2 ms·

you're missing the fact that here in the US race is an extremely large factor in how students succeed, partly from correlation with socioeconomic and cultural f

by zem 3y ago

you're missing the fact that here in the US race is an extremely large factor in how students succeed, partly from correlation with socioeconomic and cultural factors, but also because it determines what sort of treatment kids get in school, from the teachers and from the administration. anecdotally, I have a friend who, when she was looking for a school for her kid, had to drill down into the data for which schools had significantly worse results for black students, because that spoke to systemic factors in the school environment, and so even if the school looked good in its overall statistics she knew her kid would not likely get a good education there.

tomsmeding 3y ago
This is actually a good point; I had not considered that the equality that people are trying to achieve here is equality between races. And if that's what you're interested in, surely that's what you need to track. I'm sorry for your friend; that situation sounds like a very odd mix of empowering (having the data — albeit after drilling) and deeply discriminatory and marginalising. Over here we do actually have at least some of the race inequality problems, but we're putting much less emphasis on them. The approach has advantages but clearly also disadvantages. Thanks for the thought-food.