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I have never been thoughtful enough to realize that the exclusions mentioned (women, POC) throughout US history fit the definition of 'identity' or 'identity po

• stcredzero 8y ago
  the omissions present, and the effects of historical politically enforced inequalities must be taken into account I say this as a lifelong Democratic party member and voter. (Until recently.) In 2019, inequality is propagated through differences in access to effective educational environments. It's the Democratic party which opposes school vouchers and funding increased choice in education for disadvantaged neighborhoods. I know that such choice is an important issue for inner city parents. I've been approached by an inner city mother asking how she could get a coding education for her son. As was mentioned in the Watergate scandal, always "follow the money." (Or eyeballs. Or fame. Or votes.) Who benefits from disadvantaged neighborhoods? Who benefits from encouraging large populations to refuse to assimilate into their host society?
  • dbt00 8y ago
    > I say this as a lifelong Democratic party member and voter. (Until recently.) In 2019, inequality is propagated through differences in access to effective educational environments. It's the Democratic party which opposes school vouchers and funding increased choice in education for disadvantaged neighborhoods. I know that such choice is an important issue for inner city parents. I've been approached by an inner city mother asking how she could get a coding education for her son. One, this is completely off-topic for this article. Two, and this is important, I find the "I, an anonymous person, used to believe X, so you should believe me when I espouse political beliefs that are antithetical to X" school of debating incredibly tiring. Just make your case, skip the "as a ...." introduction. Third, and this is important -- almost all school voucher programs are designed to take public money and put them into subpar schools with few to no standards. Voucher programs with standards get support, voucher programs that exempt private recipients of funds do not. > Who benefits from encouraging large populations to refuse to assimilate into their host society? Most democrats and public education supporters are for integrated education. Most voucher supporters are not.
    • stcredzero 8y ago
      One, this is completely off-topic for this article. Not at all. If you want to look at how disadvantage is propagated, that is exactly what it is in the US. I find the "I, an anonymous person, used to believe X, so you should believe me when I espouse political beliefs that are antithetical to X" school of debating incredibly tiring. Just make your case, skip the "as a ...." introduction. Then just take my advice and start "following the money." If you believe there is systemic discrimination which has lasted decades, there must be a reason for it. Start ferreting out the incentives. Who profits in terms of money and power? https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/11/14/a-legacy-of-liberalism https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/11/14/a-legacy-o... Third, and this is important -- almost all school voucher programs are designed to take public money and put them into subpar schools with few to no standards. Voucher programs with standards get support, voucher programs that exempt private recipients of funds do not. Feel free to link some articles about this. Standards could be used as a political tool to repress competitors, or there could be real concern about standards, or there could be a mixture of both. Most voucher supporters are not. Many voucher supporters are the very disadvantaged people we are supposed to be helping!
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      • gamblor956 8y ago
        Politics isn't always about profit. A lot of times its simply apathy or a lack of resources.
        • stcredzero 8y ago
          In the case of disadvantaged minorities, it's often about cultural isolation and a corrupt minority elite.
  • moosey 8y ago
    > In 2019, inequality is propagated through differences in access to effective educational environments. This is not accurate, and has been covered in excruciating detail in books like "The New Jim Crow" and "The Color of Law", so I don't feel like I need to argue the case at extreme length. > Who benefits from disadvantaged neighborhoods? People who want cheap workers. People who want to make sure that they don't have a voice. People who don't want to pay taxes. > Who benefits from encouraging large populations to refuse to assimilate into their host society? People who want to make sure racists vote.
    • stcredzero 8y ago
      People who want cheap workers. Employers want good workers, at any price. Employers want socialized and dependable workers, and many schools don't manage to support this. People who want to make sure that they don't have a voice. I have no idea who that might be, unless it's people who de-platform, namecall, and denigrate people for "wrongthink," even if it's not anything bad and just asking questions and thinking differently. If people are to have a voice, they need to be free to "fire" their representatives. It doesn't seem like the media and the political machines of the cities actually want that. People who don't want to pay taxes. People who are concerned that government is too big would rather such neighborhoods didn't exist. The incentive structure of aid would seem to propagate the very conditions it's supposed to help. > Who benefits from encouraging large populations to refuse to assimilate into their host society? People who want to make sure racists vote. The people who talk in terms of race and identity for votes are the unsavory part of politics, on both the left and the right of US politics.
      • moosey 8y ago
        This is a nation based on race and identity, almost it's entire history. We only started calling it identity politics when people who aren't in power try to achieve justice. Here is why we shouldn't do the private school voucher thing, unless we take away the right of private schools to select their students: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2016/03/29/the-overwhelming-whiteness-of-u-s-private-schools-in-six-maps-and-charts/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ef02d08ca98b https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2016/03/29/...
  • mturmon 8y ago
    > ...the Democratic party which opposes school vouchers and funding increased choice in education for disadvantaged neighborhoods... Hmm, in my city (LA), one Republican (Riordan) and later Democratic mayors (Hahn and Villaraigosa) have strongly supported charter schools, and the results (after two decades plus) are decidedly mixed. I used to be a moderate supporter of charters, basically for the reasons you mention, but the experiment has generally failed. Basically, oversight of a network of charter schools is really hard, so there will be bad charter schools that "look good" from the outside. It's hard for parents, even involved parents, to understand this before their kids graduate, so there's no good corrective for charters that are siphoning money off, or providing poor educational outcomes. This seems to be a case where market pressures suffer from a too-long feedback loop, and information about outcomes is too hard to acquire.
    • stcredzero 8y ago
      Hmm, in my city (LA), one Republican (Riordan) and later Democratic mayors (Hahn and Villaraigosa) have strongly supported charter schools, and the results (after two decades plus) are decidedly mixed. I used to be a moderate supporter of charters, basically for the reasons you mention, but the experiment has generally failed. So there was some success and there was some failure? Urban public schools seem to be a failure overall. Shouldn't we see an experiment that yielded some successes as a success in gaining information? Basically, oversight of a network of charter schools is really hard, so there will be bad charter schools that "look good" from the outside. It's hard for parents, even involved parents, to understand this before their kids graduate, so there's no good corrective for charters that are siphoning money off, or providing poor educational outcomes. This seems to be a case where market pressures suffer from a too-long feedback loop, and information about outcomes is too hard to acquire. I think this applies to schools, period. No, there's no good corrective which guarantees a parent can use to put their kid into the right school, outside of moving to a good neighborhood. (And even there, there's no guarantee.) The information loop is going to take generations to work out. So long as the institutions last over several generations, that will at least be possible.
      • mturmon 8y ago
  • aidenn0 8y ago
    I'm opposed to school vouchers because I feel like the most likely outcome is to move private schools from the 1% to the 10%, and as upper-middle class parents abandon public schools, the political will to improve them will decline. I've seen cases where school choice was marginally improved, and what happened was that the parents who had the largest combination of motivation and time moved their kids, which caused what was left of the school to become ghettoized, because those were the same parents who would volunteer in the classroom, run the PTA, seek out donors for particular programs &c. It's possible that larger changes would result in improvements even though smaller changes result in serious problems, but I don't see larger changes coming soon, and school voucher programs do not appear to be large enough to accomplish this goal. We may be stuck in a very pessimal middle ground right now; it seems likely that significantly increasing school choice would improve things from where we are, but also seems likely that the exact opposite approach of banning private schools and assigning kids to public schools by lottery would also improve things, as that could motivate the wealthy and connected to improve schools that poor kids are equally likely to end up in.
    • stcredzero 8y ago
      but also seems likely that the exact opposite approach of banning private schools and assigning kids to public schools by lottery would also improve things Can you imagine if that were done to you?
      • aidenn0 8y ago
        Arguing over the morality (or even constitutionality) of such a measure was not the point of me bringing it up. It's obviously a complete political non-starter in the US (it's within the Overton Window in Britain, but still highly unlikely). The point was that there are compelling arguments to make that both greatly liberalizing school choice and greatly eliminating school choice would improve things for those who are economically disadvantaged. That says a lot about how badly things are working now.
        • stcredzero 8y ago
  • jacobolus 8y ago
    > It's the Democratic party which opposes school vouchers and funding increased choice in education for disadvantaged neighborhoods. I would recommend taking a slightly broader view of the politics involved, and reading more from education policy experts. Charter schools are being pushed predominantly by folks with an agenda to (a) break the power of teachers’ unions (and organized labor more generally), so that they can reduce teacher pay, benefits, social respect, and job security, (b) reduce overall education spending as a means to cut taxes on the wealthy, (c) give resources to schools which are less publicly accountable and can more easily kick out struggling or problematic students, spend money on dubious corporate programs, etc., (d) personally profit off the partial privatization of the education industry and outsourcing of education functions , (e) for some wealthy people, use donations to charter schools as a massive tax dodge which also brings them positive publicity. Many Democrats have bought in fully to the school choice / charter school message, such as e.g. the Obama Administration education department, which was run by people (like Arne Duncan) with no teaching experience and little education or policy credibility among experts. Of course the lack of qualification, corruption, and bad faith of Betsy DeVos puts all of the Obama people to shame. It has been a massive bi-partisan swindle decades in the making, and the results are bad so far and only getting worse, especially for most poor children in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Teachers are justifiably extremely angry, but have remarkably little influence considering their expertise and position. (Though recent successful teacher strikes around the country have showed that they still can have some effect if they are willing to fight hard.)
    • stcredzero 8y ago
      (a) break the power of teachers’ unions (and organized labor more generally), so that they can reduce teacher pay, benefits, social respect, and job security Wouldn't an education market that worked do precisely that for schools that are failing catastrophically? (b) reduce overall education spending as a means to cut taxes on the wealthy As far as I know, no one outside of libertarian absolutists actually has a goal like this. As far as I can tell, this is a strawman, a fiction. (c) give resources to schools which are less publicly accountable and can more easily kick out struggling or problematic students If "publicly accountable" means less micromanaged by a centralized bureaucracy, I don't see how this is necessarily bad. The point is to diversify the education market. Also, isn't the whole point to be able to easily kick out struggling or problematic students? If the social climate in a school makes it a disaster, but you can put some of the kids in a "lifeboat" with a better climate for learning, why wouldn't you? (d) personally profit off the partial privatization of the education industry and outsourcing of education functions If the results are good, then they should profit. (e) for some wealthy people, use donations to charter schools as a massive tax dodge which also brings them positive publicity. I think that wealthy people donating to schools is one of the best ways any society can do wealth redistribution. Again, I see nothing wrong with that.
  • dragonwriter 8y ago
    > In 2019, inequality is propagated through differences in access to effective educational environments. It's the Democratic party which opposes school vouchers and funding increased choice in education Because both exacerbate educational inequality and reinforce the degree to which traditionally disadvantaged groups remain consistently on the disadvantaged side of that inequality, which, as you note, is an important problem. School choice (at best, but real programs, particularly voucher programs, tend to be far worse than “at best”) amounts to accepting failure and abandoning systematic efforts to root it out in the public school system but maximizing the degree to which parental skill, attained largely through the education, determines whether or not students are subjected to that failure.
  • jacobolus 8y ago
    By the way, > encouraging large populations to refuse to assimilate into their host society? In my experience this kind of argument is originated and pushed predominantly by socially sheltered racists and nativists (or those pandering to them), as a fear-based rhetorical cudgel, with little factual basis. Literally the same arguments were made about every generation of immigrants in the past, including my own Irish ancestors, Germans, Swedes, Italians, Poles, etc., all of whom successfully “assimilated”. My friends who are 3rd generation Guatemalan or Chinese or Egyptian or Pakistani are largely culturally indistinguishable from the 5th generation Italians or the 7th generation English. The rhetoric happens to now focus on Latin Americans and Muslims, as those are the groups currently trendy for the right to demonize. Of course African Americans have been getting heaps of abuse for centuries now, and down to today have faced more systematic racism than other groups, so there are various entrenched policy problems involved in helping their communities succeed (but it’s definitely not because they “refuse to assimilate”).