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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.
There’s always going to be racial disparities because there are racial disparities in academic skill as evidenced by testing. Getting rid of honor’s classes because black and latino students do poorly is like getting rid of swimming competitions because short guys do poorly or getting rid of beauty models because fat women feel offended. It is the exact wrong way of looking at the world. The black and latino students, instead of narcissistically believing they are morally harmed, should feel gratitude that they live in a nation where smarter people live and should feel blessed that they have more capable competitors to inspire them. If there is any moral harm occurring, it is that smart students will grow up to have to subsidize the problems of dumb students. In no way do the dumb students possess moral victimhood status, IMHO.
You're essentially arguing that black and Latino students should just accept the reality that they aren't as smart as white people, and be grateful that there are white people around to serve as role models.
Even if this were true, our society is not constructed such that we can assert a modern-day Great Chain of Being and expect the people born into the bottom rungs to accept it.
Are you suggesting that we join them in their denial of reality, or that we lie to them?
As I said to @The_Nybbler, I don't have suggestions. I am just pointing out that accepting the worst racial stereotypes about your people are, in fact, true, would be such an incredibly bitter pill to swallow that I don't think most people could do it.
I'm pessimistic, and I don't think there actually is an easy way forward, unless we conveniently discover either that HBD is wrong, or that the problem is easier to correct than we think.
People have ways to cope. It's always a sad day when a young man understands he doesn't have the makings of a varsity athlete, but he moves on. People typically value the things they are good at and denigrate the rest ('acting white') .
In the less politically correct accounts of white life in africa, they note that the indigenous accept the intelligence difference as a matter of course. Similarly to how an 'old-fashioned' white person might prefer a jewish lawyer.
I don't think trying to find a spooky force that keeps them down does anything but feed their resentment.
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