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The war on merit takes a bizarre turn

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Re: The war on merit takes a bizarre turn

#61

Post by kcplate »

salad-fan wrote: post #38
ipaddr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think your kids are safer at public school from being molested? The stats would say you are safer at Catholic school where lines are less blurred and fewer teachers date students. But most likely to commit such an act is a parent or someone close to the child. Sending them to any school might be the safest option.

What makes you think Catholic school kids don’t have parents or other relatives? And are you trying to argue that the Catholic Church does not have a history of child molestation? Because the evidence seems pretty overwhelming to me.

Commenter makes a point about Catholic schools and where their curriculum focus is, you turn that into an indictment of the church. Second commenter again focuses on schools, you again indict the church.

Everybody gets it, the Catholic Church had a scandal. It was awful and destructive to many folks and the church deserves the blame and fault for the coverup. However, that scandal doesn’t seem to have anything to do with a conversation about curriculum choices at a Catholic school. Your trying to derail a conversation because of your biases.

Re: The war on merit takes a bizarre turn

#62

Post by salad-fan »

kcplate wrote: post #61
salad-fan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think Catholic school kids don’t have parents or other relatives? And are you trying to argue that the Catholic Church does not have a history of child molestation? Because the evidence seems pretty overwhelming to me.

Commenter makes a point about Catholic schools and where their curriculum focus is, you turn that into an indictment of the church. Second commenter again focuses on schools, you again indict the church. Everybody gets it, the Catholic Church had a scandal. It was awful and destructive to many folks and the church deserves the blame and fault for the coverup. However, that scandal doesn’t seem to have anything to do…

Not at all. Catholic schools are not even remotely independent of the church despite what you seem to think, and therefore share the same systemic problems.

Re: The war on merit takes a bizarre turn

#63

Post by fatjokes »

stonogo wrote: post #37

The cognitive dissonance in this article is staggering. It's the "top school" in the country, but at the same time it's being mismanaged because administrators aren't doing the work of some third-party student-ranking corporation? Or it's the "top school" in the country but there's deep injustice because they don't throw pizza parties for kids who are good at standardized tests? The struggle between "this is the best…

The "best school" reputation was built over many years. The woke mismanagement is recent. It's actually a pretty easy reconciliation but I admit I have some context on TJ.

Re: The war on merit takes a bizarre turn

#64

Post by fatjokes »

jcranmer wrote: post #54
crystalmeph wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the article wrong on the facts? That is the only thing that matters. Many Hacker News readers are in the same demographic that would be in contention for National Merit honors, so it seems pretty “on brand” for HN.

This line in particular made me do a double-take: > with most TJ students in a protected class of “gifted” students, most of them racial minorities, many with disabilities, and most coming from immigrant families whose parents speak English as a second language. That is, at best, incredibly misleading, if not outright wrong. The "racial minority" here is Asian, which makes up ~70% of the school population (whereas th…

Um what. Last I checked Asians were definitely a racial minority in America. Saying they're not minorities because they're a majority of TJ is like saying Blacks aren't minorities because they're a majority in Harlem. It denies their lived experiences outside a very specific bubble.

Re: The war on merit takes a bizarre turn

#65

Post by rayiner »

defrost wrote: post #57
rayiner wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article concerns the metrics we use to decide how to advance kids into advanced educational opportunities. How is that a “trite matter of near zero import?” I think your view of the conservative reaction may be colored by the fact that you don’t have the other side of this culture war wherever you are in Europe or Asia. To my knowledge, elite high schools in Germany or China aren’t abandoning objective metrics l…

> This article concerns the metrics we use to decide how to advance kids into advanced educational opportunities. Not to my reading. I would summarise this as an article about the shortcomings of the National Merit Scholarship Corporation [1], their failure to put sufficient postage on notifications and their offloading of their notifications onto schools. [1] https://www.nationalmerit.org/s/1758/interior.aspx?sid=17…

That summary ignores all the relevant context. Since the 1980s, TJ has been a highly selective public high school. The average test scores there are comparable to several Ivy League colleges. As is common all over the world, TJ’s admissions process was based on standardized testing and grades. This was completely uncontroversial for decades.

The National Merit Scholarship is based on a standardized test called the PSAT. It’s not the most important thing in the world, but important enough that every year the Washington Post would publish the list of students from the DC area who were selected. This was great marketing for the school, because TJ students were like 2/3s of all the students recognized out of dozens of high schools in the area. There was no pizza party, but the school would go to some effort to publicize the result because they felt it reflected very positively on the school.

Two years ago, there was a huge fight over TJ’s admissions process. The school had become 70% Asian, and had very few black students. In that fight, progressives attacked standardized testing as racist. The progressive school board then changed the admissions process to a lottery system. A federal judge found that the change was motivated by anti-Asian racism: https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/we-won-coalition-for-tj-w.... Then an appellate court overturned that decision, and now the Supreme Court is deciding whether to hear the case.

In that context, what the article is about is the TJ administration downplaying the National Merit Scholarship results, which until recently they had publicized and pointed to as a source of pride. The story is thus about a deliberate decision by the administration to downplay a certain kind of educational metric, based on progressive ideas, that until very recently the school had embraced as an important metric.

Frankly it’s bizarre for someone from outside the US to say conservatives are waging a frivolous “culture war” here. What the conservatives want to do is keep the system that TJ had until two years ago, which is still the system most of Europe and Asia has.

Re: The war on merit takes a bizarre turn

#66

Post by kcplate »

salad-fan wrote: post #62
kcplate wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commenter makes a point about Catholic schools and where their curriculum focus is, you turn that into an indictment of the church. Second commenter again focuses on schools, you again indict the church. Everybody gets it, the Catholic Church had a scandal. It was awful and destructive to many folks and the church deserves the blame and fault for the coverup. However, that scandal doesn’t seem to have anything to do…

Not at all. Catholic schools are not even remotely independent of the church despite what you seem to think, and therefore share the same systemic problems.

Never said they were independent, I said the conversation was about curriculum and not church scandals.

Additionally, although I don’t have the statistics, it would not surprise me one bit if pound for pound, Catholic schools were indeed safer school options for the students than a public schools despite the scandals in the Catholic Church.

Re: The war on merit takes a bizarre turn

#67

Post by positr0n »

johnnyo wrote: post #17

The opening paragraphs seem to imply that the awards were withheld based on race. When you get into the meat of the article, though, it makes it more clear that the school just forwarded a paper cert to the kids, and didn’t make a big deal about it. And parents are complaining because the school didn’t make a big deal out of it or get it to students “fast enough” to apply for some early admission stuff. It’s been a w…

> It’s been a while, but I remember most of those “National Merit” type things to be not very important or relevant.

That's what I thought when I was a kid, but it turns out that the important college ranking system uses "number of national merit finalists" as a high weighted metric. I got a full ride to a respected state university solely from that PSAT test and so did two of my friends.

Re: The war on merit takes a bizarre turn

#68

Post by defrost »

rayiner wrote: post #65
defrost wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This article concerns the metrics we use to decide how to advance kids into advanced educational opportunities. Not to my reading. I would summarise this as an article about the shortcomings of the National Merit Scholarship Corporation [1], their failure to put sufficient postage on notifications and their offloading of their notifications onto schools. [1] https://www.nationalmerit.org/s/1758/interior.aspx?sid=17…

That summary ignores all the relevant context. Since the 1980s, TJ has been a highly selective public high school. The average test scores there are comparable to several Ivy League colleges. As is common all over the world, TJ’s admissions process was based on standardized testing and grades. This was completely uncontroversial for decades. The National Merit Scholarship is based on a standardized test called the PS…

> That summary ignores all the relevant context.

All that you added was not in the article and therefore not in the summary of the thrust of the article.

> The story is thus about a deliberate decision by the administration to downplay a certain kind of educational metric

It's about results arriving late and then filtering through what is pretty much a universal hand to hand to students that all school suffer through.

WE have similar systems here, important reults and awards are directly notified to students, not filtered through a school admin. The fault lies with the National Merit Scholarship Corporation .. who seem to expect others to do their work for them.

> Frankly it’s bizarre for someone from outside the US to say conservatives are waging a frivolous “culture war” ..

Do you not read your own countries media? Have you not seen the baseless hysteria over trans people, "woke history", etc?

Re: The war on merit takes a bizarre turn

#69

Post by jcranmer »

fatjokes wrote: post #64
jcranmer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This line in particular made me do a double-take: > with most TJ students in a protected class of “gifted” students, most of them racial minorities, many with disabilities, and most coming from immigrant families whose parents speak English as a second language. That is, at best, incredibly misleading, if not outright wrong. The "racial minority" here is Asian, which makes up ~70% of the school population (whereas th…

Um what. Last I checked Asians were definitely a racial minority in America. Saying they're not minorities because they're a majority of TJ is like saying Blacks aren't minorities because they're a majority in Harlem. It denies their lived experiences outside a very specific bubble.

I'm not saying that they're not a minority; I'm saying they're not a disadvantaged minority. And, in the larger context of TJ, there's an ongoing battle over the extremely low level of black and Hispanic population (which are largely disadvantaged) versus the extremely high level of Asian population.

Re: The war on merit takes a bizarre turn

#70

Post by imgabe »

ffssffss wrote: post #24
imgabe wrote: post #5

"Equal outcomes for every student" I'm genuinely curious what this is supposed to mean. Every student gets into the same university? They all get the same job at the exact same salary upon graduation? What is the real-world consequence of this policy supposed to be? If your outcome as a student is guaranteed to be equal to every other student's outcome, what is the incentive to work harder? Outcomes being equal doesn…

This 22 second youtube video is the supporting evidence linked by the article for that "equal outcomes for every student" line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujpcvIsMZBU So, your guess is as good as mine, because that video certainly is not some kind of school policy position, as the article implies. I'm pretty suspect of the rest of it, since as someone else pointed out, the school actually did notify the students…

> So, your guess is as good as mine, because that video certainly is not some kind of school policy position, as the article implies.

The person in the video is the superintendent of the Fairfax County Public schools who stated that "equal outcomes" are a priority for her upcoming tenure. Maybe not a policy directive, but the leader of the school system is stating that it is a priority they intend to focus on.

The author has an agenda, sure, but they didn't fabricate the video or put words in the mouth of the district superintendent.

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