Exactly. Equal opportunities should exist. Equal outcomes won't likely exist, purely because of different abilities, different environments, etc.

If you want to improve the outcomes of the lower performers, you have to address the environmental factors.

You do not take away the challenges for the high performers. That solves no problems, and creates more.

Most importantly, you cannot, and should not, ever, let ideology dictate what is best for the kids. Doing so does a grave disservice to all kids.

Some kids need far more challenge. Give it to them. Some kids need extra help. Give it to them.

> Equal opportunities should exist. Equal outcomes won't likely exist, purely because of different abilities, different environments, etc.

Thomas Sowell puts an even finer point on this:

"If there is not equality of outcomes among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, why should equality of outcomes be expected — or assumed — when conditions are not nearly so comparable?"

If you don't have equal outcomes that is prima facie evidence of structural racism (or some other ism). It's like solving an integral and setting C at whatever value makes the equation work for your preferred solution value.

First, there may be biological differences. Asians tend to be shorter, while africans tend to be stronger. Similarly men tend to be taller.

Second, the ism may be classism. Poor students with less access to education might perform worse. Classifying classism as racism and solving it that may be wrong.

Third, the ism may be cultural too. If asian parents drive their kids harder by their parenting technique, that's not racism either.

It does not help to call all differences as only racism. The truth is differences are caused by a variety of reasons, of which racism is one.

I think the issue is where you draw the line between inputs and outputs. If you are judging being in the advanced class the outcome; then you are right to look at biological and social/cultural differences. But when you look at the wealth prospects of these kids beyond 5th and 6th grade, you see that an African-American with a college education has as much wealth as a "white" high school dropout. There has to be more going on here than just biologies and bell-curves.

You also have to ask, statistically, who is educating the children? Mainly white women. Who does the worst in school? Black boys. The 2 groups with the least amount of things in common. Being able to effectively communicate with someone who doesn't come from your culture seems to be important when it comes to education, right? You click on the article and you are looking at a big picture of a white lady. I didn't have a single male teacher (besides for gym) until my sophomore year (I think AP Trigonometry?). At the very least, we need a 50/50 mix of male and female teachers.

Trust me, though. I don't agree with them getting rid of gifted programs. I don't think you can deal with racism with feel good platitudes and policies. The issue is the wealth gap; that's it. If African-Americans had similar wealth prospects as other groups besides latinos, most of these issues would disappear. African Americans built the country and weren't paid for any of it. We are talking about a group who has been financially shackled for hundreds of years via federal laws; and now we are living in a hyper-capitalistic society. How can you "move out" the hood without money? Heck, can blacks from the hood even get jobs picking fruit on farms like "illegal" workers. Fighting racism against blacks is about a debt that is owed and has never been paid; not about reliving Jim Crow or throwing racists in jail or making white people feel bad about themselves. You can't legislate a man's heart (1st amendment and all).

You are mostly making my point. My second point was classism, which was saying precisely what you are saying.

I was replying to someone who was arguing that everything was solely racism. That doesn't make sense to me. In fact, you argue that white women have not been doing a fair job teaching black men. But why are Asian americans excelling in school then? I don't think it's just racism to blame.

> Fighting racism against blacks is about a debt that is owed and has never been paid

And that's one bad argument. Reparations? Look, I'm from India and india was for a long time ruled by the british, and an even longer time ruled by muslim rulers who became the elite in india. So, if one tells me that britain needs to return the stolen 45 trillion (yup somebody estimated this bullshit number), or that muslims need to pay reparations, I'm pretty sure they would be called racist nationalists.

The law should only make sure that the people right now have equal opportunities for them, regardless of their history, skin color, ethnicity, and even wealth. Everything else is a illiberal idea that can only make things worse

India has a caste system. That's more comparable to African American and White American relations than the British rule of Indian. No one is asking Britain for anything. When your own country has put in you in a caste system; then all of a sudden end the caste system via the law; but don't do anything to fix the damage done; that's a problem.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/pages/article/indias-unto...

And the real issue is, you can't have a fair society if we have different castes of people. This is not about class; because if it were you would see different results in the wealths of even first generation immigrants to America compared to African Americans. People who have been in America for 200 years or more have as much wealth as people immigrate illegally. You forget, that people who are able to LEGALLY immigrate to America are people who have the money to do it. Even Africans (NOT African Americans) come to American with more money than African Americans. And Africans don't see themselves as "black". Another reason it's not about skin color, many people from India can be much darker than your average African American. We are talking about a specific group of people that has been caste on the bottom. This is about lineage.

People aren't living in the hoods because they statistically fall on the part of a bell curve that makes them dumber than most; which is why they can't succeed. You can't draw a direct line between IQ tests and how much money someone makes; so that point doesn't matter.

Also, I don't think it's about blaming white women or saying they are doing a "bad" job; especially when you see that many of the black boys are coming from single mother households. This starts to get into uncomfortable territory; but let's just say this isn't about putting the blame on "white people" or "women" or any particular group of people. This is about shame on the American Government for not finding the will to make this right. This is an investment into a large portion of untapped potential in America.

In terms of Asians being able to learn from white teachers; anecdotally many of the Asian Americans I grew up with were forced to learn English very well and were very respectable. Furthermore, they had parents that made sure they excelled in school. It wasn't about them being smarter; it was about them having a disciplined environment. I think cultural, specifically Chinese and Japanese cultures, fitting in is more favored. African American culture is based on attention and being unique. Not understanding the culture will make it hard to understand the person.

If you won't listen to me, listen to Christopher Hitchins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MNu2GNx-kQ

Finally, as a side note, I respect where you are from and all; but your country has literally very little rule of law. I'm not saying every single place, but we aren't going to use India as any measuring stick for democracy or restorative justice. Most people I know from India would concur. America has so many flaws, but I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. Having been to many countries, I love them all, but there is a reason the world is being "westernized"; for good or for bad. Cheers mate!

Your argument is all over the place, and it literally says that i said originally. That the differences are caused by a variety of reasons and not just racism.

For example, you started with saying that white women are racist for not teaching black men properly. But then changed it to say that it is cultural because black men are in single households. Said the same thing for asian americans, and pretend to say that i said that asian americans do better because they are genetically smarter. No i didn't mean that. The strictAsian american parent is a stereotype for a reason.

In the end, reparations are a bad and illiberal idea. I can probably never give any example of how it can go bad because you'll just dismiss it like you did.

you make some good points here.

> It does not help to call all differences as only racism. The truth is differences are caused by a variety of reasons, of which racism is one.

This is where the neo-liberals fall down. They like to blame, or over-blame, racism for all the world's ills as it has the convenient side effect of allowing them to sides-kirt any / most of the blame.

Fundamentally, we have no idea how to educate kids at scale. This is especially true of disadvantaged youth who have difficult home lives with their own myriad particularized challenges.

Is the solution to hold back those who are advantaged and just toss them into unaltered "normal" classrooms? That doesn't really seem correct. It's difficult to understand how it might help anybody.

However, maybe there's something we haven't figured out yet. Something that isn't the de facto racial segregation we currently accept, that also isn't so painful and counterproductive for the advantaged students.

This problem seems to require a creative solution that we are unable or unwilling to identify. Addressing wealth inequality would be an obvious start, but this is out of the purview of educators.

Sadly, dismantling one system that has known defects (but also obvious benefits for the advantaged students) without having any idea how to address the underlying problem seems to be putting the cart before the horse.

The ideal school lets every student learn at their own pace, using a tablet with pre-recorded lectures and computer-graded quizzes. Instead of lecturing, teachers tutor small groups that did poorly on the same quiz, to help them understand the material and progress. This is the mastery learning model [0]. Classroom experiments have shown that mastery learning students learn much more with the same time spent with teachers [1] [2].

This shows that society knows how to educate children equitably and at scale. Unfortunately, it doesn't do it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning

[1] http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18105487

I have an idea how to educate kids to scale: don't.

Unfortunately, the American genius is for replacing labor with machinery. When we encounter a field in which that simply doesn't work, we are thrown for a loss.

It's not that we don't know how. We just can't accept the results.

>Not having an gifted program is like having wrestling matches without weight classes. It's no fun and no good (for anyone).

Agree.

My company had a Diversity and Inclusion series, and the one thing that resonated most with me was the concept of Equity vs. Equality. It was accompanied by a picture of two kids trying to watch a ballgame over a fence, where one kid could not quite see over the fence and the other was far too short.

In the part labelled "Equality", each kid has a 6" tall box to stand on. They get the same things, but the result is that the too-short kid still can't see the game, and the taller kid simply gets a better view. For the part labled "Equity", the tall kid gets a 2" box and the short kid gets an 8" box, resulting in each having an equal view.

Now, that's a pretty simplistic presentation, but does highlight that simply giving every person the same thing is not a solution. Needs will vary across the population, and that's what we should be targeting.

The same should apply for the baseball game they are watching.

The less able players should get 4 strikes, the better players maybe 2.

Correct?

I’m familiar with the illustration you referred to. It’s sad how so few miss the fact that the kids are trying to watch a Competition! And, if the rules were as set forth above, the game wouldn’t be worth watching in the first place.

I'm somewhat confused by what the point you are trying to make here. Are the kids here supposed to be competing on height? Or ability to obtain a taller footstool?

The more I think about this the more absurd it seems. The situations are so entirely different that conflating them this way is just strange.

We're talking about schools here, right? It's not a zero sum game like baseball.

No, the issue is not zero sum but the trade off of equity versus equality of opportunity.

* In your class are 30 kids, one of which screams and interrupts the the teacher. Do you kick the bad actor out so the other 29 kids can learn, or do you keep the bad actor in so that no one can learn?

* In your class are 10 slow kids and 10 fast kids. Does the teacher go at a slow pace so that everyone learns the same amount or does the teacher go at a pace so that the fast kids learn the most and the slow kids are frustrated by things being over their heads?

The problem is that we have too many blank slate utopians who believe it is the respnsibility of teachers to ensure that everyone leaves school with the same knowledge, and simply don't recognize that different students have different abilities and tempers and different suitability for learning.

This fanatical belief, to which they cling despite all evidence, is absolutely devastating for our educational system and causes it to be grossly inefficient:

* We do not have a trade school system in the US because we hate "tracking", or the idea that some kids should go into a more academically focused track and others should go into a less academic/more hands on track. Thus everyone goes to a school that is chartered as college prep which just means that there are no good college prep schools and there are no good vocational schools. It sucks at both tasks, but at least everyone gets to pretend that they have the same possibilities at college as everyone else. Thus we have a shortage of skilled craftsmen and vocational work, which then forces businesses to import these even as more of the native population slides into poverty while immigrants, who were spared the US secondary educational system, do well.

* Given that there are wide and persistent academic differences between groups, yet the teachers have convinced themselves that differences can only be the result of lack of funding or racism, accelerated classes are being cancelled all across the country and testing regimes that show differences are being cancelled as well, which leads to more misallocation of resources as students are not routed to the education appropriate to them and then universities lack reliable information to make admissions decisions. Thus university education in the US is extremely inefficient as they must do remedial courses to catch up what students should have learned in high school. This inefficiency creates a shortage of high skilled workers, which again forces the businesses to import them as more of the native population slides into poverty while immigrants who attended more rational tertiary regimes do well.

* the idea that "everyone can be X if they just try hard enough" leads to enormous self-loathing on the part of students who are being lied to and forced to participate in classes not suited to them, all so teachers and administrators can cling to these utopian delusions. At the same time the notion that "everyone can be X if they try hard enough" is a mockery to gifted students who are intentionally denied the chance to maximize their potential because educators don't approve of their race or would rather eliminate gifted programs entirely than have their illusions of equity shattered.

>* We do not have a trade school system in the US...

That may be a regional/state thing, then. My high school was adjacent to the vocational school for the region, where high school kids on a trade track would learn trades like carpentry, plumbing, electrical, culinary, etc.

> the idea that "everyone can be X if they just try hard enough Agree on this as well, and the goal shouldn't be that everyone gets X on the state math test, it should be that every kid has the opportunity to achieve their maximum potential. That's really what it should be, but as you note, nowhere is setup for that and people abhor things that can't be directly measured.

If your class has 30 kids, that is too many kids. Doesn't matter whether your in an advanced class or regular class, your spreading the teacher too thin and they likely can't do more than a light skim of student work, let alone in depth corrections of errors, open tutoring hours, etc

https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research/featured/the-class-size-d...

> The problem is that we have too many blank slate utopians who believe ...

This sounds like a personal attack. Next time, talk about the merits of the idea, and leave the out judgement of the people who hold the idea. The phrasing is excessively aggressive. "We have too many X" sounds like you want to get rid of some X. People have a right to participate in society and influence the structure of society through democratic processes. If you think the problem is that too many people hold idea Y, then say that.

> This sounds like a personal attack.

Categorization of people based on their beliefs around the topic at hand is not a "personal attack", much like how in a discussion about the merits of condiments, calling someone a "ketchup fan" ain't a personal attack.

> If you think the problem is that too many people hold idea Y, then say that.

That's precisely what the GP did. How you misconstrued it so badly is beyond me.

To me it seems that most miss that the three different kids are watching a competition from back of a fence, without paying, while others paid for the game...

I happen to know the image you are talking about. Luckily I saved it when I first saw it somewhere.

https://imgur.com/a/dlo0Y2k

In case it's not obvious, this is a cynical parody of the original cartoon.

God is that a bad image. "Helping others means cutting off your own leg" isn't really something I can get behind.

It's the Harrison Bergeron solution.

That analogy infers that everyone ends up at the same place (i.e. seeing the ball game).

In reality, everyone won't get to the same place unless you raise the bottom and lower the top.

What we should be aiming for is removing barriers. Let people reach their own potential - which won't be the same across everyone.

Which is indeed what a "corrected" version of that analogy does: making the final outcome the replacement of the wooden fence with a chain link fence.

(And then there's the satirical "capitalist" "solution" where the stadium owner builds a taller fence and scolds the kids as freeloaders)

that's an important observation. the students are secondary, at best, to the culture war being waged by activist adults.

also the victims of teacher unions that are keeping schools closed, despite the lack of scientific evidence supporting that position.

If naming victims is important, than we should also name the students who are victims of their parents being systematically excluded and oppressed as well I would imagine?

I think the smarter thing to do would be to stop demanding everyone complete the same tasks. Let the quicker students skip the repetitive exercise and give them something challenging.

Or let them explain it to the slower kids.

See also the recent discussion on same-age vs mixed-age classrooms. By mixing age groups, the kid who is advanced in history can hang with a grade or two above her own. But she might be a grade below in writing, and that should be 100% ok.

I was a poor kid that attended a gifted program in first grade, the majority of the parents were upper middle class doctors and lawyers. It was lord of the flies classist bs. I clearly wasn't supposed to have been let in and went back to normie classes. It wasn't again until 6th grade that I was back into a one class a day advanced program.

I don't think there should be separate classes for advanced or gifted students. Many of the aspects of gifted programs are just better funded less shitty versions of regular classes. Just like the startup within a corp trope, the gifted programs are often just cover for a private school within a public school.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26204386

Now you introduce a new social aspect where you could have freshman in senior classes and via versa. Would that encourage more relationship between 14 and 18 year olds friendship or otherwise and does matching maturity matter?

Does that mean some are finishing in 2 years and others in 6. In some places you have a cutoff of 21 years where you need to go to adult school at that age.

That already happened when I dropped out at 16 and attended community college with 16-60 year olds, as it should be. Maturity lessons would certainly help a whole lot of folks, myself included.

Who said we had to have grades at all? And why there needs to be a split and a set progression? I think some might leave at 16 and some at 28, both could be fine and ideal.

A big factor is that not every teacher is capable of teaching gifted students. The gifted public school I went to recruited college professors to teach our middle school classes. I met a lot of HS teachers that couldn't keep up with the math the gifted students where doing as early as 7th grade.

It's silly to expect for the average teacher to be able to teach every kind of student. Some teachers are better at challenging gifted students. Some teachers are better at teaching large groups of "average" students. Some teachers are better at teaching basic concepts to students that the educational system has failed.

My experience in school (and now with my kids in school) was that there was no such thing as a group of "average" students. There's a huge variation in most grades.

Sure, you could pick the smartest kid in each class and put them in a gifted program, und give extra help to the slowest learners. But that wont help the rest of the class that still spans a huge range.

That's why I think that education should move away from the "everyone does the same thing" type.

I took some extra physics classes in high school. And guess what, in those extra classes every student got their own exercises. Because we were all at different levels and had different interests.

Why don't they do that in normal classes?

Well, one problem is that practically every teacher wants to teach the easy, gifted students that already know most of the material anyway. No one wants to deal with the not-so-easy ones, where teacher quality and proper discipline actually makes a huge difference to quality of education. That's why explicit tracking is so unpopular - it exposes these not-so-comfortable dynamics.

The "challenging" is called advanced learning.

I meant without first testing them and putting them in separate classes.

I think the challenge is it's pretty difficult to be customizing instruction to 30 different students at wildly different levels.

Having some students help instruct others can work, and when it works, I think there's a lot of positives. But, it can also be socially akward, and lead to a lot of negatives (especially outside the classroom).

I think there are real issues with equal access to advanced classes, but making it equal by ending the program seems like the wrong thing to do.

I think a great strategy would be to allow students who are done with the daily lesson early to have the freedom to be let lose on Khan Academy or other sites which aren't necessarily focusing on getting farther ahead but instead they are given the freedom to explore applications of topics being taught (i.e. mathematics as applied to bird migration patterns or cryptography, etc.).

> Or let them explain it to the slower kids.

It's a good idea, except... It would defeat the main purpose of education, which is to teach obedience to authority and that knowledge and subsistence comes only from authority figures, not ones' peers.

>A priori, I'd say the goal of an idealized education system

All sane people agree with you. However, those who prioritize "equity of outcome" disagree.

@biren34:

Well put ..