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Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

wsj.com

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Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#461

Post by UncleMeat »

lordnacho wrote: post #226
beebmam wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, absolutely. A lottery system for admissions.

Not sure if you're joking but it would be a heck of a lot more fair. Just have some sort of objective bar like SAT score, and then do a lottery. Then you don't have the "did we do enough for XYZ group", the RNG will simplify both decision making and justification. If there's x% of XYZ passing the minimum score, that's how many will be in your class.

The article calls out the TJ admissions process as discriminatory.

The activists that are regularly called racist against asians proposed exactly this policy. It was called a "merit lottery" and worked by setting a GPA lower bound and then admitting students randomly if they had a GPA of at least that level. This policy was ultimately seen as "too extreme" and non implemented but it saw its fair share of "lefties hate asian success" and proponents were even called "enemies of excellence" by Scott Aaronson.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#462

Post by cuteboy19 »

pewpew2020 wrote: post #308
fmajid wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This discrimination is not to protect Black or Hispanic students from being outcompeted by Asians, it is there to protect Whites , just like anti-Jewish discrimination before WW2 when Jews were not considered white. Bringing Blacks and Hispanics into the conversation is a red herring used by elite universities to defend the indefensible. If you want to see what a truly meritocratic admissions policy would look like,…

Exactly, if it becomes truly meritocratic, I feel that there are enough qualified Asian (chinese/indian/other countries) applicants that 100% of the batch would be asian.

And there is nothing wrong with that, if that ever happened

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#463

Post by gruez »

mschuster91 wrote: post #195
com2kid wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America needs to build more colleges. Based on current wtf pricing and demand, 2xing the number might do it.

Or fix the demand side. Right now, megacorps are abusing colleges as a filter to weed out people who can't cope with high stress environments or keep deadlines and, even more egregious, load the cost for a lot of what used to be employer-paid on-the-job training onto the students via student loans. A "bullshit job" should not require a college degree.

How would that "fix" look like? Awareness campaigns? "ban the box"?

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#464

Post by pinephoneguy »

rayiner wrote: post #415
ipnon wrote: post #100

It's discrimination any way you slice it. You can't lower the bar for one person without raising it for another so long as the class sizes remain the same. If elite universities are about providing education (a valid point of critical contention), then systematically barring Asians from entry is the same class of injustice litigated in Brown v. Board of Education. It's not enough to say you can learn calculus just as…

Note that most Americans of all races, including Black people, oppose the practice of race conscious admissions: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ... . People of all races also overwhelmingly oppose consideration of race in hiring: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america... . In California, Prop 16 failed in every single majority Hispanic county. It’s a minority of most…

> It’s a minority of mostly white progressives pushing this stuff.

I think if you look a little closer you'll find that many members of that "white" minority are in fact not White (or Hispanic, Black, or Asian.)

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#465

Post by SyzygistSix »

0des wrote: post #425
SyzygistSix wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Studying to pass the SAT is gaming the system if ideally we want well-rounded, whole people to be the elite leadership in the future. Not that including extracurriculars doesn't weight admissions towards the children of current elites. But the idea is that multiple metrics cancel out the biases of the individual metrics. And I understand some people are okay with elite education and others think that is itself the pr…

Well rounded and whole is an odd term. Can you explain that another way? Everyone who becomes sufficiently specialized and proficient in one thing is limited in the breadth of their experiences due to their metaphorical 10,000 hours being spent somewhere else (study).

Since Harvard is undoubtedly where so many future leaders come from (perhaps another entirely different problem), a better description might be leadership qualities.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#466

Post by TulliusCicero »

Chris2048 wrote: post #269
TulliusCicero wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ultimately, I can't justify the idea of rejecting students based on race, but when I look at those demographics I just don't see much to get worked up about. If you look at those particular stats, sure, it doesn't sound particularly objectionable. But if you look at others: https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/15/politics/harvard-affirmative-... > Under questioning from SFFA lawyer John Hughes, Fitzsimmons detailed some of…

> "sorry, we have enough people of your color This is how US green card applications work too though.

That’s also bad imo.

People shouldn’t be treated better or worse just because their country has more or fewer immigrants.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#467

Post by TulliusCicero »

j7ake wrote: post #250
TulliusCicero wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but it’s harder to game. Income is vastly more fluid than racial identity, especially since in this situation it’s more advantageous for your income to go down.

Income and wealth are better predictors of “privilege” than race though. So one is using a worse indicator. Using a mix of income and wealth over several years to me is an appropriate indicator and cannot be easily gamed. The fact that Will Smiths kids get a better chance to get into college than a similar applicant from a first generation immigrant family from Vietnam shows how broken race as an indicator can be.

That’s probably fair, though even rich black people have to deal with discrimination that rich white people don’t.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#468

Post by giantg2 »

alistairSH wrote: post #447
giantg2 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... and experience factors, including students who are economically disadvantaged, English language learners, special education students, or students who are currently attending underrepresented middle schools." I would think this would be the more problematic part. It's not based on achievement/performance but based on status. It sounds as if they give preference points for people with low income, from underreprese…

Yes, the old policy was also race-blind in language, no question about that. But, it had decades of results that were extremely race-biased. Equality vs equity - I'd prefer we removed the sources of inequity. Do that and equality works itself out (in theory, anyways). The admissions fee removal seems like an easy win - paying for access to a public high school strikes me as extremely inequitable and I can't think of…

"I'd prefer we removed the sources of inequity. Do that and equality works itself out (in theory, anyways). ... I'm not sure about language and income policies, but at the same time, fixing those sources of inequity are massively complex and outside the scope of the school board."

I agree that the main drivers of inequity in education are huge and mostly driven outside the schools. I think the schools need to act mostly on equal treatment and stay out of equity. We can remove things like admission fees (which I also think is wrong for public schools the charge) without adding equity focused subjective measures. After all, the simple fact of having advanced placement or high achievement courses is inequitable (and I don't think there's anything wrong with that).

Why not start by removing the fees and standardized tests, then see how that works before implementing the more controversial subjective and class based changes? This sort of change would retain equality while reducing inequity. That's what I would like to see more of.

"I wish I could find the actual policy WRT language/income/school, implementation is key here."

I agree that we are lacking some details here. It seems the court ruled that the steps were illegal, and that the school doesn't even hide that the changes made were to adjust racial balance. That's pretty damning, but I would like to see the actual contents.

“Emails and text messages between Board members and high-ranking [Fairfax school] officials leave no material dispute that, at least in part, the purpose of the Board’s admissions overhaul was to change the racial makeup to TJ to the detriment of Asian-Americans.”

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#469

Post by SyzygistSix »

zozbot234 wrote: post #419
SyzygistSix wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it seem like the US no longer has an issue when there's an entire class of people who are not being educated, has high crime, and ending in mass incarceration. I can accept that some people have an issue with current liberal ideas because they think they don't work. If so, what is going to work? Or is the current state inevitable in order to have the high-functioning economy that the US has? Certainly more H…

Criminal justice reform has always been an interest of enlightened conservatives and libertarians, not liberals. We all know that Biden talked about "super predators" and pushed tough-on-crime policies which are clearly failing today. The BLM protests have really forced the policymakers' hand, but these protests came from the grassroots not from the liberal elite.

I perhaps should have said progressives and you are correct, although I am under the impression that the tough on crime legislation was broadly popular among conservatives and liberals, and not so much enlightened conservatives, libertarians, or progressives. But the latter groups have always been a minority.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#470

Post by qiskit »

rayiner wrote: post #311

I attended TJ, back when it was about 30% Asian. I’ve always felt like the school should do more to get more underrepresented minorities. I’ve found the recent efforts very off-putting however. It’s based on a modern strain of social justice ideology that adopts some very ugly assumptions about Asians. I’m reminded of Alison Collins in San Francisco, who called Asians “house n—-ers” and said they use “white supremaci…

> It’s based on a modern strain of social justice ideology that adopts some very ugly assumptions about Asians.

But the assumptions are based on socio-political history. It's fairly well know that the asian american population is very whitewashed primarily because most asians ( chinese, vietnamese, etc ) were pro-white collaborators who fled china, vietnam, etc after their side lost wars ( chinese civil war, vietnamese war, etc ). These are people who sided with their european/american colonial masters against their own people. And another group are asians historically dominated by white nations ( philipines, japanese, etc ). There have been demographic studies that showed that most asian americans date and marry white. It's so skewed that asian american communities will disappear in a generation or two without asian immigrants.

> I’ve been told to my face that Asians aren’t “grateful” enough to Black people for the Civil Rights movement and we “owe them.”

It was the civil rights movement of the 60s that ended the ban of asian immigration. Without the civil rights movement, there hardly would be any asians in the US. Asians were specifically banned from the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act

Oddly enough, asian women were the only gender specifically banned from the US. Looking back it's bizarre, but it happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_Act_of_1875

It was only in 1965, as a result of civil rights movement, that the ban was lifted. 99.99% of the asians here today came after 1965.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Ac...

I'm against affirmative action, against woke culture, etc. But there are kernels of truth on every side. I certainly don't think you owe anyone anything, but there is a reason why other minorities might think you do. This issue also shows that everyone has issues with everyone. And everyone will fight against everyone when the pie gets smaller and smaller.

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