If certain demographics are heavily underrepresented (and I don't know if it's the case here), either we must assume that they are less smart (and so produce less "high school material") or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination. The latter being almost certainly true, lotteries and quotas don't look like the dumbest ideas.
So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for? The parents have three options: send your kid to school where they learn nothing (maybe get a tutor and self-learn?), send them to a private high school which costs north of $50k/year in SF (some are more like $65k... and that is IF you can get in!), or you move somewhere else. But there has been a country-wide effort to dumb down public schools combined with softer discipline (thanks to lawsuit fears), so you might simply end up at a private school anyway.
Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.
There is a major downside to selectivity as it's done right now, which is that you end up with a competitive pressure cooker in that program since the student body will mostly consist of kids with highly driven parents who demand top-of-class academic results, every assignment perfect. It makes kids anxious-to-suicidal depending on how much pressure they experience, but it doesn't make them uniformly better at the material; depending on the subject and the student, either they're way ahead or they are really struggling, and if they are already doing some work to think about the material, "study harder, do more homework" doesn't really increase that rate, it just makes them more performative and "grade-grubbing". And this doesn't change when you look at secondary education either; there are many "tough" and "competitive" colleges, but they don't turn out graduates that are of equivalently greater skill.
But that does not mean that dumbing down is a good idea! Selectivity within each school, and making greater use of online learning to offer advanced, fine-grained tracking, gets to the good part of selectivity, which is that learning becomes more focused on individual student needs. "Staying with the class" is in many ways the worst part of school and absolutely shouldn't be the thing to emphasize, whether we're talking about high-flying academics or troubled delinquents and special ed students.
Vast swaths of the country get by without having any choices in high schools. The idea that need a selection of different schools with different levels of prestige and focuses is such an urban entitlement.
If I need heart surgery, I’d rather be in NYC (Mount Sinai specifically) then BFE fly over country, and if I have the means I’m on the next flight. Same with education. Hard to find fault imho with those who want more than the lowest common denominator for their children.
Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not akin to burning libraries.
> So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for?
Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not the same as dumbing it down (whatever that is supposed to mean). In Europe children are not required to write essay or complete extracurricular activities to enroll in highschools or middleschools, and they are not generally dumber than the Americans.
> Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.
The admission criteria of a highschool do not necessarily reward merit. They are more likely to reward having been tutored on how to write highschool admission essays.
In some countries, the differentiation starts even much earlier than that, with 8 year long "gymnasiums".
I had to do an admissions test, plus average grade from primary school (50-50 scoring ratio, if I remember correctly).
They score everyone, and put them on a list. The top gets in. The rest, good luck, try somewhere else.
So it's not random.
No iphones, electric cars, or covid vaccines, for example.
Even the communists realized that when you've got smart students, take advantage and educate them as best you can.
The third reich idiotically drove out their best scientists, who wound up enthusiastically working for the Allies developing the technology that defeated the reich.
> We estimate several models with an extensive list of control variables and high school fixed effects. Results consistently show that high school GPA is a positive and statistically significant predictor of educational attainment and earnings in adulthood. Moreover, the coefficient estimates are large and economically important for each gender.
I doubt there will ever be a way to satisfactorily control for other variables when it comes to these sorts of real-life studies (there is a reason the majority of social science isn't reproducible[1])
> No iphones, electric cars, or covid vaccines, for example.
Do we have any data on the correlation between high-school admission criteria and inventing the Covid vaccine or whatever?
We are not talking about taking advantage of excellence, which starts to become visible after highschool. We are talking about 10-year-olds who go to school to be taught the fundamental theorem of arithmetics.
> Even the communists realized that when you've got smart students, take advantage and educate them as best you can. > The third reich idiotically drove out their best scientists, who wound up working for the Allies developing the technology that defeated the reich.
I don't know what the communists and the nazists have to do with changing the admission criteria of a high school. I suppose it's a way of expressing disagreement in American English?
Caltech requires good grades as criteria for admission. Caltech graduates have a disproportionately high percentage of Nobel prizes.
https://www.caltech.edu/about/legacy/awards-and-honors/nobel...
BTW, I think the mRNA vaccine technology is worthy of a Nobel Prize. Don't you?
> either we must assume that they are less smart … or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination
The failure of schooling starts much earlier than the admissions test, and it is wrong to infer from disparities in test results that the test itself is racist (as the ringleaders of the SF Board of Education assumed).
What do we do about these 10 year olds? We assume they are not "high school" material and we put them in the school for dumb kids? Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them and so the school system can't do anything about it?
> The failure of schooling starts much earlier than the admissions test, and it is wrong to infer from disparities in test results that the test itself is racist (as the ringleaders of the SF Board of Education assumed).
The admission test is not racist per se, but if it results in, say, blacks not being admitted to an institution, it exist in a framework that materially enables racism. We are talking about a high-school, which enrols 12 year olds to teach them basic trigonometry and some basic notions of history and literature (in the best case scenario) and not about Hydra hiring PhD candidates to build a death ray. When properly motivated, everybody with a 80+ IQ can succeed in high school, one may argue that you could pick them at random.
Each child, like each adult, has different motivations in life. Not all children are equally motivated for schoolwork.
> The admission test is not racist per se, but if it results in, say, blacks not being admitted to an institution, it exist in a framework that materially enables racism
No. You need to look at confounding variables, not just race. It could be that a large percentage of black children in this area come from poor families and must therefore work part-time jobs after school instead of studying. That’s just one example of many possibilities. “Correcting” the problem by putting these children into this special school does nothing to change their poverty: they still must work after school and can’t study. And that means they can’t keep up with the other children in this privileged school. Your solution is probably to make the schoolwork easier and force everyone to suffer the same fate. My solution is to give that family money so their high school kid doesn’t have to work to help support his family.
In reality, your solution is the one that gets chosen because of the wokeness movement.
Is this what the evidence suggests or what you wish to be true?
Yes, evidence suggests that blacks and Indians and whatnot are not dumber than whites and that foreigners are not dumber than the locals.
