New York City Schools To Eliminate Gifted Programs
Outgoing New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is making one of the most sweeping changes to the nations largest public school system by eliminating gifted and talented education classes.
Mayor Bill de Blasio will overhaul New York City’s highly selective, racially segregated gifted and talented education classes, a sea change for the nation’s largest public school system that may amount to the mayor’s most significant act in the waning months of his tenure.
The elementary school gifted and talented program that New York has known for the last several decades will no longer exist for incoming kindergarten students next fall, and within a few years, it will be eliminated completely, city officials told The New York Times.
Students who are currently enrolled in gifted classes will become the final cohort in the existing system, which will be replaced by a program that offers accelerated learning to all students in the later years of elementary school.
The gradual elimination of the existing program will remove a major component of what many consider to be the city’s two-tiered education system, in which one relatively small, largely white and Asian American group of students gain access to the highest-performing schools, while many Black and Latino children remain in schools that are struggling.
New York, home to one of the most racially segregated school systems in the country, is more reliant on selective school admissions than any other large system in America.
The move represents one of Mr. de Blasio’s most dramatic actions to combat segregation in city schools, though it also puts New York more in line with how other cities are approaching their own segregated gifted classes. About 75 percent of the roughly 16,000 students in gifted elementary school classes in New York are white or Asian American. Those groups make up about 25 percent of the overall school system.
Though the mayor has long promised to tackle inequality in city schools, he has been criticized by some for not taking more forceful action on desegregation until the end of his mayoralty. His schools chancellor, Meisha Porter, who was appointed this year, has been instrumental in pushing him to fundamentally alter the gifted and talented program, according to people with knowledge of the last several months of intensive negotiations on the issue.
The change also presents an unwelcome challenge for Mr. de Blasio’s almost certain successor, Eric Adams, the Democratic nominee for mayor, who would have to implement an entirely new gifted education system during his first year in office.
Mr. Adams has expressed skepticism about overhauling the gifted system and has said he wants to offer more gifted programs in low-income neighborhoods. While the next mayor could technically reverse Mr. de Blasio’s plan, doing so would be logistically complex for a new administration and could cause confusion among parents. It is still possible that the next mayor could make adjustments to the plan.
His progressive long-game is to double the population of Florida, where people will be more climate-conscious.Report
I think a better analogy is fighting climate change by banning thermometers.Report
De Blasio ought to be ashamed of what he’s doing and for the children of NYC we should all hope that the next administration reverses it. If this kind of crap keeps coming to other public school systems they will deservedly collapse. I imagine our international rivals can’t contain themselves with laughter at how stupid this is.Report
Utterly idiotic. For a bunch that wants to advance public schooling they sure are doing a lot to encourage parents to flee to private schools.Report
This is where the reductive application of woke-ism just smarts. We need good public services in this country and nothing undermines the case for them more than these stunts. Not only are they bad policy, I don’t think there’s even a constituency anyone can claim is being placated by it.Report
Twitter, which isn’t a constituency per say but makes noise like one and has a mainline to too many influencers and decision makers in left wing, left of center and centrist politics.Report
Harrison Bergeron was a strawman. Nobody is arguing that we create equality by hobbling people. The “so-called” slippery slope is a fallacy.Report
Eh… the existing system is pretty effed. Will the new system be better? Time will tell. But clinging to the old system “BECAUSE AT LEAST IT’S SOMETHING!” ain’t helping many folks.Report
So instead of expanding access to identify and include more black and latino gifted students, they are just scrapping the whole thing?
Well, at least Bill’s Progressive Creds are intact, I guess.Report
Is that on the table anywhere as an option?
I’m not deep inside NYC school politics, but I know that reform efforts tend to be dead on arrival. For various reasons, it seems much easier to start something new than change something existing. So the plan here seems to be to blow up the status quo and try to start from scratch with something better. Though, they aren’t really blowing it up, since it will be phased out over a few years, leaving time to phase something new in.
Now, if they fail to put something new in, this is a disaster.
If they put something worse in, this is bad.
If they put something better in, this is good.
But we can’t lose sight of the fact that the status quo itself is bad.Report
They’re blowing up the part of the status quo that is working.
I don’t see how that helps the people in the parts that are not. It just encourages the rich and functional to take their kids somewhere else.Report
Define “working.”Report
From the article, Bill is ending the program and basically leaving the rest up to whoever comes after, so no expansion is on the table. So I’m betting private and charter schools see an uptick.Report
I understand the philosophical impulses behind this but it is just going to lead to more parents selecting private schools for their children or decamping to the suburbs earlier.Report
Probably not the former. Most private schools have waiting lists. There aren’t exactly tons of empty seats to take.Report
Get rid of some of the pity kids and let the ones whose parents can afford to pay do so.Report
I assume you are referring to kids who receive scholarships or financial aide. It’s not quite that easy, since often time those funds come from donations that are specifically earmarked for such purposes.Report
I’m not saying it won’t happen… that some kids from the gifted programs won’t end up in private school and that may result in someone else who would have gone to private school now not doing so.
But it won’t happen a ton.
And at least some of those kids who switch from G&T to private school may themselves receive financial aide or otherwise be from outside “the elite.” There are some families in the city who could easily afford private school but who opt for public (G&T or otherwise) but most who are in the public school are there because private school would be a real stretch at best or an impossibility financially.Report
So the woke elites will force mediocrity on the poor and lower classes while sending their own children to private schools and then ponder in confusion why they’re despised by the poor and lower classes.Report
I’m not sure who “the woke elites” refers to in this comment.Report
The Mayor of NY is under a lot of pressure to make things all equal. He’s going to do that by closing the upper track.
The parents of those kids, many of whom voted for the Mayor because of equality, aren’t going to sacrifice their kids to the equality god if they have the money to avoid doing so.
So the elites there will send their kids to private schools, just like the DC politicians do no matter what their politics.Report
If they remove it and put nothing else in place, I agree it’s an awful move.
If they put something better in place, perhaps more differentiated programs within each school as opposed to pulling all G&T kids to specialized schools, it could be a real improvement for all.
It remains to be seen.
I don’t think they were ever gonna get more differentiated options in local schools as long as G&T existed.
“My kid needs more than his school is offering!”
“Apply for G&T.”
“We did but didn’t get accepted.”
“Then he doesn’t need or get more.”
Now, perhaps, we’ll get parents at all schools clambering for more and all schools being supported to offer more.
If we get that, it’s a huge win. If.
If not… well, I’ll have my torch and pitchfork ready.Report
They’re eliminated G&T to “fight segregation” and moving to “accelerated” in school learning.
Different cultures and social/economic groups have different educational outcomes to the same inputs. Those cultures are unevenly distributed across the races
The previous system “entrenched segregation” which means that the G&T were getting better educations (my definition of “working”) and the bulk of them were white/asian.
That’s pretty much the definition of G&T and the expected result of letting G&T be taught to their potential. That’s also satisfying the needs of the G&T.
My experience with G&T is there aren’t enough of them in any one school to have a full classroom of G&T, so “accelerated” is code for “put in the same classroom as everyone else and taught as they are”.
I might be wrong about that, I hope so, but the motivation of this move seems suspect.
This entire situation hits the radar as dumbing down the education of those doing too well so the politicians aren’t embarrassed by the racial makeup of that group.
That implies that your example student who would get G&T and can’t now won’t improve, it’s just that he’ll look better because the kids who did qualify before won’t be passing him.Report
Funny thing about private businesses- when they have an undersupply, waiting lists and skyrocketing prices they tend to expand to meet the demand. I don’t see any reason why private schools would be different.Report
When we have a dysfunctional market, my first thought is always to check what the gov is doing.
My expectation is the NY government prevents the creation of private schools.Report
Generally yes but I think that schools are slightly different because limiting supply increases their prestige. During the Obama administration Harvard’s president admitted that they can probably increase the student size by a factor of five to seven without really lowering academic quality at all. Harvard obviously doesn’t do this because they think that will decrease their status as university. There are about 68,000 students in the Ivy League schools and Cornell has the lion’s share of them at 40,000. The rest remain purposefully small.
Many K-12 private schools are going to operate on this same principle. They are prestigious because of a relatively small enrollment. The best private schools like having this small enrollment because it allows them to operate as mini-colleges. Increasing student enrollment will make them operate more like a public school out of necessity because teaching techniques that work with a ten to twelve student classroom don’t work well with a twenty-five to thirty student class room. The private schools willing to expand might be more interested in tuition than education.Report
I get it. I’d also presume that if individual private schools aren’t willing to expand enrollment then more new schools will shoulder their way into the market. I’m not familiar with NY’s regulations around private schools though and, understandably, an educational establishment that’s doing this kind of malpractice in public education would probably want to discourage development of escape hatches. Perhaps we’ll see a rise of boarding schools in neighboring states.Report
Bluntly speaking, I’m not sure if there is a market for new private schools outside certain specialized markets, Parents want to know their kids are going to get an education and tend not to be that into experimenting with a new school that is just starting unless they happen to be into some non-mainstream educational philosophy.Report
Depends on the alternatives. If my choices are trusting a new school that’s restrictive in who they admit or trusting a failure factory, then that’s easy.
Presumably most parents won’t be facing that specific choice but it might be how new schools get started.Report
Well, in NYC in particular, you run into space issues. My school (which has different rules because we are legally a day care) is limited by square footage. Other schools don’t have the same legal restrictions, but practically they can only put so many kids in a class and they can’t just add an extension to their buildings.
Beyond that, schools don’t necessarily want to grow for a host of reasons.
So while supply can change and it might a bit, it can’t just change freely and infinitely.Report
Yes I would guess that. If this little adventure in “equity” produces some other kind of academic excellence track I’d assume that things will stay as they are. But if they just try and equalize outcomes or lump kids in with lower performing kids I think we’ll be shocked at the lengths that engaged parents with high performing kids will go to nurture that. And I doubt the outcomes will be woke.Report
My mistake here may be viewing this through a pedagogical lens and not a political one.
I can definitely see a path whereby keeping G&T learners in their local schools and creating different tiers of programming could be a boon for all. It’d be hard to do well but even done not-so-welll, could yield good outcomes.
But, if this is indeed just about wokeness and signaling, then, yea, probably not gonna end well.Report
My biggest problem with it is it’s an incredible overreach. Wokeness is not widely popular- it’s just well connected. On top of that they’re quite good at cancelling or destroying stuff but I’ve not seen much constructive positive suggestions from them. Often they just babble the fashionable lingo and crib off their Marxist neighbors. So if we have the connected elite steer public education in this direction it could, in a worst case scenario, be the kind of thing that fishin kills public education.Report
Thats where my not being deep into NYC (school) politics hinders me.
I see: “NYC axes status quo G&T” and I see how educators redesigning the program can be great.
I ignore the part where it’s not DOE but DeBlas. Blegh.Report
Most private schools have waiting lists.
Why? Can’t they make more?Report
Private schools are, in many respects, positional goods. If I opened CJ’s Private Academy of Learning, the folks on the waiting list at Horace Mann, Fieldston, or Dalton would not think of it as much of a substitute and would stick to what are, for the relevant students and their families, pretty good public schools. At least not until it had been around long enough to grow some ivy on its walls and get a reputation — which it would get only if it could attract the sort of students who get into Horace Mann, et al., in the first place.Report
Perhaps, but with the trajectory public schools seem to be going the bar to having a successful private school that people of modest to medium means would be willing to pay to send their tykes to drops lower and lower. It starts to cease to be a positional good.Report
Yes and no.
Yes, it stops being a positional good.
However ejecting disruptive students from my kids’ classroom is an absolute good. Limiting that classroom to “medium and above” does a lot to do that.Report
The exceptions are for parents who want a nearly entirely religious education for their children. I don’t think that Ultra-Orthodox parents or Evangelical Protestant parents really care that much about the age of the institution. Parents who want their kids to get a more mainstream education are going to care how long the private school has been around for. Even if they don’t want something as prestigious as Horace Mann, Fieldston, and Dalton; they want some evidence that the school knows what they are doing.Report
Read this one and winced:
Report
The question this begs is: Are private schools offering a better education?Report
What would you accept as an acceptable measuring stick?
Here are some that I would propose:
1. Tests (including literacy, math but I’d also accept SAT or the other one)
2. College Acceptance/Completion
3. Projected Lifetime Earning
I don’t know if all of those are measured but, if they are, I think that those measures would demonstrate “better education”.
If you don’t think they would, I’d ask which measuring stick you’d prefer.Report
My expectation is those metrics mostly reflect selecting for kids (or their parents) who are focused on education. Now that might also reflect private schools being able to fire teachers who aren’t doing a good job, but IDK what private school union contracts look like.Report
If you don’t think that comparisons of testing, college, and earning would be a good measurement of education, I’d ask which measuring stick you would recommend.Report
I accept the measuring stick, I just think it’s happening because of what I said.
There is value added to my kid if I put her with other kids that are focused on education.
There is value lost if she’s in a classroom where the teacher is struggling with non-educational issues created by students who aren’t prioritizing learning.Report
So maybe we’ve been thinking about those schools that have 40% graduation rates all wrong.
They’re necessary. They provide a place to send the students who don’t prioritize learning.Report
Yes.
The logic is grim, but that’s where it leads.
Having said that, those students should be able to leave and should be encouraged to do so.
Schools like that should be a last resort, not a forced choice… but they’re not going away.Report
No Child Let AheadReport
Those are all poor metrics because you aren’t comparing like populations.
When I ask that question, what I’m really wondering is, “Will student A do better in School X than in School Y?”
For some students, the answer is undoubtedly that the private school will be a better option.
For some student, the answer is undoubtedly that the public school will be a better option.
For the vast majority, I would say the reality is that most kids would do more-or-less the same in either school.
Let me be clear: I’ve made my living… and my mother has made her living and my girlfriend has made her living… by helping to peddle the idea that our private schools offer something considerably better than the local public options. I have a very vested interest in this idea being true. And I can tell you with confidence that for most of our students, we don’t do that.
That said… there are many other benefits that come with attending a private school, which are real and which many parents actively want. So, it is not that we add no value… just that we don’t necessarily educate kids better than public kids.Report
True, but typically schools don’t have like populations.
The RW question is “which school would my kid do best in” rather than “which school teaches best after norming for population”.
IMHO one of the big ones is a re-roll of the dice.
If your kid is being bullied or otherwise failed in the local public, then just switching schools to change everything can be a good thing.
My youngest was just thrilled to change states with my job making me move, that let her take a mulligan on her social life.Report
I don’t disagree with any of that.
In my local area, we have great public schools in most towns. Even the weaker ones are generally weak relative to the strong ones but would probably be above average elsewhere. The nearby privates are generally on par with the publics. Some are actually looked down upon… where you go to perhaps avoid an expulsion in public or where you hope to paper over a poor record. Some are single-sex Catholics or Yeshivas, with some of the former offering elite sports opportunities. My mom’s school has really fallen off and primarily relies on international families who fall for the faux prestige or parents who just like the idea of their kid wearing a tie and blazer to school.
My school, right in the heart of Manhattan? Some of the the teachers are great… some are pretty meh… a few are like, I wouldn’t put my kid in their class. Our value-add is primarily the community and support we offer parents AND our support of their application to private ongoing schools. All of that has real value. But I don’t think we’re doing anything better for the kids than the UPK around the corner.Report
My wife was a teacher for years. My general impression is if the classroom has 5+ dysfunctional attention sucking kids in it then there is no learning. The ideal number is zero.
The word “private” means nothing, that’s not where the value is added. The value comes from my kid not having any resource sucking kids in there with her lowering her education.
Ideally we get that via “tracking”. My oldest was in a class on the wrong track and she had to sit out in the hallway to study because the teacher couldn’t control the classroom. Me seeing the Vice-Principle fixed that.
Less ideally I can get that by “moving”. I’ve also gone “charter” (charter schools are public schools in that State). “Private” would be expensive but if NY is going to make that a must have then that’s what would happen (I’m not in NY).
Big picture, efforts to fight inequality by preventing my kids from getting a good education aren’t going to be well received.Report
I think that really depends on the private school. The most elite private schools with really high tuitions and low student to teacher ratios can do things that even the best public schools in a very affluent suburb with no problem students can do. They can run classrooms as mini-symposiums while my upper middle class very education focused public high school, the question was where you were going to college not whether you were going, still relied a lot on lectures because we still had twenty to thirty students in a class.
Private schools that are either very ideologically focused because of religion and/or because they are just the size of a public school can’t do that. My impression of Catholic schools is that the they can be anything in quality between a bad public school, a good public school, or a really elite private school depending on their class size.Report
They’re getting better results, which is a different thing. To translate it to higher education, simply because more people know elite colleges than elite private secondary schools, is the education at, say, Harvard better because of something Harvard is doing, or does it just get better results because it’s full of kids who got into Harvard? It seems to me that what we need to evaluate what schools are doing rather than who they’re teaching is some kind of value-added metrics. Not that I know how to do that.Report
This is pretty much it… well said.Report
Most discussions about schooling always tend towards some variation of a lifeboat ethos, where we are encouraged to push the low performing people out. The polite version of this is where high performers are given access, and low performers are studiously ignored or just quietly dumped onto the streets for someone else to worry about.
Today on my way to work I saw a man crossing 5th Street. He was dressed in nothing but a hospital gown and slippers, wearing a hospital bracelet. He was clearly incoherent and stumbling through traffic lanes in a daze. He was one of the many who get dumped once their public funds are exhausted, tossed on the street like stray dogs.
And they get ignored until the day they steal or assault or set fire to something, at which point they get pulled into the system once again, repeating the cycle.
The question isn’t “can private schools do better than public” because if you are working with the top end almost any school system works.
The question is what to do with the low performers. And I’ve never seen anyone offer a good idea.Report
At the moment we pretend low performance is a result of racism in government policies which ended before their parents were born and not culture that they experience. We don’t even entertain looking at culture for whites.
Bad choices, especially bad cultural values, have strong Constitutional protection. Even, or especially, when those bad choices affect their children.
Some of the ugliest parts of our history have been efforts to deal with that.
The gov has limited tools to fight inequality, even in education. Fighting inequality should NOT be a top priority of the gov.Report
What happens to the ones thrown overboard?
Do they just, like disappear and we never have to deal with them?
Oh wait, here’s one.
Tonight, a block from my home.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbnbIUaX-NUReport
They get to benefit or suffer from the choices they’ve made, same as everyone else. And as normal, the rest of us will also benefit or suffer by extension from some of those choices.
We have a good understanding of what that means if they choose to be unvaccinated.
If they choose to be uneducated, this doesn’t mean they can’t get rich or successful, but it does mean that the odds are against them.
Society has a limited ability to shield people from their own bad choices and their own cultural problems.Report
Right.
When someone is uneducated, drug addicted, socially misfit, we all suffer.
Not just in physical ways, but economic. After we toss out all the low performing students, throw all the mentally ill into the streets, what happens to the economic engine of our society?
Well, we already know the answer to that, and in is widespread decline and impoverishment.
In these discussions everyone likes to pretend that the cost of not addressing social ills is free, while addressing them is expensive.
But in fact, not addressing them is catastrophically expensive.Report
There are strong arguments for doing [something], there are not strong arguments for doing [everything]. The 80/20 rule applies, we’re going to get the bulk of the return on our investment from the first money we spend and helping the bottom of the barrel will be extremely expensive.
There are also agency problems and unintended consequences.
This is grouping together things that shouldn’t be.
Mental illness is a problem. Some illnesses are cheap and easy to fix and the economy benefits a lot by having people cured. Other illnesses are impossible to cure and are bad enough that the people with them will always be a drain on society. That drain is probably minimized by giving them a bare minimum of services.
Thankfully that last group is a tiny percentage and doesn’t threaten our “economic engine” and won’t lead to widespread decline and impoverishment.
However cultural ills do threaten all of those things. That includes children facing social pressure to not get an education, cultural habits which let violent gangs flourish (which prevent economic activity), and so on.
Also there is a difference between low performing children and disruptive children. The former don’t affect my kid’s education but the later actively subtract from it and I don’t want them in the same classroom.Report
Which brings me right back to my first comment, of what to do about our dysfunctional citizens.
I notice that with disruptive students, as with homeless people, the conversations always revolve around the language of fault and blame- the drunk in the alley is there by his own fault, the disruptive student can be blamed on the parents.
Which is probably true, but does exactly nothing to change the situation.
So what do we do?
Every day that goes by without educating and treating and housing the dysfunctional citizens in our society, is a day that the fortunes and well being of the functional citizens is harmed and degraded.
So…what should be done?Report
Are we allowed to consider culture as contributive to their creation in the first place?
Like, can we suggest more paternalism among the communities that create the most dysfunction?
Wait, how are we defining dysfunction anyway? You know CEOs are pretty dysfunctional!Report
Good questions.
What do you think?Report
I think that the best way to maintain the status quo is to run as quickly as possible away from unfashionable conclusions that might result in social sanction.
In practice, this results in people not wanting to measure stuff like ability, education, and so on and, instead, coming up with some trite (but fashionable!) solution such as “the problem is Capitalism” or some bullshit like that.Report
So let’s not do that.
What would be some of those conclusions?Report
Well, that the best way to have helped the stabby guy was to put him in a program that would not have said “this person needs a college prep education!” but one that said “we need to train this person to be a damn good janitor”.Report
You look at what is predictive and try to encourage things that are predictively beneficial.
Marriage is hugely predictive and beneficial. Ditto getting vaccinated. Ditto cooperating with the police.
It would be useful to end gov dysfunctions, the war on drugs comes to mind.
And then we wait a couple of generations.Report
We will pay one way or the other. But I find it hard to believe that doing nothing is more expensive than giving seriously dysfunctional people the infinite care they need.
As for what should be done, getting rid of or sharply restricting the ability of local zoning to prevent the creation of housing would help a lot.
Full treatment of addiction is probably waiting for technology improvements. We’re studying how addiction works, we may come up with a magic pill or two.
When it comes to cultural problems, we do little to nothing.
Giving the gov the ability to force good choices on people is giving Trump-as-president the ability to force bad choices on people. Or if that’s too hypothetical, we did really nasty things to the Native Americans in the name of their culture being inferior.
IMHO it would probably be more useful to name and shame than to tell large groups of children that they can’t succeed because of racism, but that’s just me. Similarly it would be useful to promote marriage, but I’m not sure how to do that without being really heavy handed.Report
Maybe we can learn from the past.
In the late 19th century American cities were teeming slums of dysfunction where roving gangs made effective No Go zones, and where most poor children were illiterate and caught up in cultures of alcoholism and delinquency.
One of the primary missions of public education as well as the philanthropy that built public libraries was to intervene and inculcate a culture which would break that cycle.Report
I guess the first question is how long did that take?
The 2nd is I’m not sure we’ve found the root cause we need to deal with. If it’s the War on Drugs, then we might be willing but we haven’t. If it’s The Great Society, then we’re not willing to get rid of it.Report
What is it that you believe that we did then that we’re not doing now? Libraries are still here. Free public schools are still here. Welfare spending has been dramatically increased.
Along every dimension, American policy is far to the left of where it was a hundred years ago. If you want to look to the past for guidance, there’s only one way to go.Report
And poverty is reduced, crime is lower and wealth has increased.
So I conclude that the changes of the turn of the century such as public education worked. Lets not tear down that fence since now we know why it was put up.Report
Well, do we have a problem, or is this purely an inequality illusion thing?
Take 30 cultures. Someone needs to be last if we’re going to use a ruler to evaluate them.
People who follow a certain culture tend to do worse than another. Those people still don’t want their culture destroyed, and refuse to consider that their culture is part of the problem.
So what do we do? Try to destroy the culture? And after we destroy that culture, will we destroy the next worst?Report
That is very humane and very true but lifeboat ethos, while unpleasant, has certain roots in reality. Resources are limited and a disruptive kid can be astronomically bad for all the other kids in the classroom. That makes education potentially very zero sum. Also few things get people as worked up as their kids. The politics of this are fraught. If people perceive that this is a choice between equity and their individual kids welfare then equity will be turfed so fast our heads will spin. Woke policies don’t have a good track record at all in my own experience- a terrible one. I hope these educational woke gurus in NY have a really good handle on what comes next once they start dragging down the engaged parents kids. If there isn’t a damn good alternative that is equitable and effective then there’ll be hell to pay.Report
I don’t believe it is nearly as zero sum as you (and Dark) seem to. Human systems are fallible and while there will never be a 0% slip through rate we would do much better with even more multi tracking, not less. GT classes and magnet schools are really only a half hearted attempt at it because the idea conflicts with the American idea of equality and because even the limited amount of it we have produces optics politicians don’t like.
De Blasio’s move really amounts to ‘hide the evidence’ and North and Dark are right about how it will be perceived by parents. What needs to happen is a rethink of how the resources we have are used instead of doubling down on a one size fits all model.Report
An interesting question:
Report
I think it’s a great idea. Then grades could start meaning something again based on the program in which they are achieved as opposed to all the inflation and self-esteem based silliness.Report
The big problem with tests like the SAT is that they tell us things we don’t want to know, i.e. that we’re not all equal, and that [my kid] isn’t at the top of the pack.
Grade inflation and “self-esteem” are efforts to avoid telling us those things. The pressure to avoid hearing what we don’t want to hear isn’t going away.Report
You see this with IQ discourse a lot.
What is intelligence anyway? How could it even be measured? There are a lot of kinds of intelligence! Like, if we were talking about strength, I don’t know if you mean the ability to lift heavy things, the ability to run fast, the ability to jump far, the ability to run for a long, long time, the ability to install drywall, or what! So what even is strength? Same for intelligence! Nobody knows what it is!
I also have no intention of listening to your attempts to make distinctions between types of intelligences.
Therefore: Intelligence cannot be measured.
With the whole “how can we measure ‘education’, anyway?” discourse above, it’d be like trying to define “physical fitness”. What does physical fitness even mean? BMI has significant problems. Also, “fit” sounds fatphobic! It’s perfectly possible for someone who is obese to be fit!Report
And yet somehow we were able to select kickball teams in grade school.
The problem has never been measuring fitness or intelligence, it is trying to square the “uncomfortable” results with a dysfunctional, make-believe radical egalitarian ideology.Report
But why is that pressure so high? Because the individual stakes of failing in the American rat race, which for better or worse is majorly impacted by education, is also so high. This is where there are some real implications for policy that no one wants to hear. The path to allowing real competition and achievement involves empathy and some sort of viable road for those who for whatever reason can’t cut it at a high levelReport
Maybe we could create a trillion dollar per year social safety net!
Just spitballing.Report
I have no idea how that’s remotely relevant to what I said, but ok.Report
A social safety net is an “empathetic” “policy” that catches people who fall or are unable to jump high in the competitive “rat race,’ allowing them to regain their feet and get back on the “road.”Report
Or it just makes losing not that bad.Report
A social safety net doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re talking about. The issue is that our system treats college as the only end game when ~2 out of 3 students won’t go. That’s the source of the grade inflation, the creative resume building, the BS maneuvering, the life boat mentality, etc.
Those students who don’t make it are at best prepared for nothing but no skill service jobs. Yea I guess Medicaid and unemployment insurance exists but that’s all after the fact. It isn’t a corrective and the model is a waste of resources that serves the taxpayer poorly.
Keep in mind this conversation is in context of the Matt Y tweet Jaybird posted.Report
RE: ~2 out of 3 students won’t go
In 2019, about 44 percent of high school completers immediately enrolled in 4-year institutions and 22 percent immediately enrolled in 2-year institutions. (Google)
So 2 of 3 go right after HS. No clue how many go community as adults but it’s non-trivially high.
RE: the life boat mentality, etc.
Most kids add to my kid’s educational experience. We get “lifeboat” with the kids that subtract from it. Insisting that people don’t poke holes in the boat is reasonable and an amazingly low standard.
There’s room for EVERYONE in the lifeboat; Some people not only don’t want to be there they also don’t want anyone else to be there.
RE: Those students who don’t make it are at best prepared for nothing but no skill service jobs.
You have to actively work at screwing off to end up with nothing. And then, if you’re determined to make choices which start you at the absolute bottom rung of the employment ladder, there are still no skill service jobs which have ladders.
Alternatively, take a couple of classes at the local community college and you’re an apprentice carpenter or whatever. Industry is desperate for that. Local HS would even let you do that for free in High School.
You’re also allowed to take those classes as an adult after screwing around for a few years or decades.Report
Dark, what are you even arguing with me about? My position is that the public school system should be even more multitracked, maybe something similar to what’s done in Germany. Part of my reasoning is that it’s pointless to hammer children lacking the aptitude for higher education in the manner we do until they’re 18 then dump them into the work force and/or post-HS training programs varying in quality from decent enough to farcical. Our resources would be better spent finding something they can do earlier on in life than tripling down on that which they obviously can’t. Once we do that we can drop these pretenses and comfortably impose real rigor.
And I know, I know your kids went to a school that had students with behavioral problems. I’m a parent too and I pay a good chunk of change in part for my son to avoid that kind of thing. But that experience is not the end all be all of education policy nor is it insightful to focus the entire conversation on those incorrigible people who will choose not to succeed in any system. I’m perfectly willing to deal harshly with those who refuse to get their acts together but that doesn’t mean we can’t do better.
But back to my question. Maybe your real position is that the existing system is flawless, as is? It seems like you don’t think that but then you keep responding as though any suggestions for improvement is beyond outrageous.Report
Multi-tracking is very nearly the opposite of the lifeboat ethos, and different than what it appears NYC schools were doing.
Once again I refer to the past, where schools have robust shop classes teaching metalwork, woodworking, auto repair, and even technical drafting.
Which was my entry point into becoming an architect, by the way.
If we translate this into today’s economic environment, it occurs to me that the old categorization between college/ white collar job skills and non-college/ blue collar skills is getting blurred to the point of being obliterated.
Of all the people I work with who create 3D virtual models of buildings, only a minority came out of universities; the rest migrated into the field through blue collar craft work, or videogaming.
If I try to imagine some sort of “tracking” system which would produce workers for the modern economy, I’m not opposed so much as puzzled.Report
Eh, I’ve seen multi-tracking as a lifeboat variant.
“You get the *GOOD* lifeboat. This other guy gets the barely adequate lifeboat. That woman over there gets the life preserver and advice to marry well.”Report
There will always be some of this but my hypothesis is that a critical mass evaporates with reasonable alternative paths. My contrarian, and un-PC take in all this is that we don’t need to care about fleeting notions of demographic ‘equity’ if there are more paths to success.* Which makes de Blasio’s approach exactly backwards.
*Hopefully this also leads to net better outcomes and my money is that it would, but I concede that is mere hypothesis.Report
In the 90’s Bill Gates said something, and I’m paraphrasing this, “Every child deserves a quality college prep education.”
This sounds like one of those bromides that gets everybody to nod but, as I look around, I see that it’s pretty much blank-slatism and downright harmful.
But as sentiments go, it’s lovely.Report
“Every child deserves a quality college prep education.”
I get that you’re quoting someone, but this is nuts. It’s even more nuts when you combine that with “all cultures are equal” or even “all children are blank slates”.
This sort of thinking got rid of the “lesser” tracks so we could focus on college prep.
So we end up with two tracks, college prep and not-interested-in-learning. We also have efforts to claim that even two tracks is “racist” and we should just have one (which is where your quoted statement leads).Report
What makes it even more nuts is that his peers, the founders of tech companies include many who were college droputs.
That is, he and his peers are walking evidence that college isn’t a requirement for job skills.Report
That. The richest guy I know got that way by changing careers. He went from being a bouncer in a gentleman’s club to being a plumber. Now he owns his own company.
Big picture you need to have some clue what you want to do, the younger the better.Report
I’m lost. You sounded like you were agreeing with me, then in your last paragraph seemed to suggest agreement with the existing system. Where I guess we fret over our inability to get lowest academic performers into calculus or advanced English classes by grade 12 instead of giving chances at something more useful years before the point of no return.Report
I am agreeing (Or at least not disagreeing) with the idea of tracking, I’m just having a hard time imagining how it would work in the rapidly evolving 21st century jobscape.
Tracking always sounds like it segregates students by cognitive skills, which itself is based on a 20th century conception of jobs where the highest are the white collar professions, and the lowest are blue collar physical work.
But that’s rapidly changing. Working with software is becoming a requirement for even crafts like machining, blurring the old lines.
And the pay scales reflect this.
A machinist or structured wiring installer can earn more than the architect of the building.
So what would the “tracks” look like? What would the criteria be?
Which jobs at the big tech companies actually require a four year degree with all the bells and whistles of academia?
Could we enlarge and embellish trade academies specifically to train people in tech skills, without the pretension of general ed and humanities?
Maybe- I don’t really know. What I’m really thinking about is how the subject of tracking is automatically associated with our 20th century notions of work, and therefore connected to 20th century notions of class.Report
All very fair points and I guess this is where I cop to my ignorance on the details. I’m certainly open minded on what makes most sense, and agree it probably isn’t what did in the 70s or even the 90s.Report
We should break up the colleges and stop insisting that “well rounded” is useful or needed.
I went to a lecture from a world class surgeon where most of it was him bitching about the parts of his life that sucked (not how he phrased it, and it was fascinating, and he was focused on that because it was informing us on business opportunities).
He thought about half of his last 7 years of medical training was worthless. He knows how to deliver a baby, he’s never done so and never will. Rather than 7 years with half of it wasted we could have twice as many surgeons.Report
There is an argument to be made that well-roundedness comes from the time when the potential pool of leaders and professionals was a lot smaller, so you needed them to be able to do just about everything. and know a little bit of this and that. These days we have a much larger potential pool, so what we need is specialists. This doesn’t really bode well for the humanities.Report
I think I should have said “de-bundle” college degrees.
I have no sympathy for classes that exist only because students are forced to take them. That means the students believe, probably correctly, they don’t add value.
Note reducing college from 4-5 years to 2-3 would have VAST implications for student debt, and those two extra years of work would also help normal students a lot.Report
Almost all private universities began as divinity schools, then became finishing schools for the elite, and only in recent times, like since WWII and the GI BIll, have people looked at universities as primarily job skills academies.
The titans of the first Gilded Age like Carnegie and Hearst weren’t the products of university study, very few people were. Most people learned their job skills through on-the-job training.
What if we taught jobs skills via an apprenticeship system, and universities shrank to be what they once were?Report
Land grant schools, well before 1900. Almost everywhere between the Appalachians and the Sierras. An enormously successful effort. During an era while a lot of the (in particular) Northeastern private universities were finishing schools, the people who did the science and engineering came up through those non-elite public schools.Report
Not sure why the geographic limitation. They’re all over the country.Report
I forgot about those! A good example.Report
My guess is that anything that leads up to a managerial level position, all the way up to President and CEO, is going to still require a university degree even if what the computer science people who go to universities is not that different than the people who go to computer science trade academies learn. There is no way that big multinational companies are going to allow non-elites into the higher positions of running departments and companies.Report
This raises the issue of what happens when you have the wrong degree, and the answer is you go out and get another one.
Or alternatively, my friend needed specific MBA classes but already had a technical degree. So he “failed” to get an MBA but didn’t care.
The stupid part was he couldn’t get a degree because he didn’t have some of the pre-reqs for bundled classes that he didn’t care about. (It’s been long enough that I don’t remember the exact details).Report
For existing companies. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook? Those started from nothing*. Getting a top-level job there now is, of course, no doubt what you say.
Probably me being defensive, but I believe that what you get from a four- or five-year computer science or computer engineering degree is very different than what the “trade academies” provide.
* I have a friend who still kicks himself over not taking the offer he got in the mail after buying an early Microsoft product: an opportunity to buy $1,000 of stock that would have made him a multi-millionaire eventually.Report
Eh, my corner of the computer world puts more emphasis on certifications like the RHCSA and CISSP than a university degree.
I know that my boss would hire someone who had both of the above (with only a high school diploma) than someone who had a Masters in Computer Science but neither of the above.Report
We are illustrative of what people outside the field miss. When I retired from tech, the company employed dozens/hundreds of people with certifications to take care of the systems that provided service to tens of millions of subscribers. Some who did grunt work, and some who did much more sophisticated versions of that sort of thing. They also employed a handful of people like me to evaluate/develop algorithms and tools for forward looking things.
Complementary skill sets.Report
Why would we be imposing tracks? Just leave the options open. Hell, you probably don’t even need to bother putting the shop classes back into the high schools if there is a public tech school nearby, just partner with the tech school(s).
What probably does need to happen is the HS graduation requirements would need to become more flexible. If you need two math classes to graduate, maybe they can be shop math, or something like that.
But the kids will figure out their own track, if the track is available to them.Report
Nearly every existing tracking system is based on using testing to get kids into what the powers that be consider the right track for them. Maybe you can have a democratic system where kids choose their own track but history doesn’t make me enthusiastic about this.Report
When did you graduate high school? Because my high school had a voc-tech track and an academic track, they were open to all, and the only real restrictions were scheduling (if you wanted to take wood shop, you couldn’t take AP Calculus, because they were offered at the same time).
Schools got rid of shop classes because the push to college emptied those classes out, and it didn’t make sense to spend budget on expensive shops no one was using. Especially when you could spend the budget on athletic programs, because no one got a university scholarship for wood shop.Report
Unfortunately the focus on athletic programs and athletic scholarships is a “parents” thing.Report
Sure, it’s absolutely a parent thing, who bought into the idea that college was the only to success. Where the school gets the blame is the catering to a minority of parents with academically marginal children who have some talent in a sport, in order to create opportunity for college for a minority of that minority, based upon the anecdotal promise of the smart kid who can only afford school on an athletic scholarship.
Talk about elitist waste of resources.
I wonder how many HS voc-tech, art, and music programs died to better promote the legendary athletic scholarship? How many schools happily killed those programs in order to boost their athletic reputation and their stats on how many of their graduates immediately went to college (& how many of those got scholarships).Report
Paying for college is an idea WAY more reasonable and understandable than the reality.
We have parents who want their kids to WIN!! There’s a subset that want their kids to become pro-athletes. IMHO what they’re doing is proving that [their kid] is better than [your kid].
Eliminate athletic scholarships and we’d still have this cultural obsession with sports and HS would still be getting pulled into it.Report
We don’t need to get rid of athletic scholarships, but HS shouldn’t be allocating budget away from other educational options in an attempt to boost athletic scholarships.Report
I think HS is going to do what the parents want. (And not only that, they SHOULD).
If the parents are making poor choices for their kids, well, that’s the problem in a nutshell.Report
I think you are missing my point. In a given HS class, how many athletes do you have, how many of those athletes are banking on an athletic scholarship, and of those, how many actually have the academic chops to succeed at college?
So your parents that the school is listening to represent a very small minority of the parents at the school.Report
CDC claims 57% of them play a sport. We had something like 400 person classes.
Most are Track-and-Field or Cross Country (both of those can easily be more than a hundred people). After those two you have Football and get to enter the debate on whether Marching Band counts.
On a hundred plus person Cross Country team where only the top 7 have scores, it should be really obvious than at most one or two might get any sort of scholarship and if they’re not scoring in the top 5 in meets, not even them.
Now the weird part is it isn’t obvious. I have friends whose daughter swam for four years. They’d talk about her getting a scholarship. She was the 3rd fastest person on the team which wasn’t all that great itself.
The Volleyball team would get one to three seniors with full scholarships every year. But they were a regional powerhouse AND I saw 6 seniors result in only three scholarships at the awards ceremony.
Those three had parents who had their kid do club every quarter the team wasn’t playing. Coach doesn’t put up with slacking grades so all of them can go to college… although what they consider strong academics is not what I consider.
My expectation is four to eight kids might get serious scholarships across all sports. If your team isn’t trying to take the State Title you have close to no shot. Probably all of them have the chops to go to college although mismatch is a serious concern.
So call it 1-2% of students, although I wouldn’t be shocked if it was less.
Now do they dominate politics? No clue. IMHO physical fitness and playing a sport adds a lot of value just as a way to ward off obesity and increase intelligence.Report
So 1-2% of students get to siphon away resources from other kids… That’s not sounding like a school responding to the desires of the majority of parents.Report
I think you’re wrong on 2.5 points.
First, key number was 57%, something like half of the students benefit from athletics. All of them if we count Gym although the facilities are too large for just that.
2nd, go to a LaCross game, or woman’s basketball. It’s just the parents. Team is small so the crowd is small. Go to a HS football/basketball game. Most of the people in the stands aren’t parents.
The political support for athletics isn’t just, or even mostly, the “athletic scholarship” crowd. Now it’s a problem that although 1% will get one, maybe 10x think they will.
Or go to any college Football game. Athletics taps into something really tribal. HS is a watered down version of College/Pro.
The half a point is athletics is pay-to-play. The counter point is I’m not sure if they pay full freight. The counter to that counter is athletics provides some benefit so they shouldn’t have to.
Now all of this is from the point of view of a parent at a good school where most of the kids will go to college so academics CAN NOT be ignored. If there are bad schools with great athletics programs where they take the place of academics, then that’s off my radar. Also all my kids are female so I only got involved in women’s sports.
However the silly bad school that we played tended to be weak across the board, so weak that they’ve been kicked out of the conference.Report
Just to be clear, I’m not saying we shouldn’t have HS athletics, but if a school district has a choice between funding shop or arts programs, and building a new football field, they should be spending money on the educational programs.
If all your educational programs are fully funded, and you have budget left, then go ahead and spend it on athletics.Report
The question is really “what sort of tracking are we talking about”.
Are we talking “let’s label some kids gifted and give them special stuff” or are we talking “Look, we’ve got at least two classrooms full of 5th graders every year who are bored as heck in their classes. They’re not challenged, they distract other students, it’s just a big PITA and not helping anyone. Let’s offer faster-paced classes in X for these kids”.
The latter, up until you can get into dual-credit classes with the local college in HS, are kinda important.
I mean I’ve read the theories about faster students helping slower students, but that pretty much only works well when everyone is within shouting distance of each other.
When 10% of your class is bored out of their gourd and 18 months ahead, 20% are still struggling with last year’s material, and the middle of the pack if working fairly hard to learn the current content — it’s a huge PITA and does no one (teachers or students) any favors.
This is especially problematic as class sizes rise.Report
YepReport
I graduated in 1998. My high school offered a few voc-tech electives but not an entire track because it was one of those “everybody will go to college” high schools that you get in affluent suburban school districts. They got rid of the shop classes and home ec classes due to lack of interest a couple of years after I left.Report
My school was rural WI (1992), where maybe 20% had college aspirations, and the rest were taking over the family farm, etc.
Shop class was still very much a thing.Report
Technically kids here pick “their own track”.
In reality that means parents. The powers-that-be had their own suggestions and recommendations. Expecting competence from that is naïve.
The school system is a tool for me to use to help my kids. It is NOT an entity whose judgement or interests should be trusted. It has no skin in the game. It lacks information. Often it lacks competence.Report
My position is that the public school system should be even more multitracked
Whoops, my bad. I’m good with that.Report
The main problem with this reframing is generally harder classes sounds something like any kid can opt into if they want while gifted classes sound like the kids were pre-sorted. Parents and to an extent kids in these classes want the sorting to be done before the first class even begins.Report
In New York, they had General, Regents, and Honors.
Everybody knew what was up.Report
Growing up we had “normal” math (i.e. math for students who aren’t interested in education) and “advanced” math (i.e. math for students who are).
The G&T got to ace their “advanced” math class while being bored.Report
You have evidence to support that’s in fact what parents want?Report
In Illinois, they have regular classes and college prep. Students self select, though there are minimum prerequisites. Effectively it allowed my grandson to get away from disruptive idiots. (Paraphrasing him).Report
A new development in the War on Messengers: The UC system has declined to adopt an alternative to the SAT for use in admissions because it does nearly as good a job of testing academic achievement as the SAT does.
To clear up some confusion this may have caused, I want to reiterate that it’s Republicans who are anti-science and Democrats who are pro-science.Report
I spent a few minutes checking to see if the SAT really is predictive. The “it is very predictive” argument seems strong and fleshed out. The “it’s not” argument comes from groups whose focus is on equality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Predictive_validity_and_powersReport
As a citizen, why should I prefer a system that gives advantage to those who score well on tests, versus a system that equalizes opportunity?
Which delivers better outcomes for society?Report
Which delivers better outcomes for society?
Is this measurable? Who decides what “better” is?
It’s impossible to compare things.Report
That’s a different argument (which I might answer in a different reply).
It’s one thing to say “the test is predictive but we’re going to do race norming because we want to engage in social engineering”.
It’s another to say “the test can’t be predictive but I don’t like what it’s saying”.
You are entitled to your own opinion, you’re not entitled to your own facts.Report
You’re defining “equality of opportunity” at a group outcome level, not an individual input level.
The SAT doesn’t drop someone’s score by 200 points if the color of their skin is “wrong”. That would be heinous.
What you are suggesting is it’s somehow “more fair” to give points to someone based on the color of their skin and/or group identity.Report
Isn’t the entire purpose of public education and public universities social engineering?Report
Isn’t the entire purpose of public education and public universities social engineering?
If “yes”, then it’s important to *NOT* screw the social engineering aspects up by making public education and public universities into crappy simulacrae of themselves.Report
Public education can justify it’s existence at an individual level. For example I sent my kids to public schools because that was (imho) best for them. In that context the social engineering is a side effect or at least subordinate to letting individuals prosper, or fail.
“Social Engineering” becomes a serious problem the moment you insist individuals take one for the team because that will make you feel better.
It would be fine and ethical if we gave disadvantaged children extra resources like online access to tutors and the like. That’s trying to fix things via inputs and at the end the day you’re going to evaluate everyone as individuals.
Attempting to force groups to have the same outcomes is going to stomp on individuals, i.e. they won’t have “equal opportunity” because they need to succeed at the acceptable rate.
You can have “equal opportunity” or you can have equal outcomes, but you can’t have both.Report
I’m fine with delivering added resources to disadvantaged children at the primary school level, then after that begins to remedy the imbalance, withdrawing the university level aids.Report
We can’t treat people as individuals until after their groups have the same success rates?
In reality that means we can’t stop favoring Obama’s children (and other minority children who never experienced discrimination like overseas immigrants) until after the inner city kids get their parents to marry.Report
Well then we should work on getting people to marry then.Report
I’m all in favor of that… but I do have to wonder what that would mean in practice.
Strong Gov benefits for children which can only be collected by married couples?
Multiple relatives have avoided getting married to collect benefits from the gov. That suggests some of our “Great Society” benefits are misaligned and creating problems.Report
We’re touching on what is currently called bourgeoisie values, the stuff that Charles Murray talked about in Coming Apart where people who live ordered disciplined lives get better outcomes than people who don’t.
Which is completely true, almost trivially so. Divorce is expensive, single parenthood is ruinous to life goals.
A lot of liberals get uncomfortable with this sort of conversation because it is most often weaponized against an outgroup. In the current iteration, the street level theory is that black people lack bourgeoise values so they suffer worse outcomes in life, and of course until they get better values this will remain an intractable problem.
What’s noteworthy to me is that this identical argument is old, very old and has been used to explain virtually all unequal social outcomes since antiquity.
But history- real actual empirical data- has not just falsified the notion of inherent or genetic differences, but it has also falsified the idea of culture as being static and immutable. Cultures that thrive in one generation can collapse in the next, or vice versa.
Which is to say, that the inculcation of societal norms and bourgeoisie values is difficult and fraught with all sorts of bigotry, but is achievable.Report
I agree with all of that.
As far as I can tell, we are putting a lot of effort into teaching the wrong values. That’s what it means when relative after relative decides to not get married to min/max gov benefits.
The gov is enabling and/or encouraging dysfunctional behavior.
Not just them. I think it’s 40% of whites who have kids out of wedlock. Now some of them are doing that in name only so that number might be high.Report
Maybe relevant if we’re talking about values: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22673605/upper-middle-class-meritocracy-matthew-stewart
He gets the “what” pretty well. Then after that he puts down the “why” to what he wants to see since he clearly didn’t bother talking to anyone in the class he’s supposedly studying.
You “optimize” (his word, not mine) your children because it’s important, and it’s a duty. Imho instincts play a part as well.
I can do good things for my kids or I can not. If not then I’m depending on the government and chance.
Big picture it’s a debt you pay forward.Report
Yea that’s actually really an amazing read in terms of identifying the issue correctly but then having the stupidest analysis of it possible. As if it’s some kind of moral failing to want well for your children. Even more bizarre is that he takes that position while acknowledging the fear of just how far there is to fall.Report
Here’s a blast from the past:
“I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally.”Report
It’s really breathtaking. But I guess if the point is to prove that you can come out of the ivy leagues with no critical thinking capabilities or sense of perspective, well touché.Report
“There are some things so stupid that. only intellectuals believe them.” George Orwell.Report
I assume this challenges his worldview, ergo it must be a moral problem.
His worldview is presumably everyone should have an “equal” opportunity, ergo there isn’t supposed to be good/bad parenting or at the very least it’s not supposed to have any effects.
Face to face with good parenting having massively good results, well there must be something seriously wrong with that. He’s one step away from wondering if bad parenting has bad results, and that’s just unthinkable.
Inequality is because of racism, no other explanation is acceptable.Report
I think you’ve got two spurs. The first is the natural inclination of parents to help (and push) their children to achieve. The second is that, at least by first world standards, the US economy is precarious for workers of all stripes, and it’s a pretty long fall for people who have managed to do well for themselves. No one wants to see their children plummet and parents lose a lot of sleep over that possibility.
What’s totally absurd is treating the first spur as a problem, as opposed to something that should be encouraged, and treating the second spur, that very real fear, as some silly triviality to be hand waved away.
I’d be kind of curious to find out what this ivy league philosopher does with his own family. Does he live by these principles he proposes for others? I doubt it.Report
I think the handwaving away economic security is wrong, I can kinda see where it comes from. How many of those 9.9% have an economic insecurity of their own making? They bought way too much house in far too expensive a neighborhood, and they drive late model luxury cars, and the house has top end appliances, and gets remodeled every 5 years or less, and the family takes more than one expensive vacation every year, etc.
So I think part of that handwaving is a recognition that for a lot of that 9.9%, the insecurity could be alleviated by making better financial and lifestyle choices.Report
I don’t buy the morality play version of this anymore than I would for people further down the ladder. Yea keeping up with the Jones’ happens and there are ants and grasshoppers everywhere in all classes. But the 9.9 are stacked with student loan debt for those credentials and the jobs to finance them are concentrated in the highest cost of living parts of the country. Unlike the 1 or the .1 or whatever they are also still subject to being wiped out by another financial and/or housing crisis or a medical emergency or just the general vagaries in the job market. The real estate situation in particular is intimately tied to the quality of educational options and forces all kinds of difficult trade-offs.
This isn’t a sob story for the upper middle class, who all things considered still get a pretty good deal in this country. It’s just to say that they’re responding to incentives and circumstances like everyone else. Proposing that they just stop working so hard and investing so much in their children isn’t a solution and it’s offensive enough to deserve derision.Report
Sure, but if your starting assumption is that the UMC is largely in a Jonesian struggle, rather than a victim of their parents and grandparents NIMBYism (among other issues), then it’s easy to handwave it away, just like people handwave the problems of the poor as being bad with money and spending too much on vices.Report
The concept that Economic Insecurity drives this was an ass-pull from the vox author who is looking for “why this is not needed and is bad”.
I’m not convinced it exists much less drives the behavior of this caste.Report
It exists, but how prevalent it is, that’s not something I think we have hard data on, so assuming it drives behavior is a stretch. Especially when you start to look at demographics (of those who are financially insecure, how many are older families versus young adults just starting out, or folks who are close to retirement or retired).
So even if it’s a significant concern, for the issue at hand, it needs to be a significant concern for parents of school age children. And then you have to filter that against the normal desire of parents to give their kids as many opportunities as possible.
And finally, of the SES, how many parents are really pulling out all the stops, Tiger Mom style? As with so many things, is that kind of parenting really prevalent, or is it just noisy enough that the handful of such parents get all the attention precisely because they are outliers.Report
Thanks for the link.
What interests me is that this essay could just as easily have been written in1961, or 1921, or 1821 or any other period where there is an accumulation of wealth at the top end, but people are still scrambling for a slice of it.
When he talks about people hyper focused on their children, doesn’t that remind you of the mother in the movie Titanic, or Downton Abbey or any other piece from that era where social strivers are desperately trying to leverage their children to a slot on the economic lifeboat? Or like a Jane Austin novel where the perch on the social hierarchy is always precarious, and subject to the whims of fate and the slightest misstep could mean calamity and ruin.
For that matter, think of the cultural upheavals in the 1960s.
The main criticism then was that the bourgeois values were stultifying and reflected not positive values of discipline but narrow minded prudery.
Whereas with 50 years of hindsight, a counter criticism has been made that while personal freedom means we can have sex without guilt, it was also gamed and weaponized to mean that we walk out on our children without guilt.
I think Stewart acknowledges that much of this is the human condition, that what we call values always have a double edge to them- that freedom can also carry with it irresponsibility, that discipline carries with it repression.Report
I think Stewart acknowledges that much of this is the human condition, that what we call values always have a double edge to them- that freedom can also carry with it irresponsibility, that discipline carries with it repression.
Which is why some might look askance at getting rid of accelerated programs or the SAT.Report
You’re reversing cause and effect. We live in a time where pretty much anyone can join the upper 10% if they have parents who do this sort of thing. The current 10% got there largely by their parents doing it, so that’s what they intend to do for their own kids.
As for the upper 0.1% and their infinite wealth, that’s a different problem(?) and a different conversation.
Something else to point out in the “equality” issue is “upper 10%” is a snap-shot and actually affects more than 10% of the population. My dad is retired, he had a few years up there but currently has an income of zero. None of my kids are up there yet, but I’m reasonably confident about the oldest two (and have no clue with the others).
Yes. That’s the REALLY nasty part of this. Parental irresponsibility results in stunted economic opportunity for their kids.Report
pretty much anyone can join the upper 10%
This is undoubtedly true, but largely irrelevant.
As citizens deciding how to organize our democracy, the question really isn’t “What provisions and structures should we create for those who are well organized and successful”?
Because really the answer is, “Nothing. They need no help, and we only need to let them be.”
The real question for citizens is always, “What provisions do we make for those who fail?”
Because failure is the problem, not success.
Bankruptcy, traffic congestion, crime, mental illness, poor family structure…these are things that society needs to address.
Telling us that traffic is congested because of people’s poor commuting choices may be true, just doesn’t get us anywhere to a solution.Report
The real question for citizens is always, “What provisions do we make for those who fail?”
It’s weird how the answers seem to involve taking away stuff for the relatively high achievers instead of making provisions for those who fail.Report
Yeah its weird that healthy people take care of the sick, instead of the other way round.Report
Taking away stuff from the healthy is taking care of the sick?Report
The healthy people keep getting told that the root problem is they’re racists and it’s their behavior that needs to change.
Nothing is going to get fixed until the sick people are told that abandoning children is sick.Report
What are we defining as “failure” here? If it’s “crime” or “mental illness”, then yes.
If it’s “poor family structure leads to inequality so we need to enable and encourage poor family structure” then the gov just became part of the problem.
We need to encourage good parenting, not bad parenting. We especially shouldn’t excuse bad parenting by what was done to their great grand-parents much less claim the later has more effect than the former.Report
Note, this isn’t just because of welfare structuring. Even if we re-structured the welfare incentives, we’d still have this problem, and government would still be at the heart of it. Because there are a lot of single parents out there who are only single because one of the parents is in jail, or has enough of a record that they can’t tuition assistance for school and/or get a high paying job, so it’s either starve, or both parents are working 2 jobs just to keep the rent paid and food in the kitchen.
And in a large number of such cases, the crime in question was victimless. The Malum Prohibitum kind of crime with an excessive penalty that ruins people for no good reason.
So it’s not just welfare kings and queens.Report
Population of the US is about 330 million.
We have about 59 million getting Welfare.
We have 2.1 million in prison.
We have 6.7 million in prison, parole, or probation.
The FBI says we’ve had 73.5 million ever arrested on a felony charge (plus some misdemeanors). That’s not convicted and may include dead people.
You’re not wrong, but back of the envelope suggests our social programs are a bigger problem.Report
Define “welfare”, because getting SS benefits is technically on welfare. On disability – welfare (technically I’m on welfare, because my VA pension is a disability pension, even though I have been a FTE for the past 25+ years). So what constitutes being on welfare?
If we are looking at the welfare benefits that are tied to family, such as SNAP, you need to break that out.
Are there any welfare benefits that are harder to get if one or both parents has a record?
Of that 73.5 M with a record (and that is 30% of the adult population), how may are solidly in the demographic that would need welfare of some form?Report
We currently have something like 40% of children born outside of wedlock. That seems too big to be explained by prison.
Granted, if we use the broadest definition possible (arrested) then we’re at 30% of the population. But to the best of my knowledge we have no filters on “arrested”. If we shift the standard to “convicted” then we’re at something like 8% (33% of Black males).
These are numbers worth looking at and worth reform, but if we have something to explain 20% of the pie then we still have the remaining 80% to worry about.
This is also assuming that someone with a criminal conviction can never get married, which also seems a reach.Report
On a side note:
Most enrichment activities, although run by one parent for their kid, benefit other children. A baseball team needs 8+ kids in addition to the coach’s kid. Cub scouts is also a club. And then there are the taxes the 9.9% pay.
Forcing this caste to flee for the sake of their children is nasty. You’re getting rid of their taxes and also the bulk of the people who run enrichment programs.
You’re probably also getting rid of the involved parents in the PTO and the School Board.
Society wants these people and what they do.Report
If it’s a marriage problem, it’s not going to be solved by getting rid of the SAT.
And it sure as hell ain’t gonna be solved by getting rid of accelerated classes.Report
Is the test strongly predictive of academic success at the university level? Yes/no?
If yes, why would you mess with the test?
If the concern is that the test is gameable, then you pressure the developers of the test to address that concern (I believe they have been in recent years).
If the concern is that the test will weed out those with potential, but who were simply not provided with the necessary education to do well on the test, then you pressure schools to take a more wholistic approach to admissions.
What you don’t do is mess with scoring based upon demographics in order to give some kids a leg up. Why? Because that is doing a disservice to those kids. It hides the fact that they are probably NOT ready for university and they will need extra help at University.
I’d prefer the schools adopt a more wholistic approach so that the kids who will need additional support can be identified early and evaluated for what supports will be needed.
Or we can just continue on letting kids drown in student debt they can’t pay off because they failed out of school.Report
I agree generally with the proposition that we should create strong remedial efforts to improve outcomes of historically excluded groups.
Doing this earlier is better than later, but even done late is better than not at all.Report
And doing something to adjust test scores will obscure the need for remedial efforts.Report
The last time I was working for the math department at one of our local community colleges, all incoming students had to take a math placement test, no matter what their transcripts or other test scores said. There were some number who were very unhappy to discover that they were going to have to take one or more remedial classes before they could start calculus.Report
I agree.
For instance, I just learned my son has dysgraphia (dyslexia, but for writing, instead of reading). Writing for him is a massive chore, he hates it. Going to need to get him in to see an Occupational Therapist soon here (we just got the diagnosis on Thursday).
Getting that diagnosis involved me spending $3K out of pocket, because our insurance won’t cover it. The school, as good as it is, offers some diagnostic services, but it’s a pain to get them to cough it up, and it’s pretty limited. And by limited, I mean for $3K, Bug spent 6 hours in testing to identify and rule out a whole host of possibilities.
For $3K, I will be able to get him the remedial supports he needs NOW.
For people who can’t drop $3K…Report
There are two common fallacies behind the claim that it doesn’t have any predictive value. One is failing to account for range restriction in studies that look only at a particular university. The other is positing a false dichotomy where universities have to choose between high school GPA and SAT scores. The SAT doesn’t have to be better than high school grades at predicting college performance—it just has to add value, such that GPA + SAT is better than GPA alone.Report
There is something that Trumwill said a million years ago that still sticks with me.
We need to not compare “college” with “no college”.
We need to compare “no college” with “community college” and compare those two with “Compass Directional State” and those three with “State University” and those four with “Small Liberal Arts Colleges” and those five with “Ivy League”.
Is the SAT predictive among those six categories? I’m guessing it is and that the p value is astronomically high.Report
Freddie wrote about educational assessments back in June.
If you want to know more about educational assessment, this post is a must-read.Report
And it’s probably also a good idea to check out his essay called”You Aren’t Actually Mad at the SATs – you’re mad at what they reveal“.Report
Both great links. Thank you.Report
I think a lot of the hysteria over the fall of standardized testing is the myopia and stunted perspective of people who can’t remember any other method.
There wasn’t always a SAT.
In the 50’s and 60s the California Master Plan for Higher Education of 1960 established that UC must admit undergraduates from the top 12.5% (one-eighth) of graduating high school seniors in California.
There wasn’t a SAT test to take, if you were in the top 12.5% of your school, you were given entry. And it was tuition-free!
Point is, there isn’t anything magical about standardized testing. Taking the top percentage of schools and devoting added resources to those schools to improve the lowest performers would solve for both diversity and excellence.Report
Didn’t some state try this a lot more recently?Report
I think a lot of the hysteria over the fall of standardized testing is the myopia and stunted perspective of people who can’t remember any other method.
Uh oh! Sounds like somebody’s got a case of the Dunning-Krugers! The hysteria is coming from the social creationists who are claiming that standardized tests are racist, classist, and basically Hitler in paper form.
There wasn’t always a SAT.
There wasn’t always indoor plumbing or legally recognized gay marriage.
Standardized testing solves a real problem, which is that grading standards are not consistent across schools. The top n% approach addresses that problem, but runs into the problem that academic talent is wildly unevenly distributed across schools. The top 12.5% of a low-performing school are not even close to being on the same level as the top 12.5% of a high-performing school. Denying this is how you get silliness like remedial classes at selective universities.
Taking the top percentage of schools and devoting added resources to those schools to improve the lowest performers would solve for both diversity and excellence.
This is putting the cart before the horse. If you think you can bring the performance of low-performing schools up to par with “added resources”—an approach which has been failing for decades—then do that first, and then there will be no need to play these silly games with college admissions.Report
If you wanted to make a good argument for basing selective college admissions around a “top n% of class,” criterion, the most tenable approach would probably be to argue that by doing so, you’d give high-SES parents a strong incentive to move into neighborhoods served by schools with mediocre test scores, given their children a much better chance at being at the top of their classes and getting into selective colleges.
This wouldn’t actually result in more people from low-SES families getting into selective universities, but it would help debunk the social creationist myth that children of high-SES parents only get better test scores because they go to better schools.Report
Having involved parents is a relational good, not an absolute one.
Anything the gov creates for poor children, for example Sesame Street, will be used by involved parents.
It’s also hard to see how the gov replaces parents for “fixing the gov dropping the ball” much less “my kids’ needs come first”.Report
I don’t think that this is necessarily true. For example, Sesame Street, to the extent that it does anything useful (I’m very skeptical), seems like it should have a gap-closing effect. It doesn’t require any special investment. Parents don’t have to be educated to use it. You just plop your kids in front of the TV and that’s it. Furthermore, Sesame Street is mostly just a substitute for things high-SES parents are already doing. If you’re already teaching your kids kindergarten material before they get to kindergarten, Sesame Street isn’t going to add much value.
In general, tools for bringing low performers up to par are going to be much more useful for low-SES families than for high-SES families, especially if they don’t require any special skills or investment from parents.Report