4 ms·

>On the surface it sounds fair, the best get in, but in reality tests are always +/- a few points given day to day performance, and students who have worse home

>On the surface it sounds fair, the best get in, but in reality tests are always +/- a few points given day to day performance, and students who have worse home life (inadequate nutrition, lack of private educational resources, etc) already had to work harder to earn a passing score, so little Johnny who hasn't had breakfast in 2 years being 5 points behind Jennifer who has a private nanny with a degree in early childhood education, is not a fair comparison. The point of these tests isn't to make fair comparisons of students' whole lives. They are designed (and succeed to varying degrees) to make fair comparisons of a particular skillset across students, hopefully in a way that is highly correlated to the task at hand. In a finite world, that is how you make good use of scarce resources. Yes, this results in uneven outcomes. If we only have so much of a given resource (teacher time, facilities, learning resources, etc.) to dedicate, then putting the difficult but tailored material in front of Jennifer is a better use of resources than trying to accumulate enough second chances so that Johnny can eventually achieve escape velocity from his circumstances by happenstance.

com2kid 4y ago
> If we only have so much of a given resource (teacher time, facilities, learning resources, etc.) to dedicate, then putting the difficult but tailored material in front of Jennifer is a better use of resources than trying to accumulate enough second chances so that Johnny can eventually achieve escape velocity from his circumstances by happenstance. Except Jennifer is likely to do alright in life no matter what, while the opportunity afforded to Johnny can mean he escapes generational poverty. Or we could just build enough classrooms so everyone gets the best education possible. As a bonus, this is long term profitable because Johnny goes on to pay a metric ton of taxes that pay for his education many times over.

com2kid 4y ago

> If we only have so much of a given resource (teacher time, facilities, learning resources, etc.) to dedicate, then putting the difficult but tailored material in front of Jennifer is a better use of resources than trying to accumulate enough second chances so that Johnny can eventually achieve escape velocity from his circumstances by happenstance. Except Jennifer is likely to do alright in life no matter what, while the opportunity afforded to Johnny can mean he escapes generational poverty. Or we could just build enough classrooms so everyone gets the best education possible. As a bonus, this is long term profitable because Johnny goes on to pay a metric ton of taxes that pay for his education many times over.