Sure, it just means it's a bit of a pointless debate...
Questions that are much more interesting to me are:
* should any level of the education system attempt to correct for underlying socioeconomic factors?
* if so, how? (I would love more discussion about this because it both seems like an extremely difficult problem and because otherwise we waste all our time and energy on non-effective things like removing standardized tests from admissions requirements.)
In the software engineering interview world, for instance, a whole lot of active discussion is spent around interviewing methods. Let's make that bigger! Let's figure out how to get the people who never even make it to the interview stage today a better opportunity.
Otherwise it's like taking two plants, reducing the amount of sunlight one gets to 50% of what the other one gets for several years, then moving them both to a new environment, waiting four more years, and saying "huh, the one that was taller before we moved them 4 years ago is still taller, guess that's a good measurement to use to pick plants, since even controlling for that, the taller ones from the light-limited cohort are also ended up taller than their cohort-mates after the last 4 years!"
> Questions that are much more interesting to me are
Sure, but it's still worthwhile to point out factually inaccurate articles and deceptive papers. If they want to argue for how the education system should correct socioeconomic factors, they should do so honestly, not by lying to us that tests are useless.
Questions that are much more interesting to me are:
* should any level of the education system attempt to correct for underlying socioeconomic factors?
* if so, how? (I would love more discussion about this because it both seems like an extremely difficult problem and because otherwise we waste all our time and energy on non-effective things like removing standardized tests from admissions requirements.)
In the software engineering interview world, for instance, a whole lot of active discussion is spent around interviewing methods. Let's make that bigger! Let's figure out how to get the people who never even make it to the interview stage today a better opportunity.
Otherwise it's like taking two plants, reducing the amount of sunlight one gets to 50% of what the other one gets for several years, then moving them both to a new environment, waiting four more years, and saying "huh, the one that was taller before we moved them 4 years ago is still taller, guess that's a good measurement to use to pick plants, since even controlling for that, the taller ones from the light-limited cohort are also ended up taller than their cohort-mates after the last 4 years!"