Affirmative action has failed

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This isn't a failure of affirmative action, but of our education system as a whole. Poor, URM kids go to crappy schools, which set them back from the very beginning. If all American children went to comparatively high quality schools, I would bet money that URM would have higher representation and AA would not even be necessary.

It's not entirely a school problem. The parents of these children also have a role here. There is only so much a school can do if the family / parent figures are not supporting the child.

+1 schools are only reflective of the students (ergo, the parents) who attend them. You can try all you want, but teaching students who come from homes where education is an afterthought is HARD.

The educational level of the parents is key. The studies have shown an absolute absence of long-term (i.e., into high school) impact of programs like Head Start for underprivileged kids. The children do better initially, but the effect goes away as soon as the program ends. I say one study (from Harvard, I think?) that looked at a range of programs, and the only program that worked was one that had focused intervention into the homes of disadvantaged students beginning at a very early age, and continuing on through high school, with mentors assigned to individual students and their parents. The problem was that it is incredibly expensive and there simply isn't the manpower to implement it on any kind of scale. The studies on the "word gap" between underprivileged and middle class kids have been extensively covered. Pouring money into the schools isn't going to fix the problem, when so much of the work that goes into preparing a kid for academic success happens between birth and 5 years of age.

[Anonymous]

I have a different perspective and I feel that its not as cut and dried as PP argues. I was in the first year of Head Start in the United States. My parents were not educated and did not have degrees. In fact, my father did not learn to read until later in life. My mother was smart but uneducated.

What she did do was to get me into every program she could get me into and instilled in me a strong work ethic. I have three degrees.

For me, the early education was a game changer. I don't think the answer to the problem of long-term gain retention is answered by taking away the programs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have a different perspective and I feel that its not as cut and dried as PP argues. I was in the first year of Head Start in the United States. My parents were not educated and did not have degrees. In fact, my father did not learn to read until later in life. My mother was smart but uneducated.

What she did do was to get me into every program she could get me into and instilled in me a strong work ethic. I have three degrees.

For me, the early education was a game changer. I don't think the answer to the problem of long-term gain retention is answered by taking away the programs.

Yes but your mom cared enough to get you into every program, and instilled a strong work ethic in you. For the vast, vast majority of young people living in poverty, that is not a typical experience.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's such a big leg up so this is mind boggling.

It might not be as mind boggling if the applicant pool demographics were known. Another interesting data point would be the percentage of applicants of each race rejected from each school.

You can see this for black students for some schools here. But I still don't get why it matters:

[Anonymous]

Malcolm Gladwell addressed this in his Revisionist History Podcast. In Ep 4 - Carlos Doesn't Remember, Gladwell describes something most Americans don't think about, but take for granted as one of the best things about America:

MG: Carlos is a smart kid. He’s gotten a scholarship to a really good private school. He’s excelling. It’s not hard to imagine that, one day, he’ll to a college of his choice. He’s going places. This is what civilized societies are supposed to do, to provide opportunities for people to make the most of their ability. So that, if you’re born poor, you can move up; if you work hard, you can improve your lot. There’s even a term for this, capitalization. A society’s capitalization rate is the percentage of people in any group who are able to reach their potential, capitalize on their potential. I think the capitalization rate is one of the single best ways we have to capture how successful and just a society is. If I know that number, I think I have a better handle on how well a country’s doing than if I know its GDP or its growth rate or its per capita income. And right from the beginning, Americans have told themselves that they’re really good at capitalization, really good at social mobility, any kid can grow up to be president. That’s what’s supposed to set America apart from everywhere else.

He goes on to look at all the factors that make the path to realizing Carlos' potential pretty rocky and broken. Most are a pretty lost cause by the time they reach 8th grade. If you want to generalize the reasons, the primary is that survival supersedes education in many different ways.

Another that he doesn't talk about in this episode is that public policy puts education at bottom in most places, even though human capital is a lower cost investment than safety net programs we pay for adults who can't support themselves. It's an opportunity to raise the country's rate of capitalization, but we miss it again and again and then complain about "takers."

This report on rural education (where a surprising number of kids are minority) points out how little we actually care about social mobility, though we pay it lots of lip service.

[Anonymous]

Transcript for Carlos Doesn't Remember: https://blog.simonsays.ai/carlos-doesnt-remember-with-malcolm-gladwell-e4-s1-revisionist-history-podcast-transcript-73ea1f123d4a

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This isn't a failure of affirmative action, but of our education system as a whole. Poor, URM kids go to crappy schools, which set them back from the very beginning. If all American children went to comparatively high quality schools, I would bet money that URM would have higher representation and AA would not even be necessary.

It's not entirely a school problem. The parents of these children also have a role here. There is only so much a school can do if the family / parent figures are not supporting the child.

+1 schools are only reflective of the students (ergo, the parents) who attend them. You can try all you want, but teaching students who come from homes where education is an afterthought is HARD.

The educational level of the parents is key. The studies have shown an absolute absence of long-term (i.e., into high school) impact of programs like Head Start for underprivileged kids. The children do better initially, but the effect goes away as soon as the program ends. I say one study (from Harvard, I think?) that looked at a range of programs, and the only program that worked was one that had focused intervention into the homes of disadvantaged students beginning at a very early age, and continuing on through high school, with mentors assigned to individual students and their parents. The problem was that it is incredibly expensive and there simply isn't the manpower to implement it on any kind of scale. The studies on the "word gap" between underprivileged and middle class kids have been extensively covered. Pouring money into the schools isn't going to fix the problem, when so much of the work that goes into preparing a kid for academic success happens between birth and 5 years of age.

First pp here, and I knew someone would have these responses. Obviously parents are the most important factor. Obviously children from the most broken, messed up homes are going to have a harder time.

But largely I think this is a cop-out, or an excuse to ignore educational inequality. "Oh, their parents aren't good enough, things will never get better." There are also studies that show when you put URM kids in a middle class school with a bunch of middle class kids, their results improve. There are so many schools in America that are either mediocre or grossly inadequate. In other words, actual integration is the answer.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This isn't a failure of affirmative action, but of our education system as a whole. Poor, URM kids go to crappy schools, which set them back from the very beginning. If all American children went to comparatively high quality schools, I would bet money that URM would have higher representation and AA would not even be necessary.

It's not entirely a school problem. The parents of these children also have a role here. There is only so much a school can do if the family / parent figures are not supporting the child.

+1 schools are only reflective of the students (ergo, the parents) who attend them. You can try all you want, but teaching students who come from homes where education is an afterthought is HARD.

The educational level of the parents is key. The studies have shown an absolute absence of long-term (i.e., into high school) impact of programs like Head Start for underprivileged kids. The children do better initially, but the effect goes away as soon as the program ends. I say one study (from Harvard, I think?) that looked at a range of programs, and the only program that worked was one that had focused intervention into the homes of disadvantaged students beginning at a very early age, and continuing on through high school, with mentors assigned to individual students and their parents. The problem was that it is incredibly expensive and there simply isn't the manpower to implement it on any kind of scale. The studies on the "word gap" between underprivileged and middle class kids have been extensively covered. Pouring money into the schools isn't going to fix the problem, when so much of the work that goes into preparing a kid for academic success happens between birth and 5 years of age.

First pp here, and I knew someone would have these responses. Obviously parents are the most important factor. Obviously children from the most broken, messed up homes are going to have a harder time.

But largely I think this is a cop-out, or an excuse to ignore educational inequality. "Oh, their parents aren't good enough, things will never get better." There are also studies that show when you put URM kids in a middle class school with a bunch of middle class kids, their results improve. There are so many schools in America that are either mediocre or grossly inadequate. In other words, actual integration is the answer.

But then the limousine liberals scream and cry that they can't have their snowflakes around "FARMS kids" or "the ESOL kids" or that snowflake needs a "high achieving peer group" (or "but what about the property values!!!!!") thus we get bubbles of racial and socioeconomic homogeneity like Bethesda and North Arlington. Go check out the MCPS or VA public schools board and you'll see what I mean.

[Anonymous]

When it 95 percent Asian, I wonder then what many of you will say.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This isn't a failure of affirmative action, but of our education system as a whole. Poor, URM kids go to crappy schools, which set them back from the very beginning. If all American children went to comparatively high quality schools, I would bet money that URM would have higher representation and AA would not even be necessary.

It's not entirely a school problem. The parents of these children also have a role here. There is only so much a school can do if the family / parent figures are not supporting the child.

+1 schools are only reflective of the students (ergo, the parents) who attend them. You can try all you want, but teaching students who come from homes where education is an afterthought is HARD.

The educational level of the parents is key. The studies have shown an absolute absence of long-term (i.e., into high school) impact of programs like Head Start for underprivileged kids. The children do better initially, but the effect goes away as soon as the program ends. I say one study (from Harvard, I think?) that looked at a range of programs, and the only program that worked was one that had focused intervention into the homes of disadvantaged students beginning at a very early age, and continuing on through high school, with mentors assigned to individual students and their parents. The problem was that it is incredibly expensive and there simply isn't the manpower to implement it on any kind of scale. The studies on the "word gap" between underprivileged and middle class kids have been extensively covered. Pouring money into the schools isn't going to fix the problem, when so much of the work that goes into preparing a kid for academic success happens between birth and 5 years of age.

First pp here, and I knew someone would have these responses. Obviously parents are the most important factor. Obviously children from the most broken, messed up homes are going to have a harder time.

But largely I think this is a cop-out, or an excuse to ignore educational inequality. "Oh, their parents aren't good enough, things will never get better." There are also studies that show when you put URM kids in a middle class school with a bunch of middle class kids, their results improve. There are so many schools in America that are either mediocre or grossly inadequate. In other words, actual integration is the answer.

But then the limousine liberals scream and cry that they can't have their snowflakes around "FARMS kids" or "the ESOL kids" or that snowflake needs a "high achieving peer group" (or "but what about the property values!!!!!") thus we get bubbles of racial and socioeconomic homogeneity like Bethesda and North Arlington. Go check out the MCPS or VA public schools board and you'll see what I mean.

I can attest to this, sadly. Sometimes I wonder about the reaction of my supposedly progressives neighbors would be if there were mandatory bussing. I think it might be even more brutal than the 50s and 60s.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The whole idea is so "un-american." Let kids compete. Let the best win.

+11111111111111111111

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's such a big leg up so this is mind boggling.

It might not be as mind boggling if the applicant pool demographics were known. Another interesting data point would be the percentage of applicants of each race rejected from each school.

You can see this for black students for some schools here. But I still don't get why it matters:

Ask JBHE why it matters; they saw a need to gather the data.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Malcolm Gladwell addressed this in his Revisionist History Podcast. In Ep 4 - Carlos Doesn't Remember, Gladwell describes something most Americans don't think about, but take for granted as one of the best things about America:

MG: Carlos is a smart kid. He’s gotten a scholarship to a really good private school...

He goes on to look at all the factors that make the path to realizing Carlos' potential pretty rocky and broken. Most are a pretty lost cause by the time they reach 8th grade. If you want to generalize the reasons, the primary is that survival supersedes education in many different ways.

You're trying to distort root cause of everything wrong with Carlos's upbringing: his parents, specifically his mom, who was narcissist criminal who refused to let him accept a 4 year boarding school scholarship from Choate!

Shitty parents, shitty kids. Shitty people need to stop bringing multiple babies into the world when they can't even get their own life together.

[Anonymous]

You think shitty parents are all low income earning parents?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's such a big leg up so this is mind boggling.

It might not be as mind boggling if the applicant pool demographics were known. Another interesting data point would be the percentage of applicants of each race rejected from each school.

You can see this for black students for some schools here. But I still don't get why it matters:

Ask JBHE why it matters; they saw a need to gather the data.

I'm asking the previous poster I was responding to why it matters related to the NYT article. I know why it matters to JBHE...fool