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> Rather than doing the hard work of examining how public schools fail poor and minority students, leaving them disproportionately ill-equipped to gain admissio
by prirun 4y ago
> Rather than doing the hard work of examining how public schools fail poor and minority students, leaving them disproportionately ill-equipped to gain admission to selective high schools, education officials in San Francisco discard merit and disguise the much larger issue of the failure of government schools.
This implies that if public schools were working "correctly", every student would qualify for "selective high schools".
First, that's impossible. People are different, they always will be, and nothing the government or anyone else does is going to make people exactly equal. There will always be smarter kids, average kids, and not-so-bright kids.
Second, why is it automatically the public school system's fault? What if something like the number of kids born to unwed mothers is a factor, like this:
https://www.childtrends.org/publications/dramatic-increase-in-percentage-of-births-outside-marriage-among-whites-hispanics-and-women-with-higher-education-levels https://www.childtrends.org/publications/dramatic-increase-i...
According to the above article, Black and Hispanic women are more likely to have a kid while unmarried. IMO this will have a huge impact on a child's development. And the more education a woman has, the less likely they will have a child while unmarried. Parents with more education are going to be able to help their child more with schoolwork, and it has nothing to do with how well the public school is performing.
- sollewitt 4y agoI think they're trying to say if pubic schools worked ideally the demographics of selective high schools would reflect the demographics of the school district.
- prirun 4y agoI guess I don't get it. It's possible to select by race (or at random) to make the demographics of a selective high school equal to that of the whole district. But then you get lower performance, as they've shown. What doesn't seem possible is to select by race to match the district and get the higher performance of merit-based admissions, when there are confounding race-based factors like having kids and only 1 parent or less education. The only way it would be equal is if all races had the same level of education and probability of single parents (or if these two things are not contributing factors to a kid's school performance).