Reply to TJ Admissions Roundup

Forum Index » Advanced Academic Programs (AAP)

Reply to "TJ Admissions Roundup"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]On the other hand, there might be lots of less advantaged kids who are more likely to find solutions to future problems because they are better at original thinking because they haven’t had everything handed to them by parents who are financially well off and/or focused on education.

I was the kid who was a NMF from a less advantaged family, so I know that kids like that need more support from the schools than kids who get plenty of support at home. As a society, it would be too bad to lose out on all that those kids can do in the future. 
[/quote]

I don't doubt that less advantaged kids can achieve a lot.
I was not wealthy growing up, if you want to argue about who grew up poorer, we can have that debate but I think I met the threshold for growing up poor.  
My family was on government assistance from time to time.
I know what government cheese, government peanut butter and government canned meat taste like.
I can tell you the denomination of a food stamp by its color.
But I also think that poor kids can meet objective measures of academic merit as well as anyone else.

There are three selective high schools in NYC whose alumni have won a ton of math and science prizes including 15 nobel prizes, a handful of wolf, field, abel, prizes in math, and a bunch of others.  
These schools range from 40% to 60% free/reduced lunch.  
Admissions to these schools is based on a single test.  
The SHSAT is more or less the same test that TJHSST used until recently.  
In this day and age of test prep, the population at these schools are significantly poorer than TJ and even more asian.

We know how to give preferences for poverty while preserving merit but we didn't do that at TJ because that was not the purpose of the change.  
The purpose of the change was to reduce the asian population and increase the population of kids of other skin colors.
If we tried to preserve preferences for poverty while preserving merit, we would have seen an even larger concentration of asians as poor asians take a disproportionate number of spots meant for poor kids.[/quote]

The above post is very focused on financial poverty, which is one type of disadvantage. In the context being discussed here, less advantaged refers to being financially disadvantaged, yes, but also the disadvantage of having parents with less education or less interest in education.

Babies don’t choose their parents. It is not a level playing field when there are children with parents who pay for test prep and other children with parents who don’t have the same level of education or ability to support their kids educationally. [/quote]

Babies don't choose their innate intellect or internal motivation either and we don't level the playing field for those things.

At some point it really doesn't matter why one kid is smarter than the other, the curriculum designed for the smartest kids should be available to the smartest kids and not to some other kids that we think would have been the smartest kids if only they had wealthier parents, or more educated parents or more involved parents.

The poor kids at stuy sat the same test as the children of doctors and lawyers.
The poor kids aren't getting a preference at stuy.  
This isn't a social experiment; this is education, and going to TJ isn't some prize, it is an opportunity.  
An opportunity that you don't really benefit from if you aren't smart enough.
The poor kids at stuy may have had to overcome more to reach the same level of achievement as the middle class kids but they did it despite their poverty.  In fact 40% of the kids at stuy are eligible for free and reduced lunch.

We can try to improve the world, but we can't pretend we live in an alternate world and say that the kid who studied hard and made sacrifices to achieve academic success is no better than a much less accomplished kid because that second kid's parents didn't care as much about his education.

[/quote]

Studying hard and “making sacrifices” doesn’t make a kid smarter. They might have learned more information, but they don’t become more intelligent.

If a kid can’t figure out new problems unless they’ve already studied them, they won’t be the people who innovate and change the world in the future. We need to make sure we get those kids who are original thinkers who grasp new ideas and figure out how to solve novel problems. [/quote]

And this is what white people get wrong about intelligence.
It's not entirely genetically determined.
It's not just nature, it is also nurture.
You can get smarter by studying, you can waste potential by not studying.

Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech in NYC use the SHSAT and ONLY the SHSAT to select students.
They have over 15 nobel prize winners and a bunch of math awards like the wolf prize, the fields medal, the abel award.
That is more than fairfax has ever produced.
The SHSAT was the exam that TJ used before they started experimenting with quant Q in 2017.

We know how to measure IQ,  We solved that riddle a century ago.
We know how to select for IQ.  You don't pick random kids and hope they are the smart ones.  You can actually test them to see who is smarter than the others.
We just don't do it anymore because we don't like the distribution of skin color of the people who get the high IQ scores.

Change the world?
There is literally a black student at woodson that developed a treatment for skin cancer that didn't get into TJ because of the random nature of the admissions process.
If you actually cared about finding the best students, you would stop putting race ahead of merit.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics