Do those same experiences (lets call them outcomes ok?) come because they have different opportunities? Do teachers and schools not provide an equal playing field?
Maybe we should be talking about disbanding the teachers unions.
Oddly, the law schools themselves don’t seem to care about the “average” score. They care about the median. Which is to say, they want that line above which half their students have a particular score or better to be as high as possible. If you look at how scores vary between the 25-50-75th percentiles at any given law school, but especially the most prestigious, you can get an idea of just how little (or how much) a high score matters, really. Hint: medians are much higher than what these schools consider to be the minimum threshold for success. The drive for high medians, but maybe not so much high bottom quartile (or very minimum) scores, has everything to do with schools wanting to compete in USN&WR rankings and little to do with that particular score being some kind of bright yellow line below which “you shall not pass,” be it at the school, on the bar exam, or in the profession.
But, different “cultures” also have different resources to use to prioritize those things.
If you are exhausted from working 2 MW jobs and spending 5 hours on the bus in order to pay for a roof over your kid’s head and to get something in their stomach, then you may not have the time and energy to check to make sure that they did their homework. Much less get them to the library, participate in PTA, take them for music lessons and private tutoring.
I do think that society needs to take a greater responsibility for the education of its young. If a parent can step up and do better, then great. But if a parent is not capable, or even if they are just not willing, then I don’t think that it should be the child who is left to suffer for it.
And this is not just altruistic. Less poverty means less crime. Better educated citizens make better choices in a democracy. More applicants for higher tier jobs means better candidates for those jobs are chosen.
We are not just letting them rot, we are letting our entire society rot, in order to ensure that they pay the consequences of the actions that they took as children.
Does this apply to hispanic immigrants too or only the ones that succeed in spite of racism from both sides through hard work and painful sacrifice?
The effect is fairly well studied and documented. It’s not like they didn’t have control groups. Stereotype threat is a real thing.
It’s important to not lose sight of the fact that we’re talking about a minority of blacks in America. A disproportionately large minority, but nevertheless a minority. While many Black Americans share the shame history of oppression, many have been successful while others have not. As another poster in another thread argued, it is a systemic problem internal to the black community, apart from external systemic issues, that they themselves need to do a better job of addressing and improving.
Yes, they do. Parents do matter. I know that you have said that in order to fix this, we’d have to strip parents of their rights, but the only right that I would see that they would no longer have would be to make their child fail.
If their peers are telling them that getting A’s is acting white, then fuck them. If their parents are telling them this, then that actually is a problem. Don’t know that we need to take the kids away, but we should probably limit the parental involvement in their education. I don’t think that this is the case nearly as much as the parent just not having the time and resources to do right by their child as they would like to.
Teachers and schools could provide and equal playing field, but often don’t. I’ll not cite this at the moment, as it is an NPR story that I heard way back, and it would take me a bit to find it and its references, but I think I’ve seen this also referenced here, probably by iiandyiiii, that black students are generally selected against for programs, that they are often put into remedial classes, or they receive discipline disproportionate to white students. So, even if they are coming into the classroom at an equal level, often, the classroom environment itself tilts against them.
That would be an easy fix that would do more harm than good.
Maybe some adjustments here and there to their contracts, but I don’t see what good it would do to eliminate protections for a teacher against arbitrary dismissal.
Well, in all the schools I mention, the schools are pretty highly segregated, and yet despite that, the minority students consistently underperform the white and asian students, and not in some sort of hard to discern way- it’s pretty spectactularly different. It’s not like the teachers are deciding that the 2 black kids in the classroom are somehow undeserving; the whole school is like 85% black, or 85% white or whatever.
This is even true in schools like my children’s school- it’s 40% black, 25% hispanic, 25% white and 10% everyone else. And despite that, the exact same dramatic differences between the races seem to show up. So I’m thinking that at least in the case of my kids’ school, it’s not funding, it’s not some kind of status ranking, but it probably is something cultural. What, I’m guessing is a relative lack of emphasis on education/academics/reading in the culture.
And I don’t know how you fix that.
Then we have been having different conversations.
You focus on black communities because you can fall back on the history of slavery like its a trump card. But the policies you defend don’t only apply to blacks. It applies to hispanics as well. In fact it applies about three times as much to hispanics as it does to blacks.
In my mind the conversations surrounding the descendants of american slaves and the descendants of american indians is very different than the policy conversation you are trying to have that conflates the descendants of slaves with hispanic immigrants because the history is not comparable.
I don’t know who said that but I have said much the same to only get called racist as well as a host of other things for it.
It would apply to Hispanic immigrants, too. Why wouldn’t it?
I have no idea the reason for your dichotomy here. It is not relevant to anything that I have said.
Those are two different things. That people (Americans anyway), learn better through games or entertainment than through rote memorization and regurgitation is fairly well studied and documented.
That is orthogonal to stereotype threat.
This thread started on one topic by headed off in a tangent on another that turned out to be very insightful. Look for the poster thickpancreas.
Median is a form of average. In fact it is the form of average that I cited. The median at stanford is 171 and the median at touro is 148.
I don’t think you know what you are talking about when it comes to law schools, the legal profession or the admissions process at top law schools. Perhaps you should try an analogy using something you know more about.
[quote=“k9bfriender, post:143, topic:817385, full:true”]
But, different “cultures” also have different resources to use to prioritize those things.
If you are exhausted from working 2 MW jobs and spending 5 hours on the bus in order to pay for a roof over your kid’s head and to get something in their stomach, then you may not have the time and energy to check to make sure that they did their homework. Much less get them to the library, participate in PTA, take them for music lessons and private tutoring.[/quote]
What resources do the poor asian kids in NYC have that the poor hispanic kids do not?
Poor asian parents also have to travel long distances to work long hours for very little pay.
Why do their kids have to give up a spot they earned to make room for a hispanic kid that didn’t earn their spot?
Probably. That’s why I usually don’t bother. For second, I thought that what you had said was relevant, but you have disabused me of that notion.
@kearsen1, this is a perfect example of putting words in someone’s mouth, and presuming their motives, in case you were looking for one.
On the one hand, yes, racism in america has subsided to the point where blacks can succeed through hard work and sacrifice… and luck. Sure black females are the most educated group in america (followed by asian females), but there is still a significant headwind, there is not a lot of room for error for a young black male. And despite being the most educated group in america, that education is not translating into a significantly higher income for black women. Some of this is the fact that they are in professions that don’t pay as well as most, but even correcting for that, black women do not seem to get raises and promotions at the same rate as others.
On the other hand a middle class white male can be a total fuck up their entire lives and then get their act together late in life and still make a decent living as a real estate agent selling homes like the one he grew up in. There is an almost endless supply of second chances for white men. Remember that stanford kid that got a slap on the wrist for attempted rape? The judge’s attitude was that he didn’t want to fuck up his entire life over one mistake. A black man goes to jail for 25 years for the same crime and noone wonders about what his life will be like. Black lives matter, not just in the lethal sense but in the sense that the lives they live are just as important as the life lived by a white person. Their dreams, hopes and aspirations are no less important than the dreams and aspirations of a white person.
There is a big difference between saying that this is their problem to fix themselves, and to acknowledge that there are internal problems in the community that they need to work to alleviate.
It would be racist to simply say that black people don’t value education. It is not racist to see that, due to historical and contemporary factors, many in the black community do not prioritize education as much as others.
It is a not so subtle difference, IMHO, but instead, a very important one. One says that it’s just their fault, and they deserve what they get, and the other acknowedges that they are interdependancies in the different “cultures” that influence those resources and prioritizations. That it needs to be a cooperative effort, that dividing ourselves into groups and telling one group or another to “fix themselves” is doing no just them, but all of us an injustice.
I really hate to ever say “Listen to this podcast,” but, well, listen to this podcast.
No, I’m not going to dump and run, but I also don’t think that I can fully do it justice. This is with Cailin O’Connor, who is a biologist who studies how game theory interacts with evolution.
Towards the end, and I can try to get a better timestamp when I get home if desired, they start talking about game theory and social evolution. And she talks about how, as soon as you get identity groups “playing the game” systems will be set up where different identity groups get different shares of the pie. the groups that get the most will justify it, as they obviously deserve it. But the interesting thing is, so will the group that gets less. They have learned that asking for an equal share will end up with them getting nothing, so they learn to accept less.
As an employer, I see this. When I get a white person come in, they ask for a higher starting wage than when I get a black person applying. Even if the black person has more relevant experience. I often find that the black person works harder, and is willing to accept less. They are surprised when I base pay on merit, not on what they expect.
It is not anyone’s fault, either in the favored or the disfavored party, it just is a natural way of satisfying the equilibrium. And, just because it is natural, does not mean that it is fair or that it is right. The fact that it is natural for there to be these disparities means that there needs to be a deliberate effort to equalize the shares, and that effort needs to be on the part of the group that is demanding more, as the group that accepts less does not have the ability to demand more.
Misogyny, institutional racism are still a problem in our society. They need to be addressed. What I was addressing more specifically was the conversation about the value that various communities place on education and achievement. I think those can first & best be addressed by the communities themselves.
I appreciate that you feel confident in making that assertion.
I doubt that the problem is black parents telling their kids that school is for fools. Anyone smart enough to keep a baby live until school age is smart enough to realize that education is important, they may not value it quite as much as asian parents but I doubt they value it much less than white parents.
It’s relevant to the conversation because asian kids are being shoved out of spots that they have earned, mostly for hispanic kids. If asian kids do not have some unfair advantage over hispanic kids then why are we changin admissions policies to increase the hispanic population at the expense of the asian population?
My comments are on topic with my OP. What conversation are YOU having?
Well, you certainly don’t sound like you know what you’re talking about in that arena. I still can’t believe you didn’t know that median was a form of average.
Yep, that’s what I just said. I assume that we are in agreement here?
So, it’s not just white or black, it is hispanic too? Your OP made the fallacious claim that “we ought to live in a Harrison Bergeron dystopia”, and then you moved the goalposts from there.
A conversation about meritocracy. Just because it is not going the way you wanted, where I am not doing as you say and advocating for a dystopia, doesn’t mean that I’m off topic.
You keep adding in things and moving the goal posts. Your complaints about hispanics are not related to your own OP.
Do you really think that ASL_v2.0 didn’t know that? Really? It was very clear to me that when they were using the word “average” they were referring to the mean, and contrasting that to the median. It is very important to know which one you are talking about, as the two can give very different results, and most often, when one speaks of an average, they are speaking of the mean, and so substituting the median instead can give create a false interpretation.
That you chose to assume that they were stupid and harp on that, rather than address the actual arguments there tells me that you didn’t actually have a counter to that argument, and so you chose to pound the table, ineffectually, I may add, instead.