381–390 of 816 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> with the goal of improving opportunity for all I'm chatting with some friends who are parents in the Bay Area. Their admittedly very Californian response is that at least this should reduce competition for college spots. (Their kids are obviously going to get tutoring.)
Ha that’s not actually happening though because college admissions aren’t going to be based in knowledge but on ability to jump through hoops perfectly
This stuff seems so cartoonishly bad that I feel like I'm missing something. But I've been unable to find the progressive arguments. We need popular progressive bloggers to explain the other side.
I don't really think it is progressive, just dumb. The Dallas project the author defends as a better alternative is also in mostly democrat voting city
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And if you could fix the system, it would have been fixed by now. If you have a kid today, you have 5-6 years to fix the system before it starts failing them. Your kid will be grown before any meaningful change is made, and any harms caused by the current system will be fully baked in. If you have money, you have an escape hatch right now. Vouchers make that escape hatch available to more people. Public education doe…
Actually, public education has to mean public schools. Vouchers are a band-aid invented by right-wing nutjobs to allow religious schools to be funded by public money; they do this by taking money away from secular public schools. If public schools are broken, we need to fix the public schools, not break them further.
There is a first amendment case to be made about withholding education funds from religious schools. By withholding funds from schools that are deemed to be "religious" the government is creating a preference for schools that are not on the list of religions but may be every bit as ideological. The government cannot prefer one ideology or religion over another. It is required to be agnostic.
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No-one does real intelligence studies in humans because it's such a third-rail in academia. Think "The Bell Curve". Some scientists seem to believe that intelligence is intrinsic. The analogy with dog breeds, with their different temperaments and capabilities, with individual variation, applies to humans as well. See Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences | Lex Fridman Podcast https://www.…
Some people believe being homosexual is also intrinsic, despite identical twin studies showing contrary evidence. People like simple answers. It’s probably partly genetic, partly environmental. In other words, something worth studying further.
Does anyone have a less biased article about this to tell if this is actually a thing? I remember the controversy over Common Core Math and I realized a lot of people complaining about it weren't very good at math and their criticism was more a reflection of that than valid criticism. Now it's hard to believe when people complain about something when education is involved.
Proponents argue that it advances equity and removes stigma. Opponents argue that equity is a bad goal and even if you thought it was a good goal, this perversely accomplishes the opposite.
You're starting to see articles like this one or this one https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/07/14/metro/cambridge-schoo... because well, the worm turns.
*While standardized testing is not truly objective it is dramatically more so than grades.
It's hyperbolic and not a totally fair comparison, but reading this, I had to go find and reread "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut. https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge... When the means to achieve equality is to handicap the strong, we're going the wrong way. It would be more expensive and harder to try instead to invest in and help those with additional needs. But nobody is interested in…
Spending more doesn't seem to help. California is the best funded but worst grades.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/public-s...
But if you take these rankings at face value [2] it does seem there's more than spending at play here. Though perhaps spending simply has to be normalized against Cost of Living?
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education/p...
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I strongly suspect that in practice, those engaged parents handle it by moving to the next polity over that's not trying to use them to improve policies.
They often don't have a choice. They can stay, but as just one vote they cannot reform the system. They can fight for thier kids, but they may have limited results. (My mom faught hard in ~1965 to be able to take shop, but it was a boys only class and she didn't win)
A common phrase of the "soft bigotry of low expectations" is at work here. Those held to lower standards will fall to lower standards, deprived of the resources and support to achieve. The article attached provides a fantastic explanation. https://www.educationnext.org/teachers-should-replace-the-so...
> It does not matter if they grow up in foster care or a two-parent family.
But it does! Very much. I just don't understand why the US tries everything other than fixing the most glaring cause. Lots of problems can be fixed by encouraging and aggrandizing stable two-parent families instead of getting schools and teachers to fill proxy parenting roles.
This is the way. Teach kids more, not less. Ask more of them, not less. If you need to lengthen the school day and school year to do so, do it. Do it now. "So what should we do instead? Dallas came up with an answer: Teach kids more math instead of teaching them less. In 2019, Dallas Independent School District implemented a new equity policy that encouraged many more people to take honors math classes: Many capable…
Does putting marginal students in advanced classes actually help them?
The text of the article further suggests that many of the students who scored well on qualifying exams weren't taking the classes because they didn't have the parental involvement or default assumption that they would take it.
(Note that the opt-out group was selected from the general population based on the results of an exam; it wasn't a population-wide opt out. I suspect from your comment you didn't see that?)