Colleges that ditched admission tests find it harder to fairly choose students

Go read what you wrote about policing and other stuff. It was demeaning and clearly not my intent. Apparently you’re an adult, so yes, have whatever discussion you like. I’m just saying I won’t be apart of it, unless you plan to force me.

The common application encourages people to apply for schools they aren't qualified for ("what the hell it's only another $30"), a phenomenon which has been exacerbated by the schools themselves. The USNWR ranking includes acceptance rate ("more selective" means a higher proportion of rejections), so schools send letters to kids who can't get in, encouraging them to apply. I saw these letters last year.

In addition, the common app really restricts what you can say. For example two kids might have earned an Eagle Scout rank: one just did the minimum to get a check box; the other might have really used it to learn and develop. In the common app there isn't really room to differentiate unless you devote your essay to it.

Back when each school had a unique application, the burden of applying makes you more judicious in your choices. However it also allowed you to adapt your application to what you wanted to emphasize to each school.

For a quantifiable difference: back when I was applying to universities in the 1980s, MIT had quite a high acceptance rate compared to its peers, ~18% IIRC. Why? Turns out few people applied because they (probably correctly) assumed they wouldn't get in anyway.

> Don't mistake not being welcomed with open arms for the teacher being "bad". In many public schools, there's a whole lot of heavy management on hitting specific test goals and curriculum items. Your offer would likely not help the teacher in this task.

Understood. I do know teachers who are, objectively speaking, just terrible. Like the teacher who, years ago, was "teaching" a Lego robotics class. My kid told me she would come into the room, take out her magazines and tell the kids to do whatever they wanted. My kid ended up teaching the others, she did nothing all year.

When I characterize things as "bad" I am thinking about what I will call the system rather than, for the most part, individuals. Few people are motivated --in any profession-- to push hard and excel without a process, structure and stimulus that drives them there. The colloquial term is "self starters". Most are not self-starters, that's just normal and independent of profession. Add a unionized system within which a genuinely bad teacher can "hide" and be protected for decades and you have the makings of bad educational outcomes.

You seem to be the kind of teacher we should strive to have at every school. Your students are lucky to have you. As a kid I attended both private and public schools (about the same number of years each) and I know the difference. My argument is our public schools should be far better than they are and, perhaps, even better than anything private schools could deliver. For one thing, they have the financial backing of an entire nation. The only reason they are not is that our policies and focus are wrong.

I come down hard on unions, not out of spite or ideology but rather out of experience. I was a member of a union for about ten years when I was in my 20's. I saw the sausage being made. Unions had every reason to exist back in the day. It is my opinion that, in a wide range of industries (maybe not all) unions are horrible beasts that exist for the benefit of the wrong people. This is to say, their management. Union members are not the problem. They are average folk who just want a good life and everything anyone else would want. Unions, however, are driven into creating the problems they do because their mission isn't aligned with the outcomes of what it is they affect; in this case, educational outcomes.

Getting off that subject, I was a mentor for our local FRC team for many years. We got to Nationals a couple of times.

While not a teacher, I am pretty good at teaching complex subjects in ways that make them accessible. Well, at least that's the feedback from my own kids and FRC team members. I very much understand you don't need a lot of stuff to teach. It can get in the way.

I absolutely love working with kids. I would hate to be under the thumb of a system that did not allow me to help them excel (in real terms, not just pass tests).

Regarding your microprocessor trainer. You'll appreciate this. I own a couple of these:

https://i.imgur.com/ZsIJj1p.png

I am of the 8080, 6502, MC6800 era. I actually owned an IMSAI and such things as a real DEC VT100 terminal.

I used the 8085 trainer to teach my kids assembler and show them how things work at the base level. They had a lot of fun with it.

I've been thinking of doing a series on YouTube that goes from basic gates and logic through actually building a small microprocessor and defining your own assembler instructions. From there I would implement Forth, move on to programming block-based storage, write a text/code editor and then implement a few interesting higher-level projects. I know this would be a lot of fun to do (at least for me). It's a question of time. I might be able to jump on this in a few months. It's one of those things that's been in the back of my mind for, quite literally, years.

Lots of interesting elements in your comment.

> Even with more resources, as long as we're going to insist on mainstreaming students with behavioral problems or who just don't care about the educational process, outcomes for the other students in the rooms are going to be affected.

The insistence on equality at all levels and all things is a problem. I know there are people reading this comment thinking "this guy is a bigot". If you are that person, please stop, calm down and think.

Everyone understands that there are people who will never been competitive swimmers, basketball players or good dancers. While I am not terrible at sports, I could not become one of those three, no matter what I do. One of my kids will never be an artists. Just not interested, at all. Another cannot think about anything else. Why is it that we want to shove everyone into the same mold when it comes to intellectual capacity, IQ, etc.? Should I force one of my kids into art class and the other into engineering? No. That would be insane.

We don't all have to be engineers. It would be a really sad planet if that were the case. It is not bigoted to suggest we need to allow kids to excel at what really drives them. Expose them to a range of topics, of course. Don't torture them by forcing them into a mold. Should a kid who is an artist not graduate high school if they don't pass algebra, physics and calculus? Why?

I love this Ted talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

The whole thing is interesting, however the story that starts about 15 minutes in speaks loudly to this matter of treating all kids as if they were clones of some made-up model of humanity. I won't spoil it for those who might not have seen it. Watch this and think about what we are doing to our kids in school.

> who just don't care about the educational process

I don't know enough about this. I wish I understood it better. My uninformed thinking is that we damage both groups of kids by forcing them together. One of my kids had to ask to be moved to a desk at the front of the class because the kids in the back were not interested in the class at all and made it impossible to pay attention and learn. The uninterested group should not be discarded. They need a different focus and help. If their families can't support them, perhaps better programs can. I revert back to this idea that not everyone in K-12 is, or should be, college-bound. That's an unnecessary model that might just be causing more damage than good.

Of course, this has policy implications that transcend schools. There has to be opportunity outside of college-centric careers for that large percentage of non-college-bound students to be able to access middle-class living. This perspective, if accurate, results in many tentacles affecting wider policy and politics. In other words, it isn't just about schools and the policies that control them.

> Education can not fix equity issues: lack of parental support is a powerful disadvantage that we cannot expect a classroom teacher to overcome

Maybe I am being naïve. My thinking is, if, a big "if", we could "fix" --whatever that might mean-- the system for one generation, maybe two, the parental problem might self-regulate over time. Sadly, there are kids who are in a really bad environment. Can we address that as a society? Equal outcomes are a fantasy. That does not mean we don't try. I would gladly devote half or more of our war-machine budget towards a better educational system and better outcomes. For that to happen humanity needs to change. None of these things are simple. Easy to throw around grandiose ideas. Hard to make them happen. Also, very easy to throw your hands up and give up when nobody seems to care (as I have done locally).

> I've been thinking about teaching a Verilog + microprocessor design class in our high school.

I've done tons of work with FPGA's. They are great. My fear, when it comes with using them as a teaching tool at that level, is that the student could suffer from exactly the same problem they have when they learn Python as their first language: Everything is magic. I could be wrong. Perhaps it is because of the fact that I came up wiring raw gates together on breadboards that I feel getting down to that baseline has greater value than instantiating an entire circuit with half a dozen lines of code.

Here's a thought I had for yet another attempt to help our local schools with STEM. There are so many well executed resources out there that one could create a hybrid program based on using them under supervision.

My example of this is having my own kids take the MITx 6.00.1 and 6.00.2 courses on edX under my guidance and supervision. This was a lot of work, yet, a lot easier than coming-up with a full curriculum and coursework from scratch. I could see taking this kind of an approach with HS kids to teach a CS class or two. They would get to boast about earning CS certificates from MIT, which I would hope would me motivating enough.