[hedora]

According to the University of California’s own internal study, there is a small group of students with terrible GPAs and good test scores. They tend to do well in college.

There used to be a set percentage of spots for students in that situation, but the admissions people decided that “Standardized tests are racist!” is a good twitter sound byte and eliminated the spots.

Of course, their own reports said that the “bad GPA, high test score” cohort were mostly from underprivileged areas (and disproportionately black or hispanic). That nuance didn’t make the 140 character cutoff, so that group is officially abandoned by UC now.

In other news, they’re now promoting a big push to make the student body composition match the general population.

However, there is only one over-represented ethnic group in the UC system. Guess which one?

Hint 1: Whites are under-represented.

Hint 2: They swore they’d never bring back UC’s old “asian quota”.

I honestly think the people running this state’s school system are malicious racists. Their results speak for themselves: California schools are currently ranked 43rd in the nation. They used to be top ten.

[timmg]

> According to the University of California’s own internal study, there is a small group of students with terrible GPAs and good test scores. They tend to do well in college.

This was me, fwiw. I’m so lucky that the engineering school I got into was enamored with my math score.

[matai_kolila]

This was me as well; I should not have been allowed in, I took someone else's spot and I forever feel a tiny bit bad about that. I was not ready for college, and ultimately never graduated.

I'm plenty smart, I just needed an extra couple of years to mature before I was ready to take on the responsibility required for school, but by then my software career had already begun in earnest so I never returned.

[Spooky23]

The arguments against tests, from SAT to civil service exams is that effective tests correlate to IQ. IQ=racist, because we say so, so tests=bad.

[thaumasiotes]

> IQ=racist, because we say so

The argument is a bit less stupid than that. IQ = racist because whites and Chinese have it while blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Mexican immigrants don't.

Is that reflected in different levels of group performance? Well, yes, but ignore that.

[ergocoder]

Obviously we currently don't ignore it while not studying it in details either, so we've come up with IQ=racist and stopped there.

[bena]

I think you're closer to something than the other poster.

Let's give the assumption that certain racial/ethnic groups perform better on IQ tests as a whole than others.

If that were true, that would just be a fact. Yes. But why that is matters. And a lot of the why is just plain old racism. The groups who don't score well on IQ tests don't do so because they've been held back from all of the progress enjoyed by the rest of the world.

It's that progress that increases IQ scores. It's not that white people and Chinese people are smarter due to genetics or culture or whatever people use to spout. It's because they've been able to leverage the progress of the world to advance themselves. Black people, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans, especially immigrants have not been allowed the same access to leverage it. You give them the same resources, the same chances, and over time, you'll see the same increases.

In fact, you do. Because those groups constantly get progress's hand-me-downs. Last year's progress. So they lag behind.

[lokar]

You jump from the UC to primary/secondary schools. They are not run by the same people.

Most of the decline is due to underfunding due to prop 13

[kyboren]

> underfunding

This is a decades-old talking point that simply isn't true and hasn't been for years. Funding levels keep breaking records year after year.

"K-12 per-pupil funding [in 2022-23] totals $15,261 Proposition 98 General Fund—its highest level ever—and $20,855 per pupil when accounting for all funding sources." [0]

"Reflecting the changes to Proposition 98 funding levels noted above, total K-12 per-pupil expenditures from all sources are projected to be $18,837 in 2020-21 and $18,000 in 2021-22—the highest levels ever (K-12 Education Spending Per Pupil)." [1]

[0]: https://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2022-23/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Edu... (p. 3)

[1]: https://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2021-22/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Edu... (p. 4)

[britch]

I don't know the specifics here, but it seems possible for something to both:

A) have received more money than ever before

B) not have enough money to function properly

[kyboren]

OK, please see the chart at the top of page 5 of the 2021-22 budget PDF: https://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2021-22/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Edu... .

You can see that in 2012-2013 there was a big jump in funding from 2011-2012, going from $47.3B to $58.1B. In 2022-23 we're at $102B.

We're at roughly double funding levels from a decade ago, and the schools still don't have enough money to function properly? If so, this is alarming, and signals something is deeply wrong. We should investigate what is wrong and fix it rather than throwing ever more money into the black hole and hoping that will improve outcomes, despite a decade of evidence to the contrary.

[iopq]

How come everywhere else they get LESS money and have BETTER outcomes?

Hint: teacher salaries are a very tiny part of the expenses

[barry-cotter]

NAEP scores have been pretty much flat since the 1970s while inflation adjusted spending per student tripled.

https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/they-spend-what-real-co...

[WillPostForFood]

California spends about twice as much per student today (inflation adjusted) as it did before Prop 13 passed, so it doesn't track that Prop 13, or underfunding, is the cause of the poor performance.

[JamesianP]

All the 200+ student classes would certainly hurt them a lot though since that's a big chunk of some rankings.

[WillPostForFood]

I meant that primary/secondary funding per student had doubled. The UC and CSU systems have gotten less money from the state, but not because of Prop 13 which limited property tax rates. UC/CSU weren't and aren't receiving property tax revenue.

[lokar]

Prop 13 made it harder to raise all tax rates

[lokar]

That does not include capital expenditures

[hahaxdxd123]

Actually California's state school system at the UC level is 1st in the country. And 1st in the world.

[concordDance]

> However, there is only one over-represented ethnic group in the UC system. Guess which one?

Does the ethnic group that gets a quarter of Nobel prizes and was hated by Hitler not count or something?