Mind you I have no idea what the numbers are or should be on either side of this. I just think saying that you know of one instance where the program was not cancelled is not the best argument that there's nothing going on here.
Ignore the data points, I’m fine?
Let's just gloss over the "defund the police" comparison, those are just bait.
Grades-based selection for high school seems crazy to me, it perpetuates problems with stratifying K-12 based on the socio-economic status of the neighbourhood. Parents are going to chase the schools with the best standing. Those with the means would do anything to boost the kids grades, including extra-curriculars. Those who don't have the means langish.
We see that all the time in places like HK.
Evaluating teachers based on weak proxies such as student grades are disasters. Weapons of Math Destruction has a whole chapter on it, and she'd explain it far better than I can.
I'm not opposed to grade-wide testing, as a data point to assist with the curriculum. But this articles doesn't even try to piece together a coherent point...
It makes me want to move to Finland or Singapore.
Secret how?
Is this a conspiracy theory?
Our district has a bazillion expensive programs for kids on the “left side of the curve” but there is so little funding for gifted kids they are forced to keep it on the down-low. Apparently in the past parents have stormed the school board meetings demanding their kid be admitted, threaten to sue for “unequal treatment”, etc.
Are we talking Lawrence Wilkerson, Rand Paul, Trump, Peter Hitchens, George Will, or Bill O'Reilly?
Of the ones on your list that I recognize, he's closest to George Will. A quick google suggests that he may be like Wilkerson. I wasn't able to learn anything useful about Peter Hitchens.
He's actually the guy who coined the term "axis of evil". So I'm not sure if you're making a joke or if it's just a coincidence.
RationalWiki has a rather amusing, somewhat satirical take on him:
When I was a kid my school had a "Gifted and Talented" program.
The "gifted" kids were selected based on performance on aptitude tests, then "talented" kids were appointed by the school board.
Every single "talented" kid had a teacher for a parent. That is not hyperbole.
I don't think it's deliberate, but I think this war against standardization is to further exclude outsiders.
At the time, I didn't understand why I was pulled out of class except to discover how quickly I could arrange triangles and be plopped in front of a piano like a just-add-water circus monkey expected to be an instant concert pianist with this one weird trick.
The war on merit is to make it all about victimhood. Forced busing also ruined public schools because more affluent parents pulled their kids put and put them in private schools, and the number of public schools decreased dramatically.
Having said that, I'm glad to see schools moving away from using tests as the primary metric. I think balancing standardized scores with things like a student's ranking in their school gives a higher-resolution image.
For example, take two students with similar test scores -- one at the top of their class in a struggling school and another in the middle of the pack at an elite school. The former is likely a more capable student given that they were able to earn a similar test score with fewer resources.
The other advantage with metrics like zip code or school ranking is that one way to game that kind of metric is to intentionally send your kids to a struggling school or merging school districts to incorporate struggling schools, and it seems like that might have some positive impacts.
That was a similar argument for indiscriminate school bussing, and if anything those formerly big-fish-in-a-small-pond students , past a certain age like 7 or 8, were more likely to fail in their more rigorous environment. This "reverse bussing" solution you've suggested could just result in the educational equivalent of gentrification or could push people to invent their way out public schooling entirely. And with the pandemic, the public school system had further undermined itself. As edutech and homeschooling platforms are become the next evolution in learning. Students won't be required to participate in struggling schools as that's not the only option left to them anymore. They can have their education a la carte. In addition to this, merging school districts isn't usually a move made for educational advancement. It's a move made for federal dollars or latent cost-cutting. And where there's one form of cost-cutting, there are bound to be others that slowly compromise student education starting with the education of the brightest. Parents who can afford charters or private school rarely deal with the shenanigans of politics or the sociological experiments that come with public education.
It's a sucky predicament to just ask schools to solve discrimination. And, more to his point, to ask white parents to potentially sacrifice their own kids' education for the good of the many. I think school admissions are the culmination of so many other societal errors. We wouldn't have such a fight over school admissions if our schools weren't so unequal. And our schools wouldn't be so unequal if our housing wasn't so unequal. Stopping testing-based admissions is like throwing a monkey wrench into an injustice machine.
