So you believe that there is a legitimate category called “race”, and that, based on membership in that category, Florida can predict school outcomes.
If racial classifications are arbitrary, then they are not valid. If they are valid, in that they can be used to predict outcomes, then they are not arbitrary.
And your assertion that ‘it isn’t that blacks will do worse’ is obviously false. Florida is setting the standards lower for blacks than for whites or Asians. If they meet their standards, blacks will do worse.
It’s the soft bigotry of low expectations. Florida does not think black students can be expected to achieve at the same level as whites or Asians or Hispanics. And that expectation is based on race.
:shrugs:
I suppose you don’t see the contradiction, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
First, I’ve never argued that “race” as a concept doesn’t exist. Others may have, I can’t really speak for them.
Second, I see the contradiction. I get it. We’re setting the bar lower for blacks as a group than whites as a group and you know what? That sucks.
You know what sucks even more? Having blacks on average consistently score lower on tests than whites and neither work to find a solution nor even address the fact that it happens.
I’m on a school board right now. Our school district is approximately 85% free or reduced lunch, and approximately 85-90% minority. It’s also struggling badly academically. Thing is that some schools in my district are struggling worse than others. As the principals come to us with goals for this year, the one thing I’ve demanded is that they do not each come to us with a goal of making AYP (annual yearly progress) in their school.
Yes, making AYP is the state goal. Yes, they *should * be making that. Yes they *should * have that as a goal. But I know mathematically for some schools it’s so remote a possibility, you might as well call it impossible. I know it. The teachers know it. The principal knows it.
But if we go in pretending that all schools started off the year equal and all schools should therefore have the same goal, then we also have to pretend that they tried their best when they inevitably fail (which they will) because otherwise we’ve set them up to do the impossible.
No, it’s better to acknowledge the unequal field from the start and work to make steps towards equality (even if it takes a few years), rather than pretending everyone’s equal to start and then scratching our heads in confusion as to why the tests came back the way they did.
That’s one way to put it. Another way to put it is to say that Florida is expecting the same level of improvement in its population of black students as in its populations of white or Asian students.
I see I’m a bit late to the party, but there are a few important things to remember:
This is a nonbinding policy statement which will be quietly dropped just as soon as local school districts actually start allocating funds to comply.
Unlike schools in most states, Florida schools are primarily funded at the state rather than local level; in theory, this guarantees roughly equal educational opportunity, but it’s a big scam. One of the largest factors is cost of living, which is basically a way of channeling funds to wealthy districts even though cost of living is a tiny variable in terms of the cost of running a school. Our teachers are unionized, and their salaries are hardly adjusted at all for cost of living. In other words, disparities in test scores have very little to do with race, at least here.
Thats the thing. You can’t dismiss a reasonable, plausible explanation without undercutting that explanation somehow or presenting an equally reasonable plausible explanation JUST BECAUSE it leads to conclusions you don’t want to believe. Conclusions that you know “in your gut” to be untrue.
It is widely accepted that 40-70% of intelligence is heritable. The conservative argument for heritability of IQ is largely an attack on affirmative action.
I suggest we move away from the standard of “racist” toward a standard of “correct.”
We seem to have gotten to the point that if anything is “racist” then it must be inherently incorrect.
I’m assuming here that by “racist” you mean “based on an expectation that a particular SIRE group will underperform another regardless of nurturing opportunity.” (i.e. that there are fundamental differences among SIRE groups which cannot be erased by creating similar nurturing)
In every study to date, this is exactly so. All of the standard SIRE groups perform in the same rank order when (for example) socio-economic opportunity is adjusted for. For example, high-income blacks will still underperform low income whites; black children in families with high parental educational achievement will still underperform white children from families with low parental educational achievement.
Florida (and also Virginia, I believe) are wrestling with a very practical problem: no matter what they do, there’s this persistent gap in performance among SIRE groups. For those of us who are “racist” (at least, I think most people on this board would consider me racist) the approach taken by Florida and Virginia simply reflects reality. We can’t have the same absolute standards for SIRE groups because SIRE groups don’t have the same potential. It would be like saying the NBA should reflect SIRE groups in the larger population.
So, yeah–it’s racist. But so is mother nature. This idea that SIRE groups are “social constructs” doesn’t mean that each SIRE group has equal access to the same pool of genes. They don’t. If they did, there wouldn’t be any SIRE groups.
Has any educational goal set by any state department of education, based on tests that the department itself devises and administers, ever not been met?
Current proficiency goals for mathematics benchmarks are 45 for blacks (82 for asians) and are supposed to rise to 57/89 respectively by 2016. Link has the other numbers between these extremes.
They are just numbers, and I’m not aware of any sort of magic that is going to make them change. Beatings, maybe? They are just totally arbitrary numbers, as far as I can tell, and the idea that you’ll get one group to make twice as much progress as another makes no sense to me.
It seems like they could have skipped the controversy if they’d simply given a proficiency test at the beginning of the school year, then made it a target to raise that particular kid’s score by, let’s say 20 points, by the end of the year. They’d still capture the fact that some kids of a certain racial group starts at a lower point than others, but it would be based on something tangible rather than grouped by race
I wrote a post almost identical to this one, but ended up not posting it. What you’re suggesting would certainly be better than what Florida is doing, but the results would still be subject to manipulation. They would just teach to the test - not the subject matter of the test, but the specific questions on it. Or they’d just plain give the students the answers. Multiple schools have been caught doing this in similar circumstances.
The only chance of making this at all objective and useful would be to have the testing administered by an independent body whose funding does not depend on the outcome of the testing.
Well yeah, but the dilemma is the totally artificial goal improvement difference among groups.
The black group is supposed to go from 45 to 57. That’s an improvement of roughly 25%–i.e. 25% more black students than before would suddenly need to pass the test.
The asian group only needs to get from 82 to 89. That’s less than 10% improvement. And if they raised the standard for asians to be the same proportionate improvement as the black group is supposed to get, they’d have to surpass 100%.
(Everyone takes the same test. They just adjust the standard of how many are supposed to pass within each group.)
So I don’t think Virginia will be meeting these goals…
Thanks to the FCAT program, Florida public schools already spend 99% of their core subject time “teaching to the test” (and are cutting non-core subjects to do even more of it).
Fortunately for me, I was in the 11th grade the year before the test was first officially administered, so when we took it the scoring was anonymous and only used to set a baseline for the following year’s students.