I'll give an example. I attended a gifted program starting in 3rd grade. I went to an elementary school for 1st and 2nd grade that was almost entirely white with some asian kids. Part of the mechanism for selecting students for the gifted program was a letter from the student's counselor, teacher, and principal.
My mom noticed that some schools were sending way more kids to the GT program than others. Several schools basically never sent any kids. No surprise, there were more black and hispanic kids at the schools. BUT these schools did not have a lack of students with high SOL scores or grades. It turned out that the process of identifying students and writing letters was letting these kids down. A few years of local activism to adjust the process and suddenly a bunch of kids from these other schools were being admitted to the GT program and succeeding.
Activists recently tried to adjust the admissions criteria for TJHSST, a magnet school in the area, to be a "merit lottery." This says that you set some minimum qualification (minimum GPA and accelerated math coursework) and then select students at random from that pool. This proposal was called racist against south and east asian students and activists were called enemies of excellence by various people like Scott Aaronson.
I was personally identified as having potential for going to TJ at age four. My parents paid a lot of money for me to have tutoring specifically for the admissions test.
In the above example, black and hispanic students with similar qualifications (test scores) are not receiving the same access to accelerated programs.
The point is that the mechanisms by which we define qualifications and select students really really matters and can encode all sorts of inequities.
This is, of course, far more complicated, and involves difficult problems. Far easier to sweep it all under the rug by calling attention to qualifications "unacceptable".
And in the example I listed for early GT admissions, there was no need for developing "underdeveloped" students. They were already developed. They just had systems that didn't enable them to get through the gate to the GT program.
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4979
> In a world-historic irony, the main effect of this “solution” will be to drastically limit the number of Asian students, while drastically increasing (!!!) the number of White students. The proportion of Black and Hispanic students is projected to increase a bit but remain small.
From class of 2024 to class of 2025.
* Economically disadvantaged students: 0.62% to 25.09%
* Black students: 1.23% to 7.09%
* Hispanic students: 3.29% to 11.27%
* White students: 17.70% to 22.36%
* Asian students: 73.05% to 54.36%
The raw increase in black students is larger than the raw increase in white students. But Aaronson predicted a "drastic increase" in white students and for the number of black students to increase by "a bit." Oops.
You can slice stats further. The number of asian students who are also on free and reduced lunch increased between years.
We will obviously have to wait a few years to see how college admissions turn out and then we'll need to wait longer than that to see how their lives turn out. But early concerns about the students being "lower quality" are not panning out.
There is also the question of what "elite" means. Should TJ select for people that are extremely good at taking tests so they can have students take a mountain of AP classes and score a lot of 5s? Or is that not actually the best kind of education for gifted students? The most valuable material when I attended was not the testing but building weird software in the syslab. This value isn't encoded in grades and test scores.
This confuses me greatly. Are they using more generous grading for pandemic reasons? I've observed a noticeable difference between a top 5% student and a top 1% student, so the fact they're getting the same scores is odd... Wass the material/pace much lower than what the student body could cope with?
Middle school GPA of the admits. Not their GPA in their freshmen year at TJ. I don't believe that TJ publishes this information. In a few years you'll be able to get a few proxies in average AP scores and college admissions information (though these metrics are flawed in their own ways).
But more and more evidence is stacking up that maybe your core assumption (the new class is full of worse students so that more white people get admitted) might not be true. Continuing to grasp for possible other explanations that allow you to keep holding this belief isn't good science. There are more than 500 very smart 8th graders in fairfax county (and prince william and fauquier counties) each year. Changing the testing procedure doesn't mean that less smart students are being admitted.
> with similar test scores
> WITH SIMILAR TEST SCORES
What I found: https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2016/01/18/teachers-race-affects...
and of course the link to the gov data source in that article is broken: http://https//nces.ed.gov/ecls/
Edit: I see where they pulled the line from. Misleading at best as the "tests" they are talking about are not gifted assessment tests, but rather standardized testing which I don't think is that great of an indicator. I was in the gifted program during middle school, and that was predicated by a few admittance tests, one of them being IQ.
> However, controlling for math and reading scores did not have the same effect for black students. In fact, black students continued to be assigned to gifted programs half as often as white peers with identical math and reading achievement.
If you read to the end, the paper is literally linked: https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-news/files/20190417222934/Gris...
I find this to be frustrating. How many times have we heard from people defending the existing systems that standardized testing is an appropriate method of stratifying people. When universities decide to minimize the relevance of the SATs we see howls of complaints. Now suddenly these tests are of minimal utility if they demonstrate that qualified black and hispanic students are being turned away?
Yes, a student who studies hard may get good academic test scores, but may do poorly on gifted admittance tests. They're testing two different things. The former tests ability to understand class content, the other tests the ability to solve problems which are not part of school curriculum.
Having the raw data matters.
Cited statements also need double checking. Frequently there's a game of telephone going on and the original research has been distorted.
This is not just a left wing phenomena, it's a phenomena anywhere you get people who aren't completely dispassionate observers (this excludes all advertiser funded media as they are incentivized to make things interesting and engaging).
As I said in my other post, in my school you were taken out of regularly classes, but still had to learn those things and do that work. That means the student has to agree to work 20% harder, usually at home, where they may not have that luxury. There are probably other considerations that aren't coming to mind at the moment, too, that also affect the number of children in Gifted programs.