I think you should consider the possibility that you might be the one with the racist attitude. Patronizing paternalism is another form of racism.
You see, I believe Blacks are no different than any other race when it comes to academic achievement. So when I observed that after 30 years of Affirmative Action, blacks are still struggling in college I conclude that Affirmative Action is not working, or perhaps even making things worse.
In hindsight, the failure is not surprising. What we have been essentially doing is taking black kids who havenât learned how to swim and throwing them into the deep end of the academic pool. Shouldnât be surprised if a lot drown.
Another complication is that to better justify race-based affirmative action, colleges decided that racial diversity on campus enhanced education. This then justified recruiting black students internationally as a means to satisfy affirmative action goals, further moving away from the original reparative objective of the program.
Obviously, we should copy the HUGE success of Finnish education policies, emphasizing intense investment in every child from pre-natal care through High School, and also providing a broad spectrum of internships, college, and on-line education.
After that, we might observe that all the AA policy shrieking is fishwives fighting over rotting fish. I was and am for AA, but I consider it a low priority compared to Actually Educating Everybody.
But for some reason the USA, the originators of universal free education as a policy, now are far more interested in all manner of insanity, mostly destructive consumerism maximizing profits to corporations and minimizing health, rather than anything like long time horizon infrastructural investment in people (the biggest payoffs) and clever durable projects in energy, transportation, housing, commerce⌠(merely huge payoffs).
To be fair, they didnât really have a choice. SCOTUS disallowed the use of any other justification - only promoting diversity was held to be a sufficiently compelling government interest in Bakke to support their racial classifications.
That is why bussing school kids around a district to integrate all the schools was started in the early 70s. Resources follow the white kids. Put white kids in all the schools, and, it was hoped, the resources would follow them, and the black kids would have a chance at an education. Many white parents had an apoplectic fit over bussing, with the riots by blue collar whites in South Boston getting the most media attention. Since then, the Shiny faction has used âneighborhood schoolsâ as a dog whistle for segregated schools.
Of course, whites fled the cities, to overwhelmingly white burbs, leaving the poor in the inner city, with no resources anywhere in the city district.
Then Shiny folks, like those in Michigan, started a push for âcharter schoolsâ. Ordinarily, you would expect the kids in charters to do better, because they are the ones with the parents motivated enough to enroll them in the charter school, and get them to school every day, so those kids would do better than average, regardless which school they were in. Surprisingly, a study of charters in Michigan a few years ago, showed that kids in charters were not learning more than the kids in public schools. In fact, many of the charters performed the education mission worse than the public schools.
The push now is to have the state subsidize the âJCsâ by funding private schools at the same rate as the public schools. Fifty years ago, the hot debate in Michigan was âparochiaidâ; state subsidies for religious schools, as the religious schools were seen, by white parents, as a refuge from integrated public schools, but they wanted the state to pay for it.
SteveâŚwent to the ghetto high school in Kalamazoo, while the other high school was overwhelmingly white
That would be great. I think though that there is a simpler solution made up of three policy changes that have long been discussed. The first is to shift poorer schools to a 12 month calendar. This will provide extra teaching time for these kids to catch up, while also providing day care and nutrition for poor kids during the summer months. The second is to make two year community colleges free. The third is to mandate that the flagship state universities have to accept all qualified community college graduates before taking in international students.
This will allow disadvantaged kids to take remedial college courses after high school before entering the mainstream university system.
Wonât solve all the problems but I am pretty sure it will help domestic Black and Hispanic students a lot more than affirmative action did.
YES on your list. It would be an excellent first step towards Finnish success. Did you invent the list or find it somewhere I can visit?
david fb
(in retirement I am planting trees and finding poor bright disciplined kids to educate as far and as long as they want to go, Makes me happy.)
A wonderful video showing a smart smartaz journalist torturing top scoring Wharton Business School students as to how they were rated so high in high school and college to be in the USA elite!
It is not about AA, it is about what is really going down in university admissions, which is actually a mix of stooopidness and inertia.
The thing about the Barnsley effect is that what starts out as arbitrary and illusory ends up being real. When screening for the best hockey players at age 9 or 10, Canadaâs recruiters end up making a lot of mistakes and missing a lot of potential talent, itâs true. Theyâre overselecting old players. But those old players end up getting years and years of additional resources - more time practicing, better coaches, better opponents, more opportunities. Years later, the relatively young players who got weeded out arenât (on average) as good of hockey players as the highly-trained ones. They could have beenâŚbut theyâre not.
We would expect the same thing to be true with the dynamic that Gladwell is discussing in the classroom. The kids who got diverted into gifted programs and selective junior and senior high schools when they were younger werenât necessarily more talented or smarter - just older. But after years and years of being in those gifted programs and selective schools, they are now (on average) far better prepared students than the kids who were shunted away from those resources.
Thatâs not a problem university admissions officers can fix. Itâs upstream from college admissions.
Albaby
N.B. - I think Gladwell lost a little credibility with his feigned puzzlement at why we test all the students on the same day. He claims to have no idea. But heâs smart enough to know that testing everyone on the same day uses the fewest resources and simplifies the mechanics of administration.
Remember, that universal free education was great when it was for my kids and grandkids. But when it included âtheirâ kids, too - well - enough is enough. MY property taxes (in my high property cost, low child-count-per-family area) need to go to MY schools. THEIR property taxes (in their low property cost, high child-count-per-family area) can go to THEIR schools.
Lots of moving parts here. Many of which are subject to manipulation.
Talk about a lot of assumptions. How are Irish or Italian immigrants different than Chinese or Indian immigrants? Why is it more difficult now? There is no such thing as race. There are skin colors and people use them in terrible ways. You are using them now.
The court is making no such claims. Zero Nada etcâŚand zip.
The courts true legal under pinning is correct, legislate it.
Only the boomers assume things wont change. The Millennials and Zs have no such beliefs.
You have no idea what you are saying. Yes Blacks are no different academically. Then you say struggling in college? AA means the applicants belong.
Plenty of people struggle in college how did you get that Affirmative Action means Blacks struggle more in college than anyone else?
How is AA making things worse? You say that but there is no such thing. You do not get into Harvard because AA makes things worse. The yield rate is just over 80%. You act as if Blacks do not graduate.
Really how does AA make things worse for Blacks?
I do not want another post so I will add this hereâŚ
Monday, July 3, 2023 3:16 PM ET
In a complaint filed on Monday, a legal activist group demanded that the federal government put an end to Harvardâs special treatment for children of alumni and donors, arguing that fairness was even more imperative after the Supreme Court last week severely limited race-conscious admissions.
The court wont change this because it was not an executive mandate.
Excuse me but among rural and suburban whites we have higher poverty rates than in Black and Hispanic communities or than in any mix of inner city communities.
The education of any of the children is getting hurt. We need universal federal education funding and standards. But most states that want the bible would opt out under all sorts of lies.
The list was off the cuff but there is nothing particularly new or profound. The advantages of year-round schools for the poor are obvious and the community college route to 4-year universities is not uncommon. For example in California:
A smart but poorly prepared disadvantaged student (of any race) would probably have much higher academic success by getting remedial education in community college before going into a four year university program than they would entering directly into an elite 4-year college through affirmative action.
As I posted earlier, I think one consequence of affirmative action is that a lot of black students are in colleges they just arenât ready for. As a result of early difficulties they end up taking easier classes and switching to easier majors. This would explain the following curious statistic:
One wonders how many affirmative action black students from poor school systems wanted to be engineers but after taking calculus and physics classes they werenât ready for ended up in social work. Having a great personality doesnât help one solve a differential equation.
The community college to four-year university plan is a remarkably cost effective way for disadvantaged groups to succeed in college. It already exists in many states. It works. Make community colleges free and push it in poor communities as the best route out of poverty.
60% of African Americans are middle class. Their kids are well educated if they can get into Harvard. The assumptions are crazy that someone who has what it takes needs to go to a 2 year school because black people are poor. Please know what you are talking about instead of using old stereo types.
For the SAT (the big one under discussion for college purposes) it isnât true anyway. The SAT is administered 7 times throughout each year. Each kid can also opt to take it multiple times, and some schools will even âsuperscoreâ (take the highest section on each taken at different times rather that the usual summation of one time) to give you a higher considered score in most cases.
They get âdivertedâ into gifted programs because they ARE smarter and because they have parents who care. If you try to âdivertâ by some other criterion then they wonât all be smarter and they wonât all do as well. Heck, it wouldnât really be a gifted program at that point.
Wow, 2 hour lag period between posts. Since the powers that be are trying so hard to end this thread I thought I would try to keep it going.
Itâs not stereotypes. Itâs data. One good example is a study on Duke students. Duke is one of of those âelite schoolsâ. Pay careful attention to the dark red line which represents the mean GPA of Black students at Duke during each semester.
Black students at Duke, a good percentage of which no doubt benefitted from Affirmative Action have much lower GPAs than all other groups.
Now look at how the Black GPA rises after semester 4, and seem to be converging with the other groups. What seems to be good news actually isnât. From the study:
Grading standards differ wildly across majors at Duke, with similar differences seen across many universities. In particular, natural science, engineering, and economics classes have average grades that are 8% lower than the average grades in humanities and social science classes. Note that these averages do not take into account selection into courses: average SAT scores of natural science, engineering, and economic majors are over 50 points higher than their humanities and social science counterparts. Although blacks and whites initially have similar interests regarding whether to major in the more strictly graded fields, the patterns of switching result in 68% of blacks choosing humanities and social science majors compared to less than 55% of whites. We show that accounting for these two issues can explain virtually all the convergence of black white grades. What happens after enrollment? An analysis of the time path of racial differences in GPA and major choice | IZA Journal of Labor Economics | Springer Nature Link
In other words, because of early academic struggles Black students switch from harder major to easier ones. This results in careers with lower incomes on average than their nonBlack Duke peers. I donât think affirmative action helped these Black students. It hurt them.
I have several problems with âgiftedâ programs, which deserves its own thread for its long-term effects on the US economy. One simple one is that I think the terminology stigmatizes those who arenât chosen as being innately âungiftedâ and therefore destined to be less successful. I think schools should borrow from their athletic programs and use the terms âVarsityâ and âJunior varsityâ. Kids that arenât initially chosen for the Varsity (gifted) group can still aspire to making it if they try hard enough. I think that is psychologically healthier for kids.
At Duke reading that on average black students begin with a B- average GPA and everyone else with a B average. The last semester everyone has between an A- and B+ average and Blacks end up end up with a B+ average.
That does not mean these students of any stripe should not be at Duke. The pay averages do not mean people of any stripe should not be at Duke.
You have no point at all except your idea that black students in the current numbers should not be educated. That is disgustingly wrong. Notably your rationales are even more disgusting.
