See, this is why I don’t like debating you. When it doesn’t go your way, you resort to abuse.
What the fuck isn’t “going my way”? When you’re being a disingenuous prick instead of actually debating, I get pissed off.
Which is why I had you on ignore for a while, but for some stupid reason I keep forgetting your true colors.
And here you go again with your “I have been nothing but unfailingly polite” shtick. Octopus should sue you for copyright infringement.
Certainly I understood ‘performance in higher education’ to mean the grades achieved. If that was not your meaning you should have clarified that a lot earlier, for example at the point when you linked to a study and claimed it showed SAT scores ‘have fuck-all to do with performance in higher education’ - a study that measured performance in higher education by first year college GPA and likelihood of continuing to the second year.
And if you agree that SAT results are a reasonable predictor of college GPA, and not something that only measures test taking ability, why have we been debating all this time?
They are only an accurate measure of college GPA insofar as part of your GPA is determined by your test taking ability. I dispute that these tests measures anything particularly inherent to the individual (except as far as the individual’s experiences can be said to be inherent to them), or that it should be used to determine how “worthy” someone is of receiving higher education, which you apparently disagree with.
I also don’t see why you, an outside observer, would care what someone’s college GPA is, unless maybe you ask when hiring them for their first job out of college (and even then a 4.0 at one university is not the same as a 4.0 at another). Whether students at a given college have a high GPA overall is certainly not a useful measure of whether that college is teaching them useful skills.
I replied before you edited your post. You admitted yourself that your accusation was unreasonable - but what, I just shouldn’t care about being called stupid for no good reason?
I put you on ignore because it happened several times that you misunderstood something I said, and instead of trying to clarify, you leapt straight to attacking me.
I took you off ignore because you seemed to be acting reasonable again. I want to continue the debate, but I don’t want to put up with random abuse whenever you get pissed off at something I didn’t even say. So will you agree to make sure you understand me, and vice-versa, before reaching for the insults in future?
If you have any substantive objection to how I’m debating, then please give it now - and be specific, rather than making vague accusations.
I will do my best to ensure I understand you, yes. Again, I apologize for my poor phrasing.
If we burned all the schools and fired all the teachers of poor minority children, they simply wouldn’t have “schools of their choice”.
General childhood education is not something that markets can reliably provide, because the benefits are too externalized. Very few parents can afford to pay up-front what it really costs to educate a child for ten or twelve years.
So there has to be some kind of non-market funding for universal schooling, which the US (inadequately) handles through state and local taxation.
But you can’t just leave it up to the market to provide the schooling options, because they’ll compete for the advantaged and high-achieving kids, and avoid or outright reject the disadvantaged and low-achieving ones, who are much harder to educate successfully.
And you can’t just decree that schools have to take everybody who wants to attend them, either, because their organization and resources can’t absorb the fluctuations of market whims. If student enrollments suddenly double because a school’s name recognition goes up in a positive way, it can take the better part of a decade for the institution to cope with that. And if student enrollments suddenly fall again, that just disrupts and destabilizes it more. (Plus, lower-income parents are generally more geographically restricted in the choice of schools it’s feasible for their kids to get to.)
So if you’ve got to guarantee that there will be accessible decent education for every schoolchild, you’ve got to put into place at least some regulations about which schools which children will be attending, based on demographics. And there you are, back at the geographically delimited public-school model again.
“School choice” proposals are ultimately just ways to siphon off money to private schools and leave less support and resources for the neediest students that the “choicer” schools don’t want to deal with.
Depends on how poverty is defined and the results that competing systems are achieving.
At the very least you have a comprehensive knowledge of British quarries.
“This thread” is advocating nothing of the kind. The OP barely advocates that. Wanting to rid the board of people who are
is not promulgating an echo chamber; quite the opposite.
Thank you. Although you are apologising for the wrong thing here. I don’t blame anyone for a misunderstanding; those are inevitable. It’s how you deal with it that’s important.
I think the two biggest factors in how someone does on a test are their intelligence, and knowledge of the subject. Which of these is more important depends on the test. ‘Test taking skills’ will make some contribution, varying according to the individual. And to be honest I find it quite baffling that you could believe otherwise. Surely at your high school there were kids who did well in their work, and kids who struggled? Kids who easily understood the material, and kids who didn’t? Kids who you would ask for help, and those who would ask you (maybe reversed in different subjects)? And when the class took a test, the results would reflect this, much in the way you would expect if tests measure learning and (academic) ability?
Are these things inherent to an individual? What does that even mean? If you’ve acquired skills and knowledge, you’re in a different position to someone who hasn’t. If you don’t learn tennis until you are an adult, you’re almost certainly never going to win at Wimbledon, and you will probably not be ready for advanced training, no matter how naturally talented you might be. As for the relevant talent, twin and adoption studies show IQ is very little affected by environment, and is substantially heritable (up to 80%). But the existence of the Flynn effect suggests this is not true on a group level. If only we could work out what causes it!
It’s somewhat debateable whether the purpose of college for most people is to teach useful skills, or to serve as a signal of ability - the ability to qualify in the first place, and stick with it for several years, motivate yourself to do the work and reach a given standard. If you eliminate standards, then it no longer serves that function - which might be one way of reducing the importance of higher education. 
And that is what I think we should try to do as a society. Reduce the importance of degrees and higher educational qualifications in general, and go back to learning on the job where that is feasible. It seems to me that we have produced a society of haves and have-nots - one in which education is a major divider between the two - and juggling who gets to be in which category is not addressing the real problem.
That’s still probably the best rate in human history. Until recently, being poor was the default condition - the vast majority of humanity has always been poor. It was only in the past century or so that things started to change.
I’m not saying that we can’t do better: we most certainly can, and if that means trying new systems, then we definitely should. But we have to keep things in proportion.
Erm, not really. Just because the food poisoning I received from your chicken picatta was worse than the food poisoning I got from your potato salad doesn’t mean that the potato salad should be lauded. 
That’s really not a good analogy. Food poisoning is not the default result of every meal and never has been. I agree with @Alessan. We shouldn’t be complacent, but we should acknowledge how far we have come already.
It’s 6am. My good posts will arrive in about an hour.
It kinda was, before the advent of modern agricultural and food handling processes. Even water wasn’t generally safe to drink. It may have not been the result of every meal, but it certainly was a risk. Why do you think that the Torah spent so much time on dietary and sanitary laws? Do you think that the USDA and FDA (or their UK equivalents) serve no real purpose? That the local health department just comes into restaurants to give them a hard time?
There was a time when formaldehyde was widely used as a food preservative, along with a host of other toxic chemicals to make food appear fresh. Have we come far enough to just reduce that practice, or should it be eliminated entirely? (And yes, some products do contain small amounts of naturally occurring formaldehyde, but that’s a different matter than intentionally adding it as a preservative.)
So, the analogy does hold, in that just because we used to have an unacceptably high risk of food poisoning with each meal, we shouldn’t accept it in a modern society.
A risk of food poisoning is not the same as it being the default. Indeed, this is just another example of how much better modern society is, that food poisoning has become such a rare event.
And saying we should not accept food poisoning in modern society is one thing, but would you suggesting abolishing the FDA because it isn’t doing as a good a job as it could be? That would be the equivalent of what @Sam_Stone was warning against.
I agree. I’m all for not accepting things - it’s how stuff gets improved. My problem was referring to a system that seems to be working much better than any system tried before it as “broken”. Flawed, yes; unfinished, absolutely. But not broken.
It was the default that people got food poisoning on a regular basis. Not sure the reason for your attempt at hair splitting here.
And yes, for most of us in industrialized countries, food poisoning is relatively rare. (most food poisoning these days comes from poor food handling practices in the home, rather than contaminated food supply or commercial operations.)
No, but it could stand improvement. There are still the occasional outbreaks of contaminated foods making it to market and to the table. Criticizing its failures, and looking to improve where it fails is not the same as abolishing it.
No, that would be an excluded middle, in claiming that the FDA is doing a good enough job, and it will not take any criticism in its practices. If that were the case, then replacing it with an agency that would be willing to do better would be preferable.
Apparently my shipment of good posts arrived early! Who knew!?
That’s not what he said.