Yes, the median black family is not poor but the poverty rate among blacks (and hispanics) is significantly higher than it is among whites and asians. I suggested this approach here and it was suggested to the school board, but this has much less traction here or with the school board.
“The child poverty rate was higher for blacks (4 times) and for Hispanics (3.5 times) than that for
whites (4 percent). The child poverty rate for Asians or Pacific Islanders (6 percent) was just above that for whites.”
Twitter is full of people claiming Asians now earn more than white people. (Or maybe it’s just certain Asian ethnic groups, I don’t know who decided lumping 60% of the world’s population together was a good idea.) Are you saying this is just a result of more Asians living in high CoL areas?
I think this notion that magnet schools like tjhsst are the “best” schoool is part of the problem. These schools aren’t really “better” for everyone. I think it is a lot closer to being a “special needs” school than anything else. Not all schools need organic chemistry just like not all schools need a bunch of occupational therapists. A lot of the kids at tjhsst run out of math and science classes in their sophomore year and tjhsst provides them a place where they can continue their math and science education. So when people see racial disparity there, it seems like there is more of some good thing going to one group over another and it bothers them.
Tjhsst doesn’t get high sat scores and high college admission rates because of anything special that the school does. It achieves these things by selecting kids that are already going to get high sat scores and high college admission rates. There is an academic achievement gap among 8th graders taking the test and the test only reveals that gap, it does not create it. The argument I always hear is "we will get to the root sources of that gap later but right now we must MUST! address this disparity at the specialized school NOW! I have heard this argument for 30 years. When are they going to get around to addressing those root causes?
Destroying specialized programs that addresses the needs of academically advanced kids is a feature, not a flaw. The orthodoxy at education departments across the country has shifted. They used to think tracking was good, now they consider it bad. NYC is considering eliminating gifted and talented programs altogether because they think gifted programs are racist.
The fact that the burden falls entirely upon asians is a predictable consequence of asian political weakness. If asians do not punch above their weight, politically speaking, they will continue to bear the burden of “reform” That is simply how structural racism works. Noone is deliberately trying to fuck over those asian kids but without political power in a society driven by identity politics, they are the odd man out. Asian concerns will always seem trivial.
What conclusion do you draw from that, then? (And shouldn’t we be comparing the rates of single-parent families from 20 - 60 years ago with today’s income figures if we’re going to do it properly?)
Why is this so popular? This is the enforced mediocrity I was talking about earlier. Handily illustrated here:
Reports show that a lot of what you claim here is missing a lot.
New York City kids deserve an education system that makes room for enrichment in any area where they excel, without discounting that they may struggle in other subjects, or even have a disability that requires more support. They deserve to learn with and from all their classmates.
We don’t have to look far for examples. In 2017, District Eight in the Bronx began offering enriched curriculum to all students, not just those who qualify for a designated G&T program, and demonstrated benefits across their student body. The education professor who designed the curriculum used in D8 said the main tenets were engagement, enthusiasm, and enjoyment. The curriculum helped students learn by getting them excited to be in school.
The City should work with the Department of Education to explore ways to provide enriched and advanced curriculum to all students, rather than continuing to label and segregate kids.
Those divides are not due to cognitive differences between races, but a function of access, resources and systemic bias against blacks and Latinos, education experts said.
Because there’s no federal standard for identifying giftedness, states and districts come up with their own definitions – which is one reason researchers don’t have a clear answer on the benefits of gifted education.
It’s not a strawman in the UK, that’s how my school was. Nothing for gifted students, almost no tracking, most targets were about getting more kids to pass the GCSE, ignoring those at the top and bottom of the class. If US education is moving in that direction, I think it’s a bad thing for kids.
As pointed out already, there is a lot to be gained by concentrating on all students rather than applying an enriched curriculum to just the gifted ones.
In 2017, District Eight in the Bronx began offering enriched curriculum to all students, not just those who qualify for a designated G&T program, and demonstrated benefits across their student body. The education professor who designed the curriculum used in D8 said the main tenets were engagement, enthusiasm, and enjoyment. The curriculum helped students learn by getting them excited to be in school.
Giving an enriched curriculum to all students is a great idea. What I am objecting to is trying to teach all students at the same pace, meaning some get left behind and others are held back and become bored and frustrated. I don’t think those things are mutually exclusive.
Your little cartoon shows the tall guy getting no help at all, the short guy getting one crate to stand on, and the shortest guy getting two crates - so all the help going to the littlest guy and none to the tall guy.
In other words, the left hand side shows the thing you complain about, and the right shows a strawman.
The cartoon is a strawman because there’s no benefit to the tall guy in being taller. But for gifted students there is a huge benefit in being challenged and having work at their level.
No tracking means holding back students who could be learning more and doing better, harming them to try to create equality of outcome.
Besides being a straw man, the cartoonist had to cut the bottom of somebody else, that is not the lower part of the body of the tall guy in the straw man cartoon.
I conclude that there are factors that still favor higher incomes for white people.
I think that being a single parent affects your income today. I think being incarcerated affects your income today. It may affect your child’s income as well. The disparities in these factors were more pronounced 20-60 years ago but asians still had much lower rates of illegitimacy and incarceration than whites…
I don’t know. I think some of it has to do with the pool of people who are willing to dedicate their lives to public education generally. I think some of it has to do with how poorly critical race theory translates from legal academia to things like education and other social policy. It may just be part of a policy cycle where everyone thinks this is a good idea now but will think it’s a bad idea in 20 years.
‘Factors’ being racism. I suppose the CRT folks could argue that all the disparity is caused by racism and the numbers show there is no racism against Asians. That seems unlikely. I’d like to see the trends over time.
I thought the argument was that these factors cause kids to do less well at school and basically screw up their lives? Certainly a single parent will be poorer if you’re looking at family income, and people in jail aren’t earning anything. Can’t they factor those out when comparing incomes?
Education certainly does see a constant stream of fads and arbitrary changes. Back when I was learning to read, phonics was out of fashion, and now it’s mandatory. It’s amazing how little successive governments seem to care about evidence when it comes to children’s education.
I applaud NYC’s attempts to reform their GT program. They used to have GT programs in every school. They should go back to that. Taking GT kids out of their local school was a bad idea and while it promoted some efficiency it made the GT applications more complex and that made the GT program much whiter as white parents were better able to navigate the more complex application process, get better recommendations, etc.
What access to resources do poor asian kids have that poor hispanic kids do not have?
What systemic bias exists in nyc against hispanic kids that does not exist against asian kids?
I think there is an advantage to belonging to the dominant group. Being ethnic chinese in china provides an advantage too. The whole system is built with the white person in mind. When they decide how complicated paperwork ought to be they are not thinking about asian or hispanic immigrants. They are thinking about white people not because they are trying to screw asians and hispanics but because that is just the standard that everyone uses. Names like jones and smith get more interviews than names like wong or garcia. When jones fucks up “everyone is human” when garcia fucks up people are acutely aware of his race when wong fucks up, people think they might have gotten an defective asian (anything short of perfection fails to cover the spread). A lot of people would describe all this as racism.
How do you think the CRT folks explain the disparity between asians and hispanics?
I’m sure it’s out there. I recall seeing that even after correcting for everything whites still did better than others. Blacks earn less than everyone else after correcting for everything.
There is a reason why I try to compare asians with hispanics. The differences there are fairly modest after you correct for everything.
In a sense, this is true, but it is nonetheless consistently ranked in that spot and in a sane world of educational politics would be valued for that instead of destroyed.
Some of the other programs in the Governor’s School system are much more specialized - there’s one just for “ocean sciences,” one for arts, and one for “government and international studies” in Richmond.
The arts one in particular is a good example of using the program for something with no direct relationship to overall academic performance. There’s lot of kids who are good trumpet players or dancers who don’t need to take linear algebra as part of a one-size-fits-all “gifted” apprach.
The Richmond school used to make a big deal out of how it was offering something for advanced students of the humanities and social sciences instead of trying to fit everyone with high academic ability into the STEM track, though in recent years it’s become much more TJ-like.