric was about "if we just do blind auditions, the racial disparity in orchestra will go away." That didn't happen and the rhetoric has taken a more aggressive stance: "give all races equal opportunities by quotas and we'll get the desired outcome soon." That didn't work either, the rhetoric has dropped the pretense of justice and has resorted to a simple idea: "white is bad, black is good." It's entertaining to watch how the so called "equality justice seekers" attack white and asian kids because they dared to outperform blacks and hispanics. I can totally see how universities will implement soon the curve fitting so popular in the corporate world: when asian students will be given a "GPA budget" that they can distribute among themselves, and that budget will be "3.0 for everyone or 4.0 for some and 2.5 for others."
> I remember times when the equality rhetoric was about "if we just do blind auditions, the racial disparity in orchestra will go away." That didn't happen and ...
It wasn't even tried, really - not in the educational context, at least. You can't talk about these educational disparities without noticing the real elephant in the room - the stark differences between mainstream and minority culture, and the obvious problems with the lack of enduring social capital in these undeprivileged minority communities. But somehow, the whole subject of culture has become a dirty word among equality advocates. For some reason, people seem to have fixated on the idea that it all boils down to race and diversity in some way, even though it's hard to see how these could make a difference.
This is a strawman. Please point me to the place in this article where the superintendent states this. As far as I can tell, the officials quoted are concerned about the lack of diversity in their advanced classes, which are disproportionately white. This is not the same as "white is bad".
> I can totally see how universities will implement soon the curve fitting so popular in the corporate world: when asian students will be given a "GPA budget" that they can distribute among themselves, and that budget will be "3.0 for everyone or 4.0 for some and 2.5 for others."
This is pure fanciful speculation and has no relevance to this article. The school district has not proposed any such scheme. What evidence supports the claim that such a program will be implemented "soon"?
In corporatese, "lack of diversity" means too many white and asian males, and generally if you're concerned with too much quantity of something, that's because this something is deemed bad.
The relevance is very direct. The next thing those "concerned officials" will notice is that asians and whites get much higher grades on math and other stem subjects.
Whether intentional or not, one reason/consequence for gifted programs is they help public schools compete to keep upper income people in public schools and away from private options. However, within those schools it can create a very two tracked environment. One group of kids is invested in heavily, the other effectively warehoused.
I went to a math and science magnet school. It was placed in a lower performing school. The magnet school had the effect of improving the average performance of the school while actually investing little in the communities that needed the most support. In a way it was a kind of school bussing and I got an exposure to more diversity in high school. OTOH it was clear there were two tracks at the school for the haves and the have nots.
Still, what is the alternative? For upper income people public schools exist in a marketplace competing with private schools. It also seems suboptimal to have them abandon the public schools (already happening due to Covid) and segregate themselves further into private schools.
In our school system they basically have kept gifted programs but let anyone opt into them. Maybe that’s a good option? I dunno.
I'm skeptical that there's any amount of investing in children that can make up the gap between those with engaged and invested parents and those without. Adding in raw ability does not make closing any gaps easier. And, obviously, how much money a family has has a strong influence on whose parents are engaged and invested.
I attended a form of magnet school, funded by a dozen or so school districts in the county. It was able to offer classes that none of the districts could have afforded by themselves. Even there you had implicit tracking - you could do lots of calculus or lots of chemistry or lots of physics, but not all of them. Dismantling it might have improved funding a bit at the home schools, but at the cost of shutting down all the advanced courses entirely.
Letting people opt in to gifted programs is a wonderful idea! A great many children only wait for the chance to succeed. That said, it might be worth considering carefully the resources requires and consequences. There will inevitably be children who are not up to the task. Opting them in to programs they are not ready for is setting them up for emotionally devastating failure as you grow class sizes.
I am uncomfortably reminded of how many colleges use lower division courses as weeders. They let anyone opt in to 101 and 102, but 301 is dependent on making it past those.
I love the idea of public schools. Education can, should, must be for everyone. However, this belief often sits awkwardly with the reality. Ultimately, if you want to keep higher income families in public schools you have to offer them something compelling. Dismantling gifted programs for anti-racist reasons may not always make the grade.
My takeaway was that the kids getting into gifted programs are overwhelmingly the kids whose parents know how to get them into gifted programs, through combination of knowing the system and/or squeaking loud enough that their kids get placed. "Knowing the system" includes knowing that you have to start on applications to multiple schools perhaps a year or more in advance, for example. Kids are slotted into the gifted programs from a very young age, and then tend to accumulate early advantages which carry forward, again with strong advocacy from parents who know the system.
As a result, these programs have a lot more to do with extending class privilege than anything else, and class in the US has strong correlations with race.
Its so weird how its okay to just say that parents are just too dumb to figure out how to get kids into gifted programs.
My parents literally didn't speak English and was only in the country for less than a decade after coming to the USA with a backpack and 20 dollars, and still figured out how to push me into gifted programs at a mediocre city school. It was study, do well on exams and read whatever was handed to me. I didn't even speak english w/ fluency until I was in the 3rd grade and I still did fine.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I do think most parents push for what’s best for their child regardless of any circumstance. At the same time, I feel the immigrant success story unintentionally hides the effects of structural and historical racism.
For some 85-90% of Black Americans, the comparison would be: “My family has been here for centuries. My great-great grandparents were slaves. My great grandparents and grandparents were physically, violently terrorized in the face of social, economic and political pursuit. It’s only been 65 years that anyone in my family has had their Constitutional rights legally guaranteed. Nonetheless having no cultural origins outside of the U.S. and no apparent choices for fleeing this persecution, my parents figured out how to push me into gifted programs at a mediocre school district.”
How the immigrant experience and descendant-of-slave experience compares in terms of hardship doesn’t matter. But I think it’s important to call out that your parents were seeking a better place to build a life, whereas most Black Americans are seeking to build a something better in a society that has shunned them the majority of its existence. That has an effect... not in making Black parents dumb, but wary and highly cynical.
I’m guessing this will get downvoted, but it’s for context, not whataboutism.
So which is it, parents are too dumb to figure out how to get their kids into gifted programs which is why the school wants to change the rules, or parents are deliberately sacrificing their kids education.
Also the word MOST is doing some pretty goddamn heavy lifting here. DO you have something to back up the claim?
Gifted programs are largely NOT tailored to the students because they are still pegged to the grade level. They are mostly pricey busy-work masquerading as education.
Might be fun to answer this question very literally.
Set up a world simulation with two nations. In one nation parents are rewarded a great deal for investing in making their kids maximally educated/capable/productive, through the better opportunities and status they win for their children. In another, just turn that dial down and reward parents who do that a little less. The simulated nations are in all other respects equal.
Nation one will always outcompete nation two. Because of compounding effects, eventually the difference between the two nations will be very large. Nation one will ultimately subsume nation two and set its policy equal to nation one’s. So that’s why.
In a third nation, there's a government program that identifies high-achievers without parental input. They have a larger, less biased, field of kids to choose from, and therefore end up identifying and raising up kids that would have been passed over in the system that depends on the parents doing the right things. Since this leads to a larger pool to pick high achievers from, they end up outcompeting the country picking over achievers only from those with additional class advantages.
That's a straw-man, and I think you know it. I said nothing about isolating children from their parents. I also didn't call parents 'dumb' for not knowing how to manipulate the system on their children's behalf, as you said in your other comment. Parents want the best for their children across the board, but have different ideas of what 'the best' might be, and different access to information and resources for getting there. That doesn't make them 'dumb,' and dismissing them as such means you're not asking questions about what other priorities and/or limitations might be in place. You're applying a label and deciding not to understand what might be behind it.
My point is that it's ultimately best to widen the mouth of the funnel to increase the chance of picking up high performers. I tend to think it's better to do this at an institutional level, for a variety of reasons.
As a point of reference, I think the California university system has done an excellent job historically of facilitating this kind of thing. The community colleges are cheap and widely accessible, and provide a solid, attainable path into R-1 and R-2 research universities for students who do well. This (and similar efforts to widen access to higher education) had a lot to do with the easy availability knowledge labor in the 70's and 80's throughout California, powering an economic boom and improving class mobility at the same time.
If the parents don't prioritize education, the kids won't, and whether they're naturally gifted/intelligent or not, they won't do the points listed above, and they won't end up in the programs.
Why should any paperwork be required? If the student has good scores, put them in the G&T program. You can send the student home with a piece of paper informing the parent, but there's no need to make it opt-in.
Well, it can be solved very nicely by teaching everyone else how to "know the system". So where are the activists going door-to-door in black neighborhoods convincing the parents to submit applications to multiple schools and coach their kids through math problems so that they could get a better chance at admission?
Nope, much more rewarding to go bash the upper-middle class for wanting a better future for their kids than a ghetto and a minimum wage.
Mind you, nobody dares to go bash the top 1% "Ivy-league-by-donation" class. Their kids will inherit wealth, networks and power anyway. You are just helping them clear out the next 20% of the income spectrum, that would actually have a shot at competing with them. So feudalism and hereditary rule incoming.
I would also recommend listening to the 'Nice White Parents' podcast. I'd also add to that the 'School Colors' podcast https://www.schoolcolorspodcast.com/
Both of these podcasts explore the issues that inspire changes like these. If you've already made up your mind, you may not be convinced that abolishing gifted programs is the way to go, but at the very least both of these programs are entertaining and present a perspective that many people don't have. Especially for people on a forum like HN which includes many people who graduated from such programs and don't know what regular schools are like.
Logistics seems like a potential issue. It might work in a place like NYC where everybody can live within a few minutes of multiple schools, and just ride the subway to school every morning like my mom did in 1940.
I live in a mid sized city in the Midwest, and the same concept would translate into 25000 minivans hitting the road every day at the same time in the morning and afternoon. Granted, a lot of parents already drive their kids even just a few blocks to school, but it could be made a lot worse.
The day when both of our kids were out of day care and could just walk themselves to school was a huge liberation for my family.
As a parent of white and asian children, this type of thing does cause visceral concern for me. Are public programs that benefit my children going to be cancelled because they tend to include disproportionately more children from our group than other groups? Will I be forced to go private to get the teaching I need for my children?
At the same time, I also recognize that there is scant evidence that gifted and advanced learning programs are beneficial. Selection bias is extremely hard to control and is the driving factor behind most deltas in education statistics. Are the kids coming out of the program better equipped because of the program? Or were the better equipped kids selected into the program? I'm inclined to guess that typically it's more of the former than the latter.
So for now I'm delaying judgment on these moves. We will be watching carefully to see whether the quality of the teaching slips when our gifted programs are cancelled. If that happens, and if I believe we can get better teaching elsewhere, we will go private and it will be fine. But my guess is that the gifted program is really not that important and we will be fine continuing without it.
As a parent of Bangladeshi-Irish children, I’m not delaying judgment. Whether or not gifted programs are valuable is besides the point. I’d welcome a concrete debate about the utility of gifted programs, and whether the benefits are worth the resources spent on them.
But the gifted program here wasn’t eliminated because of cost-benefit reasons. It was eliminated because administrators felt that too many kids in the program looked like our kids. They’ve taken a page out of the Old South playbook and there is no reason to reserve judgment on that.
I recognize that the terms of the debate might not be what I would choose. But I'm more concerned about the practical impact on my children than the ideological content of the debate. If the gifted programs are not actually having a causal positive impact on my children, I don't care so much if they are cancelled, no matter why they are cancelled. I am less interested in the ideology of the two sides of the debate, although I respect that other people feel differently and I don't wish to foreclose on other people arguing that aspect of things.
Ideology drives policy, and this won’t be the only policy decision made based on ideology. Virginia recently eliminated the admissions test in the science/tech magnet high school I attended because the school had too many Asian kids: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/thomas-jeffer....
Standardized testing has been a huge equalizer for Asian Americans vis-a-vis whites. My family came to America from Bangladesh—we were fortunate to be solidly middle class, but we lacked the social connections and cultural capital of even the average middle class whites around us. Standardized testing allowed my brother and I to stand out and break into professions that just a generation ago were reserved for the children of elite white families. Getting rid of those opportunities strikes me as ill-advised at best and motivated by anti-Asian sentiment at worst.
No place exists where this isn't happening to some extent or another. Where are you going to move to? No place I'd want to be is free from other human beings.
> Are public programs that benefit my children going to be cancelled because they tend to include disproportionately more children from our group than other groups? Will I be forced to go private to get the teaching I need for my children?
Well yes, this is what they mean when they talk about "combating privilege".
I think the most efficient and ethical way to combat privilege is to spend more resources to bring underprivileged people up, rather than taking away resources to bring privileged people down. In many respects that is the only viable option. For example, kids who have been abused are going to need more support to reach the level of achievement of kids who live in homes free of abuse. You can't solve this by taking away the advantages of the more privileged group (i.e. abusing the children who haven't been). You can only address this issue by providing more support for victims of abuse.
> I think the most efficient and ethical way to combat privilege is to spend more resources to bring underprivileged people up
In the context of primary education, and I mean this in the most sincere way possible, what if they don't want to? You're ignoring the agency of the students. A lot of children, occasionally my younger self included, see it as their duty to rebel against the educational system. So how can you improve someone's educational attainment against their will?
Students, even in gifted programs, push back on the demands that are placed on them. I did too when I was in school, and I was in gifted and advanced placement programs throughout my schooling. I'm not sure to what extent this is specific to privileged or underprivileged groups.
There is nothing a school can spend money on to fix this problem.
Likewise, there is nothing the occupying US army can spend money on to solve extremism in Iraq.
They would have to entirely reinvent their organization to be something that it’s not. This is the NAACP unwisely putting pressure where it’s not needed (schools) instead of where it is needed (legislators). Blame the NAACP for failing at the governmental level and trying to backdoor into the schooling level.
You're free to believe whatever you want and it's really none of my business, but what you're saying is just not going to happen. It has been tried many times before and it's a Herculean task. Way too hard, if not virtually impossible and it always ends up like this. If you support combating privilege, just be prepared to lose everything. It's fine by me, but let's not get disillusioned about what it actually means.
The funny thing is that if they really tried to combat the privilege - the rich families connected to the ruling class - the privilege would combat them into the ground, so they wisely chose a weak opponent that vaguely resembles the rich (common skin color).
Yes, yes, and yes... this is happening in California already. As a future parent of Asian kids, I’m preparing to have to spend through the nose on private education.
The biggest fallacy is that gifted students would attend regular public school classes if gifted program is unavailable. In reality students with wealthy parents will transfer to private school, middle class will move to suburbs and few students with poor parents (disproportionally people of color) will stay in shitty regular school. Only last group prospects and education will be damaged long term and overall numbers involved is not really enough to have material positive influence on overall level of students in Boston public school.
“My kids are dumb. I do not want other parents kids to get ahead only because they are smart”
What do you tell a poor black gifted student? "Sorry friend, no gifted classes for you the gifted classes were making the administration look bad. That is more important than your accademic career."
Why do you assume this is about making the school look bad, and not that there might be some serious issue if black/hispanic people are not performing as well as others. They are launching an investigation into the matter, not removing the advanced classes. Did you misread the word 'suspend'?
Goddamn, its weird how its so common to just insult vast swaths of people, under the guise of helping them. I went to one of those shitty city regular public schools and I managed to test into honor schools for Jr High
> few students with poor parents (disproportionally people of color) will stay in shitty regular school.
I'm white and this was me. If it weren't for these programs, I'd either be in jail or working retail/fast food. Congratulations on provoking me, I'm going to take a long hiatus from HN now and go build something. I've changed my password to a randomly generated (ephemeral) string on this and my main account; I won't be back to contribute.
Getting rid of advanced classes does nothing to solve the real problem: different kids have wildly different resources/home lives and those differences often cut across racial lines. Want to fix large difference in racial makeup between regular and advanced classes? Implement universal pre-K. Give all children free breakfast, lunch, and dinner that's healthy. Give parents $700 per child. Mandate that all homes have safe drinking water free of lead. Put social workers, psychologists, and nurses in schools. Tackle the material circumstances that tend to stifle a child's development and the rest will follow. Canceling classes doesn't do anything for anyone.
> different kids have wildly different resources/home lives and those differences cut across racial.
One of the largest impacts on a child's outcome is if they have two parents that are involved in their lives, and even more if they are involved in their education. The classroom has little to do with parenting. There's other reasons why kids dont have two parents though.
Married two-parent households is also the biggest advantage Asian kids have, even compared to whites, at every income level. Social liberals sold America a bill of goods by normalizing divorce and single parent households (not just at the individual level, but at scale). And the impact has been the worst in disadvantaged groups that already have so many other things stacked against them: https://www.aei.org/articles/the-power-of-the-two-parent-hom...
> Getting rid of advanced classes does nothing to solve the real problem
The people doing it aren't interested in solving the real problem, they are interested in not having to expend effort dealing with political fallout of one particular symptom of the problem, and they are willing to exacerbate the problem if it achieves that goal.
Give the parents choice of schools so that they can adapt the education to correctly suit their child. Absolutely stop making educational decisions and policy based upon political choices. Just ... stop it. It is hurting all kids when this is done.
Give the parents free home internet if they cannot afford it. The boss tells me that this is a major problem even for the college prep high school where she teaches.
Provide support for parents and families who might need the extra support (homework checkins, tutoring, etc.) that parents may or may not provide. Boss tells me that some of the parents just don't care. Kids shouldn't suffer because of that.
>>Give the parents choice of schools so that they can adapt the education to correctly suit their child.
This mostly benefits parents of means, as getting kids too and from a more distant school is not without costs, and neither is researching and evaluating alternative schools (which also dependent on parental abilities which are directly related to education, which is already the strongest predictor of children's educational outcomes.)
That one “reform” is the one fo the best way to cement existing inequities, despite it superficially looking like empowerment.
> Absolutely stop making educational decisions and policy based upon political choices.
That's logically incoherent: educational policy choices are a subset of political choices.
these differences across racial lines are not an inhibitor for Black Americans to compete at high levels in sports.
Lord knows how much more staggering the difference could be if all Black Americans actually grew up with good nutrition, education, and training. I mean, the NBA is already 75% African American.
What if it is the case, that all of things you mentioned, and more were provided to lessen the disparity, and yet it still came out as predominately one or two races?
I won't repeat my claims here, but I'll add that at this point, at least part of that overrepresentation is self-perpetuating. Many people expect the next Michael Jordan to look like Michael Jordan. That's why Armon Johnson was almost a first round draft pick in 2010 while Jeremy Lin got passed over completely despite the fact that Jeremy Lin is clearly talented by any objective measure.
I'm also uncertain that: 1) cognitive and physical development have the same inhibitors and 2) those inhibitors affect cognition and physical development to the same extent. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that lead hurts the brain more than the rest of the body.
re: cognitive vs physical development, I think at the level of star athlete most of the difference in performance is, for lack of a better word, mental
If you look at Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, Jeremy Lin, Tiger Woods ... they're very physically gifted, moreso than a typical pro player ... but it's not like they win by being drastically more physically gifted than their competition.
The thing that helps them to win may not be exactly conscious thought, but I think it's effectively a mental/behavioral advantage — certainly to me it seems like a better fit than attributing their success to their physical build (compared to competitors). Michael Phelps on the other hand ... well, some people are just born with the bodies to play certain sports :)
However, sports can differ in what they are in need of when it comes to traits and skills, and like you pointed out, many would negligently exclude that intelligence can also be a factor.
Take American Football - the running back and wide receiver position will ask for almost exclusively physical traits. Players like DK Metcalf fits his position so well almost solely based on his physical performance and players in these positions are predominately Black. However, the Quarterback asks less of the physical and more on decision making, and players in these positions are predominately White.
I believe it to be a mixture of both, although physicality and athleticism takes a lion share of what factors are needed to be successful in sports, whereas intelligence is required in selected sports.
As you mentioned, Michael Phelps has an physical anomaly where he has the legs of someone with a height of 5'10 and the torso of someone who is 6'7, which is what propelled him to become to greatest - but to your point, swimming does not ask much for the mental. Maybe reaction time for starts, and strategies for 400im and anything longer than 400m freestyle, but doesn't ask for much compared to other sports out there.
Worse than that, getting rid of advanced classes in public schools increases the divide between rich and poor, because the private schools attended by wealthy children will still have advanced classes.
I don't buy this. Rich people already have better schools and will do better anyway. The divide is growing not because of schooling but because of the centralization of wealth.
That's also true, but "dumbing down" public schools by eliminating advanced learning classes will make it even more difficult for the poor to compete in the knowledge economy.
>People are different and they have different aptitudes.
There is some thinking that if we don't have ALL categories/jobs/promotions with the same population proportion it is because "systemic racism".
>I am still waiting for at least 53% of NBA be white.
People are in fact different and have different aptitudes, but there's no reason to believe that those differences cut across racial lines. When you see wildly different racial/socioeconomic/gender representation in a field, you should look at it more closely.
Consider basketball. It's predominantly black today, but it wasn't always so. Basketball was at one point more closely associated with Jewish people than blacks people. In fact, not long ago, people called basketball a Jewish sport [1]. And here's a fun fact: the first non-white NBA player was Asian [2]. There was a point in history where Jews and Asians were better represented in basketball than black people.
So why is the NBA 80%+ black today? Let's look at outside factors. During the Great Migration, blacks moved to from southern towns to northern cities and transitioned from a largely rural population to a largely urban one. In a city, basketball is the perfect sport for a poor/working class kid. It doesn't require a field. It doesn't require a lot of equipment. It can be played on pavement. It's easy to pick up but has a high talent ceiling. So if you're a kid in the city who's interested in a sport and you don't have a ton of resources, you're probably going to end up playing basketball for reasons that may have less to do with your natural interests and aptitudes than your situation, environment, and (eventually) societal expectations.
This dynamic cuts both ways. Jeremy Lin was one of the best high school players in the country in 2005 but wasn't nearly as a heavily recruited as he should have been based purely on his stats. UCLA wanted him to be a walk on. If he were black, he would have gotten an athletic scholarship and been on magazine covers. I wonder how many other Asian basketball players are underrecruited simply because they're Asian. Whether it's 1 or 1,000, the sport is poorer for it.
Sometimes what appears to be the consequence of "different aptitudes" can suggest something systemic instead. That doesn't mean that we should enforce a quota, but it does mean that we shouldn't take differences in representation to be the result of differences in aptitude.
>You can see it on your own family with siblings. Same "genetics" but very different aptitudes and skills.
I'm not sure that siblings have the "same genetics" or that it's fair to compare differences in populations to differences in individuals. It's obvious that individuals are different due to genetics. It's not obvious that the distribution of those individual differences should differ across racial lines.
There are absolutely reasons to believe that there are differences of all sorts between races on a statistical/population wide level, but we’re at the point where people can’t even conceive of that.
I think nurses are an excellent example of systemic racism/sexism. Being a nurse used to be seen as an exclusively male profession. Given that it is pretty clear it is a cultural rather than innate association. How we handle this is really complicated and requires a lot more thought than “lets do nothing, it must be natural this is way”.
This is Hacker News, so let's talk about this from a software development perspective.
This feels like solving a CI failure by just deleting the failing test.
If the entrance criteria are bad or biased, then by all means fix them. For example, Stuyvesant, perhaps the best high school in New York, offers free study materials and tutoring sessions, offers entrance exams on the weekends and after hours on weekdays, offers free shuttling to the test sites, and in general tries to make its entrance exam as fair as possible. And indeed, the majority of students there are poor and qualify for free lunch.
But then, if the concrete issues that you can identify with the entrance criteria are resolved, but outcomes still aren't what you're looking for, guess what: now you have a great "unit test"! If you're red-green-refactoring your public policy to achieve equity, then surely a fair entrance exam for your advanced schooling is a good failing test. You can now implement other policies to try to see it go green. Maybe you can have free public pre-school, or pregnancy care packages with vitamins and other resources, or who knows what else. And then you can monitor your entrance exams a few years later and see if things are improving.
I think it's useful to present a different software engineering analogy. Getting into Stuyvesant is a lot like getting a job at a FANG company. Much like Stuyvesant, these companies tell you up front that you should practice for the test and provide links to study materials. They tell you that your normal experience of doing well at work/school is not necessarily enough, even if you are very good. The purpose of this entrance filter is not actually to select the smartest people or the most deserving people, but to select the best people - where "best" is on a scale of merit that is combination of being smart, knowing how to play the game, and being willing to dedicate yourself to passing the filter. When you think about this, it's important to note that it is not the case that students who don't get into a top school are all academically worthless, the same way that is true that many good engineers cannot/will not work at FANG.
"It is the year 2081. Because of Amendments 211, 212, and 213 to the Constitution, every American is fully equal, meaning that no one is stupider, uglier, weaker, or slower than anyone else. The Handicapper General and a team of agents ensure that the laws of equality are enforced."
The intention is kind, but there's no better way to force _every_ remaining parent who can afford it to send their kids to private schools (or move to the 'burbs) and increase the inequality even more.
There was an interesting podcast series that took on the disparity issue in some detail when a neighborhood public school in NYC got effectively taken over by parents who could no longer find slots for their kids in the "good" schools: "Nice White Parents" [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren...].
It's an uncomfortable thing to approach no matter how you look at it. But the solution, if there even is one, is for parents to take a much deeper role in how schools are operated and funded. For the wealthy, that will simply mean private school, period. For those that can't do that but who still care about their kids education, it going to mean A LOT MORE involvement in public schools.
If you believe knowledge of this world can be gained from evidence, and that when evidence shows something, that should be believed over ideology or dogma, what should you then believe about race and intelligence, and about equality?
Intelligence appears to be mostly genetic (see the Wikipedia page “heritability of IQ”). There are many maps online showing average IQ in different countries, which hints at races having different intelligence.
This hints at ideas of equality of outcome between people of different ethnicity being a thing this world will not see.
In nature, I don’t believe there are any examples of equality between entities, except on the level of physics or maybe chemistry. No two entities are equal.
This would imply that to get equality, the only way is to push down the groups that most often reach top achievements - to design a society that is anti-white, anti-Asian, and anti-male. I once met a girl with a poignant tattoo: “free men are not equal - equal men are not free”.
I look forward to the intelligent HN community enlightening me on this subject
The oppression and equality narrative seems to be like the Christian Gospel - the absolute truth. Everything that contradicts it, even science, must be false.
The article below, while technically not wrong, go as far as to undermine the most robust abstraction we've ever came up with, math itself, to deny the IQ.
It's a symptom of a bigger underlying problem. We no longer have a full circle of smart capable people that would achieve economic success independently, then raise their kids, teach them their ways and let the next generation achieve their own success by starting their own wave of companies.
Instead, through low interest rate, overinflated stock market and lack of antitrust oversight, most of our economy is controlled by the corporations. And they don't want an ambitious well-raised kid to get a good education and disrupt their business. They want to import talented and well-educated people from other cultures, so they will fulfill their corporate roles, but will have a poor shot at building enough network locally to start competing for their own market share. And the racial card is played as an argument to keep their kids' ambitions down.
As a first-generation immigrant, I find it very disturbing. I worked hard throughout most of my life and it has brought me happiness, and I don't think it's unethical for me to want to help my kids walk the same path. Moreover, I wish more and more parents, regardless of their race, would adopt my approach. But instead of creating additional opportunities for others, the recent activism is all about destroying the opportunities for those who may threaten the corporate hegemony. As for myself, I find it more and more lucrative to move back to Eastern Europe, now that I know how to run a business and don't depend on anyone. I hear a lot of similar sentiment among the Chinese community. I wonder what long-term effect will it have on the U.S. economy.
This issue is an artifact of a factory assembly line system that educates pupils on each subject in lock step. Their solution to different needs and paces is to split into a slow, normal and fast track. We can do a lot better.
With modern wealth and info tech we can abandon that for most academic subjects, and let each child learn at their own pace, on their own laptop, touchpad, etc. Not an assembly line but a collection of artisans. It doesn't matter if a genius is sitting next to a plodder if the whole class isn't expected to be on the same page.
Part of the problem is that the teacher is expected to be knowledgeable on the subject, which is fine. But now we can geographically separate the subject expert from the classroom manager. Teacher can't teach a fourth grader calculus? No problem, here are a list of online teachers who can give personal help, along with canned videos, etc.
We'll get closer to equal protection under the law by treating every child as unequal in the classroom. If you teach to the mean you poorly serve the long tails on either end.
The single greatest skill you can learn in class is autodidactics. Learning that should be at the center of the school experience. Self-paced learning of a predefined curriculum is a large step toward that. And a return toward the standard practice of pre-industrial one-room schools.
I have a son enrolled in boston public schools. I live in a gentrifying part of town. When I go to the prarent meetings the principal (who is an absoutely AMAZING women easily putting in 80 hour weeks) had to fight tooth and nail for funds to add a social worker to the school. The range of incomes between students is HUGE. There are a lot of parents struggling to pay rent, and definatley don't have the ability to invest in their childs education outside school the way I've been fortunate enough to.
We put about $8k into a fund to help these parents... but it's not even close to enough. Honestly, if you want to improve outcomes, maybe we should look into helping struggling families pay rent, and become more stable.
When my wife and I got our foster care license I was astounded by how many resources our state puts towards foster kids after they're put into the foster system: hundreds of dollars a month to the foster parent, life coaches, psychologists, tutors, birthday and Christmas allowances, great medical care. And the main goal is reunification with their family.
Meanwhile, before being put in foster care they and their families get no support!
I often think about how broken of a system that is. I feel like if half the foster resources went to the families to begin with, then we could avoid a lot of foster care (parental abuse notwithstanding) in the first place! And it's so traumatic taking kids from their moms.
I live in the Boston suburbs. Not a single person at my work or social circle have kids in the Boston public schools. In fact no one even lives in Boston (because of schools of course). This would actually have the opposite effect on the Boston public schools if you ask me.
Private schools in the Boston area are booming because of Corona. Actions like this will continue the trend unfortunately.
I worked for a county school system in an administrative role. My philosophy is that most of the time smart/students with a supportive home life will do well in most situations. I have a similar opinion about students in the opposite categories doing poorly. There is also a group that stretches across the entire student population (including all ethnicities) where you can move the needle and it is mostly comprised of smart people without a supportive home life and anyone on the bubble in those categories.
Also, a pet peeve of mine is when race issues are made out of economic issues. It can be hard for a school system to face the reality that they cannot change the economic situations of the students by feeding them 2 (awful) meals per day and penalizing students that are well off.
That said, it may be reasonable to use race as a proxy but it comes with a lot of baggage and some of that baggage is that you are failing a race. I would love to see that they have done some studies and will be using the money from the advanced learning classes to move the needle on a larger group but the article is written as if they are taking punitive measures in an attempt to close the gap.
I believe that black and hispanic students are not being served well by the way this school system appears to be approaching the situation. I hope they eventually face some facts. We spent a long time focusing resources on hopeless students and just about as long on students who will succeed regardless of attention. Lets spend some time on those who are reachable and I think we will see blacks and hispanics better represented as a side effect.
I believe there are black and hispanic students who are not doing well in school that may develop great ideas and plans for the future due to their education. I want to live in a world shaped by those ideas. The first step is grabbing the low hanging fruit and not casting this as a fight between races. Its so easy to make this a reason to get along that I am suspicious of people who make it a reason to divide people further.
I'm all for equality but I'm not for enforcing equity of outcome. If there are any structural inequalities, tear them down. Everyone should have an equal shot a life. But this unfortunate does not mean everyone is going to have an equal outcome in abilities. Some people are just better at things than others.
It’s a truism that the fastest way to achieve equality is by holding everyone back.
I remember when they instituted a policy in our city some years ago for physical education class. The policy was that you were not allowed to lap anyone during running.
"A district analysis of the program found that more than 70 percent of students enrolled in the program were white and Asian, even though nearly 80 percent of all Boston public school students are Hispanic and Black."
"The program was open to all students in the Boston Public Schools who took a test known as Terra Nova in the third grade and received a high score."
"Last fall, 453 students received invitations, 143 students applied and 116 enrolled this year, officials said."
"Cassellius says interest in the program had declined over several years and only five schools currently offered the program"
So, in summary, about ~25% of invited students enroll in the program, i.e. parents aren't interested in their kids taking this program, it's dying out anyway, undoubtedly costs money, and those that are interested in the program are vastly, disproportionately white and asian. I think bringing up racism might be a bit inflammatory. I think it's safer to say, though, that the program isn't desirable to anyone, and particularly undesirable to minorities. And yes, they should have an enrichment program that people find worth taking.
Tracking started because struggling students need more help, and the best thing for them is to get the advanced students out of the classroom. So fine, don’t have advanced classes, send those kids to play outside, whatever. But this is pure ideological self-harm.
If their goal is to be antiracist, is the most effective policy to stop challenging advanced students? Maybe start with how to get minority students to be advanced proportionally, rather than punish those who are already advanced, who are probably disproportionately Asian Americans who are facing a lot of hate crimes and racism this year.
Do we propose mixing all groups of people to perfect ratios of societal values? Is it racist to not have proportional representation in any subgroup? For instance, is it racist that Asian Americans are overrepresented in elite schools relative to black or hispanic students?
I think the label racist is so overused, that we now have a new term antiracist which basically means "us" vs the "them" of racists. And yet is it truly racism we always are seeing, or is it class, economics, genetics, opportunity, health, stability, and many other things that cause disparity?
The number of comments exceeds the number of upvotes. That tends to indicate a flamebait topic. Racial issues and issues involving identity have an above-average likelihood of triggering a flamewar.
Public schools are basically just going to become a lower class school system. It didn't have to be this way, and I wish it wasn't (I went to public schools with a year stint in a private one and I highly attribute my time in public schools as shaping the better parts of my character) but the pandemic has made the "school choice" advocates the ultimate winners of the debate given how we set things up with public schools. It turns out, by investing so heavily in a system with centralized power structures and highly correlated disincentives against our children, we ultimately would pay profound costs when those cross-cutting incentives broke against our kids.
Private schools have been open to varying degrees, and the kids have not been left behind. Meanwhile, public school kids are permanently scarred many with mental health issues and their educational and developmental growth stunted. It doesn't take a genius parent to look at this and the trajectory and do literally everything possible to prevent their children from entering this system while it implodes.
Public schools have been a driver of class inequality for decades. With neighborhoods segregated by wealth and schools funded by property taxes, public schools have long only amplified class disparities.
I thought that too but this article [0] with really good graphics shows how the federal and state government give out funding selectively to counteract that such that 47 states actually allocate more per-student funding to poor kids than to nonpoor kids and according to the article, it has been this way since at least 1995.
>A district analysis of the program found that more than 70 percent of students enrolled in the program were white and Asian, even though nearly 80 percent of all Boston public school students are Hispanic and Black.
>School Committee member Lorna Rivera said at a January meeting that she was disturbed by the findings, noting that nearly 60 percent of fourth graders in the program at the Ohrenberger school in West Roxbury are white even though most third graders enrolled at the school are Black and Hispanic.
>"This is just not acceptable," Rivera said
What the item the article doesn't spell out explicitly is that many (most?) "gifted" or "enhanced learning programs" participation is based on IQ test scores.[1][2]
To be clear, "gifted program" is often a different concept from "magnet school" with extra specialization courses such as music.
So not sure what Rivera is saying is unacceptable. Either:
a) advanced programs should continue but should not be using IQ tests as the bar for inclusion because intelligence tests underrepresent black students
b) misunderstand the gifted programs and doesn't know that IQ tests are involved and thinks the programs are just based on parent requests and teacher recommendations so some human beings are deliberately discriminating black children
I can't speak to Boston particularly, but I have never seen a gifted program based any art of IQ test or proxy. In fact, I am almost sure that a vast number of people I knew in gifted programs, including myself wouldn't have scored particularity high on an IQ test. In fact I distinctly recall one gifted student asking me if their ASVAB score (commonly claimed by HN users and other to be correlated with IQ) of 20 was good.
Interesting, I grew up in Georgia and was constantly in and out of gifted classes from elementary school through high school. The process was very similar except there were basically no tests involved. In high school I was bumped to a gifted class randomly in the middle of the year without any additional processes.
I suppose it’s possible that that could have changed since I was in school, but it wasn’t that long ago either.
Another day, another Asian gets the raw end of the stick.
"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" they said. "Reach out and grab that American dream" they also said. So many of us listened and found a tiny slice of success in the academia despite being systematically opposed and ridiculed... and now what? We're somehow treated in the same vein as the 'oppressor' who have been enjoying their undue systematic advantage and our success must now be supressed?
We're still heavily underrepresented in Hollywood, most major sports leagues, the government, and practically most forms of leadership - yet we're finding ourselves constantly lumped in there as "whites and asians" when it's convenient for the narrative of racial inequality to construct a heart-wrenching story. Do people not see how backwards it all feels?
Just like you buy the propaganda that whites are “oppressors enjoying systemic advantages”, so do other people buy in the same propaganda but lump in Asians as well (i.e. “people doing better than me”).
They didn't say that racism doesn't exist, those are words you've put into their mouth.
They said that you're buying into the same identity politics narrative that you're decrying, where groups of people are put into a basket based on their ethnicity and assigned the label "oppressor" without regard for individual variation.
In case it wasn't absolutely clear to you, I'm in full agreement with you on how ridiculous the decision to suspend the gifted program is.
Speaking of racism in the U.S., however, nothing you say will change the dozens of firsthand experiences that I endured as a minority immigrant growing up in this land. I say this not from a place of bitterness, but from a place of sadness: I too wish racism wasn't real or as heavily perpetuated as it actually is. Working in SV almost makes me forget the shit I had to endure because it's much less visible from the ivory towers of the west coast. But my friend, racism is very real, and it is very alive. I'm not here to say whites are evil and we are noble - it's simply that being in the place of power gives you many more avenues with which to abuse.
Let me say this one last time: shutting down a gifted class due to its racial make up is the wrong way to go. It's the lazy way to "establish social justice". I say this not because I believe racism isn't real - I say this because this is reverse racism. If what we want to build is a world that is accepting of all individuals regardless of their race, we should accept that racism exists and devise reasonable solutions to combat it. Punishing white kids is not the way to go, nor is denying that racism is alive.
> The person "buying into the propaganda" in this instance is not myself, but you unfortunately.
I wish I knew how to say this in a constructive manner, but your lack of self-awareness is sad. You are guilty of the very thing you are decrying, just changing the race to what fits your narrative.
Yes, I am saying you are racist and don't realize it.
I'm genuinely curious why you're still pushing the oppressor narrative, given that you see how it's being used as a weapon to enforce equality of outcome? instead of equality of opportunity.
People blamed white supremacy for the recent unprovoked attacks on asians by black perpetrators. Cognitive dissonance became really common on that side of the political spectrum.
Think deeper. The American dream died in 2008. We could have let the inefficient corrupt behemoths crash under their own weight and free the market for the next wave of companies. But instead we printed more money and bailed them out. Ans we keep doing it ever since [0]. It's not about Asian, Black, Russian, Jewish or whatever. It's that if you haven't bitten a large enough chunk of the pie before 2008, you are second class and are bound to working for those who had. And when people across the society get frustrated with their lives, the racial differences is the easiest thing to spot, so it metastasizes first.
U.S. is now as much "a land of opportunity" as Democratic Republic of Congo is "democratic" or People's Republic of Korea "people's".
Democrats focus on race because they think it’s the key to holding onto power. Black voters turned Georgia blue. They won’t stop until something changes that calculus.
This is a really hard subject. I can remember growing up as the only black kid in an all white class of kids in elementary school, and all of my friends made it into the "advanced" cohort. I knew I was just as bright as any of them, and that given a chance I would thrive there too. But for whatever reason I didn't make the cut, and this removed me from my peer group for the rest of my school years. They grew apart and I ended up mostly friendless. I don't think race really had a lot to do with it. But if you're going to separate kids, at least have a whole other school to send them to, rather than creating a distinct hierarchy among the classes. I think that really messes with kids' self esteem.
In my advanced program, they would ship us to a nearby elementary school, and the advanced students there would be sent to our school (same district, same grade level, just 10 minutes down the road), I can only assume it's for the same reason you mentioned...
I feel that schools should be smaller, 100 kids at most. The teachers should be very specialised. For example in electronics, or music, or biology. Kids can quickly rotate into and out of these specialised schools.
Specialization is one part certainly but we need other changes too. We need a decomposition of schools (many different providers instead of a one stop school for all subjects and activities), greater choice (charter schools, private schools, to challenge public school dominance), and movement away from the one size fits all educational culture imposed by giant monolithic teachers unions like the NEA (who are proponents of such racial “justice” policies).
Unfortunately the ideologues who recognize the threat posed by educational choice to a public education system are already gearing up to fight against choice. Elizabeth Bartholet of Harvard for example, has been trying to build academic activist momentum against home schooling, which she describes as “authoritarian” (https://nypost.com/2020/04/23/harvard-professor-wants-to-ban...). Of course, those against homeschooling don’t see any authoritarianism in schools being weaponized into propaganda machines when activist progressive politics are injected into the curriculums.
I have nothing against teacher unions, or public schools.
I just think that the one size fits all, isn't optimal.
One size fits all seems to be a product of the early 1960s, when a large number of schools had to be built quickly to accommodate the boom of new kids born the previous decade. Large, modern, new, schools with good gyms and science labs were viewed as better than one room school houses.
I think 60 years latter we are ready to try something new. A diversity of schools. Some large, some small, some very specialized, some retain the current model.
Some where a student focuses on one topic throughout their studies, refining their knowledge every year. For example the same science fair project but get better every year, every iteration.
Some schools where a student tries as many different things as they want.
I believe that there is nothing more motivating than taking an intrinsic interest a student shows and getting the student to spend all their time on it.
I also believe that all specialized paths lead to the same general knowledge in math, history, music., etc.
OECD's PISA office[0] found that large, college-style lecture hall sized classes were optimal for teaching large numbers of students. They used this factor to explain South Korea's better educational outcomes than the United States'. South Korean high schools typically have large class sizes and evaluate performance based on regular standardized testing, whereas American schools typically try to always make class sizes smaller and use subject grading criteria.
They are effectively going to resegregate the school system. The parents of high performing kids that can afford it will move to school systems with advanced learning classes whether public or private.
"The elected worthies who sit on its powerful school boards do not pursue objectives [such as learning] so much as balance competing local interests. This is a recipe for risk aversion and inertia or, as MCPS’s wry superintendent, Jack Smith, puts it “not decision-making but mush”."
Translation - If it is not possible to identify enough "vulnerable group" geniuses, then it is assumed that all children are not geniuses. I think this kind of stupidity can only occur in developing countries. Unexpectedly, the nearly 30 years of brainwashing education in the United States has produced so many brain-disabled officials from all walks of life who cannot think normally. sorrow!
My oldest child is about to enter the Boston Public school system. Many of my peers think I’m crazy to want to send my kids to public school, but we really value community and equity. I don’t yet know what level of academic achievement my kids will achieve. But my choice what will I have, if the public schools cannot serve their needs. I’ll be forced to join growing trend of abandoning public schools for private and charter schools.
Also parent of Boston kids. We will start in BPS but if it's bad we will go private school. What choice do we have as parents? Thank god we have money!
The correct answer IMO is to give every parent a voucher, and then let the schools compete for students. Would quickly show which public schools are good, and allow poor people to afford private schools. But this opinion apparently makes me some sort of evil person, so what do I know.
I’m on HN today because I learned some basic Logowriter & HTML at 8 & 9 years old in 1994 at an a program connected to private & public schools called Academic Resource Center in Tallahassee, FL (it’s no longer around).
It was once every week or two and my time there was made up of 2 electives. There were all kinds of science, art & drama classes as well.
It was GREAT and it meant that I had access to a computer a few years before we had one in the house and had instructors who could actually guide me many years before I otherwise would have.
All of that said, the ticket in was being in the advanced math class. I can see a handful of ways this would be a bad way to gatekeep it. The reason it was so great was that it gave kids an opportunity to find a subject they are interested and then double down with much less strict guidance. No grades, much less serious “school” feel.
I would guess that almost everyone needs this, not just kids that can get the hang of / care about math a little quicker.
Presumably, the lottery is unbiased in its selections¹. Which means that the same mismatched demographics are occurring in the set of students passing the entrance exam. So it seems to me that the real problem is that the non-advanced classes aren't able to adequately achieve good outcomes for students who aren't white/Asian. Presumably, due to socio-economic disparities that cut across racial lines due to history.
But instead of kneecapping the advanced students, why not dedicate more resources to those who are socio-economically disadvantaged, and start fixing the problems that cause them to be underrepresented in the entrance exam?
¹though it'd be nice if the article had researched this, since I can think of socio-economic circumstances that would cause one demographic to accept at higher rates than others.
Does anybody note that all schools and even universities do not count Asians and even South East Asians as minorities. Even though they have a lower percentage of the population as compared to Blacks and Hispanics.
This might be anecdotal evidence, but a large number of Asians that I know of are first generation or second generation Asians whose parents ran Asian restaurants or worked in those nail saloons. How are they counted as more privileged as compared to Blacks and Hispanics is beyond me.
In fact, as much as I disliked the Trump administration, it was sensible of them to sue to universities in an attempt to shed more light on the admissions criteria and how Asian students with the same scores were not admitted as compared to Black and Hispanic students.
Too bad, the Biden administration dropped that lawsuit.
I initially had a knee jerk 'sky is falling' reaction to this article, but I believe the problem is less these "underrepresented minority children can't cut it so we shut the program down" and more COVID-19 has devastated underrepresented minority families and children cannot even hope to enroll in the program. Resources are stretched within these public school systems and perhaps we need to address that for the year.
From the article, "Last fall, 453 students received invitations, 143 students applied and 116 enrolled this year, officials said." Does anyone know the breakdown of the 435 students who received invitations?
Wait "nearly 80 percent of all Boston public school students are Hispanic and Black."? Boston was >50% white last time I visited (admittedly 20 years ago). What's happening here?
I attended an advanced school as a student. We really didn't have any more resources than the non-advanced schools. It was simply a different, more advanced curriculum taught to those who both qualified (via test score) and were lucky (it was rationed via lottery).
But we still had the same bad teacher:student ratio, the same ancient textbooks, a building in a terrible location, the bare minimum for athletics, etc.
Ya know, I miss the days when the schools in the wealthier part of town had things like advanced classes and air conditioning, and the rest of us just sucked it up and didn't whine. Because we gaddamn knew our places.
This headline will receive a lot of backlash from the anti-woke crowd, but it's a pretty fair assessment in substance. They identified a glaring issue, that most kids in the advanced classes are white and asian, despite the district being mostly black and hispanic, and are trying to find solutions to that.
Of course, traditionally the solution has been to claim that blacks are just inferior to whites and nothing should be done, and then flail your arms about while crying that the school has been taken over by the woke.
>Of course, traditionally the solution has been to claim that blacks are just inferior to whites and nothing should be done
Isn't that the implication of such a move?
An elementary school is abdicating their responsibility to effectively educate black and hispanic students to advanced levels. Why would they do that unless they thought they were inferior and beyond educating?
These "educators" would do well to study the life works of Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass.
However, one of the main positive motivations behind gifted/advanced education is that if you put those kids in a class with 30 randomly selected children and force them to move at the pace of the slowest kid in the class, they become so bored they either disengage from education or become problem students.
At the same time, if you took the median student and constantly compared them to one of two of the advanced kids, who will look like they "just know everything (since prior work is invisible to the class), that's just disheartening.
A priori, I'd say the goal of an idealized education system is to continuously provide learning challenges at the optimal difficulty for each student. Since that's far from possible right now, the very least we can do is bracket kids in 3 categories so they don't drive each other insane.
Not having an gifted program is like having wrestling matches without weight classes. It's no fun and no good (for anyone).