That’s a pretty big IF because race is pretty central to this analsyis.
If race were not an issue, there would not be an issue.
Wait. What? Racial discrimination harms individuals not merely society. Segregation didn’t only harm society, it harmed individuals. Maybe I’m not getting what you are saying.
Wow, originally affirmative action was about not discriminating against people. I had no idea, I thought it was always quotas and preferences.
Exactly. If a black student who otherwise qualifies to attend is rejected from Harvard because of racism, they have been harmed. And if an Asian student who otherwise qualifies is rejected due to a soft quota, they have also been harmed.
I was thinking of individual justice as the right to be judged on your own merits, without prejudice based on race or sex or whatever. Social justice is about inequality between groups, which can be caused by disparate treatment of the first sort (eg redlining?), and some people want to fix it with more discrimination, or by lowering standards rather than raising them. Simplistic answers to complicated questions.
I was reading this article by a well off parent about the problems negotiating New York’s schools, which might interest you:
There’s a lot in there, and you can see the problems caused by inequality, and also how the offered solutions are not fixing them.
This paragraph was almost an aside:
We had faced this problem with our daughter, who was reading far ahead of her grade in kindergarten and begged her teacher for math problems to solve. When the school declined to accommodate her, and our applications to other public schools were unsuccessful, we transferred her to a new, STEM-focused private school rather than risk years of boredom. We regretted leaving the public-school system, and we were still wary of the competitive excesses of meritocracy, but we weren’t willing to abandon it altogether.
Poorer parents with smart kids don’t have this option. They get the years of boredom, and their parents can try to coach them - if they are able, if they have the time and motivation - or the kids will fall behind. And that’s only a small part of the problems outlined in the article.
If we’re still talking about TJ (you mention Harvard later so I may have lost the thread), it’s a public institution.
What’s different about (TJ vs the other public schools) vs (Harvard vs other colleges) is that TJ is offering a program that provides advanced coursework for students who are likely run out of classes at their local highschool, whereas Harvard is mostly just providing a brand.
I don’t care as much about the latter. But for public high school, I want level-appropriate education available to all students. Based on application data and the coursework the school offers, I believe that most of the eligible students would well served by the advanced coursework offered at any number of other schools, whereas most of the current accepted students would not.
The boundary is going to be fuzzy though. The kid already kicking calculus ass in 8th grade probably needs a special program to receive level-appropriate instruction through high school. The ~1200 students in Algebra I who applied? Probably not. But in between, it gets hard. A test can help. But maybe it makes sense to lottery the “maybes”.
Which is kind of what they’re doing, last I checked. Which may not be up to date. But I think the lottery pool is too big on the low end. My proposal would be to offer more (half?) admitted spots and to increase the minimum requirements. E.g. at least be in Geometry unless you can show you’re an amazing self-study with your test score.
I haven’t a clue what that would do to admissions demographics. If the demographics of the admittable students is skewed, that suggests some K-8 intervention is warranted. But I think the current plan will result in more students not receiving level-appropriate instruction.
As mentioned before, courts and even regulations on schools do forbid the use of quotas, what a lot of the propaganda from the right goes about is to act as if the weak affirmative action changes that are proposed in some schools or colleges with less diversity (where the right wing has an issue) is to not mention much about how quotas are not the issue, but to ignore the minorities that are affected in some schools and mislead many into the idea that it is still all about quotas.
Yes. This was the original form of anti-racism which meant being affirmatively against racism. These days it seems to also mean being in favor of racism that favors certain groups.
There weren’t quotas but there were “targets” this gave people an incentive to pick the black guy over an equally qualified white guy.
Ultimately all justice is individual.
The bill of rights frequently defends the rights of individuals even though it may not serve the greater good of society.
We let a ton of criminals go to avoid putting one innocent man in jail. Those criminals frequently go on to commit more crimes. But we value the rights of that one man over the effect that protecting those rights may have on society.
NYC has 3 specialized high schools that are much like tjhsst except the kids are far less affluent (mostly low income minorities, but not the right kind of minorities to get the support of the woke left). The mayor and school chancellor is trying to make them more representative (at the expense of selectivity) but they are constrained by a law that requires testing (as may be the case with tjhsst).
I am encouraged by the quality of arguments from the other side that we will see the end of this sort of affirmative action fairly soon.
I think it’s more than brand. After princeton, harvard probably has the best alumni network, maybe stanford is in there somewhere.
To be fair, the majority of these students track up to a handful of high schools that could implement something to address their needs. These are mostly affluent high schools or high schools with high asian populations. I suspect that if the lottery things goes through, we will see program pop up in each of these schools and these students just stay at their local high school. The losers in this are the 3 or 4 stars that might come from each of several other high school pyramids. They end up taking the routine AP classes that are offered at every school.
They didn’t pick 3.5 GPA cutoff at random. They cannot achieve the demographics they want without digging down to the 10th percentile of applicants. K-8 intervention is warranted (and supported by the opponents of the lottery).
Right now they want to pick about 20% of the class through merit and 80% through lottery. If you reversed those numbers and increased the threshhold, I don’t see a lot of opposition. But that would barely nudge the demographics and would once again mostly trade off asians kids for richer white kids.
Sure, now they do but historically, they did use quotas. They STILL use racially discriminatory preferences. The poster you are responding to seems to be referring to the historical use of affirmative action.
Eliminating a merit based test in favor or a lottery is not a “weak” form of affirmative action. Giving black students a 2 standard deviation preference on test scores over asian students is not a 'weak" form of affirmative action. Affirmative action is only an issue at schools with more selective and competitive admissions. Here in Virginia, noone is concerned with the diversity of the student body at state schools like Radford https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/radford-university/student-life/diversity/ They are very interested in diversity art the University of Virginia, even though U. Va is more diverse than Radford.
Similarly in the california system, noone is really concerned about diversity at schools other than UCLA and UC Berkeley.
I think there is a good argument that there is in fact a soft quota being used in college admissions. There have been books and peer reviewed studies that support this. Simply put, it is statistically unlikely that the asian population at many of these selective schools would have remained so constant despite the tripling of asian applicants over the last few decades. The widening gap in test scores between admitted asians and other groups indicates that selectivity among asian applicants is rising with the increase in applications, this indicates that they may be adjusting to the increase in asian applications by being more selective with asians.
It is a common sentiment among asians that they are not competing with the entire pool of applicants but with the other asians.
I can’t understand why people support this. At least with the targets it was someone equally qualified. These lotteries are replacing qualified kids with much less qualified kids, who are unlikely to benefit as much.
Not according to the social justice advocates. It’s all about how one group is doing compared to another.
How hard is it to get in, really?
I suspected that was so. Why have such a wide net otherwise?
Swapping a test for a lottery is not a weak change, that’s pretty drastic. A quota would probably make less difference to who is admitted, depending how high it was.
You missed that I also don’t see a lottery as a proper solution, more like a partial one. I only pointed before to others that many charter schools use them and the world has not ended.
Sure, that’s part of the product they’re selling, which nobody deserves or earns or anything like that. The point is that the high school comparison is about mismatched education needs. Harvard vs Elsewhere U, much less so.
I don’t have the impression that their needs aren’t already being met by the other available schools, which already offer advanced coursework. Just not differential equations and complex analaysis kind of advanced.
I think it is the manifestation of white liberal guilt on the steroids of wokeness. A lot of white people are just now waking up to the racism in this country. They want to rectify the racism but they don’t want it to be inconvenient for themselves so things like school funding reform and busing are off the table but we it is certainly acceptable to take some stuff from asians to give it to blacks (and hispanics for some inexplicable reason) and call that justice. They want to be fair but they don’t want that fairness to inconvenience them. They could just as easily have reached the same range of increases in black and hispanic students by giving preferences to poor kids but then it would be diversity at the cost of mostly white students not asians ones.
It’s mostly white people being racist against asians but feeling good about it because they’re doing something about racism against black people.
In a legal theory sense “justice” is individual. Critical race theory, when it first started out in law schools did not look as crazy and distorted as it does now, it was controversial because it asked us to put aside data and rational analysis for a moment to look at the perspective of the legal system from other perspectives. This was really just another version of “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.”
The law was facially neutral but affected different communities differently. Many times these differences broke along racial lines. So it invited us to look at policy from this one additional perspective along with all the others like economics and foreign policy.
The original crt did not justify discriminating against asians to create more opportunity for blacks. It is a perversion an analytical tool created for a relatively narrow purpose being used as a blunt instrument by people who don’t really understand it very well.
It wasn’t until crt was imported to other disciplines with much less intellectual rigor (like many of the education departments in the country) that it started to become really nucking futz.
Tjhsst, the median GPA is 4.0, I have listed the stats of every admitted and rejected student upthread I can try to find the link for you again if you need. About 15% of 3000 applicants are accepted but there are application requirements that effectively exclude a very large portion of the students in the area. The majority of students admitted to tjhsst will have taken geometry in 8th grade. Only about 20 out of ~500 students admitted to tjhsst had only taken algebra in 8th grade.
28,000 out of approximately 100,000 8th graders took the admissions exam. About 900 are accepted to stuyvesant, the top public high school in the city. Overall, about 15% of all applicants are accepted to at least one of the 3 “protected” specialized high schools combined.
I agree. I’m just saying that there is more than bragging rights at stake.
IMHO, the big difference is culture. You aren’t in a culture where you are the smart kid, the whole frikking school is smart. You start to see other aspects of yourself beyond your academic excellence. Perhaps you even become a social justice warrior, but you might never have done that if you were pigeonholed in school as one of the smart kids. It is just a very liberating place for smart kids. You fit in and that give you the freedom to break the mold.
And like I said, the really bright kids from the non-feeder schools really do get screwed. Their schools do not have the critical mass of academically advanced students to support the sort of programs that they need. The terminal math class in those schools is frequently calculus (perhaps AP calculus) and the terminal science class might be AP physics.
Yeah. Having kids makes you both more generous and more selfish; ideals will come second to supporting their own children. But you’d think they’d realise they are sacrificing someone else’s. As for the Hispanics, I reckon ‘to each according to his needs’ is your explanation there.
That makes perfect sense, unlike what CRT seems to have turned into.
It’s hard for me to compare, I don’t know how hard it is to get a 4.0 GPA, or which maths courses American kids take at what age. But sounds like a bit less than 1 in 100 get in.
Sounds amazing.
What gets me is that they fully understand the concept that racism does not require malice or hatred, it can be institutional. But they don’t recognize that racism when they implement a policy that replaces asian kids with mostly white kids. We’ve seen comments here that seem to indicate that this is unfortunate but it’s acceptable collateral damage.
I get tone policed a lot here, it’s one of the occupational hazards of holding opinions that do not conformwith the oethodoxy around here (or anywhere else for that matter). I frequently have trouble remaining polite with people that are pushing these racist ideas and presenting themselves as morally superior for throwing asian kids under the bus for the benefit of black and hispanic (and in this case white) kids. And almost noone calls them on it.
Algebra is frequently taken in the first year of high school. That is the common track at least in FCPS. So these kids are at least 2 years ahead of the bulk of their peers.
30% of FCPS gets a 3.5 I don’t know what the stats are for 4.0. in 8th grade. It is tough to figure out middle school GPAs and the 3.5 only came out as a result of the study that FCPS did to support their proposal.
It can be very humbling. Especially if you come from one of the non-feeder schools where you were an academic big fish in a small pond.
That doesn’t sound right, I’m sure we started algebra at age 11 in the UK and it was the same for everyone. High school is 14 - 18, right? What are they teaching kids instead if they don’t get to algebra until so late?
And does that mean if more advanced courses aren’t available at their middle school, the kids there have no chance of getting in? Cos you can’t be two years ahead if there’s no opportunity to learn more advanced stuff.
That’s the experience a lot of smart people have when they go to university. Suddenly you go from top of the class to middle of the pack and have to work hard for the first time in your life. Not everyone manages it.
Did you go to a non-feeder shool?
Sometimes it feels like people are just choosing not to see things because they don’t want to.
@GIGObuster, do you think there is no discrimination against Asians anymore? And/or do you believe Asians are somehow cheating the system to get the majority of places at these selective schools?
You are not going to get him to answer a question about “discrimination against Asians” using the ordinary meaning of those words. His position is based in Critical Race Theory so he can’t admit that, e.g., “racism against Asians” exists in any kind of context divorced from the white v. black psychodrama that he believes drives the world. Thanks to copious posts in the thread, we can fill out the entirety of his “reasoning,” so much as it can be called that, as follows:
This is how we get the spectacle of “anti-racists” lining up behind a group of mostly white people openly denouncing Asian immigrants, referring to a Muslim from India as a “white supremacist,” and implementing a policy whose actual effect will be the mass exchange of qualified Asians for unqualified whites - if you accept each premise in the reasoning as GIGOBuster and the CRT gang do, the logic is impeccable and the conclusion must follow.
It’s hard to make a one to one comparison because the two systems don’t necessarily group concepts the same way. It’s not as if kids here don’t ever see a variable/unknown until that class. We could have a whole thread on who teaches what when. But the sequence here is typically:
Vague undefined middle school math
Pre-Algebra
Algebra I
Geometry
Algebra II
Pre-Calculus
Calculus
More calculus
Stuff you typically only get in college unless you’re at a school like TJ.
YMMV. Sometimes you’ll see a stats class available. And most kids obviously stop well short of the end there.
A truly smart kid can pick up a book, study, and take the admissions test – they were admitting a handful of kids each year who were only on Algebra I in 8th grade. But more advanced classes are available in at least four of the five districts (I didn’t check Falls Church), so this isn’t an issue for TJ. But if you’re not ready for highly advanced coursework, it doesn’t really matter whether you could have been ready for it. At least as far as admissions is concerned. If someone gets stunted by a poor middle school program, I don’t see how tossing them into an ultra-accelerated program is going to fix that. Especially if that means placing them there over someone who has demonstrated they’re prepared for it.
I think you’ll find statistics at most “good schools” since it’s an AP class. I would guess that a few hundred high schools in the U.S. offer multivariable calculus and/or linear algebra as an option for those who complete calculus by 11th grade, which is a fairly common path for “gifted programs” nationwide. For schools that don’t have enough interest in a full class on the topic, they may partner with a local college to allow students to “dual enroll” for courses beyond what the high school offers.
I had a classmate in high school who took calculus in 9th grade and exhausted all the school’s math offerings by the following year. The calculus teacher developed an independent study program for him to continue his math studies. I would hope that anyone who has a math degree is able to help a student through a textbook on group theory or whatever, even if their daily task is teaching Algebra I.
The point of places like TJ is that there can be many more sections of BC Calculus, many more structured courses on post-calculus topics, etc. without having to make a teacher work for free as a one-on-one tutor for every one of the many students there who needs that level of instruction.
There’s also online classes, which I resorted to. Not an ideal solution IMO (especially with 90s internet), but at the time the best one available.