But with maths I think it's a bit more subtle. Just the tiny things (even just 'talk' math) you do in early education can make a massive return later. There is no 'mean' in maths education even in ages 4-10 (my kids). We live in the Netherlands, that scores quite well in the table. And still I think math education is at least unambitious for the higher percentiles.
With just a few minutes here and there I've managed to get some pretty abstract concepts in their thinking (say: zero and the empty set, that's something small kids understand intuitively / or the first algorithms with russian multiplication or divide and conquer). There's no need for pushing, and still I think I've already help lay a good foundation of math in my 10 year old. No more than 30 hours invested in math his life.
If you’re scraping the bottom to deal with family (or mental health in the parents, restricted finances, less-than-ideal living conditions, etc.), then your capacity to integrate abstract concepts becomes fairly limited.
These issues often feed into each other, and it becomes difficult to break out of this cycle, leading to trans-generational opportunity loss.
As a non-native English reader, it took me a while to understand that this means: We all know.
I think native speakers hash the words in their brain based on how they sound. And people who learned English at school primarily by reading and writing, hash the words by how they are written. The latter data structure makes it difficult to find that "know" and "now" are almost the same word.
"Just being there to talk" is more than half the battle (but also more than half the time investment) pretty much no matter the topic.
My wife literally cannot help our 7 year old with her math because we were raised in a school system that taught rote memorization. I was too, but I suck at memorization and have had to rely on fundamental understanding in order to survive in math. So luckily I can help with things.
And parent involvement helps a ton. When our kid got 50% on the practice test I spent a few hours going over the material she didn't understand. She ended up getting 100% on the real test.
[0]: https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-...
That's a lot. From your own link, a vast majority of schools are regressive, i.e poor people get less.
"A handful - Nevada, Wyoming and Illinois are weakly regressive, and the majority have a weakly progressive distribution of funding to poo vs non poor students"
Actually, looking at the data further, you can't really draw a conclusion about whether or not the funding is regressive or progressive. The local funding is definitely regressive, but you'd need to know how state and federal funds were distributed across schools to know if the end result was progressive or regressive. For instance, if federal funding was evenly distributed to every school, that would still be regressive.
The best teachers still don't want to work there because being called the c-word by 1st graders or having a 3rd grader threaten to stab you (and seem like they really mean it) and not being able to do anything about it because the two fights and one baggie of drugs admin's had referred to them by noon today has them too busy to spend any time on "minor" stuff like that, plus having lockdowns with police patrolling the halls and yelling at anyone who so much as pokes a head out a door without clearing it with them first, due to credible threats of violence, several times per year, makes you want to do literally anything else as a career in a hurry. 15-20% higher pay than the next-best-paying district doesn't make it worth it.
Schools can't fix poverty and ghettos no matter how much money you give them, but trying that is simpler than fixing the real problems that cause very, very "bad" schools, so that's what we do, even though it will never work.
2. People who are concerned about the allegedly regressive character of public school funding would do well to spell out their model of how spending affects basic math and writing performance. For almost all of history, every educated person studied under conditions that made the most impoverished reservation school in North Dakota look like Andover.
While a lot of modern education funding reforms in America focus on redistributing funds to support poorer communities, this is not an immediate win. In states like California where local property taxes have been effectively abolished by a voter backed constitutional amendment, there are big challenges in fairly negotiating the allocation of resources across the different regions of the state.
Explain Baltimore.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/larg...
*Or so. I'm going off memory.
If you look a bit deeper at public school funding in more well-off areas and you will usually find a system of tax-deductible private donations to the school, organized by a PTA or similar organization. Much of the spending difference vanishes when you consider that.
When you count the value of the PTA volunteer time by professional parents (which doesn't appear on the books), it tips the scales even further toward greater spend in well-off areas.
Do you have a cite with those numbers?
https://laist.com/news/education/los-angeles-unified-parent-...
California is unique in that it intentionally gives less funding to higher-family-income public schools, expecting them to make up the gap with private fundraising. The result is that after adjusting for private donations, per pupil spending in CA is roughly equivalent across income-disparate schools, as can be seen in the charts in that article.
Here is a visualization of the disparities in Georgia's school spending by county:
https://wallethub.com/edu/e/most-least-equitable-school-dist...
Pick one of the "High Income / Low Expenditure" counties - Forsyth - as an example. It has an average household income of $112,834. In that county, there is an entire parallel non-profit organization that raises private donations to fund programs in the school district. Here is an article describing their work:
https://www.forsythnews.com/news/education/education-foundat...
This is in addition to other private fundraising at the individual school PTA/PTO level, and via charities like the United Way (https://www.unitedwayforsyth.com/civicrm/contribute/transact...)
Here is the same type of organization but in Michigan: https://www.bloomfield.org/support/about/bhs-foundation-faqs
What all of these have in common is that the capacity for private fundraising is a function of local household income.
In places like California with progressive school funding, this private fundraising serves to "bridge the gap" in state funding between schools in richer (receive less public funding) and poorer (receive more public funding) areas.
In other states where state/local per-pupil public school funding is flat or even regressive, it can exacerbate the disparities between districts.
That's like 1/5 of the gap between APS and the next highest school district. It looks like the wealthiest in LA are able to make up for the difference. But I am suspect of this article. The parental contribution is only 0.4% of the LAUSD budget but somehow it's making up a 20% funding gap between low and high income schools. Very suspicious that they're cherry picking but I don't have the time to dig in.
>Pick one of the "High Income / Low Expenditure" counties - Forsyth - as an example. It has an average household income of $112,834. In that county, there is an entire parallel non-profit organization that raises private donations to fund programs in the school district. Here is an article describing their work:
Google says APS spends 17k per pupil while Forsyth spends 10k. For 20 schools with 200 kids they'd need 28 million in contributions to equalize. Raising $115k by selling ducks is a drop in the bucket in comparison.
Also, APS does their own fund raising. Brief googling reveals that they've raised 7.4 million through this one site alone:
> but somehow it's making up a 20% funding gap between low and high income schools.
Where are you getting the 0.4% coming from? Parents don't generally donate directly to public school district budgets. They donate to school PTAs and school-affiliated non-profits.
Perhaps you are referring to https://achieve.lausd.net/donorschoose but that's totally unrelated to outside PTA fundraising via the parent community, and it's usually tiny amounts used to pay for things like classroom supplies.
It's pretty straightforward. The article says $876 in private PTA donations are raised per year per pupil in the wealthier schools, and that is still $300 shy of what poorer schools spend overall per pupil. So the wealthier schools only make 3/4 of the spending gap.
I know this from direct experience since I write a check annually to my kid's California public school PTA for roughly the same amount.
It's in the article:
>In 2018-19, PTAs and booster clubs at LAUSD schools brought in more than $36.9 million in revenues. Compared to LAUSD’s annual $9 billion operating budget, that’s not that much money
36.9 million divided by 9 billion is 0.4%.
>The article says $876 in private PTA donations are raised per year per pupil in the wealthier schools, and that is still $300 shy of what poorer schools spend overall per pupil. So the wealthier schools only make 3/4 of the spending gap.
>I know this from direct experience since I write a check annually to my kid's California public school PTA for roughly the same amount.
Ok, but even if you and every other parent does that it still doesn't make up the difference between city spending per pupil and the surrounding suburbs.
> 36.9 million divided by 9 billion is 0.4%.
Read the article again. That's $36.9M raises mostly over the 126 most affluent schools, which is a quarter of the elementary schools in LAUSD, or over $500k raised per school, which would bridge that gap.
Furthermore a significant chunk of school district budgets go to pay for pension and health care obligations for retirees, building maintenance, law enforcement, etc.
> Ok, but even if you and every other parent does that it still doesn't make up the difference between city spending per pupil and the surrounding suburbs.
Not sure I understand what you are saying, but the affluent surrounding suburbs near me spend even more per student from privately raised donations. Some of their PTAs ask for $2k/student per year.
One process has a more level playing field, the other is clearly rigged in favor of rich well connected kids.
I'd prefer we provided the food, housing, education, and healthcare that would enable anyone to succeed on the SAT by eroding the worst disadvantages some kids face.
Practice twice a week leading up to the test with practice tests once every two weeks.
taking a prep course will help, but thats not necessary at all.
It's cold comfort to be told my parents fucked up. That's true, but it doesn't actually help.
I got in the elite range simply by buying SAT prep books. I memorized the vocabulary, and the book had enough tricks for me to do well.
Granted, I always excelled in math in school. I, however, did not excel in English (my 10th grade score was a well deserved C). But I still did great on the verbal section, and it was primarily due to reading 1-2 SAT prep books.
If you think you're going to start prepping 1-2 months before the test and do well, it won't work. For both the SAT and the GRE I started about 12 months prior (but very low intensity - a few minutes a day). I did even better in the GRE, scoring well in the top 1% nationally.
If you treat the SAT as a possible golden ticket for your future, you'll take it seriously and start prepping early. If it's merely a "Meh, that thing I need to do to get into a college", no amount of prep will help.
Therein lies the rub, the controversy mostly comes from people who reject the very premise of IQ.
Now of course, if you are raised on a diet of sugar and lead-laced air and water, you won't reach your natural genetic potential. And if you are raised by billionaires with a live-in chef and nutritionist and tutors, in a place with squeaky-clean air and water, you might reach your full potential.
But those things merely optimize, or impede, the raw material you were born with.
There was quite a significant difference between my IQ results and my standardized testing scores (based on percentile rankings -- IQ => higher rankings).
(FWIW, I think both test are utter horseshit anyway.)
What is the equitable solution to this then? You seem to be implying that SAT score differences are not inequitable but we know from recent research this is not true.
Excerpt from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-ma...
But what appears obvious may not be true. In November 2002, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a landmark paper by the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger that reached a startling conclusion. For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
At that point you can make most competition intra-racial with obvious carve outs for socioeconomic, sexual and gender minorities.
the devil is in the details as to how such a controversial system could be implemented but it’d be a trial-and-error process for sure.
May I remind you that Asians in the USA did not participate in mass enslavement of black and brown bodies.
Why should they have to give up spots for less qualified individuals? Have they not struggled enough? Most of their great grand parents were building our train tracks!
But don’t your stats show that we already do?
We “provide access” to everyone. Otherwise it wouldn’t matter how much the parents pushed the children.
If your argument is that the system should push the children harder, how do you propose that? Give less hard working kids lower grades? I think we’ve tried that and decided it’s unfair.
Even the concept that academics should be valued over other topics should be a matter of family choice. If you want to prioritize music, art, sports, food, entertainment, fitness, religion, or something else over academics, should society over-ride that?
It’s not about choosing for them, it’s about lifting the boot on these kids necks enough so they can choose for themselves.
Poor kids in America already get all of these, even free healthcare. The families of middle class kids have to pay for all of that, but not the families of poor kids.
Quadruple all these programs and you'll still have a situation where some kids want to do well but simply don't have the brains for it, and some kids who could do well but have shitty parents.
In other words, Plato's Republic.
I'm sure it's impossible to factor out the human element of relationships, but it is interesting to me as an example of the spectrum that human societies will build.
Who is “we” in this case?
Are we talking about government solutions here, or something else?
There's tons of sample tests, vocabulary flashcards, and advice on test taking strategy available completely free online. There's no secret information or techniques taught in these expensive SAT prep classes that you can't find on Youtube, Google or Khan Academy. I didn't spend a single cent on SAT prep (and not much time either) and still managed to get a 1500.
All the proposals I've ever seen have been to handicap the students whose parents try to give them an advantage. It's a popular sentiment, growing in popularity every day.
Look this up, it's been discussed here extensively.
If your school can't afford state of the art computers or technology, do you have the same access?
If your school has class sizes of 35 and mine has class sizes of 18, do we both have the same access?
Does that actually help anyone?
You could tax high-incomes more federally in a straightforward way, which is almost surely therefore easier to implement.
My rural school district provided free breakfast for precisely this reason... is it not a common thing?
From what I have gathered it seems a lot of students really need a confidence boost. Once they realize they are capable to doing well, they tend to improve their performance.
There is also like tricks and gimmicks, but that is a different discussion.
To me, those test prep places always seemed to be struggling with legitimacy. It's not like hiring a tutor to help you learn difficult concepts for the first time.
What did help is that I was encouraged to read a lot from a young age, which seems fairly accessible to most families.
Support your local libraries.
One bit of knowledge improved my ACT score from 27 to a 33: internalizing how long I have for the tests. I was so used to being able to finish school tests with a comfortable amount of time remaining, so I took the test at a casual pace which means I didn't finish. The second time, I sprinted through the test as fast as possible and my score improved dramatically.
I doubt I could have done better with more coaching or prep.
... which is part of why having parents who have themselves succeeded at these things is an advantage. Mine were from poor (quite poor, in one case) backgrounds but were worked-hard-and-eventually-did-OK sorts, not early-success sorts. So they taught me fairness and honesty in all things, and didn't know they should clue me in that some things are just bullshit games that you should do whatever you can to beat short of taking too-large risks. I mean, they hadn't even played most of those games, so how could they know?
I bet it would never occur to kids from an upper-middle-class background (doctor parents, lawyer parents, business exec parents, that kind of thing) that test prep is a bit dirty. Wouldn't even cross their minds. It's just what you do, obviously.
I do wonder if this is possible. If you up the baseline of school provision, won’t involved parents provide a further advantage over and above that?
It's fun to read biographies of 20th century scientists. Quite a few of them came from humble backgrounds and credited their success to education (and perhaps libraries). They often did not have well educated or motivated parents. Nick Holonyak is one such example. Carl Sagan is another.
And this is even more apparent when I look at the British ones. It's a bit funny given how rigid and uninspiring the British education system was.
Due to the cost and complexity of transcontinental migration, most Asians in US now, and Jews last generation, come from elites from their previous family homeland who successfully migrated to escape bad government or seeking greater opportunity, when it was tactically hard to do so for the average person. It's a natural filter for smart, capable, effective people who can raise children to be same.
The effect tends to fade over time (shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, or docks to docks, in three generations). Now that Jewish immigration has mostly ended, their great-grandchildren (and the descendants of previous generations of Asian immigrants) are, as a cohort, not performing academically as well as today's Asian immigrant children and chidren of immigrants.
The math contest winners and teams, deep into the bench, are nearly all children of immigrants (and Polgar-esque homeschoolers who get to avoid time-wasting distractions of school)
Source? Judging by elite college representation [1], they're doing at least as well if not better than Asian Americans (which granted, is not limited to just Asian immigrant children).
Elite college representation is a poor metric because of legacy admissions, influence of donors, and the reported efforts to limit Asian admissions.
Look at schools with more merit-based admissions (MIT, Caltech, etc.). Asians are overrepresented to a much higher degree.
Not necessarily. If intelligence is genetic, then by OP's hypothesis, immigrants are more likely to be intelligent and pass that on to their children - whereas GP's hypothesis (seems to suggest) that intelligence is effectively random but determination is what's passed down from parent to child. Of course, it's probably a combination of both.
In the future when the important combinations of genes yielding more intelligence are known it'll be possible to select for certain combinations and children selected this way would be expected to have a higher intelligence than either parent. i.e. making multiple draws from a distribution and picking the highest value.
The large majority of the US Jewish population came after the 1850s. They were not selected for wealth. Like the Irish immigrants were negatively selected. They were less educated than those who stayed at home, on average. Similarly Italians in the relevant period of mass migration. The middle class were doing well so they were more likely to stay home.
> The effect tends to fade over time (shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, or docks to docks, in three generations).
This has no basis in evidence. Every psychological trait I’m aware of is strongly heritable, including ones with obvious impacts on earnings like intelligence, conscientiousness and extraversion[1]. Social class is so heritable the only society to make a dent were the Chinese during the cultural revolution[2]. If you want to know more about the extraordinary persistence of social class see Gregory Clark’s work[3].
[1] Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits
https://utahpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bouchard.0...
[2] Persistence Despite Revolutions
http://davidyyang.com/pdfs/revolutions_draft.pdf
[3] https://faithandheritage.com/2017/06/the-heritability-of-soc...
(I'm really grateful that that avenue to college existed -- I could not have written an admissions essay, done extracurricular activities, or generally been a "good boy" if my life depened on it.)
Sure, a little bit of test prep will help many people, if you’ve never seen a standardized test before some familiarity is good for you. But some of these kids could not test their way out of a paper bag and the only hope for them is hire a ringer to take the test in their place.
If you're born poor or somehow outside of the social mainstream, standardized testing is your friend.
(I wasn't commenting one way or the other on K-12 education -- I had a mixed experience personally...I think it could've been done a lot better. My wife had a great experience. But she went to private school.)
Is there any way to prove/disprove this? Also doesn’t this also beg the question as to why non-Asian parents apparently won’t teach their kids to be good academics?
The SAT is an IQ test, and IQ is mostly inherited from your parents.
For this to be a real test, you'll need parents of twins willing to send only one kid to test prep..and not send the other one..you know..for science. Doubt there is a parent who would do that.
What's the issue with testing someone without prep, then giving them a week to study up, and then testing them again? People take SAT multiple times, you know, and it is a brand new set of questions every time.
I did that myself (took it 3 times total), and I can say this: taking it without prep and then taking it later with just a week of studying on my own for about an hour per day made a massive difference. Even before I got my results back on the second try, I already felt i did much better, as I was second guessing much less and felt more confident about my answers. And the final scores reflected that really well.
However, studying beyond that (which I did for my third attempt, months later) didn't help much and just marginally changed my scores by +-20 in different categories (out of 700 total max in each of the three categories, which is how it was scored at the time). I didnt feel any more prepared either. Judging by my acquaintances, it was a similar pattern. Massive boost in scores on the second try, marginal or non-existent in scores on attempts beyond the 2nd.
https://archive.org/details/ScholasticAssessmentOrG/page/n1/...
It’s like being shocked that resting heart rate and VO2 Max happen to correlate quite well relative to other health indicators. Yes they are testing different things, but not that different.
In that case I weep for the future, because I’ve met plenty of dumbass people who managed to get a high enough SAT score to get in school.
(I'm not talking about you).
I feel this must at least be a factor.
People do see over 100 point increase ~20 hours of prep, and extensive as in 3+months can push that to 200 though with diminishing returns at the top of the curve. Which shouldn’t be surprising as increasing speed, even just from not needing to read instruction, provides an advantage for most people.
Because they don't value their kids being good at academics.
I've lived in multiple countries. In the non-US ones, people don't brag about being bad at math (even when they are bad at it). As an adult, if you couldn't add/subtract/multiply two large numbers on paper without a calculator, that would not reflect well on you.
Yes, my memory of high school is that everyone including the adults celebrated sports, and hardly anyone gave a crap about the high academic achievers, who were often social outcasts.
I spent a lot of my childhood trying (though largely failing) to pretend that I was not so smart. I can't speak for other countries, but anti-intellectualism is widespread in the US.
For a couple decades a majority of people in the US had effectively gotten coupons for half-off everything they desired.
It wasn't normal, but it made those generations in the US so mentally lazy that it effectively poisoned huge swaths of the following generations, fooling them into thinking it was always going to be that easy. So now we're trying to sort out exactly why those born and raised in the US are doing so poorly now.
Anyone who wanted a job got a good paying job. It was possible in those days for the average American to support a household as the sole breadwinner. What is happening now is that those halcyon days are over. Things are more competitive. We have not approached the cut throat levels as they have in South Korea. American jobs today pay less and have less benefits than in the 1950s. We are headed towards a two tier economy. Full time employees with benefits. Gig workers who wander from job to job with no benefits.
Test prep has diminishing marginal returns.
On the flip side that means just 1 hour of prep makes a big impact.
This is what research has found and why a lot of focus is on getting kids to do any studying for anything at all.
Many kids do zero homework and zero studying. Getting them to 1 is the hardest part.
This is the biggest actionable problem for these exams. It doesn’t require race or culture or whatever at all. The research says it requires specialized instruction during school - something to achieve focused studying, as opposed to merely watching the clock go down. Difficult for the hardest students but on average, in aggregates, performs well.
My point is that there are a lot of Asian students at Harvard who did 10 hours of test prep for the SAT. They didn’t go to cram school. There are also students who DID go to cram school. I myself studied about 10 hours for the SAT.
You don’t need cram school to improve test scores. You need some studying instead of none at all.
The hard-core, months-long, daily prep courses for super-high-achievers seem like extreme overkill. The kids who need that are probably the ones in the 700-900 range, who need to learn a baseline level of math and English for the first time (of course, if that were possible, it would have already happened in school).
There is a commonly held belief that "Asian students do better because their parents push them really hard".
The parent comment is arguing that the "really hard" part is not necessary. They are stating that if you condition on "studied at all" (above some minimum threshold) you'll explain away most of the group variance.
They're also not even arguing against the claim that studying more is better, just that the biggest improvement is in studying at all.
The final conclusion is spelled out clearly: If you want to improve test scores across the board you don't have to "push kids really hard", rather you have to work to get all students to get over the initial hurdle of studying some minimum threshold.
Now the parent might not be correct, but it's hard to see how you're even coming across with the reading of that comment you are.
Looking at the math section, you might get a 600 if you don’t study but could know all the material but don’t know how to take the test.
But to get a 600 requires you to know a certain amount of material and know how to take the test. Most kids at my HS couldn’t get a 600 math even with 40 hours of math prep.
I also did not care much as a student. I don't think I am remarkable here, I think I just took the test really well. I did do one short practice course that taught some of the small tricks to the test (most common problem patterns, to leave blank if you are really not sure, to come back to the question at the end, etc..) which I think probably helped for like 100pts at least.
I scored very high in both. Believe me, as new immigrants we were completely clueless about the heated race to top spots. In my case, credits goes to my makers (mom and dad :) and the fact that Iran had fairly good public schools.
Culture is important. Two relevant shockers for me (as a very young new arrival to US):
- disrespect for teachers.
- practically institutionalized disdain for the smart kids. I am talking cultural products here.
So I honestly think cultural backgrounds that feature things like special social and personal regard for those who teach, and special regard for individuals in STEM professions (for example "mr. engineer"), are more at play here than merely ambitious parents. And guess what is driving those ambitious parents? Culture has a lot to do with it.
Escaping this is certainly a piece of why people pursue "good" schools in wealthy areas, gifted programs, and private schools. Obviously it's not a guarantee you can avoid this attitude, but there are obvious differences between educational environments.
I went to a good public school K-8, where I was part of the gifted program (what amounted to a handful of students in my year who had a few special class session per week), and then a top private high school.
One of the biggest differences from a typical American public school that I saw in the gifted program and private school was that being smart/curious/interested/engaged/academically ambitious was generally admired and encouraged. I was endlessly curious but never a particular diligent student, and had a tendency to "coast" in school, but I think being in this environment helped frame things for me in a really positive way.
It got a bit ridiculous at the end of high school as my classmates started aggressively competing for limited slots at top universities, but I feel the environment–being among people who valued ambition and using your brain–was super motivating and raised my internal bar for success in general. I'm reminded of something a tennis coach told me as I was first learning to play: the best way to improve your own game is to play with others more skilled than you.
I've gotten the impression from every high-achieving-country immigrant that I've ever talked to that schools in those countries just kick out the troublemaking kids before they have a chance to disrupt the environment for everybody else. Nobody gets kicked out of US public schools, for any reason - so the kids who don't want to be there and spend all of their time trying to ruin it for everybody else are always there.
My impression is also that the academic culture is very different - even in my poorly funded primary school full of poor kids, there was a sense of academic accomplishment being of the highest importance -- all the students knew the importance of good grades, and students that disagree were socially shunned. Smart kids were the popular kids, and the people who ranked the top 10% got into a special class and were widely admired.
Inequality is accepted in so many other places in the USA, in ways that are far worse than this.
The anti-intellectualism is a very, very real thing in the USA. In not good schools, you WILL be bullied for being cerebral.
At this point, no amount of understanding of "oh the bad kids grew up in poverty and had social/economic reasons for being bad" is going to fix these kids up.
You want to disrupt education for the rest? Teachers will disrupt the rest of your earning potential. Seems like a fair trade too, since the criminals are all getting laid and the MIT kids are all staying virgins. It takes 15 years to mint another "elite" educated individual. Just a few bad apples can destroy all of this work of trying to get someone to the MIT level. Get the bad apples out.
If you admit this, you'd be saying one culture is worse and needs to change. One party in the US is against saying anyone but white men (and Karen) can do anything wrong, so the problem is everyone else. But it obviously isn't, some groups have cultures which denigrate learning and the consequence is those groups do not succeed academically or economically.
All of the USA has at least some cultural issues (drunk driving is popular, for example). So who could we really trust to drive cultural change? Current teachers seem to be reinforcing victim mindset in children, the entire educational system is setup to keep kids away from people doing better than them -- grade separation alone, for example, prevents kids from learning from peers who already understand the material. The churches are corrupt and fractionated. Who would have the moral authority to drive cultural change for the better?
They actually tried this in US starting in late 80s and 90s, when we got a slate of 'geeks who get babes, and social acceptance' movies - War Games, Real Genius, Revenge of the Nerds, Weird Science, Hackers, etc.
[p.s. didn't finish that thought! /g]
But imho this was the wrong set of adjustments. The inducements - sex, money, and social acceptance -- are certainly attractive, but any kid with half a brain can note that there are far easier and certainly more exciting ways than learning -- culturally celebrated ways, yo -- to get that very same set of inducements. It did however get us to the geek hero celebrity stage, with Jobs and now Musk.
[edits]
We already have a bunch of federally mandated AYP testing (no) thanks to No (ALL?) Child Left Behind, why can't this just be old copies of the ACT or SAT. By the time kids are ready to apply for college, it will be second hand and not another extra thing they have to learn.
Or, in other words, if parental involvement IS a part of the educational system, then it's impossible for the system to provide good outcomes without parental involvement since, you know, it's part of the system.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm confused why some people seem to blame the educational system for lack of parental involvement in some demographics.
That seems very naive to think that school overcome the impact of parenting. If a child doesn't have its physical and psychological needs met then there's not much the school can do. School can't make children do their homework at home either.
To be fair, I did spend a lot of time thinking about math because I liked it.
Spending childhood doing things you enjoy and which also have economic utility is a secret power.
Most people in the top 5th percentile of academic things also happened to spend a truly absurd amount of their youth obsessing over that academic thing. They may also be gifted, but spending all that free time in youth thinking about things is probably way more important than IQ.
(For me it was programming and law... I was reading legal briefs and slinging code most evenings of middle school through high school, which set me up with a rather absurd advantage over my peers once I got to college.)
BTW: elite unis/programs are looking for those types of people. It's not the extra curricular box checking that interests them, it's evidence of thousands of hours of practice at high value add skills. The practice can be forced with absurd amounts of grit, which is why it's a secret power when it comes out of intellectual curiosity.
It's a challenge, for sure. Should it be the overriding goal? Maybe if we weren't competing with other countries on the world stage.
This sounds good in theory, but it can have unintended consequences. One way to read what you are saying here is that we should have a system where parent involvement has no impact.
I may be biased (as a parent), but I think parental involvement should be encouraged, not disincentiviezed. Parental involvement is one of the forces of nature. It should not go to waste.