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Privileged Poor vs. Doubly Disadvantaged at Elite Schools

theamericanconservative.com

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Re: Privileged Poor vs. Doubly Disadvantaged at Elite Schools

#81

Post by jariel »

tenpies wrote: post #59
droithomme wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public schools in the US and most religious upbringings (not all) teach blind submission and deference to authority. Students who question things too much are deemed troublemakers obstructing the teacher's valuable dictation time. Repeated offenders are referred to a psychiatrist for a ADHD referral and subsequent drugging and parents who object get a DCS referral and their kids rehomed in foster care where they are…

> Public schools in the US and most religious upbringings I would say the school system in general does that. The whole point of the school system is to turn you into a predictable automaton of economic utility. You want to be creative? Do that in your own time or pray you can control your creativity enough to only release it during the designated classes.

"The whole point of the school system is to turn you into a predictable automaton of economic utility."

No, they are there partly to educate you, partly to babysit you, with the hopes that you can 'get along' in life afterwards, or maybe go to University.

Highschool doesn't prepare you for anything specific, certainly not the workforce.

In Germany, the education is considerably more focused on moving people into the trades or higher education, which frankly, works very well though it's arguably even more elitist than the US, as fewer kids go to Uni (tend to have richer parents).

Re: Privileged Poor vs. Doubly Disadvantaged at Elite Schools

#82

Post by sudosteph »

Interesting that the author uses office hours as the determiner of likelihood that someone attended an elite school before college.

I never attended office hours, but that's because I tailored my class schedules every semester to maximize blocks of hours that I could use for part time work. I worked for the college and later for a tech company. I was lucky that my schedule could vary between semesters, but I was still limited to time blocks during a standard business week. Typically did 20 hours a week of work with a 15 hour course-load. So office hours almost never lined up with my work schedule. Sure it would have been nice to have enough of a rapport to ask for extensions on papers, but I passed my classes anyhow and the grades I got for particular classes have never once been in a factor in my career.

I don't regret my decision to prioritize work over college. The professional skills, especially the soft skills I learned from years of experience put me way ahead of my peers when it came to finding employment and moving through the ranks. The relative financial security work provided and being able to comfortably afford to live off-campus independently (low CoL area) was my initial motivator, but it was more than that eventually. I just felt respected and useful when working, and the opposite of that in almost every schooling environment.

Re: Privileged Poor vs. Doubly Disadvantaged at Elite Schools

#83

Post by rumanator »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #61
amalcon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember one friend back in college who constantly asked for -- and received -- deadline extensions on assignments. Usually, there was not what I would consider a good reason for this (illness, family emergency, etc) but rather something under that student's control (social obligations, just not being happy with the work so far, things like that). For a while, I felt like that student had a superpower: if I asked f…

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic in characterizing those actions as 'just wanting to be helpful', but until I was a bit more world weary, i would have expected what your professor did in that story to be grounds for instant firing and utterly unacceptable (and would have expected everyone else to share my opinion), as it strikes at the very core of the integrity of an education system.

What core of the education system do you feel was under attack? The ability to assess how much a student learned about a specific subject?

Re: Privileged Poor vs. Doubly Disadvantaged at Elite Schools

#84

Post by SamReidHughes »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #61
amalcon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember one friend back in college who constantly asked for -- and received -- deadline extensions on assignments. Usually, there was not what I would consider a good reason for this (illness, family emergency, etc) but rather something under that student's control (social obligations, just not being happy with the work so far, things like that). For a while, I felt like that student had a superpower: if I asked f…

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic in characterizing those actions as 'just wanting to be helpful', but until I was a bit more world weary, i would have expected what your professor did in that story to be grounds for instant firing and utterly unacceptable (and would have expected everyone else to share my opinion), as it strikes at the very core of the integrity of an education system.

One class I was taking (ToC using Sipser), I forgot to turn in the first two homework assignments on time, so I didn’t turn them in at all. Then I had to make sure to get perfect scores on the rest of the homeworks and exams to get an A. I wound up getting 100’s until a 98 on the final, so I visited the professor’s office at the designated time for questions on the final and asked what I got wrong. After he explained what I did wrong, we got in an argument about whether I should get points for the first two homework assignments, until I relented and accepted that he could give me points for the software part of the assignments without him looking at it, so he could give me an A.

On the other hand, when working as an undergrad teaching a Calc II recitation, I had a student miss a quiz I was supposed to administer, because for no reason, he just didn’t show up, so I let him meet me later that week and take it in front of me. My goal was to help him succeed, because getting a zero would really suck. I don’t think it violated the integrity of anything. He wasn’t falsely getting certified as having learned calc II.

I think most teachers are willing to do things like this if it’ll make the grade a more accurate representation of the student.

Re: Privileged Poor vs. Doubly Disadvantaged at Elite Schools

#85

Post by friendlybus »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #57
friendlybus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The whole concept of "discussing your grade" is another overlap. People from a certain strata do this constantly and it's a perfect example of something bluring (a) and (b). I've seen this happen with working class people in high universities. It's not a class issue, you can learn it from others.

Except it is a class issue: just like you CAN learn dining etiquette from others, unless you have been presented with the idea that dining etiquette is something that you should/need to learn, there is no obvious way to pick up it's even a thing that you should be focusing on, because everything in the culture places euphamisms and misdirection between the phenomenon and what's really going on, and you've never even…

I agree that feels like cheating. But you can equally make that division down gender lines and not class because women are more likely to build a working relationship with profs than men. Class and gender are not the issue here, it comes down to an individual perspective on the school system. The value of a task and the socializing around it matters. It depends where you are in life which matters more.

Re: Privileged Poor vs. Doubly Disadvantaged at Elite Schools

#86

Post by cafard »

droithomme wrote: post #52
whymauri wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tony Jack makes this pretty clear. Schools are patting themselves on the back for increasing low income and minority enrollment without considering the fact that a large portion of these students is the "privileged poor". As a result, entire school-wide policies are being misguided and failing poor students who did not have an elite-level secondary education. Back-of-the-envelope math (which I don't believe is correc…

> a large portion of these students is the "privileged poor" Yes I know that is my whole point. A large portion? What does that mean? The number of destitute minority kids going to top elite preparatory schools is an incredibly tiny number, vastly less than a tenth of a percent of students overall, and completely statistically insignificant. Very very few students in the US go to elite prep schools and only a tiny nu…

> Why is this so given that private school teachers on average are paid less than public school teachers.

If you have the parents behind you, you have a tremendous advantage. If you have a lot of well-educated, prosperous parents behind you, still more, and the effect carries over to some degree to the students whose parents may be less prosperous or educated, but still organized enough to get their kids into the private school.

Re: Privileged Poor vs. Doubly Disadvantaged at Elite Schools

#87

Post by cafard »

_bxg1 wrote: post #20
kolbe wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be extreme affirmative action, and would undermine myriad efficiencies built into the higher educational system. Schools like Michigan would have some students who are totally illiterate with SAT scores hovering around 800, and some students who've already done upper-division math courses in high school. Intelligent people could no longer be grouped together to help drive each other, and schools like Harva…

Private schools could be outlawed. Rich parents who want their children to go to better schools can donate to their city's public education budget. Most of the social problems stemming from capitalism center around the fact that having money gives you and yours disproportionate opportunities for improving your socioeconomic position even more , ad infinitum. Cut out that circular effect wherever possible, and you app…

Unless you want a minute regulation of schools nationwide, you will not approach a level playing field. Are all public schools in New York City or Denver comparable? Clearly not. In Montgomery County, Maryland, parents raised quite a fuss when the system proposed to adjust the boundary between Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School (prosperous area, good test scores) and Walter Johnson High School (slightly more prosperous area, slightly better test scores). The Washington Post once carried a table of the percentage grade required to get an A in algebra at the county high schools. At Albert Einstein--not in that bad an area--it was in the 70s. In schools to the west it would be 90 or nearly so.

Re: Privileged Poor vs. Doubly Disadvantaged at Elite Schools

#88

Post by amalcon »

amalcon wrote: post #55
Glyptodon wrote: post #14

Some of these issues extend beyond such narrow groups. Office hours as a concept are easily one of the weirdest and most confusing things ever because they simultaneously encompass at least two entirely different disharmonious concepts. Are they (a) time set aside so those who need significant help can get it without disrupting class, or (b) time aside so students can chat and schmooze with their professors? The real…

I remember one friend back in college who constantly asked for -- and received -- deadline extensions on assignments. Usually, there was not what I would consider a good reason for this (illness, family emergency, etc) but rather something under that student's control (social obligations, just not being happy with the work so far, things like that). For a while, I felt like that student had a superpower: if I asked f…

So, I'd left out some details that I thought were not relevant to the main point, but apparently that lack of detail is distracting. I'll add it back in.

The institution in question is a small private university. Not one of the ones you've heard of, but they are at least somewhat comparable to that tier in an academic sense. E.g. I know people who turned down an MIT or equivalent to attend, and they often compete with that tier for grants. The class in question was normally a third- or fourth-year class (the school was pretty flexible with that sort of thing), with fewer than a dozen students and a professor I did not previously know.

The social engagement was not a frat party or something. I would not have gone to something like that the night before an exam. Further, I didn't drink in those years anyway, despite being of legal age. It was (I know I'm dating myself) an old friend's last night at home before being deployed in the Iraq war. I drove home, and a bunch of us got together to send him off. I drank soda.

Finally, on the question of fairness, the professor did acknowledge this. My score on the make-up was capped to a maximum still less than that earned by anyone else in the class.

Even with all of those caveats, it still was something I would not have thought to ask for. I apparently also taught the professor something that day, and he said that going forward he would tell his students up front that he's willing to work with them on that sort of thing.

Re: Privileged Poor vs. Doubly Disadvantaged at Elite Schools

#89

Post by kolbe »

_bxg1 wrote: post #39
Bostonian wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you ban private after-schools too? For example, my children attend Russian School of Math, which has branches around the country, especially in the Northeast. Chinese parents have created supplemental schools where Chinese language, English, art, contest math and other things are taught. If you ban physical after-schools, do you then ban online classes such as the math classes offered by the Art of Problem Solv…

No, just the ones that serve as alternatives to the public ones. Obviously after-school programs, while potentially leading to some of the same problems, would be a much more complicated question.

You are making assertions that are wildly far off from what the vast majority of educated people believe to be right. I would refrain from using the word "obviously" when it comes to us guessing what is going through your head.

Re: Privileged Poor vs. Doubly Disadvantaged at Elite Schools

#90

Post by _bxg1 »

kolbe wrote: post #89
_bxg1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, just the ones that serve as alternatives to the public ones. Obviously after-school programs, while potentially leading to some of the same problems, would be a much more complicated question.

You are making assertions that are wildly far off from what the vast majority of educated people believe to be right. I would refrain from using the word "obviously" when it comes to us guessing what is going through your head.

I don't know what your problem is, but I'm done engaging with your faux-rationalist posturing and your hyperbolic insults and accusations.
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