16 ms·

The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. The stratification is more granul

The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. The stratification is more granular than Asian versus Black or White versus Native America. For example, Jewish students excel beyond the Caucasian average while Cambodian and other Southeast Asian Immigrants perform significantly below the national average for Asian Americans. The challenge for large and heterogeneously diverse nations like the U.S. is to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement. There is also the need to provide quality education to adult learners, a wholly different, but equally important topic in the area of rapid technological change.

socialismisok 4y ago
Not only that, where one lives can impact the funding available to even provide basic education. We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools.
- zwkrt 4y ago
  Funding schools based on local property tax was institutionalized as a way to ensure rich people don’t have to pay for poor people’s education.
  - mrep 4y ago
    Except local property taxes only pay for about half of k-12 education. The other half comes from federal and state governments and the way they give out funding is to selectively counteract that misallocation such that 47 states actually allocate more per-student funding to poor areas than to wealthier ones on average according to this article [0] and it has been this way since at least 1995. [0]: https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-get-fair-share/ https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-...
    - uup 4y ago
      > only pay for about half That's a lot. From your own link, a vast majority of schools are regressive, i.e poor people get less.
      - blululu 4y ago
        The 50:50 figure is in aggregate. You would not be able to infer if the distribution is a regressive based on that number alone. The linked article does not say that the vast majority of schools are regressive. "A handful - Nevada, Wyoming and Illinois are weakly regressive, and the majority have a weakly progressive distribution of funding to poo vs non poor students"
        uup 4y ago
        I see, I didn't realize the graph of progressive / regressive changed as your scrolled the page. Actually, looking at the data further, you can't really draw a conclusion about whether or not the funding is regressive or progressive. The local funding is definitely regressive, but you'd need to know how state and federal funds were distributed across schools to know if the end result was progressive or regressive. For instance, if federal funding was evenly distributed to every school, that would still be regressive.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        Some of the worst districts in my state have the most funding and highest teacher pay. The best teachers still don't want to work there because being called the c-word by 1st graders or having a 3rd grader threaten to stab you (and seem like they really mean it) and not being able to do anything about it because the two fights and one baggie of drugs admin's had referred to them by noon today has them too busy to spend any time on "minor" stuff like that, plus having lockdowns with police patrolling the halls and yelling at anyone who so much as pokes a head out a door without clearing it with them first, due to credible threats of violence, several times per year, makes you want to do literally anything else as a career in a hurry. 15-20% higher pay than the next-best-paying district doesn't make it worth it. Schools can't fix poverty and ghettos no matter how much money you give them, but trying that is simpler than fixing the real problems that cause very, very "bad" schools, so that's what we do, even though it will never work.
  - lambdaphagy 4y ago
    1. School funding is actually somewhat progressive: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-funding-is-actually-somewhat-progressive/ https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-f... 2. People who are concerned about the allegedly regressive character of public school funding would do well to spell out their model of how spending affects basic math and writing performance. For almost all of history, every educated person studied under conditions that made the most impoverished reservation school in North Dakota look like Andover.
  - blululu 4y ago
    This takes a consequence of a decentralized government and attributes it to the intent. The origins of public schools in America take their form from the structure of American government in the era when they formed. 200 years ago American government was virtually non-existent at the state and federal level. The oldest public education law in America comes from the Massachusetts Bay Colony which required every township of a certain size to establish a basic grammar school. The reason it was done at the local level is that there was no state wide administration to capable of collecting and managing the taxes, budgeting and administrating schools in that era. Thus it was handled at a very local level. While a lot of modern education funding reforms in America focus on redistributing funds to support poorer communities, this is not an immediate win. In states like California where local property taxes have been effectively abolished by a voter backed constitutional amendment, there are big challenges in fairly negotiating the allocation of resources across the different regions of the state.
  - robotbikes 4y ago
    And it has continued for decades even after being declared unconstitutional in Ohio. So it is hard to change the attitude many people who live in suburbs have. The movement for integrated schools (https://integratedschools.org/podcasts/ https://integratedschools.org/podcasts/) is one group of people trying to fight the racial inequity aspect of this but considering the magnitude of the problem it is a big hill to climb.
  - caeril 4y ago
    I'm not sure where you live, but where I live, school funding is taxed and allocated at the county level. The county contains both extremely impoverished and extremely wealthy areas, in roughly a bell curve distribution. Schools are funded on a per-student basis within the county.
- NDizzle 4y ago
  "We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools." Explain Baltimore. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/largest-school-districts.html https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/larg...
  - socialismisok 4y ago
    Baltimore has stronger challenges to overcome, so funding it more makes sense. It can be the case that we're paying a lot for Baltimore students and also that we're underfunding them.
- treis 4y ago
  This is a commonly held myth but the numbers don't bear it out. Poor areas tend to be in cities and cities tend to have lots of commercial buildings that pay tax but do not send kids to school. Atlanta, where I live, spends 30%* more per pupil in APS than the surrounding suburban counties do. That's typical for American cities. *Or so. I'm going off memory.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    But urban schools are more expensive to run for many reasons including social pathology (metal detectors became widespread in some cities in the 1980s) as well as generally high operating costs.
  - danans 4y ago
    > Atlanta, where I live, spends 30%* more per pupil in APS than the surrounding suburban counties do. If you look a bit deeper at public school funding in more well-off areas and you will usually find a system of tax-deductible private donations to the school, organized by a PTA or similar organization. Much of the spending difference vanishes when you consider that. When you count the value of the PTA volunteer time by professional parents (which doesn't appear on the books), it tips the scales even further toward greater spend in well-off areas.
    - treis 4y ago
      >If you look a bit deeper at public school funding in more well-off areas and you will usually find a system of tax-deductible private donations to the school, organized by a PTA or similar organization. Much of the spending difference vanishes when you consider that. Do you have a cite with those numbers?
      - danans 4y ago
        Here is an article that explicitly breaks down the phenomenon with LA public schools: https://laist.com/news/education/los-angeles-unified-parent-fundraising https://laist.com/news/education/los-angeles-unified-parent-... California is unique in that it intentionally gives less funding to higher-family-income public schools, expecting them to make up the gap with private fundraising. The result is that after adjusting for private donations, per pupil spending in CA is roughly equivalent across income-disparate schools, as can be seen in the charts in that article. Here is a visualization of the disparities in Georgia's school spending by county: https://wallethub.com/edu/e/most-least-equitable-school-districts-in-georgia/77068 https://wallethub.com/edu/e/most-least-equitable-school-dist... Pick one of the "High Income / Low Expenditure" counties - Forsyth - as an example. It has an average household income of $112,834. In that county, there is an entire parallel non-profit organization that raises private donations to fund programs in the school district. Here is an article describing their work: https://www.forsythnews.com/news/education/education-foundation-gives-out-115000-grants-more-20-forsyth-county-schools/ https://www.forsythnews.com/news/education/education-foundat... This is in addition to other private fundraising at the individual school PTA/PTO level, and via charities like the United Way (https://www.unitedwayforsyth.com/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=5 https://www.unitedwayforsyth.com/civicrm/contribute/transact...) Here is the same type of organization but in Michigan: https://www.bloomfield.org/support/about/bhs-foundation-faqs https://www.bloomfield.org/support/about/bhs-foundation-faqs What all of these have in common is that the capacity for private fundraising is a function of local household income. In places like California with progressive school funding, this private fundraising serves to "bridge the gap" in state funding between schools in richer (receive less public funding) and poorer (receive more public funding) areas. In other states where state/local per-pupil public school funding is flat or even regressive, it can exacerbate the disparities between districts.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yucky 4y ago
  This is not the case here, since in Michigan the Detroit Public Schools not only have the worst test scores in the nation, but the highest funding per pupil in the state.
abduhl 4y ago
>> The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. What is the equitable solution to this then? You seem to be implying that SAT score differences are not inequitable but we know from recent research this is not true.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  Standardized tests aren't perfect but there isn't anything better. There's no better way for a poor kid with high drive to compete with rich kids. That's why MIT decided to bring back scores in admission. There isn't a better solution.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Lower the ceiling and admit by lottery. End the artificial scarcity in education. Tax the rich to fund it.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ryan93 4y ago
      How does that change anything? Kids who barely miss out on MIT arent sleeping on the streets. They are at good state schools or other top privates.
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        Indeed, and there are some studies to back that up. Excerpt from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-matter-where-you-go-college/577816/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-ma... But what appears obvious may not be true. In November 2002, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a landmark paper by the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger that reached a startling conclusion. For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
timmg 4y ago
> The challenge for large and heterogeneously diverse nations like the U.S. is to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement. But don’t your stats show that we already do? We “provide access” to everyone. Otherwise it wouldn’t matter how much the parents pushed the children. If your argument is that the system should push the children harder, how do you propose that? Give less hard working kids lower grades? I think we’ve tried that and decided it’s unfair.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > how do you propose that All the proposals I've ever seen have been to handicap the students whose parents try to give them an advantage. It's a popular sentiment, growing in popularity every day.
  - dpatterbee 4y ago
    This response smells strongly of FUD. Could you possibly elaborate?
    - Der_Einzige 4y ago
      California trying to remove math tracks and to make it harder/impossible to take advanced math in the final two years of high school. Look this up, it's been discussed here extensively.
- flatline 4y ago
  We don’t provide free access to test prep. We don’t provide equal access to parents and friends who are enthusiastic and pushed to do well on these tests. We don’t provide equal access to a culture that values academics over, say, sports and entertainment.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    What would the end state of the latter part of look like? Taking kids away from their families at birth and raising them in state not-quite-orphanages? Even the concept that academics should be valued over other topics should be a matter of family choice. If you want to prioritize music, art, sports, food, entertainment, fitness, religion, or something else over academics, should society over-ride that?
throwaway6734 4y ago
The SATs also allow for children with non parental involvement but talent to excel because it's a simple process: take a test
- socialismisok 4y ago
  It's hardly simple to prep for the SAT. It requires time and money and space.
  - adamsmith143 4y ago
    So you'd rather use a holistic process where kids with rich parents can go off to Africa and start a volunteer school or fly across the country participating in Sailing competitions? One process has a more level playing field, the other is clearly rigged in favor of rich well connected kids.
    - socialismisok 4y ago
      Please stop putting words in my mouth. I said nothing of the sort. I'd prefer we provided the food, housing, education, and healthcare that would enable anyone to succeed on the SAT by eroding the worst disadvantages some kids face.
  - wara23arish 4y ago
    I dont buy this argument for a second. You can buy a used sat prep book for cheap or even borrow one from a library. Practice twice a week leading up to the test with practice tests once every two weeks. taking a prep course will help, but thats not necessary at all.
    - lupire 4y ago
      Practicing won't teach you language and math.
      - wara23arish 4y ago
wjnc 4y ago
Just a quick note on the word 'push'. We all now the 'tiger parenting' trope. Those parents exists and it makes a difference (with clear 'pushing', which I see as a negative). But with maths I think it's a bit more subtle. Just the tiny things (even just 'talk' math) you do in early education can make a massive return later. There is no 'mean' in maths education even in ages 4-10 (my kids). We live in the Netherlands, that scores quite well in the table. And still I think math education is at least unambitious for the higher percentiles. With just a few minutes here and there I've managed to get some pretty abstract concepts in their thinking (say: zero and the empty set, that's something small kids understand intuitively / or the first algorithms with russian multiplication or divide and conquer). There's no need for pushing, and still I think I've already help lay a good foundation of math in my 10 year old. No more than 30 hours invested in math his life.
- strikelaserclaw 4y ago
  maybe pushing is the wrong word but i would say parents who care about their child's education have children who score substantially higher than children who don't have parents who care. And "caring" is highly related to family stability and the education level of one or both parents. Where education level manifests itself is in how a parent cares. My uneducated mom (who is asian) asked us to study and get good grades (an asian cultural value), but she couldn't really tel if we were actually "studying" since she was uneducated. Now the asian values meant that i at-least got "bare minimum" grades compared to other races of people but i never had enough "care" to excel (which i think i could have done). Now imagine a group of people with neither cultural values emphasizing education nor educated parents who might have their child's best interest and tell them to 'study and work hard' but given the circumstances and how kids will be kids, it is very very difficult for those kids to achieve.
  - xattt 4y ago
    I see that there is a finite bucket of cognitive energy. Learning higher-order concepts, as well as dealing with unstable family dynamics takes away from this bucket. If you’re scraping the bottom to deal with family (or mental health in the parents, restricted finances, less-than-ideal living conditions, etc.), then your capacity to integrate abstract concepts becomes fairly limited. These issues often feed into each other, and it becomes difficult to break out of this cycle, leading to trans-generational opportunity loss.
billsmithaustin 4y ago
My daughter credits the test-taking techniques they taught in her SAT prep course for a big boost in her SAT score. She says the test-taking techniques were orthogonal to how well she knew the material. I'm happy for her but at the same time it seems unfair that my ability to afford the SAT prep course gave her an advantage not available to families with lower incomes.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  Those techniques are things like skipping questions or calculated guessing which can help but certainly won't get you into elite score territory.
  - bloaf 4y ago
    They increase speed, which buys you time to work on harder problems. I bet a nonzero number of 2nd tier students could get a 1st tier score if given an extra 10 mins on each section.
- rch 4y ago
  I attended prep courses and they didn't have an impact on my scores, measured by before and after practice testing (~1500 in the late 90s). What did help is that I was encouraged to read a lot from a young age, which seems fairly accessible to most families. Support your local libraries.
- hirvi74 4y ago
  MY SO is a professional tutor, and she often has clients for standardized testing prep. From what I have gathered it seems a lot of students really need a confidence boost. Once they realize they are capable to doing well, they tend to improve their performance. There is also like tricks and gimmicks, but that is a different discussion.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Our [public] school gave a 1-hour class on the basics of the SAT test mechanisms and how to get your score to what I'd call "reflective of your ability". If kids are showing up to the SAT barely knowing how a #2 pencil works, that's bad. If they've had 1 hour on "if you can eliminate even a single answer that you know is not correct, do not leave the question blank" and "D means that no can determine which is greater not that you have no idea which is greater", that puts them in a position to demonstrate their ability and that's well within the reach of any school district that gives half an ounce of care for their students.
jl6 4y ago
> an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement. I do wonder if this is possible. If you up the baseline of school provision, won’t involved parents provide a further advantage over and above that?
- lupire 4y ago
  Not if the test difficulty stays the same, and you get more 800s and lotteries (or, dare we say it, more seats?!) for next level positions, at college or career. Tides, boats , bars.
- shafoshaf 4y ago
  When you talk about some of the least served communities, there is a lot of moving from school to school as people move from one housing solution to another. My wife taught in public school and out of the 35 students in a class there might have been a third to 40% who stayed with her the whole semester. She would have two extra pages of names of students who came and went throughout the year.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  Involved parents will likely always improve the scores of students, but the disparity between those who do and don't need not be so dramatic. It's fun to read biographies of 20th century scientists. Quite a few of them came from humble backgrounds and credited their success to education (and perhaps libraries). They often did not have well educated or motivated parents. Nick Holonyak is one such example. Carl Sagan is another. And this is even more apparent when I look at the British ones. It's a bit funny given how rigid and uninspiring the British education system was.
lupire 4y ago
SAT math is geometry,a 10th grade class for average students. Scoring below 700 isn't due to lack of "push" it's lack of some combination of intelligence, nurture, health, teaching. Due to the cost and complexity of transcontinental migration, most Asians in US now, and Jews last generation, come from elites from their previous family homeland who successfully migrated to escape bad government or seeking greater opportunity, when it was tactically hard to do so for the average person. It's a natural filter for smart, capable, effective people who can raise children to be same. The effect tends to fade over time (shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, or docks to docks, in three generations). Now that Jewish immigration has mostly ended, their great-grandchildren (and the descendants of previous generations of Asian immigrants) are, as a cohort, not performing academically as well as today's Asian immigrant children and chidren of immigrants. The math contest winners and teams, deep into the bench, are nearly all children of immigrants (and Polgar-esque homeschoolers who get to avoid time-wasting distractions of school)
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  > Jews last generation, come from elites from their previous family homeland who successfully migrated to escape bad government or seeking greater opportunity, when it was tactically hard to do so for the average person. It's a natural filter for smart, capable, effective people who can raise children to be same. The large majority of the US Jewish population came after the 1850s. They were not selected for wealth. Like the Irish immigrants were negatively selected. They were less educated than those who stayed at home, on average. Similarly Italians in the relevant period of mass migration. The middle class were doing well so they were more likely to stay home. > The effect tends to fade over time (shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, or docks to docks, in three generations). This has no basis in evidence. Every psychological trait I’m aware of is strongly heritable, including ones with obvious impacts on earnings like intelligence, conscientiousness and extraversion[1]. Social class is so heritable the only society to make a dent were the Chinese during the cultural revolution[2]. If you want to know more about the extraordinary persistence of social class see Gregory Clark’s work[3]. [1] Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits https://utahpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bouchard.04.curdir.pdf https://utahpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bouchard.0... [2] Persistence Despite Revolutions http://davidyyang.com/pdfs/revolutions_draft.pdf http://davidyyang.com/pdfs/revolutions_draft.pdf [3] https://faithandheritage.com/2017/06/the-heritability-of-social-class-insights-from-gregory-clarks-the-son-also-rises/ https://faithandheritage.com/2017/06/the-heritability-of-soc...
dilap 4y ago
It's kind of the opposite. I was a highschool dropout, highest level of math was basic algebra. I was able to change my mind about the whole education thing by buying a "prepare yourself for the SAT" book, studying it for a couple of months, doing well, and getting admitted to college. Ended up doing a math + physics dual major. (I'm really grateful that that avenue to college existed -- I could not have written an admissions essay, done extracurricular activities, or generally been a "good boy" if my life depened on it.)
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Jim Webb who was a Marine officer in Vietnam, a journalist, a novelist, and then a Democratic senator from Virginia saw standardized tests as his route to social mobility from a poor background in the rural south.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    It's a damn shame Jim Webb stepped away from politics.
  - lukas099 4y ago
    I've long thought that our intuitions about IQ tests are backwards; they are the most fair and least biased method we have to sort applicants for things. The more 'holistic' the process, the more that subjectivity (and therefore bias) creeps in. The only way around it is affirmative action, which leads to the current state of affairs.
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      I think some of the persistence of hating on standardized tests is that standardized tests are one of the few barriers against the worst rich kids inheriting status from their parents. Sure, a little bit of test prep will help many people, if you’ve never seen a standardized test before some familiarity is good for you. But some of these kids could not test their way out of a paper bag and the only hope for them is hire a ringer to take the test in their place.
faeriechangling 4y ago
> The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. Is there any way to prove/disprove this? Also doesn’t this also beg the question as to why non-Asian parents apparently won’t teach their kids to be good academics?
- someguydave 4y ago
  Yes there is a way, you put kids in test prep and see if they do better. They generally do not improve much. The SAT is an IQ test, and IQ is mostly inherited from your parents.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    > The SAT is an IQ test In that case I weep for the future, because I’ve met plenty of dumbass people who managed to get a high enough SAT score to get in school.
    - hirvi74 4y ago
      I also weep for people that extrapolate too much meaning from an IQ test. (I'm not talking about you).
  - netheril96 4y ago
    So you are saying that Asians have higher intelligence, and not just a little bit higher, but significantly higher than other race?
    - someguydave 4y ago
      of the ones present in Michigan, yes.
    - throwaway8582 4y ago
      The Asians present in North America are not a random sample. A large portion of them came here specifically to work in STEM or other fields requiring high levels of intelligence and education. It's very probable that the ones here are, on average, significantly more intelligent than both the average American and the average Asian in Asia.
basic_test_prep 4y ago
> score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. Test prep has diminishing marginal returns. On the flip side that means just 1 hour of prep makes a big impact. This is what research has found and why a lot of focus is on getting kids to do any studying for anything at all. Many kids do zero homework and zero studying. Getting them to 1 is the hardest part. This is the biggest actionable problem for these exams. It doesn’t require race or culture or whatever at all. The research says it requires specialized instruction during school - something to achieve focused studying, as opposed to merely watching the clock go down. Difficult for the hardest students but on average, in aggregates, performs well. My point is that there are a lot of Asian students at Harvard who did 10 hours of test prep for the SAT. They didn’t go to cram school. There are also students who DID go to cram school. I myself studied about 10 hours for the SAT. You don’t need cram school to improve test scores. You need some studying instead of none at all.
- roflyear 4y ago
  Right, I think this is true. I scored really well on my SAT despite being a poor student and having parents that did not give a fuck at all, b/c I did just some minor prep for the test.
  - warner25 4y ago
    Yeah, this is interesting, and it's close to my experience. Just by working through the questions in the official SAT practice booklet a couple weeks prior to the test (which I think was "free" upon signing up), and learning a couple lessons from my first sitting (set a faster pace and guess rather than leaving questions blank), I probably raised my score by 300 points into the 1400+ band on my second sitting. An instructor could easily teach those lessons in a single prep session that starts with a short mock test. The hard-core, months-long, daily prep courses for super-high-achievers seem like extreme overkill. The kids who need that are probably the ones in the 700-900 range, who need to learn a baseline level of math and English for the first time (of course, if that were possible, it would have already happened in school).
- beebmam 4y ago
roflyear 4y ago
I may be the exception to this: my parents did not care at all, and I still scored really well on the SAT. I don't remember exactly what b/c I can't look up the score anymore, apparently, but definitely above 1500. I also did not care much as a student. I don't think I am remarkable here, I think I just took the test really well. I did do one short practice course that taught some of the small tricks to the test (most common problem patterns, to leave blank if you are really not sure, to come back to the question at the end, etc..) which I think probably helped for like 100pts at least.
jimbob45 4y ago
Don’t forget apathy. I easily qualified for every college in my state with my scores and out-of-state tuition meant there was no reason to ever push any harder for a better score.
eternalban 4y ago
> The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. I scored very high in both. Believe me, as new immigrants we were completely clueless about the heated race to top spots. In my case, credits goes to my makers (mom and dad :) and the fact that Iran had fairly good public schools. Culture is important. Two relevant shockers for me (as a very young new arrival to US): - disrespect for teachers. - practically institutionalized disdain for the smart kids. I am talking cultural products here. So I honestly think cultural backgrounds that feature things like special social and personal regard for those who teach, and special regard for individuals in STEM professions (for example "mr. engineer"), are more at play here than merely ambitious parents. And guess what is driving those ambitious parents? Culture has a lot to do with it.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > disrespect for teachers ... disdain for the smart kids I've gotten the impression from every high-achieving-country immigrant that I've ever talked to that schools in those countries just kick out the troublemaking kids before they have a chance to disrupt the environment for everybody else. Nobody gets kicked out of US public schools, for any reason - so the kids who don't want to be there and spend all of their time trying to ruin it for everybody else are always there.
  - e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
    That's very much true. I remember very clearly that when I was a new 1st grade student in a poor southeast asian country that the kid that yelled back at my teacher in my 60-person class didn't come back next week, whereas I suspect the same would not fly in US public schools. The things I've read (threatening violence, etc) would've never happened in my home country's schools, and if it did would've led to corporal punishment (caning was regularly practiced) and expulsion, not necessarily in that order, and very quickly at that. My impression is also that the academic culture is very different - even in my poorly funded primary school full of poor kids, there was a sense of academic accomplishment being of the highest importance -- all the students knew the importance of good grades, and students that disagree were socially shunned. Smart kids were the popular kids, and the people who ranked the top 10% got into a special class and were widely admired.
ajhurliman 4y ago
The only way I could see your plan of offering identical schooling opportunities for everyone is boarding school, ie taking kids away from their parents. How are you going to stop/force a parent from helping their kid with homework?
Aunche 4y ago
I volunteer tutor teens in the SAT and the problem is a bit deeper than just parents. A few of my students have a similar amount of base intelligence as me, and if they studied as much as I did, they would have no problem with finding a path of least resistance to the upper-middle/lower-upper class. The problem is that even if I'm 100% sure this path exists, they are skeptical because it seems like I'm in a entirely different world from them, so I'm not different than an MLM influencer promising them $10k a week. I knew a lot of people who spent all their time studying and on extracurriculars, but the same isn't true for my students. It would require a Herculean amount of self-discipline to commit yourself to that much work when no one else you know is taking the same path.
- snarf21 4y ago
  This is why (imo), test prep should be a class you take at school. Why should it be a separate thing and a multi billion dollar industry? A lot of the SAT/ACT prep for HS students is about understanding how the tests work and how to approach questions. We already have a bunch of federally mandated AYP testing (no) thanks to No (ALL?) Child Left Behind, why can't this just be old copies of the ACT or SAT. By the time kids are ready to apply for college, it will be second hand and not another extra thing they have to learn.
  - sitkack 4y ago
    That is probably the reason it isn't taught at school. School itself does very little to encourage class mobility, starting from being funded by local property taxes.
  - Aunche 4y ago
    You can already get 8 free SAT practice tests and Khan Academy offers a free online class. If you go through all of them and learn from your mistakes, that should be more than enough to get a decent score. With tutoring and classes, you're mainly paying for someone to pressure you to put the effort in, similar to with fitness classes.
  - learn-forever 4y ago
    these are standardized tests, taking normal classes _is_ prep for them
droopyEyelids 4y ago
Your success in life is partially a reflection of how you were raised, just like your success in math.
rmah 4y ago
But if the education system provides quality education with parental involvement, doesn't that imply that it provides quality education without parental involvement? You know, since parental involvement is not a part of the education system. Or, in other words, if parental involvement IS a part of the educational system, then it's impossible for the system to provide good outcomes without parental involvement since, you know, it's part of the system. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm confused why some people seem to blame the educational system for lack of parental involvement in some demographics.
cm2187 4y ago
I am not saying the US education system is good but there is only so much you can ask from schools to offset a dysfunctional environment. And the solution isn't to take children away from their parents. You need to change the culture, and culture is hard to change. I always refer to Poland which, out of 50 years of communism, is the most religiously and socially conservative country in europe.
nradov 4y ago
Another factor is parents' choice of where to live. Every real estate web site now prominently displays standardized test scores for the local public schools. Parents who care about academics will sacrifice financially to move near the highest scoring schools (or even cheat with a fake home address), thus creating a positive feedback loop.
TeeMassive 4y ago
> to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement That seems very naive to think that school overcome the impact of parenting. If a child doesn't have its physical and psychological needs met then there's not much the school can do. School can't make children do their homework at home either.
nfw2 4y ago
That's reductive. My parents were white liberal hippies who didn't push me at all. I got C's in school and a perfect math SAT and SAT 2. To be fair, I did spend a lot of time thinking about math because I liked it.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  > To be fair, I did spend a lot of time thinking about math because I liked it. Spending childhood doing things you enjoy and which also have economic utility is a secret power. Most people in the top 5th percentile of academic things also happened to spend a truly absurd amount of their youth obsessing over that academic thing. They may also be gifted, but spending all that free time in youth thinking about things is probably way more important than IQ. (For me it was programming and law... I was reading legal briefs and slinging code most evenings of middle school through high school, which set me up with a rather absurd advantage over my peers once I got to college.) BTW: elite unis/programs are looking for those types of people. It's not the extra curricular box checking that interests them, it's evidence of thousands of hours of practice at high value add skills. The practice can be forced with absurd amounts of grit, which is why it's a secret power when it comes out of intellectual curiosity.
  - nfw2 4y ago
    Legal theory is a joy I discovered much later in life. The LSAT brain-teaser questions are also pretty fun. I've considered switching careers (now in my 30s), but I expect the realities of the job are much less thought-provoking.
  - nfw2 4y ago
    Law is cool because it's like math, but because language is less precise than math, the rules are more malleable, and there is more room for creativity.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
rayiner 4y ago
> The challenge for large and heterogeneously diverse nations like the U.S. is to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement. It's a challenge, for sure. Should it be the overriding goal? Maybe if we weren't competing with other countries on the world stage.
credit_guy 4y ago
> to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement This sounds good in theory, but it can have unintended consequences. One way to read what you are saying here is that we should have a system where parent involvement has no impact. I may be biased (as a parent), but I think parental involvement should be encouraged, not disincentiviezed. Parental involvement is one of the forces of nature. It should not go to waste.

socialismisok 4y ago

Not only that, where one lives can impact the funding available to even provide basic education. We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools.

zwkrt 4y ago
Funding schools based on local property tax was institutionalized as a way to ensure rich people don’t have to pay for poor people’s education.
- mrep 4y ago
  Except local property taxes only pay for about half of k-12 education. The other half comes from federal and state governments and the way they give out funding is to selectively counteract that misallocation such that 47 states actually allocate more per-student funding to poor areas than to wealthier ones on average according to this article [0] and it has been this way since at least 1995. [0]: https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-get-fair-share/ https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-...
  - uup 4y ago
    > only pay for about half That's a lot. From your own link, a vast majority of schools are regressive, i.e poor people get less.
    - blululu 4y ago
      The 50:50 figure is in aggregate. You would not be able to infer if the distribution is a regressive based on that number alone. The linked article does not say that the vast majority of schools are regressive. "A handful - Nevada, Wyoming and Illinois are weakly regressive, and the majority have a weakly progressive distribution of funding to poo vs non poor students"
      - uup 4y ago
        I see, I didn't realize the graph of progressive / regressive changed as your scrolled the page. Actually, looking at the data further, you can't really draw a conclusion about whether or not the funding is regressive or progressive. The local funding is definitely regressive, but you'd need to know how state and federal funds were distributed across schools to know if the end result was progressive or regressive. For instance, if federal funding was evenly distributed to every school, that would still be regressive.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Some of the worst districts in my state have the most funding and highest teacher pay. The best teachers still don't want to work there because being called the c-word by 1st graders or having a 3rd grader threaten to stab you (and seem like they really mean it) and not being able to do anything about it because the two fights and one baggie of drugs admin's had referred to them by noon today has them too busy to spend any time on "minor" stuff like that, plus having lockdowns with police patrolling the halls and yelling at anyone who so much as pokes a head out a door without clearing it with them first, due to credible threats of violence, several times per year, makes you want to do literally anything else as a career in a hurry. 15-20% higher pay than the next-best-paying district doesn't make it worth it. Schools can't fix poverty and ghettos no matter how much money you give them, but trying that is simpler than fixing the real problems that cause very, very "bad" schools, so that's what we do, even though it will never work.
- lambdaphagy 4y ago
  1. School funding is actually somewhat progressive: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-funding-is-actually-somewhat-progressive/ https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-f... 2. People who are concerned about the allegedly regressive character of public school funding would do well to spell out their model of how spending affects basic math and writing performance. For almost all of history, every educated person studied under conditions that made the most impoverished reservation school in North Dakota look like Andover.
- blululu 4y ago
  This takes a consequence of a decentralized government and attributes it to the intent. The origins of public schools in America take their form from the structure of American government in the era when they formed. 200 years ago American government was virtually non-existent at the state and federal level. The oldest public education law in America comes from the Massachusetts Bay Colony which required every township of a certain size to establish a basic grammar school. The reason it was done at the local level is that there was no state wide administration to capable of collecting and managing the taxes, budgeting and administrating schools in that era. Thus it was handled at a very local level. While a lot of modern education funding reforms in America focus on redistributing funds to support poorer communities, this is not an immediate win. In states like California where local property taxes have been effectively abolished by a voter backed constitutional amendment, there are big challenges in fairly negotiating the allocation of resources across the different regions of the state.
- robotbikes 4y ago
  And it has continued for decades even after being declared unconstitutional in Ohio. So it is hard to change the attitude many people who live in suburbs have. The movement for integrated schools (https://integratedschools.org/podcasts/ https://integratedschools.org/podcasts/) is one group of people trying to fight the racial inequity aspect of this but considering the magnitude of the problem it is a big hill to climb.
- caeril 4y ago
  I'm not sure where you live, but where I live, school funding is taxed and allocated at the county level. The county contains both extremely impoverished and extremely wealthy areas, in roughly a bell curve distribution. Schools are funded on a per-student basis within the county.
NDizzle 4y ago
"We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools." Explain Baltimore. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/largest-school-districts.html https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/larg...
- socialismisok 4y ago
  Baltimore has stronger challenges to overcome, so funding it more makes sense. It can be the case that we're paying a lot for Baltimore students and also that we're underfunding them.
treis 4y ago
This is a commonly held myth but the numbers don't bear it out. Poor areas tend to be in cities and cities tend to have lots of commercial buildings that pay tax but do not send kids to school. Atlanta, where I live, spends 30%* more per pupil in APS than the surrounding suburban counties do. That's typical for American cities. *Or so. I'm going off memory.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  But urban schools are more expensive to run for many reasons including social pathology (metal detectors became widespread in some cities in the 1980s) as well as generally high operating costs.
- danans 4y ago
  > Atlanta, where I live, spends 30%* more per pupil in APS than the surrounding suburban counties do. If you look a bit deeper at public school funding in more well-off areas and you will usually find a system of tax-deductible private donations to the school, organized by a PTA or similar organization. Much of the spending difference vanishes when you consider that. When you count the value of the PTA volunteer time by professional parents (which doesn't appear on the books), it tips the scales even further toward greater spend in well-off areas.
  - treis 4y ago
    >If you look a bit deeper at public school funding in more well-off areas and you will usually find a system of tax-deductible private donations to the school, organized by a PTA or similar organization. Much of the spending difference vanishes when you consider that. Do you have a cite with those numbers?
    - danans 4y ago
      Here is an article that explicitly breaks down the phenomenon with LA public schools: https://laist.com/news/education/los-angeles-unified-parent-fundraising https://laist.com/news/education/los-angeles-unified-parent-... California is unique in that it intentionally gives less funding to higher-family-income public schools, expecting them to make up the gap with private fundraising. The result is that after adjusting for private donations, per pupil spending in CA is roughly equivalent across income-disparate schools, as can be seen in the charts in that article. Here is a visualization of the disparities in Georgia's school spending by county: https://wallethub.com/edu/e/most-least-equitable-school-districts-in-georgia/77068 https://wallethub.com/edu/e/most-least-equitable-school-dist... Pick one of the "High Income / Low Expenditure" counties - Forsyth - as an example. It has an average household income of $112,834. In that county, there is an entire parallel non-profit organization that raises private donations to fund programs in the school district. Here is an article describing their work: https://www.forsythnews.com/news/education/education-foundation-gives-out-115000-grants-more-20-forsyth-county-schools/ https://www.forsythnews.com/news/education/education-foundat... This is in addition to other private fundraising at the individual school PTA/PTO level, and via charities like the United Way (https://www.unitedwayforsyth.com/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=5 https://www.unitedwayforsyth.com/civicrm/contribute/transact...) Here is the same type of organization but in Michigan: https://www.bloomfield.org/support/about/bhs-foundation-faqs https://www.bloomfield.org/support/about/bhs-foundation-faqs What all of these have in common is that the capacity for private fundraising is a function of local household income. In places like California with progressive school funding, this private fundraising serves to "bridge the gap" in state funding between schools in richer (receive less public funding) and poorer (receive more public funding) areas. In other states where state/local per-pupil public school funding is flat or even regressive, it can exacerbate the disparities between districts.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yucky 4y ago
This is not the case here, since in Michigan the Detroit Public Schools not only have the worst test scores in the nation, but the highest funding per pupil in the state.

abduhl 4y ago

>> The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. What is the equitable solution to this then? You seem to be implying that SAT score differences are not inequitable but we know from recent research this is not true.

adamsmith143 4y ago
Standardized tests aren't perfect but there isn't anything better. There's no better way for a poor kid with high drive to compete with rich kids. That's why MIT decided to bring back scores in admission. There isn't a better solution.
- lupire 4y ago
  Lower the ceiling and admit by lottery. End the artificial scarcity in education. Tax the rich to fund it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ryan93 4y ago
    How does that change anything? Kids who barely miss out on MIT arent sleeping on the streets. They are at good state schools or other top privates.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      Indeed, and there are some studies to back that up. Excerpt from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-matter-where-you-go-college/577816/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-ma... But what appears obvious may not be true. In November 2002, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a landmark paper by the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger that reached a startling conclusion. For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.

timmg 4y ago

> The challenge for large and heterogeneously diverse nations like the U.S. is to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement. But don’t your stats show that we already do? We “provide access” to everyone. Otherwise it wouldn’t matter how much the parents pushed the children. If your argument is that the system should push the children harder, how do you propose that? Give less hard working kids lower grades? I think we’ve tried that and decided it’s unfair.

commandlinefan 4y ago
> how do you propose that All the proposals I've ever seen have been to handicap the students whose parents try to give them an advantage. It's a popular sentiment, growing in popularity every day.
- dpatterbee 4y ago
  This response smells strongly of FUD. Could you possibly elaborate?
  - Der_Einzige 4y ago
    California trying to remove math tracks and to make it harder/impossible to take advanced math in the final two years of high school. Look this up, it's been discussed here extensively.
flatline 4y ago
We don’t provide free access to test prep. We don’t provide equal access to parents and friends who are enthusiastic and pushed to do well on these tests. We don’t provide equal access to a culture that values academics over, say, sports and entertainment.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  What would the end state of the latter part of look like? Taking kids away from their families at birth and raising them in state not-quite-orphanages? Even the concept that academics should be valued over other topics should be a matter of family choice. If you want to prioritize music, art, sports, food, entertainment, fitness, religion, or something else over academics, should society over-ride that?

throwaway6734 4y ago

The SATs also allow for children with non parental involvement but talent to excel because it's a simple process: take a test

socialismisok 4y ago
It's hardly simple to prep for the SAT. It requires time and money and space.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  So you'd rather use a holistic process where kids with rich parents can go off to Africa and start a volunteer school or fly across the country participating in Sailing competitions? One process has a more level playing field, the other is clearly rigged in favor of rich well connected kids.
  - socialismisok 4y ago
    Please stop putting words in my mouth. I said nothing of the sort. I'd prefer we provided the food, housing, education, and healthcare that would enable anyone to succeed on the SAT by eroding the worst disadvantages some kids face.
- wara23arish 4y ago
  I dont buy this argument for a second. You can buy a used sat prep book for cheap or even borrow one from a library. Practice twice a week leading up to the test with practice tests once every two weeks. taking a prep course will help, but thats not necessary at all.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Practicing won't teach you language and math.
    - wara23arish 4y ago

wjnc 4y ago

Just a quick note on the word 'push'. We all now the 'tiger parenting' trope. Those parents exists and it makes a difference (with clear 'pushing', which I see as a negative). But with maths I think it's a bit more subtle. Just the tiny things (even just 'talk' math) you do in early education can make a massive return later. There is no 'mean' in maths education even in ages 4-10 (my kids). We live in the Netherlands, that scores quite well in the table. And still I think math education is at least unambitious for the higher percentiles. With just a few minutes here and there I've managed to get some pretty abstract concepts in their thinking (say: zero and the empty set, that's something small kids understand intuitively / or the first algorithms with russian multiplication or divide and conquer). There's no need for pushing, and still I think I've already help lay a good foundation of math in my 10 year old. No more than 30 hours invested in math his life.

strikelaserclaw 4y ago
maybe pushing is the wrong word but i would say parents who care about their child's education have children who score substantially higher than children who don't have parents who care. And "caring" is highly related to family stability and the education level of one or both parents. Where education level manifests itself is in how a parent cares. My uneducated mom (who is asian) asked us to study and get good grades (an asian cultural value), but she couldn't really tel if we were actually "studying" since she was uneducated. Now the asian values meant that i at-least got "bare minimum" grades compared to other races of people but i never had enough "care" to excel (which i think i could have done). Now imagine a group of people with neither cultural values emphasizing education nor educated parents who might have their child's best interest and tell them to 'study and work hard' but given the circumstances and how kids will be kids, it is very very difficult for those kids to achieve.
- xattt 4y ago
  I see that there is a finite bucket of cognitive energy. Learning higher-order concepts, as well as dealing with unstable family dynamics takes away from this bucket. If you’re scraping the bottom to deal with family (or mental health in the parents, restricted finances, less-than-ideal living conditions, etc.), then your capacity to integrate abstract concepts becomes fairly limited. These issues often feed into each other, and it becomes difficult to break out of this cycle, leading to trans-generational opportunity loss.

billsmithaustin 4y ago

My daughter credits the test-taking techniques they taught in her SAT prep course for a big boost in her SAT score. She says the test-taking techniques were orthogonal to how well she knew the material. I'm happy for her but at the same time it seems unfair that my ability to afford the SAT prep course gave her an advantage not available to families with lower incomes.

adamsmith143 4y ago
Those techniques are things like skipping questions or calculated guessing which can help but certainly won't get you into elite score territory.
- bloaf 4y ago
  They increase speed, which buys you time to work on harder problems. I bet a nonzero number of 2nd tier students could get a 1st tier score if given an extra 10 mins on each section.
rch 4y ago
I attended prep courses and they didn't have an impact on my scores, measured by before and after practice testing (~1500 in the late 90s). What did help is that I was encouraged to read a lot from a young age, which seems fairly accessible to most families. Support your local libraries.
hirvi74 4y ago
MY SO is a professional tutor, and she often has clients for standardized testing prep. From what I have gathered it seems a lot of students really need a confidence boost. Once they realize they are capable to doing well, they tend to improve their performance. There is also like tricks and gimmicks, but that is a different discussion.
sokoloff 4y ago
Our [public] school gave a 1-hour class on the basics of the SAT test mechanisms and how to get your score to what I'd call "reflective of your ability". If kids are showing up to the SAT barely knowing how a #2 pencil works, that's bad. If they've had 1 hour on "if you can eliminate even a single answer that you know is not correct, do not leave the question blank" and "D means that no can determine which is greater not that you have no idea which is greater", that puts them in a position to demonstrate their ability and that's well within the reach of any school district that gives half an ounce of care for their students.

jl6 4y ago

> an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement. I do wonder if this is possible. If you up the baseline of school provision, won’t involved parents provide a further advantage over and above that?

lupire 4y ago
Not if the test difficulty stays the same, and you get more 800s and lotteries (or, dare we say it, more seats?!) for next level positions, at college or career. Tides, boats , bars.
shafoshaf 4y ago
When you talk about some of the least served communities, there is a lot of moving from school to school as people move from one housing solution to another. My wife taught in public school and out of the 35 students in a class there might have been a third to 40% who stayed with her the whole semester. She would have two extra pages of names of students who came and went throughout the year.
BeetleB 4y ago
Involved parents will likely always improve the scores of students, but the disparity between those who do and don't need not be so dramatic. It's fun to read biographies of 20th century scientists. Quite a few of them came from humble backgrounds and credited their success to education (and perhaps libraries). They often did not have well educated or motivated parents. Nick Holonyak is one such example. Carl Sagan is another. And this is even more apparent when I look at the British ones. It's a bit funny given how rigid and uninspiring the British education system was.

lupire 4y ago

SAT math is geometry,a 10th grade class for average students. Scoring below 700 isn't due to lack of "push" it's lack of some combination of intelligence, nurture, health, teaching. Due to the cost and complexity of transcontinental migration, most Asians in US now, and Jews last generation, come from elites from their previous family homeland who successfully migrated to escape bad government or seeking greater opportunity, when it was tactically hard to do so for the average person. It's a natural filter for smart, capable, effective people who can raise children to be same. The effect tends to fade over time (shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, or docks to docks, in three generations). Now that Jewish immigration has mostly ended, their great-grandchildren (and the descendants of previous generations of Asian immigrants) are, as a cohort, not performing academically as well as today's Asian immigrant children and chidren of immigrants. The math contest winners and teams, deep into the bench, are nearly all children of immigrants (and Polgar-esque homeschoolers who get to avoid time-wasting distractions of school)

barry-cotter 4y ago
> Jews last generation, come from elites from their previous family homeland who successfully migrated to escape bad government or seeking greater opportunity, when it was tactically hard to do so for the average person. It's a natural filter for smart, capable, effective people who can raise children to be same. The large majority of the US Jewish population came after the 1850s. They were not selected for wealth. Like the Irish immigrants were negatively selected. They were less educated than those who stayed at home, on average. Similarly Italians in the relevant period of mass migration. The middle class were doing well so they were more likely to stay home. > The effect tends to fade over time (shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, or docks to docks, in three generations). This has no basis in evidence. Every psychological trait I’m aware of is strongly heritable, including ones with obvious impacts on earnings like intelligence, conscientiousness and extraversion[1]. Social class is so heritable the only society to make a dent were the Chinese during the cultural revolution[2]. If you want to know more about the extraordinary persistence of social class see Gregory Clark’s work[3]. [1] Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits https://utahpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bouchard.04.curdir.pdf https://utahpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bouchard.0... [2] Persistence Despite Revolutions http://davidyyang.com/pdfs/revolutions_draft.pdf http://davidyyang.com/pdfs/revolutions_draft.pdf [3] https://faithandheritage.com/2017/06/the-heritability-of-social-class-insights-from-gregory-clarks-the-son-also-rises/ https://faithandheritage.com/2017/06/the-heritability-of-soc...

dilap 4y ago

It's kind of the opposite. I was a highschool dropout, highest level of math was basic algebra. I was able to change my mind about the whole education thing by buying a "prepare yourself for the SAT" book, studying it for a couple of months, doing well, and getting admitted to college. Ended up doing a math + physics dual major. (I'm really grateful that that avenue to college existed -- I could not have written an admissions essay, done extracurricular activities, or generally been a "good boy" if my life depened on it.)

PaulHoule 4y ago
Jim Webb who was a Marine officer in Vietnam, a journalist, a novelist, and then a Democratic senator from Virginia saw standardized tests as his route to social mobility from a poor background in the rural south.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  It's a damn shame Jim Webb stepped away from politics.
- lukas099 4y ago
  I've long thought that our intuitions about IQ tests are backwards; they are the most fair and least biased method we have to sort applicants for things. The more 'holistic' the process, the more that subjectivity (and therefore bias) creeps in. The only way around it is affirmative action, which leads to the current state of affairs.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    I think some of the persistence of hating on standardized tests is that standardized tests are one of the few barriers against the worst rich kids inheriting status from their parents. Sure, a little bit of test prep will help many people, if you’ve never seen a standardized test before some familiarity is good for you. But some of these kids could not test their way out of a paper bag and the only hope for them is hire a ringer to take the test in their place.

faeriechangling 4y ago

> The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. Is there any way to prove/disprove this? Also doesn’t this also beg the question as to why non-Asian parents apparently won’t teach their kids to be good academics?

someguydave 4y ago
Yes there is a way, you put kids in test prep and see if they do better. They generally do not improve much. The SAT is an IQ test, and IQ is mostly inherited from your parents.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > The SAT is an IQ test In that case I weep for the future, because I’ve met plenty of dumbass people who managed to get a high enough SAT score to get in school.
  - hirvi74 4y ago
    I also weep for people that extrapolate too much meaning from an IQ test. (I'm not talking about you).
- netheril96 4y ago
  So you are saying that Asians have higher intelligence, and not just a little bit higher, but significantly higher than other race?
  - someguydave 4y ago
    of the ones present in Michigan, yes.
  - throwaway8582 4y ago
    The Asians present in North America are not a random sample. A large portion of them came here specifically to work in STEM or other fields requiring high levels of intelligence and education. It's very probable that the ones here are, on average, significantly more intelligent than both the average American and the average Asian in Asia.

basic_test_prep 4y ago

> score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. Test prep has diminishing marginal returns. On the flip side that means just 1 hour of prep makes a big impact. This is what research has found and why a lot of focus is on getting kids to do any studying for anything at all. Many kids do zero homework and zero studying. Getting them to 1 is the hardest part. This is the biggest actionable problem for these exams. It doesn’t require race or culture or whatever at all. The research says it requires specialized instruction during school - something to achieve focused studying, as opposed to merely watching the clock go down. Difficult for the hardest students but on average, in aggregates, performs well. My point is that there are a lot of Asian students at Harvard who did 10 hours of test prep for the SAT. They didn’t go to cram school. There are also students who DID go to cram school. I myself studied about 10 hours for the SAT. You don’t need cram school to improve test scores. You need some studying instead of none at all.

roflyear 4y ago
Right, I think this is true. I scored really well on my SAT despite being a poor student and having parents that did not give a fuck at all, b/c I did just some minor prep for the test.
- warner25 4y ago
  Yeah, this is interesting, and it's close to my experience. Just by working through the questions in the official SAT practice booklet a couple weeks prior to the test (which I think was "free" upon signing up), and learning a couple lessons from my first sitting (set a faster pace and guess rather than leaving questions blank), I probably raised my score by 300 points into the 1400+ band on my second sitting. An instructor could easily teach those lessons in a single prep session that starts with a short mock test. The hard-core, months-long, daily prep courses for super-high-achievers seem like extreme overkill. The kids who need that are probably the ones in the 700-900 range, who need to learn a baseline level of math and English for the first time (of course, if that were possible, it would have already happened in school).
beebmam 4y ago

roflyear 4y ago

I may be the exception to this: my parents did not care at all, and I still scored really well on the SAT. I don't remember exactly what b/c I can't look up the score anymore, apparently, but definitely above 1500. I also did not care much as a student. I don't think I am remarkable here, I think I just took the test really well. I did do one short practice course that taught some of the small tricks to the test (most common problem patterns, to leave blank if you are really not sure, to come back to the question at the end, etc..) which I think probably helped for like 100pts at least.

jimbob45 4y ago

Don’t forget apathy. I easily qualified for every college in my state with my scores and out-of-state tuition meant there was no reason to ever push any harder for a better score.

eternalban 4y ago

> The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. I scored very high in both. Believe me, as new immigrants we were completely clueless about the heated race to top spots. In my case, credits goes to my makers (mom and dad :) and the fact that Iran had fairly good public schools. Culture is important. Two relevant shockers for me (as a very young new arrival to US): - disrespect for teachers. - practically institutionalized disdain for the smart kids. I am talking cultural products here. So I honestly think cultural backgrounds that feature things like special social and personal regard for those who teach, and special regard for individuals in STEM professions (for example "mr. engineer"), are more at play here than merely ambitious parents. And guess what is driving those ambitious parents? Culture has a lot to do with it.

commandlinefan 4y ago
> disrespect for teachers ... disdain for the smart kids I've gotten the impression from every high-achieving-country immigrant that I've ever talked to that schools in those countries just kick out the troublemaking kids before they have a chance to disrupt the environment for everybody else. Nobody gets kicked out of US public schools, for any reason - so the kids who don't want to be there and spend all of their time trying to ruin it for everybody else are always there.
- e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
  That's very much true. I remember very clearly that when I was a new 1st grade student in a poor southeast asian country that the kid that yelled back at my teacher in my 60-person class didn't come back next week, whereas I suspect the same would not fly in US public schools. The things I've read (threatening violence, etc) would've never happened in my home country's schools, and if it did would've led to corporal punishment (caning was regularly practiced) and expulsion, not necessarily in that order, and very quickly at that. My impression is also that the academic culture is very different - even in my poorly funded primary school full of poor kids, there was a sense of academic accomplishment being of the highest importance -- all the students knew the importance of good grades, and students that disagree were socially shunned. Smart kids were the popular kids, and the people who ranked the top 10% got into a special class and were widely admired.

ajhurliman 4y ago

The only way I could see your plan of offering identical schooling opportunities for everyone is boarding school, ie taking kids away from their parents. How are you going to stop/force a parent from helping their kid with homework?

Aunche 4y ago

I volunteer tutor teens in the SAT and the problem is a bit deeper than just parents. A few of my students have a similar amount of base intelligence as me, and if they studied as much as I did, they would have no problem with finding a path of least resistance to the upper-middle/lower-upper class. The problem is that even if I'm 100% sure this path exists, they are skeptical because it seems like I'm in a entirely different world from them, so I'm not different than an MLM influencer promising them $10k a week. I knew a lot of people who spent all their time studying and on extracurriculars, but the same isn't true for my students. It would require a Herculean amount of self-discipline to commit yourself to that much work when no one else you know is taking the same path.

snarf21 4y ago
This is why (imo), test prep should be a class you take at school. Why should it be a separate thing and a multi billion dollar industry? A lot of the SAT/ACT prep for HS students is about understanding how the tests work and how to approach questions. We already have a bunch of federally mandated AYP testing (no) thanks to No (ALL?) Child Left Behind, why can't this just be old copies of the ACT or SAT. By the time kids are ready to apply for college, it will be second hand and not another extra thing they have to learn.
- sitkack 4y ago
  That is probably the reason it isn't taught at school. School itself does very little to encourage class mobility, starting from being funded by local property taxes.
- Aunche 4y ago
  You can already get 8 free SAT practice tests and Khan Academy offers a free online class. If you go through all of them and learn from your mistakes, that should be more than enough to get a decent score. With tutoring and classes, you're mainly paying for someone to pressure you to put the effort in, similar to with fitness classes.
- learn-forever 4y ago
  these are standardized tests, taking normal classes _is_ prep for them

droopyEyelids 4y ago

Your success in life is partially a reflection of how you were raised, just like your success in math.

rmah 4y ago

But if the education system provides quality education with parental involvement, doesn't that imply that it provides quality education without parental involvement? You know, since parental involvement is not a part of the education system. Or, in other words, if parental involvement IS a part of the educational system, then it's impossible for the system to provide good outcomes without parental involvement since, you know, it's part of the system. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm confused why some people seem to blame the educational system for lack of parental involvement in some demographics.

cm2187 4y ago

I am not saying the US education system is good but there is only so much you can ask from schools to offset a dysfunctional environment. And the solution isn't to take children away from their parents. You need to change the culture, and culture is hard to change. I always refer to Poland which, out of 50 years of communism, is the most religiously and socially conservative country in europe.

nradov 4y ago

Another factor is parents' choice of where to live. Every real estate web site now prominently displays standardized test scores for the local public schools. Parents who care about academics will sacrifice financially to move near the highest scoring schools (or even cheat with a fake home address), thus creating a positive feedback loop.

TeeMassive 4y ago

> to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement That seems very naive to think that school overcome the impact of parenting. If a child doesn't have its physical and psychological needs met then there's not much the school can do. School can't make children do their homework at home either.

nfw2 4y ago

That's reductive. My parents were white liberal hippies who didn't push me at all. I got C's in school and a perfect math SAT and SAT 2. To be fair, I did spend a lot of time thinking about math because I liked it.

thwayunion 4y ago
> To be fair, I did spend a lot of time thinking about math because I liked it. Spending childhood doing things you enjoy and which also have economic utility is a secret power. Most people in the top 5th percentile of academic things also happened to spend a truly absurd amount of their youth obsessing over that academic thing. They may also be gifted, but spending all that free time in youth thinking about things is probably way more important than IQ. (For me it was programming and law... I was reading legal briefs and slinging code most evenings of middle school through high school, which set me up with a rather absurd advantage over my peers once I got to college.) BTW: elite unis/programs are looking for those types of people. It's not the extra curricular box checking that interests them, it's evidence of thousands of hours of practice at high value add skills. The practice can be forced with absurd amounts of grit, which is why it's a secret power when it comes out of intellectual curiosity.
- nfw2 4y ago
  Legal theory is a joy I discovered much later in life. The LSAT brain-teaser questions are also pretty fun. I've considered switching careers (now in my 30s), but I expect the realities of the job are much less thought-provoking.
- nfw2 4y ago
  Law is cool because it's like math, but because language is less precise than math, the rules are more malleable, and there is more room for creativity.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

rayiner 4y ago

> The challenge for large and heterogeneously diverse nations like the U.S. is to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement. It's a challenge, for sure. Should it be the overriding goal? Maybe if we weren't competing with other countries on the world stage.

credit_guy 4y ago

> to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement This sounds good in theory, but it can have unintended consequences. One way to read what you are saying here is that we should have a system where parent involvement has no impact. I may be biased (as a parent), but I think parental involvement should be encouraged, not disincentiviezed. Parental involvement is one of the forces of nature. It should not go to waste.