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It would only be a legal risk if they were putting kids in the program based on race. This does not seem to be the case. It just so happens to be that a disprop

It would only be a legal risk if they were putting kids in the program based on race. This does not seem to be the case. It just so happens to be that a disproportionate amount of whites and Asians made it into the program.

jakelazaroff 6y ago
Why do you conclude that it doesn’t seem to be the case? There are a ton of known second-order causes of education inequality like redlining, tax disparities, etc. It’s highly likely that the disparities in this program happen because of racism, even if no one sat down and said “we should admit mostly white and Asian kids”.
- _-david-_ 6y ago
  There is no evidence that there was any racism involved. I wouldn't say with 100% certainty there was no racism, but until anyone can show any evidence of racism I will not jump to that conclusion. There is a perfectly logical (and non-racist) reason for blacks and Hispanics to not make it into the gifted program as frequently as their white and Asian peers and that is they, in average, have lower grades. People see the outcome is disproportionate and assume racism. Instead of looking at the evidence to see why it happened they look at the outcome and try to fit their preferred narrative into it. If there is racism which causes students to have a difficult life which then causes them to do worse in school and doing worse in school means the student won't be accepted into the gifted program then I do not consider the gifted program admission to be racist. The solution should be to help those in a bad situation (regardless if it was caused by racism or something else) so anybody who is disadvantaged can be on an equal playing field and meet the requirements. There are a lot of poor white students. They likely struggle in school because of that. I don't think the solution would be to make it easier for those poor whites to make it into the gifted program just because they are poor. And yet many people would make that argument for blacks and Hispanics. Removing the gifted program because you don't like the races who make it in is racist.
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    The problem is that the people who benefit from the situation are never interested in identifying and fixing the "bad situations" until things like this happen. They're fine accepting a system that privileges their own children at the expense of others, and only when their children might be affected do they become ostensible advocates for looking at the situation holistically.
    - _-david-_ 6y ago
      Most people support things that aid themself or their family. I don't think that has anything to do with racism. Supporting more objective standards like grades and test results are the only fair way to determine who goes into the gifted classes. Determining gifted class placement by race is racist. Helping people in a bad situation is a different issue and should be treated as such. Even if there were no poor people, uneducated parents, single parent homes, etc we still don't know that blacks and Hispanics would make it into gifted classes at a higher rate then they are now. Whites and Asians also have those issues and they would likely do better if they didn't have to deal with them.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  Is your goal educating students to the best of their individual abilities? Or correcting for societal inequalities that aren’t that kid’s doing or fault, meanwhile using the kids as pawns in the pursuit of that goal of equal outcome? I’m heavily biased toward meeting the needs of the individual students. If you don’t, affluent parents will nope out of your school anyway (and possibly out of the neighborhood altogether), as they reasonably should. We are heavily pro-public schooling, attending and volunteering often at the elementary school and intending to attend the high school, but grades 6-8 schools are a mess in our town, so we’re going to private schools for those years. It’s not worth sacrificing our kids’ academic outcome at the altar of fairness and equality pulled down to the lowest common denominator.
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    My point is that the status quo is not educating students to the best of their individual abilities. It's neglecting the education of some — in ways that heavily correlate with class and race — and then, when those students unsurprisingly do worse, saying "well, they're not as smart, so they can't have the gifted education."
    - threatofrain 6y ago
      Why would any racially biased curriculum be favorable specifically for Asians? Or why would institutional support be biased in favor of Asians?
    - _-david-_ 6y ago
      If anyone (regardless of race) went into a class that was too difficult for them they would do worse in school. This will result in them not getting into as good of a university (or not getting into any university) and would result in them doing worse in life.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 6y ago
  But if the rationale is compensating for things like redlining, then it doesn’t make sense to count Latinos in the “disadvantaged” category while counting Asians in the “advantaged” category. (The majority of the kids in the groups that the administrator deemed underrepresented were Latino, not Black.) Racist policies like redlining in the 1950s-1970s were not applied to Latinos any more than to Asians, and in fact were applied less so. (There was never anything comparable to the Asian Exclusion Act applied to immigrants from Latin America.) Moreover, Latinos have similar income mobility to whites. Latino families who have been in America since the 1960s and 1970s would have quite small income gaps compared to whites by now: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. It’s true that economic disparities can be caused by historical racism. But that’s not a basis for distinguishing Latinos from Asians, or really Latinos and Asians from Italians, Polish people, etc., who are similarly situated to each other.
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    I think trying to look at this through the lens of a single issue is doomed to fail. And frankly, the full scope is beyond what can be covered in a single HN discussion. Because there are a ton of intertwined issues, and many of them don’t have a neat line straight to “underperformance in schools”. It’s the “systemic” part of “systemic racism”.
    - _-david-_ 6y ago
      If there is systemic racism then which system is racist? I think 99% of people nowadays would be fine fighting against such a system. Is it the school system, bank system, the government?
      - jakelazaroff 6y ago
        "Which system is racist?" is the wrong way to look at this. The point I'm trying to make is that there are many intertwined factors in play, and it may not be immediately apparent how some of them impact the issue. Let me expand a bit on the two factors I mentioned above, redlining and taxes. In the US, schools are generally funded by local taxes. On its own, that wouldn't seem to cause racial education disparities. But the neighborhoods in which people congregate are affected by the legacy of redlining, in which Black people were segregated into neighborhoods with lower property values. As a result, children in those neighborhoods receive worse educations, which makes them appear less "gifted" when combined with other students in higher grades. Those are of course not the only factors in play. But hopefully they illuminate how a seemingly benign program can entrench disparities created elsewhere.

jakelazaroff 6y ago

Why do you conclude that it doesn’t seem to be the case? There are a ton of known second-order causes of education inequality like redlining, tax disparities, etc. It’s highly likely that the disparities in this program happen because of racism, even if no one sat down and said “we should admit mostly white and Asian kids”.

_-david-_ 6y ago
There is no evidence that there was any racism involved. I wouldn't say with 100% certainty there was no racism, but until anyone can show any evidence of racism I will not jump to that conclusion. There is a perfectly logical (and non-racist) reason for blacks and Hispanics to not make it into the gifted program as frequently as their white and Asian peers and that is they, in average, have lower grades. People see the outcome is disproportionate and assume racism. Instead of looking at the evidence to see why it happened they look at the outcome and try to fit their preferred narrative into it. If there is racism which causes students to have a difficult life which then causes them to do worse in school and doing worse in school means the student won't be accepted into the gifted program then I do not consider the gifted program admission to be racist. The solution should be to help those in a bad situation (regardless if it was caused by racism or something else) so anybody who is disadvantaged can be on an equal playing field and meet the requirements. There are a lot of poor white students. They likely struggle in school because of that. I don't think the solution would be to make it easier for those poor whites to make it into the gifted program just because they are poor. And yet many people would make that argument for blacks and Hispanics. Removing the gifted program because you don't like the races who make it in is racist.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  The problem is that the people who benefit from the situation are never interested in identifying and fixing the "bad situations" until things like this happen. They're fine accepting a system that privileges their own children at the expense of others, and only when their children might be affected do they become ostensible advocates for looking at the situation holistically.
  - _-david-_ 6y ago
    Most people support things that aid themself or their family. I don't think that has anything to do with racism. Supporting more objective standards like grades and test results are the only fair way to determine who goes into the gifted classes. Determining gifted class placement by race is racist. Helping people in a bad situation is a different issue and should be treated as such. Even if there were no poor people, uneducated parents, single parent homes, etc we still don't know that blacks and Hispanics would make it into gifted classes at a higher rate then they are now. Whites and Asians also have those issues and they would likely do better if they didn't have to deal with them.
sokoloff 6y ago
Is your goal educating students to the best of their individual abilities? Or correcting for societal inequalities that aren’t that kid’s doing or fault, meanwhile using the kids as pawns in the pursuit of that goal of equal outcome? I’m heavily biased toward meeting the needs of the individual students. If you don’t, affluent parents will nope out of your school anyway (and possibly out of the neighborhood altogether), as they reasonably should. We are heavily pro-public schooling, attending and volunteering often at the elementary school and intending to attend the high school, but grades 6-8 schools are a mess in our town, so we’re going to private schools for those years. It’s not worth sacrificing our kids’ academic outcome at the altar of fairness and equality pulled down to the lowest common denominator.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  My point is that the status quo is not educating students to the best of their individual abilities. It's neglecting the education of some — in ways that heavily correlate with class and race — and then, when those students unsurprisingly do worse, saying "well, they're not as smart, so they can't have the gifted education."
  - threatofrain 6y ago
    Why would any racially biased curriculum be favorable specifically for Asians? Or why would institutional support be biased in favor of Asians?
  - _-david-_ 6y ago
    If anyone (regardless of race) went into a class that was too difficult for them they would do worse in school. This will result in them not getting into as good of a university (or not getting into any university) and would result in them doing worse in life.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 6y ago
But if the rationale is compensating for things like redlining, then it doesn’t make sense to count Latinos in the “disadvantaged” category while counting Asians in the “advantaged” category. (The majority of the kids in the groups that the administrator deemed underrepresented were Latino, not Black.) Racist policies like redlining in the 1950s-1970s were not applied to Latinos any more than to Asians, and in fact were applied less so. (There was never anything comparable to the Asian Exclusion Act applied to immigrants from Latin America.) Moreover, Latinos have similar income mobility to whites. Latino families who have been in America since the 1960s and 1970s would have quite small income gaps compared to whites by now: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. It’s true that economic disparities can be caused by historical racism. But that’s not a basis for distinguishing Latinos from Asians, or really Latinos and Asians from Italians, Polish people, etc., who are similarly situated to each other.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  I think trying to look at this through the lens of a single issue is doomed to fail. And frankly, the full scope is beyond what can be covered in a single HN discussion. Because there are a ton of intertwined issues, and many of them don’t have a neat line straight to “underperformance in schools”. It’s the “systemic” part of “systemic racism”.
  - _-david-_ 6y ago
    If there is systemic racism then which system is racist? I think 99% of people nowadays would be fine fighting against such a system. Is it the school system, bank system, the government?
    - jakelazaroff 6y ago
      "Which system is racist?" is the wrong way to look at this. The point I'm trying to make is that there are many intertwined factors in play, and it may not be immediately apparent how some of them impact the issue. Let me expand a bit on the two factors I mentioned above, redlining and taxes. In the US, schools are generally funded by local taxes. On its own, that wouldn't seem to cause racial education disparities. But the neighborhoods in which people congregate are affected by the legacy of redlining, in which Black people were segregated into neighborhoods with lower property values. As a result, children in those neighborhoods receive worse educations, which makes them appear less "gifted" when combined with other students in higher grades. Those are of course not the only factors in play. But hopefully they illuminate how a seemingly benign program can entrench disparities created elsewhere.