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Hey! First time poster here. Please be critical.
I saw this article last week and am not sure how to think about it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-increase-equity-school-districts-eliminate-honors-classes-d5985dee
The TL;DR is that honors classes in this subset of all honors classes had a clear bias in terms of racial makeup relative to baseline. So they stopped offering honors classes.
On the one hand this seems super effective— with a strategy like this maybe in a generation or so when they start offering honors classes again there might be less bias.
On the other hand my intuition says that in general it’s okay to allow students to self-select (or students and whoever is telling them what to do) and decide how much schoolwork they want to do.
It seems relevant to the school-flavor culture war stuff.
Any links to previous threads on similar topics would be appreciated.
Curious to know more.
Edit: not bait, genuine curiosity. Got some good criticism about low-effort top-level-posting, would appreciate suggestions/pointers to excellent top-level posts.
Continued edit: Also curious what about this post codes it as bait? A few people saw it that way.
No, the goal is not to establish representation qua representation. The goal is to prove that black people are "just as good as" everyone else; that dark skin, or "black" speech, and "black" culture really isn't worse, or even all that separate from the mainstream; that people raised in picket-fence honkey-topia aren't laughing up their sleeve at Shaniqua with the neck-swivels and the sassy-black-girl mannerisms and weave, or D'quavious who starts every sentence "naw, man, f'real..." Or that's at least what I'd bet the black people involved sometimes think (based in part on accounts like John McWhorter's). The ever-shifting demands for affirmative action, representation, equity, and all the rest of it are just a never-ending stream of metrics for this ineffable "acceptance" which inevitably fail because what's being sought isn't material - it's psychological. Your cynical approach is actually the antithesis of what these people want. Your way is just Goodhart's Law ruining their efforts permanently.
As to what the white people who actually make up the bulk and vast numerical majority of the radical-left race-activists are thinking, that's something else entirely. There, the concern isn't even necessarily with black people as people - it's often an entirely narcissistic obsession with self-criticism and self-abnegation (or at least the criticism and abnegation of things which they can safely "rebel" against). "The resistance" against "fascists" and "just being a decent person" against Jim Crow. Cynically doing redistribution wouldn't help these people at all because their focus isn't on the black people at all, except insofar as black people are a moral cudgel they can wield to make themselves look and feel better. They'll find some new way to wield the cudgel, or if it comes to it, find a new cudgel (e.g. the switch from gay rights to trans rights). The point is to rebel against what they see as an illegitimate order, not actually to solve on-the-ground issues.
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