8 ms·

This argument, while important, is the low hanging fruit of the affirmative action debate in my opinion. We would not need affirmative action if legacy based a

This argument, while important, is the low hanging fruit of the affirmative action debate in my opinion. We would not need affirmative action if legacy based admissions wasn't so prevalent in top schools. We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding to support teachers and enable smaller class sizes, test prep for students to take specialized exams, and after school extracurriculars, both academic and non-academic to prepare them for college. The best elementary schools in the nation are driven by property taxes, how many people do you know bought their house because of the school district? You probably did. Yet we really don't take these things into account when having these discussions. Everyone wants a fair and equitable opportunity for students to get a quality education but to really do so we need drastic reform to really enable that. There's enough political will to tackle the symptom that is AA but very few people want to tackle the causes.

jaaron 8y ago
But there's the rub: "We would not need affirmative action if [reality was different]." Ergo, we need affirmative action. That is not to say we shouldn't also put significant effort into eradicating institutional prejudices, eliminating poverty, and investing in all communities. However, that effort will take generations and may never fully succeed, which means affirmative action, in its various forms, is necessary to counter-balance failures elsewhere.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  > "We would not need affirmative action if [reality was different]." > Ergo, we need affirmative action. Logical fallacy. "I have a good immune system, so I would not need medicine if I got a cold." Doesn't mean I need medicine right now, when I'm not sick at all. EDIT: The example seems to be confusing people, so here's a more formal explanation: if (reality is different) then not (we need affirmative action) Does not imply: if not (reality is different) then (we need affirmative action) The original claim is P-> ~Q It doesn't follow that ~P -> Q
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - adarsh_p 8y ago
    The inverse of your example sentence would be something like - "I don't have a good immune system, so I would need medicine if I got a cold" - which makes sense, and is analogous to "Reality is not different, so we do need affirmative action."
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      The inverse of a proposition is not logically entailed by the proposition itself. You're looking for the contrapositive, but the contrapositive of his example is "I need medicine if I got a cold, so I do not have a good immune system."
    - adarsh_p 8y ago
      Got it, thanks for the explanations!
- StreamBright 8y ago
  Trying to force the outcome of something is never going to work. We need to fix the pipeline.
  - Berobero 8y ago
    Honest question: are there actually any long-term longitudinal studies of affirmative action that reasonably demonstrate it does or doesn't work? You seem to take it as a truism, but I'm not convinced that concerted after-the-fact addressing of symptoms is necessarily doomed to failure, pragmatically or generally speaking.
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    Saying there is an issue with the pipeline is he same as saying “white applicants are just better candidates”. Now, you may be right. It’s a hypothesis. But the other hypothesis is “standard admissions criteria are not adequately measuring how good candidates are.” One way or the other, you have to make a presumption. My presumption is that non-white people, as a group, are just as good as white people. That’s why I support continuing to experiment with admissions criteria until we find ones that give us close to equal representation (i.e. affirmative action.) It sounds like you disagree, you think the tests are measuring reality accurately, and it’s the non-white applicants who need to be better. Why? This isn’t a scientific debate, it’s a philosophical one. It’s two ways of interpreting the same data.
- adrr 8y ago
  You could make it around parent's income level and the amount of funding per capita the graduating school district receives. It's probably a better determinant to help the people who are really in need and removes race from the equation.
- WhyDoPeople 8y ago
  Your "ergo" is only seeing in black and white (pun not intended). We do not need affirmative action in its current form, as it actually is not fair or an actual equalizing platform. We do need a form of it that looks at ability and opportunity the child and the family have, and makes sure everybody at least has the same baseline of opportunities and skills they can work from. Growing up as a 2nd generation child from immigrant parents, you hear about all of the opportunities your father sees you have that he did not. I think many times there are cases of people being blind to what's always around them ... ability to start a business, work for a better life, provide an even better future for your child than you had. Malnutrition is a staggering problem for children that many people do not understand the severity of. It is much cheaper and convenient for a poor family to buy unhealthy food than healthy food. If a developing child does not have a good foundation to grow from, then that impacts their entire life. I think better education is the key to a better society. But that requires actual education and understanding. In my college in the USA, I saw forms of affirmative action where certain students who belonged to groups (usually divided by race) were allowed to continue with lower grades. This is a terrible idea, as it only promotes under education of these students, and actually hinders their understanding of the topics, and limits their real world opportunities in the future. Building a carriage is not the solution to flying to the moon. And right now we have a very poor carriage.
patrickg_zill 8y ago
Are you talking about "equality of opportunity" or "equality of outcome"?
- 40acres 8y ago
  Opportunity. Affirmative Action is a band aid on one of many gaping wounds in America caused by discrimatory policies. White flight, block busting and redlining all contribute to the current state of affairs in which Affirmative Action seems like a decent solution. The real solution however will require full scale reform. Have you ever seen video of a school board meeting where desegregation bussing was on the agenda? Parents go bezerk. But these are probably the same parents that would veto any changes to education funding that diminish the reliance on property taxes or any other reform which may affect them. We have a huge collective action problem in America. We have been taught that this is a land of fair opportunities and if you work hard you will get yours, but that has not been the case, so any action that tips the "free market" is looked down upon without acknowledgement that there are many policies that prevent equality of opportunities because they are subtle (in the form of tax breaks for instance) and are beneficial for the dominant groups.
  - fipple 8y ago
    Damn right I’ll fight tooth and nail any policy which aims to make my child’s school worse to make a different child’s school better. Selfish? Hell yes.
  - stevenwoo 8y ago
    You may be aware of it, but there is a proposed solution that works on the problem on both ends, the admission process and the local school districts, and is not racially based (except for the deep historical roots of class/income inequality in the USA.) https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/05/an-unusual-idea-for-fixing-school-segregation/560930/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/05/an-unu...
  - vixen99 8y ago
    Affirmative action bestows a patronizing narrative on the selected groups. And what's worst, the narrative likely taints the reputation of the beneficiaries thereafter. We all know examples of that. Affirmative action for one person almost always results in an undeserved kick in the backside for someone else.
kermittd 8y ago
Definitely low hanging fruit nevertheless I think it is a small step in the right direction. I would definitely like to see a more parental income based AA. Take the proverbial Black applicant whose parents are dentists, versus the proverbial Asian applicant whose parents emigrated and own a struggling restaurant. Who would rank higher on the AA scale? We know the answer. The other changes you mentioned are way more important, substantive, and difficult. How many parents (even those with great intentions!) would make the required sacrifices to see an equitable educational outcome for someone else's children?
- fipple 8y ago
  Going to an income basis would make me go from 100% opposed to AA to 100% supportive.
mantas 8y ago
While that would certainly improve education, affirmative action camp would still have plenty of talking points. More educated parents do have effect on their kids' educational ability. There's always space to one-up by those who got money. Classes can always be smaller, some schools can always have better teachers and equipment, more study-oriented students will keep concentrating in specific locations. Perfect equality is not possible.
- badlucklottery 8y ago
  >Perfect equality is not possible. Of course but this is one of those "perfect is the enemy of good" situations. Right now we're doing very little and it shows in Title I schools.
  - mantas 8y ago
    My point is that affirmative action will stay relevant as long as there's no perfect equality. Which is not possible. Even in today's situation affirmative action is wrong. We should accept people by merit, period.
gizmo686 8y ago
The other problem is that affirmative action (as currently practiced), is a very blunt instrument to mitigate the problems you describe. If your concern is fairness to people from underfunded schools, then discrimanate in favor of students from such schools. Currently, colleges do the opposite, since they use their historicall records to favor students that come from schools which have a history of producing students that do well at said college. The result of that is that the bennificiaries of AA tend to be the members of the target group who least need the help, and for whom the underlying justification is least relevent.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  How is affirmative action currently practiced? Not sure what you’re alluding to.
  - gizmo686 8y ago
    You could view my proposed course of action as affirmative action, and I am sure there are other approaches I haven't thought of without the problems I describe. The current practice I refer to is biasing decisions based on race.
madengr 8y ago
Throwing money at education doesn't fix anything. Washington, DC is a fine example. The worst performing school districts with the most money spent.
- vkou 8y ago
  Have you considered the possibility that these school districts have financial needs that are different from better districts, and that they would do even worse if there was less money spent on them?
  - pc86 8y ago
    Do you have examples of what some of these special needs would be?
    - jcranmer 8y ago
      In general, school districts in poorer neighborhoods need to spend more money on things like subsidizing lunches and before/after-school child care. Bad school districts also can have a spiral effect where parents with means take their children out of public schools and put them in other schools, leaving the public school with a higher baseline of children with learning disabilities or other adverse conditions for learning.
      - pc86 8y ago
        School lunch programs are largely federal, aren't they? The school itself isn't paying most (or any) of the bill, and I'm not aware of any link between socioeconomic status and learning disabilities.[0] Even if it did, does having a larger proportion of learning-disabled pupils negatively effect a school's funding? [0] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002221947600900911?journalCode=ldxa http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022219476009009...
    - vkou 8y ago
      Some examples: Schools with more special needs (In the literal sense) students will perform worse on standardized tests. They also need bigger budgets, because they need more staff, to support those special needs students. Schools with more students coming from troubled homes will perform worse on standardized tests (Because not only do those students score badly, many of them disrupt their classes, causing problems for other students.) The common solutions are smaller class sizes, more administrative staff, more money spent on dealing with damage to school property, more money spent on on-site security, etc. Being a teacher to 30 kids is hard. Being a teacher to 30 kids, and a parent to 10, and a cop to 5 is maddening. These school districts that are spending more money, and performing poorly... Usually aren't pissing it away on serving caviar on Thursdays, and filet mignon on Fridays in the cafeteria, or on sending the Grade 5 class to Disneyland, or on buying the principal a Porche.
nostrademons 8y ago
"The best elementary schools in the nation are driven by property taxes, how many people do you know bought their house because of the school district?" Sometimes I wonder how much of this is everyone mistaking causation vs. correlation. School districts with high property taxes tend to have a number of other features in common, like: stable 2-parent households; high incomes; ability to afford private tutors and enrichment opportunities; highly-educated parents; exposure to a wide social network of high-achieving peers; lack of environmental stressors; and probably genetic endowments for health & intelligence. Does anyone know of studies that have tried to tease out how much effect the educational system actually has on student outcomes, once you've controlled for parental wealth/intelligence/education/etc?
- 2bitencryption 8y ago
  Anecdote time: The high school I went to served two neighboring communities, one uber wealthy, the other lower class. As such, the uber-wealthy income taxpayers allowed our district to pay teachers in excess of $150k. I think our gym teacher made $200k. Several of my high school teachers were former university professors. And besides being qualified, these teachers were in general top-notch educators of high school students. I didn't notice any difference in achievement between the portion of students from the lower-class area and the portion of students from the wealthy area.
  - greedo 8y ago
    $200K for a gym teacher? Can you share the county/state? I'm amazed at that.
    - sushid 8y ago
      I'd guess Jersey or SoCal.
    - travmatt 8y ago
      The suburbs above NY (Connecticut) have lots of hedge fund employees and very elite prepatory schools, that’d be my first guess.
eric_b 8y ago
In Minneapolis the best schools are not the best funded. The North Minneapolis schools, which perform the worst, have the highest funding per pupil by a fair margin. I wish we could stop talking about education as though it's just a question of money. Certainly a base level of funding is required, but the real determinant of how well a child will do academically is how involved their parents are.
- 2trill2spill 8y ago
  Not just parents though I graduated from Minneapolis public schools and looking back I would say nearly 1/3rd of teachers should not have been teachers for one reason or another.
educationdata 8y ago
Your assumption is wrong. Even if there is no legacy based admissions, even if every school district in America received proper funding for everything, Black students will still have significantly low educational attainment and achievement. It is because the extremely high percentage of Black kids living under single parenthood family [1], and there is no educational / societal intervention can reverse its impact on Black kids' education and many many other aspects in their lifes. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_102.20.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_102.20.a...
- ejstronge 8y ago
  > Your assumption is wrong Perhaps... > It is because the extremely high percentage of Black kids living under single parenthood family [1] This is wildly unsourced - what data do you have (ideally across nations/racial categories) for this?
  - thatswrong0 8y ago
    Wildly unsourced? The person you're responding has a link right there in their comment with a government source.
    - ejstronge 8y ago
      Where in that link does the case for single-parenting causing poor outcomes get made? Why is pointing to a spreadsheet sufficient evidence for a complex outcome? This and the other sibling comments seem focused on single-parenting and not the rest of the GP argument (which I still maintain is unsupported).
  - fipple 8y ago
    This is such a well known fact that calling it unsourced is like calling a claim that the sun rises in the east unsourced. https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in-single-parent-families-by#detailed/1/any/false/870,573,869,36,868,867,133,38,35,18/10,11,9,12,1,185,13/432,431 https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in...
nostromo 8y ago
> We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding I'd like this to be true, but unfortunately, it just isn't. Many of the worst performing schools in America are actually reasonably well funded. Take a look at DC or Chicago and you will find individual schools within those districts that perform very poorly despite being similarly (or better) funded compared to their peers. More funding isn't always the answer. Something else is going on.
skrjabin 8y ago
The Justice Dept.'s issue however is not with affirmative action but whether Harvard's affirmative action policy/execution is lawful.
muh_gradle 8y ago
It's not mutually exclusive, and this particular issue isn't low hanging fruit. If anything, this is close to the debate on affirmative action as they come. Harvard, and universities in the US have biased admissions processes with Asian Americans that go beyond what affirmative action is supposed to accomplish.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sanitizer 8y ago
>> how many people do you know bought their house because of the school district Everyone I know, this is in the South Bay part of the SFBA
waterhouse 8y ago
Legacy-based admissions are one thing, though I can't see how a policy based on race would be the right tool to combat that (and it's not entirely clear to me that it's unjustified for a school to find ways to get alumni funding, though some institutions like Harvard clearly have all the funding they need). As for students that come from schools with or without "proper funding" and such that "prepare them for college" better or worse... Suppose it's true that certain students would be the most meritorious if everyone got an optimal education, but that, due to unfortunate circumstances, some of those students ended up being significantly less prepared than the rest. Do you actually recommend a policy that would force colleges to take these less-prepared students? It seems like a recipe for problems. (You don't actually say the opposite statement—"we would need affirmative action if some school districts do not receive proper funding". It seems implied, though you also call AA a "symptom", which admits an interpretation like "the situation makes people mad and they'll demand X and probably get it, though I don't necessarily think they're right to do so".)
PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
>We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding to support teachers and enable smaller class sizes, test prep for students to take specialized exams, and after school extracurriculars, both academic and non-academic to prepare them for college. What counts as proper funding given many school systems get massive amounts of money that is lost to corruption and past debts (which are themselves likely attributed to corruption). And how will money fix the problems of lack of parental involvement and a culture that disparages seeking further education.
- zacharytelschow 8y ago
  > how will money fix the problems of lack of parental involvement and a culture that disparages seeking further education. Bingo.
zacharytelschow 8y ago
So your solution to past injustices is systemetized injustices in the other direction?
- jessaustin 8y ago
  That isn't unheard-of. Tort law, for instance, has something of that flavor. You might respond that we're talking about different time periods. However, that ignores present reality. Right now, minorities face systematized injustice in numerous important ways.
  - zacharytelschow 8y ago
    What systematized injustices are you referring to?
    - jessaustin 8y ago
      Please familiarize yourself with basic facts about crime and punishment in USA. After that, pay attention to how those basic facts affect the communities on which they are imposed.
      - zacharytelschow 8y ago
        The basic facts are black people commit more violent crime and have a correspondingly high rate of incarceration. They have a higher prevalence of single parent homes, a contributing factor to academic under achievement (and future crime). Blacks commit abortion at such an alarming rate, in some major US cities there are more black abortions than live births. Screaming racism and demanding reparations (through redistribution of wealth, affirmative action, or other means) isn't going to change the real, underlying problems.
        jessaustin 8y ago
        Screaming? Who is screaming? Blacks are a small minority; they do not commit "more" crimes of any sort than whites commit. Yet 90% of the victims of Chicago PD violence are black. [0] In other locations like Ferguson MO, poor blacks are a captive gold mine for predatory police, prosecutors, jailers, and municipalities. [1] You cannot possibly not have heard anything about this. Even if you were right (you're not) about the verdicts reached by such a self-evidently flawed system, how could you trust those verdicts? As you would know if you knew any statistics, the average black person, just like the average white person, will never commit a violent crime. But still you clutch your pearls. USA has more people in prison in both percentage and absolute terms, than any other polity on earth in history. Crime of all sorts has dropped for decades. If drug prohibition ended, crime would drop precipitously again. In aggregate, justice would be served if everyone in prison today were pardoned tomorrow. There is no defensible reason, whether that's violent crime or anything else, to fear blacks or any minority. So why do you fear them? You're going to have to answer that one for yourself. [0] https://theintercept.com/2018/08/16/chicago-police-misconduct-racial-disparity/ https://theintercept.com/2018/08/16/chicago-police-misconduc... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/03/04/the-12-key-highlights-from-the-dojs-scathing-ferguson-report/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/03/0...
seatdrummer 8y ago
Legacy admissions is a separate issue which basically everybody would be in favor of removing because such a tiny tiny minority of kids actually get that benefit. After that only reasons you've listed for affirmative action have to do with economics. Why not just be race agnostic and then factor in income? As time passes races will fall in and out of the income brackets and nobody can argue its unfair.
thereare5lights 8y ago
> We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding to support teachers and enable smaller class sizes, test prep for students to take specialized exams, and after school extracurriculars, both academic and non-academic to prepare them for college. That doesn't change the economic conditions of the student's home life.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
> We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding In the US overall, school funding is negatively correlated with student achievement. This does not suggest that lack of funding is an obstacle to achievement.
jim-jim-jim 8y ago
I was a high school teacher for half a decade (not exactly veteran status, I know) and I've kind of soured on the very concept of education. Both affirmative action and the general push for increased funding suffer from the same fundamental flaw of "fostering opportunity." Even if every last student in the US were educated to the point of genius, at the end of the day they'd still be let loose in an economy where wealth is derived from ownership, not brainpower. Devoting so many resources towards ensuring everybody is as intelligent as Bill Gates is a fool's errand when only a sliver of a sliver can ever be Bill Gates. The sentiments that drive these initiatives are generally progressive. I don't doubt that most people involved in AA and educational reform ultimately want to ensure material security for every student in the country. The problem lies in attempting to do so through a rigged framework. It would be nice if this energy were redirected towards guaranteeing material security directly through class-conscious mass politics, without regard for that middleman "opportunity."
SenseiMaster 8y ago
It's not low hanging fruit by any means. I'm guessing it would raise the Asian American population by 10s of % at all the top tier schools. The set of students who are both poor and almost meets Ivy League standards is most likely very Asian. IIRC, universities have made the argument that financial affirmative action would not work for racial diversity (implicitly because few poor students who do well are black or Hispanic). Generally, this set is competing with the privileged black and Hispanic students who under perform compared to their socioeconomic background. Removing affirmative action would displace almost exclusively rich Hispanic and black elites with a mix of poor Asians and some rich Asian/white elites.
millermp12 8y ago
I think you're completely missing the artificial signaling that is at stake here. The scarcity is _by design_. Cf Brian Kaplan "The Case Against Education" https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp/0691174652 https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d... Robin Hanson "Elephant in the Brain" https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyday/dp/0190495995 https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...
JamesBarney 8y ago
Asians make up 22% of the harvard class(with the current quota system), and are 6% of the U.S. population. I don't think eliminated legacy based admissions or increasing school funding would bring this number down.

jaaron 8y ago

But there's the rub: "We would not need affirmative action if [reality was different]." Ergo, we need affirmative action. That is not to say we shouldn't also put significant effort into eradicating institutional prejudices, eliminating poverty, and investing in all communities. However, that effort will take generations and may never fully succeed, which means affirmative action, in its various forms, is necessary to counter-balance failures elsewhere.

dunpeal 8y ago
> "We would not need affirmative action if [reality was different]." > Ergo, we need affirmative action. Logical fallacy. "I have a good immune system, so I would not need medicine if I got a cold." Doesn't mean I need medicine right now, when I'm not sick at all. EDIT: The example seems to be confusing people, so here's a more formal explanation: if (reality is different) then not (we need affirmative action) Does not imply: if not (reality is different) then (we need affirmative action) The original claim is P-> ~Q It doesn't follow that ~P -> Q
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- adarsh_p 8y ago
  The inverse of your example sentence would be something like - "I don't have a good immune system, so I would need medicine if I got a cold" - which makes sense, and is analogous to "Reality is not different, so we do need affirmative action."
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    The inverse of a proposition is not logically entailed by the proposition itself. You're looking for the contrapositive, but the contrapositive of his example is "I need medicine if I got a cold, so I do not have a good immune system."
  - adarsh_p 8y ago
    Got it, thanks for the explanations!
StreamBright 8y ago
Trying to force the outcome of something is never going to work. We need to fix the pipeline.
- Berobero 8y ago
  Honest question: are there actually any long-term longitudinal studies of affirmative action that reasonably demonstrate it does or doesn't work? You seem to take it as a truism, but I'm not convinced that concerted after-the-fact addressing of symptoms is necessarily doomed to failure, pragmatically or generally speaking.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  Saying there is an issue with the pipeline is he same as saying “white applicants are just better candidates”. Now, you may be right. It’s a hypothesis. But the other hypothesis is “standard admissions criteria are not adequately measuring how good candidates are.” One way or the other, you have to make a presumption. My presumption is that non-white people, as a group, are just as good as white people. That’s why I support continuing to experiment with admissions criteria until we find ones that give us close to equal representation (i.e. affirmative action.) It sounds like you disagree, you think the tests are measuring reality accurately, and it’s the non-white applicants who need to be better. Why? This isn’t a scientific debate, it’s a philosophical one. It’s two ways of interpreting the same data.
adrr 8y ago
You could make it around parent's income level and the amount of funding per capita the graduating school district receives. It's probably a better determinant to help the people who are really in need and removes race from the equation.
WhyDoPeople 8y ago
Your "ergo" is only seeing in black and white (pun not intended). We do not need affirmative action in its current form, as it actually is not fair or an actual equalizing platform. We do need a form of it that looks at ability and opportunity the child and the family have, and makes sure everybody at least has the same baseline of opportunities and skills they can work from. Growing up as a 2nd generation child from immigrant parents, you hear about all of the opportunities your father sees you have that he did not. I think many times there are cases of people being blind to what's always around them ... ability to start a business, work for a better life, provide an even better future for your child than you had. Malnutrition is a staggering problem for children that many people do not understand the severity of. It is much cheaper and convenient for a poor family to buy unhealthy food than healthy food. If a developing child does not have a good foundation to grow from, then that impacts their entire life. I think better education is the key to a better society. But that requires actual education and understanding. In my college in the USA, I saw forms of affirmative action where certain students who belonged to groups (usually divided by race) were allowed to continue with lower grades. This is a terrible idea, as it only promotes under education of these students, and actually hinders their understanding of the topics, and limits their real world opportunities in the future. Building a carriage is not the solution to flying to the moon. And right now we have a very poor carriage.

patrickg_zill 8y ago

Are you talking about "equality of opportunity" or "equality of outcome"?

40acres 8y ago
Opportunity. Affirmative Action is a band aid on one of many gaping wounds in America caused by discrimatory policies. White flight, block busting and redlining all contribute to the current state of affairs in which Affirmative Action seems like a decent solution. The real solution however will require full scale reform. Have you ever seen video of a school board meeting where desegregation bussing was on the agenda? Parents go bezerk. But these are probably the same parents that would veto any changes to education funding that diminish the reliance on property taxes or any other reform which may affect them. We have a huge collective action problem in America. We have been taught that this is a land of fair opportunities and if you work hard you will get yours, but that has not been the case, so any action that tips the "free market" is looked down upon without acknowledgement that there are many policies that prevent equality of opportunities because they are subtle (in the form of tax breaks for instance) and are beneficial for the dominant groups.
- fipple 8y ago
  Damn right I’ll fight tooth and nail any policy which aims to make my child’s school worse to make a different child’s school better. Selfish? Hell yes.
- stevenwoo 8y ago
  You may be aware of it, but there is a proposed solution that works on the problem on both ends, the admission process and the local school districts, and is not racially based (except for the deep historical roots of class/income inequality in the USA.) https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/05/an-unusual-idea-for-fixing-school-segregation/560930/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/05/an-unu...
- vixen99 8y ago
  Affirmative action bestows a patronizing narrative on the selected groups. And what's worst, the narrative likely taints the reputation of the beneficiaries thereafter. We all know examples of that. Affirmative action for one person almost always results in an undeserved kick in the backside for someone else.

kermittd 8y ago

Definitely low hanging fruit nevertheless I think it is a small step in the right direction. I would definitely like to see a more parental income based AA. Take the proverbial Black applicant whose parents are dentists, versus the proverbial Asian applicant whose parents emigrated and own a struggling restaurant. Who would rank higher on the AA scale? We know the answer. The other changes you mentioned are way more important, substantive, and difficult. How many parents (even those with great intentions!) would make the required sacrifices to see an equitable educational outcome for someone else's children?

fipple 8y ago
Going to an income basis would make me go from 100% opposed to AA to 100% supportive.

mantas 8y ago

While that would certainly improve education, affirmative action camp would still have plenty of talking points. More educated parents do have effect on their kids' educational ability. There's always space to one-up by those who got money. Classes can always be smaller, some schools can always have better teachers and equipment, more study-oriented students will keep concentrating in specific locations. Perfect equality is not possible.

badlucklottery 8y ago
>Perfect equality is not possible. Of course but this is one of those "perfect is the enemy of good" situations. Right now we're doing very little and it shows in Title I schools.
- mantas 8y ago
  My point is that affirmative action will stay relevant as long as there's no perfect equality. Which is not possible. Even in today's situation affirmative action is wrong. We should accept people by merit, period.

gizmo686 8y ago

The other problem is that affirmative action (as currently practiced), is a very blunt instrument to mitigate the problems you describe. If your concern is fairness to people from underfunded schools, then discrimanate in favor of students from such schools. Currently, colleges do the opposite, since they use their historicall records to favor students that come from schools which have a history of producing students that do well at said college. The result of that is that the bennificiaries of AA tend to be the members of the target group who least need the help, and for whom the underlying justification is least relevent.

erikpukinskis 8y ago
How is affirmative action currently practiced? Not sure what you’re alluding to.
- gizmo686 8y ago
  You could view my proposed course of action as affirmative action, and I am sure there are other approaches I haven't thought of without the problems I describe. The current practice I refer to is biasing decisions based on race.

madengr 8y ago

Throwing money at education doesn't fix anything. Washington, DC is a fine example. The worst performing school districts with the most money spent.

vkou 8y ago
Have you considered the possibility that these school districts have financial needs that are different from better districts, and that they would do even worse if there was less money spent on them?
- pc86 8y ago
  Do you have examples of what some of these special needs would be?
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    In general, school districts in poorer neighborhoods need to spend more money on things like subsidizing lunches and before/after-school child care. Bad school districts also can have a spiral effect where parents with means take their children out of public schools and put them in other schools, leaving the public school with a higher baseline of children with learning disabilities or other adverse conditions for learning.
    - pc86 8y ago
      School lunch programs are largely federal, aren't they? The school itself isn't paying most (or any) of the bill, and I'm not aware of any link between socioeconomic status and learning disabilities.[0] Even if it did, does having a larger proportion of learning-disabled pupils negatively effect a school's funding? [0] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002221947600900911?journalCode=ldxa http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022219476009009...
  - vkou 8y ago
    Some examples: Schools with more special needs (In the literal sense) students will perform worse on standardized tests. They also need bigger budgets, because they need more staff, to support those special needs students. Schools with more students coming from troubled homes will perform worse on standardized tests (Because not only do those students score badly, many of them disrupt their classes, causing problems for other students.) The common solutions are smaller class sizes, more administrative staff, more money spent on dealing with damage to school property, more money spent on on-site security, etc. Being a teacher to 30 kids is hard. Being a teacher to 30 kids, and a parent to 10, and a cop to 5 is maddening. These school districts that are spending more money, and performing poorly... Usually aren't pissing it away on serving caviar on Thursdays, and filet mignon on Fridays in the cafeteria, or on sending the Grade 5 class to Disneyland, or on buying the principal a Porche.

nostrademons 8y ago

"The best elementary schools in the nation are driven by property taxes, how many people do you know bought their house because of the school district?" Sometimes I wonder how much of this is everyone mistaking causation vs. correlation. School districts with high property taxes tend to have a number of other features in common, like: stable 2-parent households; high incomes; ability to afford private tutors and enrichment opportunities; highly-educated parents; exposure to a wide social network of high-achieving peers; lack of environmental stressors; and probably genetic endowments for health & intelligence. Does anyone know of studies that have tried to tease out how much effect the educational system actually has on student outcomes, once you've controlled for parental wealth/intelligence/education/etc?

2bitencryption 8y ago
Anecdote time: The high school I went to served two neighboring communities, one uber wealthy, the other lower class. As such, the uber-wealthy income taxpayers allowed our district to pay teachers in excess of $150k. I think our gym teacher made $200k. Several of my high school teachers were former university professors. And besides being qualified, these teachers were in general top-notch educators of high school students. I didn't notice any difference in achievement between the portion of students from the lower-class area and the portion of students from the wealthy area.
- greedo 8y ago
  $200K for a gym teacher? Can you share the county/state? I'm amazed at that.
  - sushid 8y ago
    I'd guess Jersey or SoCal.
  - travmatt 8y ago
    The suburbs above NY (Connecticut) have lots of hedge fund employees and very elite prepatory schools, that’d be my first guess.

eric_b 8y ago

In Minneapolis the best schools are not the best funded. The North Minneapolis schools, which perform the worst, have the highest funding per pupil by a fair margin. I wish we could stop talking about education as though it's just a question of money. Certainly a base level of funding is required, but the real determinant of how well a child will do academically is how involved their parents are.

2trill2spill 8y ago
Not just parents though I graduated from Minneapolis public schools and looking back I would say nearly 1/3rd of teachers should not have been teachers for one reason or another.

educationdata 8y ago

Your assumption is wrong. Even if there is no legacy based admissions, even if every school district in America received proper funding for everything, Black students will still have significantly low educational attainment and achievement. It is because the extremely high percentage of Black kids living under single parenthood family [1], and there is no educational / societal intervention can reverse its impact on Black kids' education and many many other aspects in their lifes. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_102.20.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_102.20.a...

ejstronge 8y ago
> Your assumption is wrong Perhaps... > It is because the extremely high percentage of Black kids living under single parenthood family [1] This is wildly unsourced - what data do you have (ideally across nations/racial categories) for this?
- thatswrong0 8y ago
  Wildly unsourced? The person you're responding has a link right there in their comment with a government source.
  - ejstronge 8y ago
    Where in that link does the case for single-parenting causing poor outcomes get made? Why is pointing to a spreadsheet sufficient evidence for a complex outcome? This and the other sibling comments seem focused on single-parenting and not the rest of the GP argument (which I still maintain is unsupported).
- fipple 8y ago
  This is such a well known fact that calling it unsourced is like calling a claim that the sun rises in the east unsourced. https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in-single-parent-families-by#detailed/1/any/false/870,573,869,36,868,867,133,38,35,18/10,11,9,12,1,185,13/432,431 https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in...

nostromo 8y ago

> We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding I'd like this to be true, but unfortunately, it just isn't. Many of the worst performing schools in America are actually reasonably well funded. Take a look at DC or Chicago and you will find individual schools within those districts that perform very poorly despite being similarly (or better) funded compared to their peers. More funding isn't always the answer. Something else is going on.

skrjabin 8y ago

The Justice Dept.'s issue however is not with affirmative action but whether Harvard's affirmative action policy/execution is lawful.

muh_gradle 8y ago

It's not mutually exclusive, and this particular issue isn't low hanging fruit. If anything, this is close to the debate on affirmative action as they come. Harvard, and universities in the US have biased admissions processes with Asian Americans that go beyond what affirmative action is supposed to accomplish.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

sanitizer 8y ago

>> how many people do you know bought their house because of the school district Everyone I know, this is in the South Bay part of the SFBA

waterhouse 8y ago

Legacy-based admissions are one thing, though I can't see how a policy based on race would be the right tool to combat that (and it's not entirely clear to me that it's unjustified for a school to find ways to get alumni funding, though some institutions like Harvard clearly have all the funding they need). As for students that come from schools with or without "proper funding" and such that "prepare them for college" better or worse... Suppose it's true that certain students would be the most meritorious if everyone got an optimal education, but that, due to unfortunate circumstances, some of those students ended up being significantly less prepared than the rest. Do you actually recommend a policy that would force colleges to take these less-prepared students? It seems like a recipe for problems. (You don't actually say the opposite statement—"we would need affirmative action if some school districts do not receive proper funding". It seems implied, though you also call AA a "symptom", which admits an interpretation like "the situation makes people mad and they'll demand X and probably get it, though I don't necessarily think they're right to do so".)

PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago

>We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding to support teachers and enable smaller class sizes, test prep for students to take specialized exams, and after school extracurriculars, both academic and non-academic to prepare them for college. What counts as proper funding given many school systems get massive amounts of money that is lost to corruption and past debts (which are themselves likely attributed to corruption). And how will money fix the problems of lack of parental involvement and a culture that disparages seeking further education.

zacharytelschow 8y ago
> how will money fix the problems of lack of parental involvement and a culture that disparages seeking further education. Bingo.

zacharytelschow 8y ago

So your solution to past injustices is systemetized injustices in the other direction?

jessaustin 8y ago
That isn't unheard-of. Tort law, for instance, has something of that flavor. You might respond that we're talking about different time periods. However, that ignores present reality. Right now, minorities face systematized injustice in numerous important ways.
- zacharytelschow 8y ago
  What systematized injustices are you referring to?
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    Please familiarize yourself with basic facts about crime and punishment in USA. After that, pay attention to how those basic facts affect the communities on which they are imposed.
    - zacharytelschow 8y ago
      The basic facts are black people commit more violent crime and have a correspondingly high rate of incarceration. They have a higher prevalence of single parent homes, a contributing factor to academic under achievement (and future crime). Blacks commit abortion at such an alarming rate, in some major US cities there are more black abortions than live births. Screaming racism and demanding reparations (through redistribution of wealth, affirmative action, or other means) isn't going to change the real, underlying problems.
      - jessaustin 8y ago
        Screaming? Who is screaming? Blacks are a small minority; they do not commit "more" crimes of any sort than whites commit. Yet 90% of the victims of Chicago PD violence are black. [0] In other locations like Ferguson MO, poor blacks are a captive gold mine for predatory police, prosecutors, jailers, and municipalities. [1] You cannot possibly not have heard anything about this. Even if you were right (you're not) about the verdicts reached by such a self-evidently flawed system, how could you trust those verdicts? As you would know if you knew any statistics, the average black person, just like the average white person, will never commit a violent crime. But still you clutch your pearls. USA has more people in prison in both percentage and absolute terms, than any other polity on earth in history. Crime of all sorts has dropped for decades. If drug prohibition ended, crime would drop precipitously again. In aggregate, justice would be served if everyone in prison today were pardoned tomorrow. There is no defensible reason, whether that's violent crime or anything else, to fear blacks or any minority. So why do you fear them? You're going to have to answer that one for yourself. [0] https://theintercept.com/2018/08/16/chicago-police-misconduct-racial-disparity/ https://theintercept.com/2018/08/16/chicago-police-misconduc... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/03/04/the-12-key-highlights-from-the-dojs-scathing-ferguson-report/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/03/0...

seatdrummer 8y ago

Legacy admissions is a separate issue which basically everybody would be in favor of removing because such a tiny tiny minority of kids actually get that benefit. After that only reasons you've listed for affirmative action have to do with economics. Why not just be race agnostic and then factor in income? As time passes races will fall in and out of the income brackets and nobody can argue its unfair.

thereare5lights 8y ago

thaumasiotes 8y ago

> We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding In the US overall, school funding is negatively correlated with student achievement. This does not suggest that lack of funding is an obstacle to achievement.

jim-jim-jim 8y ago

I was a high school teacher for half a decade (not exactly veteran status, I know) and I've kind of soured on the very concept of education. Both affirmative action and the general push for increased funding suffer from the same fundamental flaw of "fostering opportunity." Even if every last student in the US were educated to the point of genius, at the end of the day they'd still be let loose in an economy where wealth is derived from ownership, not brainpower. Devoting so many resources towards ensuring everybody is as intelligent as Bill Gates is a fool's errand when only a sliver of a sliver can ever be Bill Gates. The sentiments that drive these initiatives are generally progressive. I don't doubt that most people involved in AA and educational reform ultimately want to ensure material security for every student in the country. The problem lies in attempting to do so through a rigged framework. It would be nice if this energy were redirected towards guaranteeing material security directly through class-conscious mass politics, without regard for that middleman "opportunity."

SenseiMaster 8y ago

It's not low hanging fruit by any means. I'm guessing it would raise the Asian American population by 10s of % at all the top tier schools. The set of students who are both poor and almost meets Ivy League standards is most likely very Asian. IIRC, universities have made the argument that financial affirmative action would not work for racial diversity (implicitly because few poor students who do well are black or Hispanic). Generally, this set is competing with the privileged black and Hispanic students who under perform compared to their socioeconomic background. Removing affirmative action would displace almost exclusively rich Hispanic and black elites with a mix of poor Asians and some rich Asian/white elites.

millermp12 8y ago

I think you're completely missing the artificial signaling that is at stake here. The scarcity is _by design_. Cf Brian Kaplan "The Case Against Education" https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp/0691174652 https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d... Robin Hanson "Elephant in the Brain" https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyday/dp/0190495995 https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...

JamesBarney 8y ago

Asians make up 22% of the harvard class(with the current quota system), and are 6% of the U.S. population. I don't think eliminated legacy based admissions or increasing school funding would bring this number down.