I'm genuinely curious what this is supposed to mean. Every student gets into the same university? They all get the same job at the exact same salary upon graduation? What is the real-world consequence of this policy supposed to be?
If your outcome as a student is guaranteed to be equal to every other student's outcome, what is the incentive to work harder?
Outcomes being equal doesn't necessarily mean they're good. The students could all fail and get minimum wage jobs. That would also be an equal outcome.
Even if we assume the school goes to the extreme of assigning students the same grades and recognition regardless of performance, maybe some virtuous students don't care about the recognition and spend extra time studying math because they simply love math. They will end up being better at math than students who don't - an unequal outcome. How is the policy supposed to address this?
So, your guess is as good as mine, because that video certainly is not some kind of school policy position, as the article implies. I'm pretty suspect of the rest of it, since as someone else pointed out, the school actually did notify the students! They just didn't hold a big ceremony. The actual issue that the parents had is that the physical awards - which were delivered to students, in paper, at school, on their desks, did not arrive before early admission deadlines. The students were informed prior to the deadline by emails to their official school district accounts, which the article says they don't often check.
This just overall feels like a culture war hack piece, it's full of red flags from top to bottom, and I mean, it's from a Federalist byline...
I'm not from or in the US (although I frequently work in or with USAians) and it's just astonishing how much of the US Federalist | Conservative pieces lack any kind of policy substance -- the media from that side of the aisle seems almost entirely focused on raising dust in the air over trite matters of near zero import.
I like fiscal responsibility and a lot of principles that these groups supposedly stand for - but the culture war obsession of the US right is just performative.
This article concerns the metrics we use to decide how to advance kids into advanced educational opportunities. How is that a “trite matter of near zero import?”
I think your view of the conservative reaction may be colored by the fact that you don’t have the other side of this culture war wherever you are in Europe or Asia. To my knowledge, elite high schools in Germany or China aren’t abandoning objective metrics like grades and test scores on the theory that those things are “racist.” Heck, Germany and France don’t even track outcomes by race the way Americans do obsessively.
> This article concerns the metrics we use to decide how to advance kids into advanced educational opportunities.
Not to my reading.
I would summarise this as an article about the shortcomings of the National Merit Scholarship Corporation [1], their failure to put sufficient postage on notifications and their offloading of their notifications onto schools.
That summary ignores all the relevant context. Since the 1980s, TJ has been a highly selective public high school. The average test scores there are comparable to several Ivy League colleges. As is common all over the world, TJ’s admissions process was based on standardized testing and grades. This was completely uncontroversial for decades.
The National Merit Scholarship is based on a standardized test called the PSAT. It’s not the most important thing in the world, but important enough that every year the Washington Post would publish the list of students from the DC area who were selected. This was great marketing for the school, because TJ students were like 2/3s of all the students recognized out of dozens of high schools in the area. There was no pizza party, but the school would go to some effort to publicize the result because they felt it reflected very positively on the school.
Two years ago, there was a huge fight over TJ’s admissions process. The school had become 70% Asian, and had very few black students. In that fight, progressives attacked standardized testing as racist. The progressive school board then changed the admissions process to a lottery system. A federal judge found that the change was motivated by anti-Asian racism: https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/we-won-coalition-for-tj-w.... Then an appellate court overturned that decision, and now the Supreme Court is deciding whether to hear the case.
In that context, what the article is about is the TJ administration downplaying the National Merit Scholarship results, which until recently they had publicized and pointed to as a source of pride. The story is thus about a deliberate decision by the administration to downplay a certain kind of educational metric, based on progressive ideas, that until very recently the school had embraced as an important metric.
Frankly it’s bizarre for someone from outside the US to say conservatives are waging a frivolous “culture war” here. What the conservatives want to do is keep the system that TJ had until two years ago, which is still the system most of Europe and Asia has.
You're definitely right, but this conversation gets utterly muddled by the approaches that the right uses. Just click into the home page of that site, and see how every single article is something shitting "wokeness" or diversity.
This is the texture of the debate right now in the US. The far right have colonized all theae reasonable positions as sort of gateways into more extreme ideology.
What you say is reasonable and I utterly agree, however just know that this conversation has been weaponized by the right.
> What you say is reasonable and I utterly agree, however just know that this conversation has been weaponized by the right.
That’s a roundabout way of saying “my political opponents are right about this but I’m going to refuse to acknowledge that because I disagree with them about other stuff.”
Also, the opposition to “wokeness” is not “far right.” City Journal is an urban conservative magazine, a group that skews moderate. Many of the writers, like Nomani, were Democrats back when that mainly meant you favored higher taxes and more social services. Opposition to “wokeness” helped Glenn Youngkin win Virginia, a state that voted for Biden by 10 points, and helped DeSantis win a 20 point majority in a state Obama won twice. In states like Florida and Virginia, which turned blue thanks to immigrants under Bill Clinton’s brand of economic liberalism and social conservatism, opposition to “wokeness” simply reflects the democratic party’s shift towards a more socially liberal platform.
As applied to education, “woke” ideas are far left, attacking ideas like color blindness and race neutrality that are widely held by the center, and most minorities themselves.
> but this conversation gets utterly muddled by the approaches that the right uses.
Sure, and a lot of conversations about racism or inequality are muddled by the approaches used by the far left. Should we stop taking reasonable positions just because far right (or far left) happens to agree and benefit from those?
> The far right have colonized all theae reasonable positions as sort of gateways into more extreme ideology.
Gee, what a pity there’s no opposition of note to these positions on the left. Surely there would be many leftists open to loudly condemning these positions and mocking those who hold them mercilessly, publicly.
All that you added was not in the article and therefore not in the summary of the thrust of the article.
> The story is thus about a deliberate decision by the administration to downplay a certain kind of educational metric
It's about results arriving late and then filtering through what is pretty much a universal hand to hand to students that all school suffer through.
WE have similar systems here, important reults and awards are directly notified to students, not filtered through a school admin. The fault lies with the National Merit Scholarship Corporation .. who seem to expect others to do their work for them.
> Frankly it’s bizarre for someone from outside the US to say conservatives are waging a frivolous “culture war” ..
Do you not read your own countries media?
Have you not seen the baseless hysteria over trans people, "woke history", etc?
> All that you added was not in the article and therefore not in the summary of the thrust of the article.
If I picked up an article in a newspaper in your country about some long running politically contentious issue, would it include years of backstory so I could understand the significance of it with zero background knowledge of the situation?
> It's about results arriving late and then filtering through what is pretty much a universal hand to hand to students that all school suffer through.
TJ isn’t some neighborhood high school. It sends dozens of kids into Ivy League schools and Cal Tech/MIT every year. The administration is like a well oiled machine in making that happen. In fact, taking the National Merit Scholarship test is completely optional, but TJ makes it mandatory for its students. That’s because the school was very proud of the fact that the Washington Post would publish the list, and local schools would have a few each and TJ would have 150+: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2002/11/14/stud....
The National Merit Scholarship results have been distributed to schools the same way for decades. TJ always publicized the results to students promptly (and not by sending an email to some account nobody ever checks). I remember when the results came out my year, it was announced publicly and everyone went to check the list. The fact that TJ downplayed it the last couple of years reflects an ideological change, not some administrative mixup.
> Do you not read your own countries media? Have you not seen the baseless hysteria over trans people, "woke history", etc?
We’re talking about education. Simple question: In your country, do you have people trying to get rid of standardized testing on the theory that it’s “racist?”
> We’re talking about education. Simple question: In your country, do you have people trying to get rid of standardized testing on the theory that it’s “racist?”
Well, I'm from .be where teachers fight it. There are many excuses used, inequality coming to the foreground in the past 10 years or so, but the real reason is that it would allow comparison between teachers and schools (and thus expose bad teachers and schools). The whole sector rallies around this opposition, including the various levels of government (because selective parents are a cause of higher expenditures). Public education is objectively worse than the (less funded) alternatives. We have 7 different governments, 4 of which have their own education system. They're all worse than private education, and catholic education when test scores at universities get compared.
> The fault lies with the National Merit Scholarship Corporation .. who seem to expect others to do their work for them.
So why was it not a problem previous years, or with other schools?
Sounds like the school decided to "randomly" start playing the whole malicious compliance card to me.
I seriously do not understand anyone who supports this stuff. It's mind boggling and will be the end of US dominance, if not the eventual end of the US itself.
This is just a tiny tale in a giant story that has been going on for decades. The US primary education system has been systematically ripping out merit and high achiever programs in favor of "equity" since at least the 1990's. You cannot read this article and ignore all other context.
And yet, the right wing consistently attacks academics of nearly every stripe.
TJ kids are already ridiculously high achievers. They don’t need structural systems pushing them that way. Changes like gutting 8th period and further subjugating curricula to the College Board have weakened the school, not strengthened it.
It is very unfortunate that conservatives have thoroughly discredited themselves. Now even when they make reasonable points, people are forced to doubt them. It is a consequence of baseless fear mongering and an unwillingness to take responsibility when those fears predictably do not pan out
This is the tactic of the right. Have a blog like this publish 10 reasonable arguments and 90% wild anti-woke stuff so you can draw people in and get a head nod, then ease them into more radical views with the other content.
TJ isn’t abandoning objective measures either. The system proposed by the proponents of change (and decried as racist by people like Asra) was a merit lottery where GPA and advanced math enrollment were the only application metrics.
The adopted system, although removing the standardized test, still incorporates grades as an absolutely essential metric.
Not true. The new system is based on a quota for each middle school feeding into TJ. GPAs and academic standards in each school are completely different. It uses a “holistic review” that includes a “student portrait” and heavily weighs “experience factors.” https://northernvirginiamag.com/family/education/2022/03/30/....
A federal judge in the eastern district of Virginia ruled that getting rid of the admissions test and the new holistic review was expressly motivated by a desire to change the racial balance of the school. The fourth circuit stayed the district court order pending appeal in a 2-1 decision. The Supreme Court upheld the stay, over the dissent of three justices.
The adopted system is indeed holistic. The proposed merit lottery was not and purely considered gpa and math enrollment. But that was also deemed racist. So it is clear that the “holistic” elements aren’t what piss Asra off.
And the adopted system does still deeply consider grades, which you claim are being discounted.
I went to TJ and grew up in northern VA. When I was there the announcement was made publicly and distributed to everyone. I’m not sure if we had a school district email account back then but that’s not how it was communicated, nor was it communicated by private letter.
Yes this is part of the culture war, but that’s not a reason to dismiss it out of hand. Everyone in this story was a democrat until 2015. Around then a subset of mostly white Democrats discovered racism still exists and completely lost their minds about it. My parents think what’s happening at TJ is nuts and I couldn’t even get them to vote for Larry Hogan.
There is a concrete policy proposal from the right and center: stick with the admissions process TJ has used for decades, based on grades and standardized tests. The same factors used all over the world for this sort of thing.
You can call it part of the “culture war,” but so what? Culture matters. Since the 1920s, we have relied on race-blind, objective metrics like standardized testing. It has worked really well, allowing numerous groups of outsiders (Jews, Italians, Asians) entry into the highest reaches of society. It’s working fine for Hispanics, who are assimilating economically at the same rate as previous generations of immigrants, including in states like California where affirmative action is still illegal. If you want to replace that with a system of racial gerrymandering, you don’t get to dismiss the opposition to that change as “culture war” “nonsense.”
> So, your guess is as good as mine, because that video certainly is not some kind of school policy position, as the article implies.
The person in the video is the superintendent of the Fairfax County Public schools who stated that "equal outcomes" are a priority for her upcoming tenure. Maybe not a policy directive, but the leader of the school system is stating that it is a priority they intend to focus on.
The author has an agenda, sure, but they didn't fabricate the video or put words in the mouth of the district superintendent.
It is incredibly stupid for the National Merit program to leave the decision to notify students up to the schools. In such a situation it is entirely 100% certain that a situation like the one at Thomas Jefferson High School will eventually happen. In fact it's probably happened multiple times already, due to incompetence, which is why it should scrapped.
From the article:
> On September 16 of this year, National Merit sent a letter to Bonitatibus listing 240 students recognized as Commended Students or Semi-Finalists. The letter included these words in bold type: “Please present the letters of commendation as soon as possible since it is the students’ only notification.”
You know what's better than a system where the schools need to be monitored to make sure they tell their students? A system where you don't have to scrutinize what the schools do, because you told the parents and the kids directly.
It's 2022. You have the information of the students who took the tests, obviously. This is a solvable problem. It can, and should, be fixed.
I would bet that there has literally never been a school that failed to notify the recipients before now. It is not just an honor for the student, but the school itself.
Yes, now, the National Merit organization will probably come up with a direct notification procedure, but it was not a failure on their part to assume that schools would act in their own self-interest.
I would guess that the number of people that act directly against their own self interest on a regular basis is a very high percentage of the population.
You are probably confused because you didn't read the article carefully? It says the school notified "after the early-application deadlines had passed".
Also: "On Monday, December 12, after getting caught, Kosatka sent an email to the parents of Commended Students, notifying them of the “important recognition” and saying, “We are deeply sorry” for not sharing the news earlier. He claimed school officials would contact college admissions offices to correct the record."
Well that's the thing. Unlike you I did read the article carefully. The article makes two explicit claims: (1) the timing of emails to parents occurred after the early college application deadline, and (2) the timing of physical distribution of certificates did as well.
However in addition to those (superfluous) notifications, the article notes that the individual students themselves received email notifications: this is the notification I referred to in my previous post. Strangely the article brushes past this point and never addresses precisely when these notifications were sent to students.
This was the part of the article I found confusing, given that the notification to students would be the most important date that determines whether a student could use the information in their college application. If the school sent emails to students' accounts, the date should be easy to verify and include in the article, but the author does not do this.
"One former student said he learned he had won the award through a random email from the school to a school-district email account that students rarely check; the principal neither told his parents nor made a public announcement."
Indeed, zooming in on the specific claims regarding application deadlines, it's hard not to put together the following picture and observe that it is entirely compatible with the precise way the author (apparently an accomplished journalist) wrote the piece:
1. The school received the notifications in mid-October.
2. They sent out email notifications to students in a timely fashion.
3. Students failed to read these "random email notifications" because, duh, they're teenagers and don't check their school email.
4. The physical certificates (irrelevant, but a nice keepsake) took longer to distribute
5. Parents were notified only later on, and then pitched a fit about it because (unlike their kids) they do read their email.
6. The school, mollified by the parents' fury, promised to notify the parents in the future so that they could make sure their kids' inattention to email wouldn't result in further screwups.
7. An angry parent wrote an article subtitled "Why are administrators at a top-ranked public high school hiding National Merit awards from students and families?" implying (falsely) that the school deliberately withheld notification to students, and carefully cherry-picking facts to make that case.
> One former student said he learned he had won the award through a random email from the school to a school-district email account that students rarely check; the principal neither told his parents nor made a public announcement
So the students were notified by email, which they don't bother checking, and it's only the regular old mail that was slow to get to them (for regular old mail and physical constraints reasons, nothing extraordinary).
The opening paragraphs seem to imply that the awards were withheld based on race.
When you get into the meat of the article, though, it makes it more clear that the school just forwarded a paper cert to the kids, and didn’t make a big deal about it. And parents are complaining because the school didn’t make a big deal out of it or get it to students “fast enough” to apply for some early admission stuff.
It’s been a while, but I remember most of those “National Merit” type things to be not very important or relevant. It’s just based on your PSAT score.
Yeah, this is internally self-contradictory. I quote:
But homeroom teachers didn’t distribute the awards until Monday, November 14, after the early-application deadlines had passed. Teachers dropped the certificates unceremoniously on students’ desks.
“Keeping these certificates from students is theft by the state,” says Yashar.
... so they did get distributed, albeit without much ceremony. Also, that's in plenty of time for scholarship applications, so "Recognition by National Merit opens the door to millions of dollars in college scholarships and 800 Special Scholarships from corporate sponsors" is a bit of a non-sequitur.
> It’s been a while, but I remember most of those “National Merit” type things to be not very important or relevant.
That's what I thought when I was a kid, but it turns out that the important college ranking system uses "number of national merit finalists" as a high weighted metric. I got a full ride to a respected state university solely from that PSAT test and so did two of my friends.
This is a possible outcome. However, another possibility is that not all children are of the same aptitude, and therefore your experience might not be representative of their.
If that’s what’s going on then it’s a little overblown, IMO. I went to Stuy and I think they just posted the list of National Merit Scholarships on a bulletin board somewhere, and yeah we all gawked to see who got it, but then it was just back to the grind. It’s not like it was some ace-in-hole that could make or break your admission.
Yeah, if you drill down into the actual sources, that appears to be what happened.
The school got a stack of certificates. They sat on the principals desk for a while, then they sat with the guidance counselor or homeroom teachers before being passed out.
The parent is basically complaining because:
1. They didn’t notify the parents via email.
2. They didn’t find out in time to put in on an college early admission application.
3. The school didn’t make a big deal of handing out the awards in an assembly or similar.
This sounds more like a complaint from an overbearing helicopter parent than any sort of issue that HN would care about.
"One former student said he learned he had won the award through a random email from the school to a school-district email account that students rarely check; the principal neither told his parents nor made a public announcement."
Rewarding bad behavior, regardless of its origin, does nothing but encourage more. My best friend growing up was Asian and worked his ass off every single day. I had a lot more fun than he did but he got into a better school and makes better money now because he fucking deserved to.
Bad behavior? The same kids still get the award. TJ isn’t deciding who gets the national merit scholarship.
I personally think that my time hanging out with people watching classic rock concert footage during 8th period was rather valuable for my life and happiness and many of the personal skills I learned are valuable for my career.
Agreed, it's about giving fifty percent reward for zero percent effort.
I think HN readers remember perhaps better than most how much the "peanut gallery" in the back of the class interfered with our ability to learn. I find the idea those assholes are going to get at least half credit for doing nothing absutely repugnant.
the school district’s new strategy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” School administrators, for instance, have implemented an “equitable grading” policy that eliminates zeros, gives students a grade of 50 percent just for showing up, and assigns a cryptic code of “NTI” for assignments not turned in. It’s a race to the bottom.
All schools, all companies should just say upfront that they want “equality of outcomes”; that way, students and prospective job applicants don’t need to waste time putting efforts to acquire any skills or even efforts to learn anything. Since the outcome is decided by tick marks, it is rational for people to not learn.
As a TJ C/O 2002 graduate, this is pretty wild to hear. The national merit scholar announcements were a big deal when I was there. There was a school wide announcement and the list of what everyone got was distributed by the school.
Actually, it looks like the Washington Post used to publish the lists at least as late as 2014. I don’t see anything from WaPo after that though.
I graduated around the same time and never once cared about this crap. TJ didn’t have a valedictorian because it created unnecessary competition and pressure. If the decision to remove the valedictorian was made today you’d see breathless complaining from Asra in the Washington Times about how this was sending the school down the toilet.
In what way is it critical to loudly publish awards handed out to students based on a test they took in 9th grade?
There was always a WASP cultural undercurrent that discouraged openly acknowledging the competition. But I think even those folks agreed that test scores were the proper way to identify the smart kids. The school certainly didn’t shy away from promoting the number of merit scholars and semi finalists it had. Downplaying that is a significant change of course.
By any chance, are you privileged enough that you never have to care about such "crap"? Because believe me, what you call "crap" might be a big ladder for someone less privileged to climb out of their actual crappy situations. Such "crap" labels often help getting admission to a good college, or embellishing your resume if you want and need a good job.
I went to a school similar to TJ and we definitely didn't give a shit about national merit scholars. Like half the school got it so it would've just become another way to bully/exclude people if the school made a big deal about it.
There is a huge difference between the Harvard policy and the TJ policy. Harvard explicitly considers race. TJ does not. TJ removed some elements of the admissions process and seeks to have students from every school in fcps but does not allocate any admissions points based on race.
The logic is straight-forward. Whether it is necessary, correct, or advantageous, depends largely on your circumstances and personal put look.
A) historically a number of groups have been disadvantaged.
B) this has lead to those groups "falling behind" advantaged groups from a wealth perspective.
[side bar - wealth begets wealth, while poverty begets poverty, and while it is possible to rise up it is hard]
C) since it is easier to get good grades when you have money, it's more impressive to get good, but not necessarily top, grades from a different starting point. Thus the route, not just the result, should be considered when reviewing applications.
D) thus admitence with "just grade scores" tends to favor those groups with money, which would result in a largely hermogenous student body.
E) education extends beyond just knowledge. The goal is to turn out adults who will function well in a society as a whole, get good jobs, add value to the community, and do on.
F) in modern times it is considered poor form, or worse, to exhibit bad speech or behavior patterns. You can no longer behave like your great-grandfather, you can no longer speak like your grandfather. To do so will harm your prospects.
G) thus, in order to become better human beings, its good to rub shoulders with those of different social, financial, gender, ability levels. In the safety of a school environment everyone can better be taught, and practice, the social norms of the day.
H) thus a diverse student body is good for all students. Previously disadvantaged groups get a leg up. Currently advantaged groups get to interact with those dissimilar to themselves, and thus improve those interaction skills.
US society likes to believe that "hard work" is the secret to financial position. But hard work itself is hard to measure, so we measure grades instead. However grades are more a function of current economic status, not work, and if anything reflect the hard work of the parents, not the students. There are various tools used to try and improve the proxy measure, things like diversity quotas and so on.
Of course imperfect improvements to imperfect proxies still result in contraversy since the system is still flawed. And naturally those most disadvantaged by the rules feel the sting the most.
None of this explains or excuses the behaviour of the school in with-holding these results though. The logic behind that is strange. Why would a top quality school, with a diverse student body, look to prejudice the ability of those students to get good college positions?
I can see some logic in not making a public song and dance about it, but surely all students, and their parents, should be notified as soon as possible?
On the up side, the fact this is "news" at all suggests this is a very uncommon practice.
But is skin color an effective, useful, or correct overlay or proxy? What are the downsides? What are the alternatives? Skin color differences in a group = diversity is perplexing to many and offensive to others, nor does it seem to logically stand up to scrutiny.
There are a few ways to look at why schools value diversity. As the other child comment points out, Lebron clearly is more privileged than most white people, but that doesn't mean he hasn't experienced things that no white person has. Certainly some of the diversity push is about giving disadvantaged students an equalizing advantage, but a large part of the push is because schools legitimately believe having different perspectives is advantageous. And make no mistake, black people do have very different experiences, and therefore perspectives, than white people in this country. Not just because they're discriminated against either, they have a unique cultural perspective/identity that may be valuable for other students to interact with.
I do think it's unfortunate that cultural groups have largely coalesced around race in this country, but that's the reality, and it won't change if the groups don't interact with each other.
The view that “cultural groups have largely coalesced around race in this country, but that's the reality” is precisely the question. Is that the best and most effective proxy for population segmentation and policy-making? Many would argue that it isn’t. Regardless, what we can say with certainty is that it isn’t evaluated.
I’m not arguing against diversity nor skin-color prejudice in America, I’m raising the question of how we best define diversity and associated ramifications.
Definitely a big question, and I don't know much about sociology so don't have any data. I will say though that using race as a signal for diversity has a few advantages. First it's a relatively objective metric that can't really be faked. Income also falls into that category, but my experience is that I grew up in a pretty diverse area, my schools growing up had about equal numbers of white, black, latino, and asian people, all from widely different economic groups. And the social groups were much, much more along racial lines than economic ones. Even leaving my home that was my experience in university and after. I'm not going to try to get into diagnosing why that is, it's just something I've consistently noticed, and it leads me to believe that racial groups do have their own unique cultural perspective that transcends income.
In the end it's tough for me to see any good diversity metrics beyond income and race, and it seems to me they are both valid and not necessarily related. If you value diversity you should probably aim to have both economic and racial diversity.
I've also noticed that many of the people claiming that race is a bad diversity metric have minimal experience interacting with different racial groups which leads me to believe it is largely from a place of ignorance or even bad faith.
While I hold a US passport and live in the US, I can’t claim a background that is solidly from the US. In my experience in the US, location matters and general culture varies (surprisingly) widely. I would find it hard to believe that a skin-color segmentation is effective across the entire population. In my limited experience not in sociology but in running consumer segmentations as a management consultant years back, the idea of a single, best segmentation for all the USA does seem suspect. My personal experience in the US is relatively low in socioeconomic diversity but high in skin-color diversity (lots of educated, well to do people from all over the world who all think more or less similarly).
“Race” or specifically European-ancestry versus former slaves is the main, historical dichotomy in the US. But well-to-do “Asians”, various people from the continent of Asia, people from other continents, and mixing tends to dilute the historical dichotomy. But the mindset persists. To me it seems as though skin-color diversity feels good to certain (perhaps many) Americans, but it isn’t necessarily logical.
False. Economic status can easily be measured. In fact, college admissions process has the entire financial picture of a candidate thanks to FAFSA.
Wonder why colleges don't publish stats of how many kids are admitted from, say, each quintile of wealth or income. I guess that would be an inconvenient stat to expose.
All of this stuff is just so hilariously nonsense.
Dude, some people have to lose. We can shuffle as much as we want, we can probably make them perfectly distributed amongst races, sexes, heights, weights, whatever.
But there will still be a shit ton of losers. It's just how the world works. You can't have 8 billion flying Tesla electric private jets to Malibu.
Or they could establish the office if the Handicapper General who would be responsible for limiting above average students in some way to make them conform
The thing some people don't seem to get is, it's not that there will be losers, it's that the losers are a liability to society, so we need to minimize "losing" as much as possible.
Certainly not by gifting people stuff, but buy gifting them education.
The thing people can't handle with this is that intelligence tends to be heritable* so the more intelligent workers you need the smaller and more racily similar the successful group is going to be which runs directly contrary to the currently popular world view.
*It's influenced by other things too of course. Once you hit a (fairly low) limit it's going to start skewing more and more male. Upbringing is a huge part of it too so children of divorced parents tend to perform worse etc.
The basic thrust of this comment is correct. Coastal elites can't stomach the fact that people are different. Some are smart, some are not. And there are observable regularities in who's smart and who's not. That's just how it is.
Haha yes, exceptional! Governments have made scholarships and admissions a zero sum game. Ideally, all these public schools do this and those kids get fucked. Then my kids will have a better chance at all of this stuff.
You bet you'll see me voting for woke people in the public school district.
Those slow notifications actually affected college admissions process for the kids. Read the last paragraph:
"On Monday, December 12, after getting caught, Kosatka sent an email to the parents of Commended Students, notifying them of the “important recognition” and saying, “We are deeply sorry” for not sharing the news earlier. He claimed school officials would contact college admissions offices to correct the record."
Is there a broader war on merit in our public school system?
Maybe.
Is sending National Merit certificates out a few weeks late evidence of such a conflict?
No.
Does this article come across as a tempest in a teacup, thereby also weakening its argument that there is a broader war on merit?
Yes.
Propagandists would be wise to choose their battles, Chicken Littling every bureaucratic snag or even isolated incident as evidence of a widespread issue creates fatigue.
City Journal is a conservative outlet, and possibly neocon.
I'm wondering if NMSC or College Board (conducts PSAT/NMSQT) notified students directly, would school admins kick NMSC out? I doubt they would be able to resist the leverage if parents went political.
There have already been explicitly racist tests including the NASP from 1964 until 2015.
More racism, cheating, and lying doesn't cure racism, it diminishes faith in public school system and gives ammunition to the pro-private school libertarian types who scapegoat "big gubberment" and don't want to pay any taxes. For what it's worth, California played cute with curricula, race-based admissions, and forced bussing in the 80's and 90's and most of the top students (the rich ones) left for private schools.
I'd be interested to know the demographics of children of that county and of the surrounding areas because I don't think they're 72% Asian or 60% male. Gender is not necessarily a problem given how the current education system fails boys and men. Are the students mostly future lawyers, doctors, and software engineers?
I upvoted because the focus should be on "academics and 'normal stuff'".
However, academics, as in what is taught, has been politicized almost forever. C.f., Texas Board of Education dictating to publishers which parts of history/etc can be taught.
Sounds like you pay a lot of money for a very specific, niche type of politics and social justice, because I guarantee it is present at a Catholic school!
"Can we talk about birth control and the effect on women's opportunities?"
Edit: on closer look, you've posted so many flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments that I think we have to ban the account unless/until we get some reason to believe that you actually want to use HN as intended. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34111206.
Why do you think your kids are safer at public school from being molested? The stats would say you are safer at Catholic school where lines are less blurred and fewer teachers date students. But most likely to commit such an act is a parent or someone close to the child. Sending them to any school might be the safest option.
What makes you think Catholic school kids don’t have parents or other relatives?
And are you trying to argue that the Catholic Church does not have a history of child molestation? Because the evidence seems pretty overwhelming to me.
Commenter makes a point about Catholic schools and where their curriculum focus is, you turn that into an indictment of the church. Second commenter again focuses on schools, you again indict the church.
Everybody gets it, the Catholic Church had a scandal. It was awful and destructive to many folks and the church deserves the blame and fault for the coverup. However, that scandal doesn’t seem to have anything to do with a conversation about curriculum choices at a Catholic school. Your trying to derail a conversation because of your biases.
Not at all. Catholic schools are not even remotely independent of the church despite what you seem to think, and therefore share the same systemic problems.
Never said they were independent, I said the conversation was about curriculum and not church scandals.
Additionally, although I don’t have the statistics, it would not surprise me one bit if pound for pound, Catholic schools were indeed safer school options for the students than a public schools despite the scandals in the Catholic Church.
The commenter went beyond curriculum with this part of their comment (which has since been edited to remove the word “woke”, I might add):
> All of the politics and social justice, whatever you want to call is not part of the curriculum. I feel bad for people whose kids are forced into this nonsense.
I don’t read it thst way at all, and frankly with woke or not it seems to be a valid point in the discussion which centers around that very concept of the administrators and educators possibly placing their thumb on the scale.
And I still don’t see how that is an entrance ramp to trying to shutdown the point they were making by laying some “invalid due to guilt by association”point.
You not only misread what they wrote, you misread what I wrote.
I wasn’t saying the original commenter was “guilty by association”, I was pushing back on their “anti-wokenes” nonsense and pointing out that their choice of schooling isn’t without serious issues of its own.
Is that what caused you to ignore facts and logic while you increasingly get more emotional?
You were hurt when the original commenter said those school have less wokeness. You strongly believe in social justice and concern yourself woke.
You don't defend your social wokeness by putting someone else down. If social wokeness is all you think it is then let it standup on its own merits and present discussion around why it is better than less wokeness or no wokeness at all.
This is a conversation about one topic that you decided needed to be used a prop to push another idea. You are not living up to the wokeness ideals you seek to defend by doing this. Perhaps a tiktok video where you dance around a painting of the word wokeness would further your point more than putting down another group.
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I'm making the point the public system has a worse record on the subject. And any child is safer at school compared to your home.
It is shocking when a priest who takes vows then breaks them and commits such acts. It is less shocking to find out a teacher is going out with a student or texting naked photos. The first is forbidden and taboo and brings great shame by society. The second is at times encouraged by popular culture when the genders are reversed (female teacher / male student) but is a crime.
Your kid is more likely to have this happen outside of the Catholic system. Your feelings about the church overshadows reality be reenforces how much of a taboo a priest having any form of sexual pleasure is.
> I'm making the point the public system has a worse record on the subject.
Source?
> The second [teacher / student relationships] is at times encouraged by popular culture when the genders are reversed (female teacher / male student)
Do you have any evidence of this? I have never ever heard anyone seriously encouraging relationships between adults and minors, or between someone in a position of authority with someone they have authority over.
But then I only started school in the 1970s, so perhaps these things were acceptable in an earlier era or in a country that I’m unfamiliar with. Regardless, today such things are absolutely unacceptable, and as someone who currently works in high school sports I can state from first hand experience just how seriously such matters are taken.
> Your feelings about the church overshadows reality be reenforces how much of a taboo a priest having any form of sexual pleasure is.
I have no “feelings” about the Catholic Church, beyond what the evidence has shown them to be. And their systematic child abuse, in many countries and for many MANY years, is a matter of public record.
> It should be noted that while childhood sexual abuse by Catholic clergy has received extensive media coverage, childhood sexual abuse by teachers and others is also a serious problem. Charol Shakeshaft, who has done extensive research on the problem of sexual abuse of students by teachers, recognizes the difficulty of collecting solid data on sexual abuse; but using available studies, she estimates that “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than one hundred times the abuse by priests.” According to Shakeshaft's research, even when abuse was reported to school officials the offenders were not reported to the police. In her study of 225 cases in New York, “none of the abusers were reported to authorities and only 1 percent lost their license to teach.”
That proves nothing - Catholic schools are still schools, after all. The point is that the Catholic Church has a systemic child abuse problem that includes, but extends beyond, its schools.
Please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. You've done this repeatedly, and we ban such accounts. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not post like this, we'd appreciate it.
Nice straw man you’ve propped up there, but it’s not mine and I have no interest in defending it. I hope Sky Daddy rewards you for defending his gang of pedophiles.
> with most TJ students in a protected class of “gifted” students, most of them racial minorities, many with disabilities, and most coming from immigrant families whose parents speak English as a second language.
That is, at best, incredibly misleading, if not outright wrong. The "racial minority" here is Asian, which makes up ~70% of the school population (whereas the school district as a whole is 30% Asian; the population of blacks and Latino are collectively ~4%, whereas the school district is 30%). This aren't disadvantaged poor families--at least some of the Asians come from families specifically moving to the high-cost-of-living area to try to place their kids at TJ, and I suspect a household income of $200k would put you in the bottom socioeconomic half at TJ. Note that none of the students are in ESL classes, and only ~2% are on reduced-price lunches, whereas the school district as a whole skews more like 20% and I think 30% for the latter.
So, in short, the student body at TJ largely isn't comprised of poor people who need every leg up they can get; it's comprised largely of people at the top of the socioeconomic ladder who are already walking on water.
Um what. Last I checked Asians were definitely a racial minority in America. Saying they're not minorities because they're a majority of TJ is like saying Blacks aren't minorities because they're a majority in Harlem. It denies their lived experiences outside a very specific bubble.
I'm not saying that they're not a minority; I'm saying they're not a disadvantaged minority. And, in the larger context of TJ, there's an ongoing battle over the extremely low level of black and Hispanic population (which are largely disadvantaged) versus the extremely high level of Asian population.
Are you serious? What do you know about the families? And what right do you have to dismiss our families as "advantaged" and thus deserving of having awards kept secret from us. This is the kind of two-faced callousness that has gotten the school into this trouble. Let me guess? You're also a member of the TJ Alumni Action Group, which has targeted our Asian families with racist stereotypes like the kind you are perpetuating.
They begin their article with the thesis that the school is “withholding awards” from Asian families.
When you read what actually happened, the school gave certificates to all student in mid November.
One parent is mad because the school didn’t separately notify the parent separately, and they didn’t do it “fast enough” so their kid could list it on an early college admission.
On its merits, the argument falls apart under analysis of the data.
I did not think that the point of the article is to complain about award withholding from Asian students.. although the attribution of race seems misplaced.
I thought the point was about the loss of meritocracy and the redefinition of what it means to fail. And grading work on a 50-100 scale.. you really don't think that's weird?
Actively disadvantaging? Because they didn’t publicly publish the list of merit scholar winners or send emails to parents but instead sent emails to students and handed out letters in homeroom?
The same exact kids were awarded the scholarship. Absolutely nothing about the PSAT or the award changed.
The cognitive dissonance in this article is staggering. It's the "top school" in the country, but at the same time it's being mismanaged because administrators aren't doing the work of some third-party student-ranking corporation? Or it's the "top school" in the country but there's deep injustice because they don't throw pizza parties for kids who are good at standardized tests?
The struggle between "this is the best school" and "these administrators are terrible" is never resolved, but it sounds like the quickest way to end this battle in the "war on merit" is for the National Merit Scholarship Corporation to mail the paper to the students instead of outsourcing it to the teachers.
The "best school" reputation was built over many years. The woke mismanagement is recent. It's actually a pretty easy reconciliation but I admit I have some context on TJ.
I'm genuinely curious what this is supposed to mean. Every student gets into the same university? They all get the same job at the exact same salary upon graduation? What is the real-world consequence of this policy supposed to be?
If your outcome as a student is guaranteed to be equal to every other student's outcome, what is the incentive to work harder?
Outcomes being equal doesn't necessarily mean they're good. The students could all fail and get minimum wage jobs. That would also be an equal outcome.
Even if we assume the school goes to the extreme of assigning students the same grades and recognition regardless of performance, maybe some virtuous students don't care about the recognition and spend extra time studying math because they simply love math. They will end up being better at math than students who don't - an unequal outcome. How is the policy supposed to address this?