"Equity" comes to schools in Vancouver

The BBQ Pit
181

There’s a difference between imperfect grammar and either

  1. total incomprehensibility, which you achieve with about 25% of your posts and you deploy strategically to make threads that you don’t like unusable

  2. constantly arguing with invisible opponents and/or yourself - e.g. in the “Another Critical Race Theory” thread you’ve tried to start an argument about people using the word “woke” about 50 times, even when it has nothing to do with the topic being discussed and seemingly no one but you is using that word. See also in this thread where you introduced the “Why Evolution is True” blog, denounced it as racist, and accused people of relying on it for news, when no one else in this thread but you ever mentioned or, as far as anyone can verify, has even heard of this blog.

It’s annoying enough that you do these things at all, and it’s particularly galling that the mods let you do it precisely because of their ideological alignment with you, when people on the other side can’t make one legitimate, readable post about certain issues. There is no way someone arguing FOR educational standards or AGAINST critical race theory would be allowed to make the same post dozens of times because they want the thread to be about something other than what it is, or consistently post the kind of word soup that you specialize in using to make threads where you are losing the argument unreadable.

182

It was demonstrated also in the thread I linked that it is you the one who has the problem. I have to notice that this usually takes place when opponents fall on their faces when idioms are used. I will have to say that IMHO that points to posters that do come from other countries that attempt to seed divisions in the US and Canada.

183

Which is more likely, that you are misusing idioms in your second language, or that native English speakers are inexplicably getting them wrong?

Lol, are you going to accuse him of being a Russian bot?

184

Uh, you are the one consistently starting threads and posting la-la-land territory exaggerations about changes in American or Canadian schools. Someone is allowing you to post them, but since this was moved into the pit, it shows that it is not me the one that is skating on thin ice.

185

The context shows that I’m more correct. When almost all others report that guys like Zoster are the ones getting wrong, for telling reasons. In that case a disingenuous attempt at trying to get moderators to fall for the “I was called a Nazi” stupid point of his.

It is not really relevant, but I’m only saying that the last one that tried to claim that I was getting idioms wrong was banned as he was a jerk too.

186

It might help if you didn’t call people soup-for-brains-leftists.

187

To be 100% fair, Zoster has shitty arguments supported by cretinous personal attacks–but sometimes your use of pronouns, clause structures, and such makes me do a double-take. To take what I quoted as an example:

The passive voice, the post-verb adverb, and the implied “that” make this part tricky. It’d probably read better if you’d written something like, “I linked to a thread that demonstrated…”

You’ve got three linked pronouns in rapid order: “it,” “you,” and “who.” That’s unnecessary, and there’s a missing “who are”. Clunkily but correctly, it could be, “that it is you who are the one who has the problem.” But it’d read better as “that you’re the one with the problem.”

“Have to” is unnecessary. “Fall on their faces” is strange here–this is not an English idiom that I know. You’ve got three adverbial clauses in a string, the first modifying “notice,” the second modifying the first, the third modifying the second. This string makes the sentence a bit difficult to follow. And the passive voice at the end, again, doesn’t read right. Consider: “I notice this usually happens when opponents don’t understand idioms.”

“I will have to say” is filler–remove it. “that IMHO that” is an unwieldy sequence of words, and your short sentence has four "that"s in close proximity, making it tricky to identify the antecedents.

Nothing here is, I believe, grammatically incorrect English, and Zoster’s a turd for calling it word salad, and your content is usually worth parsing. But it does require parsing sometimes. I’d have written this post something like this:

Short version: be careful that your pronouns have clear antecedents, avoid passive voice where you can, and keep an eye on how many adverbial clauses are forming a string.

This will be on the final :).

And again, compared to Zoster’s I’d rather read your posts any day. Although he handles the pronouns of his native language more adroitly than you handle the pronouns of your non-native tongue, he uses them to lie a bunch, which you don’t.

188

But yeah, guilty in all other counts. As I also say, I could be happy in Spanish forums, but there is no way to learn to be better at English or to get advice like yours.

189

I appreciate your taking the advice in the spirit intended–hopefully it’s helpful! “Fall on their faces” is a twist on “fall flat on one’s face”, and although that link does come up, notice none of the examples of actual uses involve plural faces. It was a little confusing to me, and my best guess as to why is that it was far enough from the idiom that it didn’t register as idiomatic.

190

Yes, that should still be happening, just in the one class.

That’s a failing of the teacher/curriculum, not the class style.

191

Teacher mode - activated! :joy: You need an animated gif avatar for this.

That’s an awful lot of advice to give in one go, though.

@GIGObuster, re auxiliary ‘do’; it’s used in English for negation, and less commonly for emphasis. So “posters that don’t come from other countries” would be correct, but “posters that do come from other countries” sounds weird because the ‘do’ is unnecessary. It should be “posters that come from other countries”.

IIRC ‘sí’ is used before the verb for emphasis in Spanish, so only if you would write “sí vienen” in Spanish should you write “do come” in English.

192

The Atlantic discusses equity and enriched classes in a recent article by David Frum.

A summary:

  • 83% of the public seems to support gifted classes and testing to evaluate learning acuity, especially if disadvantaged groups receive tutoring

  • A number of high schools and colleges are moving away from standardized tests which are said to be biased. More than 1000 have dropped SAT requirements. Frum sees this as “hostility to standardized testing in any form” being propagated by left-leaning lightweights.

  • Affirmative action remains very controversial

  • When equity is invoked, accusations of racism tend to flow both ways

  • In some states, honours and gifted programs are being reduced, which Frum sees as a blue state phenomenon.

193

Special programs don’t poll as well when the questions stipulate that many Black and Hispanic students would not qualify for admittance. But the programs’ numbers rebound if respondents are assured that students will have equal access to test prep.

Well that is the basic issue, until that test prep is available to all, what Frum has constructed is a nice imaginary world to counter what others have found as inadequate in the real world.

Also, the OP issue is taking place in Canada, not the US.

194

I don’t think this is one of Frum’s stronger article. It is about the US - but Frum is Canadian and this informs many of his views.

195

The more relevant point is many Canadian educators are strong union supporters which lean slightly left in Canada. American trends often eventually influence Canadian ones.

196

You know from the other threads that 1) there’s no evidence that “test prep” has any significant impact on who gets into these programs and plenty of studies showing its impact on test scores is marginal 2) offers to provide free “test prep” to people who need it are consistently rebuffed by the anti-education crowd because they will accept nothing less than racial quotas and the destruction of excellence 3) in places where everybody can afford “test prep” there are still populations that don’t bother with it because the issues of who cares about their kids’ education and how do not map onto income no matter how loudly or ungrammatically you insist they do. The “test prep” thing is just more of the commitment to lying and bullshitting 100% of the time that the CRT/equity cult has demonstrated on this issue.

197

No, that only shows what an ignoramus you are, test prep alone it is not enough, CRT proponents (and others that do not use CRT at all, but arrive to similar conclusions) also see other issues that need to be dealt with before the situation gets better, Frum does not mention them in his piece too. One important bit is how securing housing and helping the families of the students more directly has a big impact, besides the test prep part.

https://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-teachers-07.htm

Government housing programs and policies helped generate much of the wealth that so many white American families enjoy today. By lowering down payment requirements and extending the term of home loans from 5 to 30 years, revolutionary New Deal programs like the Federal Housing Administration made it possible for millions of average Americans to own a home for the first time.

But the government also set up a national neighborhood appraisal system that explicitly tied mortgage eligibility to race. Integrated and minority communities were ipso facto deemed a financial risk and made ineligible for low-cost home loans, a policy known today as “redlining.” Between 1934 and 1962, the federal government backed $120 billion of home loans. More than 98% went to white homebuyers.

These government programs made possible the new segregated, all-white suburbs that sprang up around the country after World War II. Government subsidies for municipal services helped develop and enhance these suburbs further, in turn fueling commercial investments. Property values soared in these communities, and white families were able to reap the benefits of increased home equity.

Meanwhile, African Americans and Latinos, largely confined to the inner city, saw their neighborhoods decline as urban renewal destroyed available housing and cut freeways through the heart of their communities and as welfare agencies dumped more and more poor families in their midst. Denied home loans, many remained renters and were not able to accumulate wealth through home equity. Those who were able to purchase homes saw their property values stagnate or fall since 80% of the market, the white population, refused to buy in their neighborhoods. As whites left, so too did grocery stores and services and many of these communities fell into a cycle of decline.

Although many of the worst policies and practices have been outlawed, past discrimination continues to affect families today, as wealth (or the lack of it) accumulates from one generation to the next. As sociologist Dalton Conley points out, a family’s net worth is not simply the finish line. It’s also the starting point for the next generation. Those with wealth pass their assets on to their children - financing a college education, lending a helping hand during hard times, or assisting with the down payment for a new home. It also provides financial security in retirement. Not surprisingly, the racial wealth gap - and the head start enjoyed by white families - appears to have grown since the gains of the Civil Rights Movement.

Wealth, more than income, is an indicator of life outcomes and performance. Dalton Conley has found that when we compare the performance of families across racial lines who hold similar net worth, many of the huge racial disparities that we see in education, graduation rates, welfare usage and other outcomes disappear. The “performance gap” between whites and non-whites is a product not of ‘nature’ or race per se but the legecy of a long history of socio-economic inequality. This suggests that remedying the wealth gap is key to addressing other types of race-based inequities.

Colorblind policies that treat everyone the same, no exceptions for minorities, are often counter-posed against affirmative action or other racial remedies. But colorblindness in a society that is unequal by color, merely bolsters the advantages that have long benefited white people at the expense of other groups.

One dramatic example that shows what can be done, but is not because guys like you want their misguided priorities to get more resources.:

198

You can’t get out of your left-wing racial patronization attitude that “underachieving = poor = black” no matter what.

Not in Vancouver where the number of black people is effectively 0 and we’re talking about what classes will be offered to an almost entirely white and Asian population.

Not in Fairfax where the median black family income is $112,000.

Not in explaining why a rich white person should get into Harvard over a more qualified middle-class Asian person.

Absolutely none of this has anything to do with redlining or housing insecurity among urban black populations, but you’re just insistent on living in a fantasy world where these stale 1960s buzzwords explain everything.

199

Again CRT is your hobbyhorse, so continuing to harp on that here just shows foolishness when you then insist on throwing shots at it. BTW the reality is that not just CRT scholars are arriving to similar conclusions, that shows that it is not a cult, no matter how stupid you are in trying to tell others that it is.

So it is talking about your model minority. It points just to more bigotry on your part.

And it has to be noticed that you were incapable of replying with any good arguments to anything that was cited, so you just are useless in many ways, not just in the way of trying to be convincing.

200

It is a bit tangential to this thread, as it promotes a Florida viewpoint. However, one wonders how different the “equity” arguments are it will be if Canadian trends often mirror those of Southern neighbours.