[s3r3nity]

+1. Folks pushing for equity haven't read (or too young to have read) "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, and it shows.

Instead of handicapping those who are ahead, we should intervene with those who are falling behind. Instead of enforcing equal outcomes, instead prioritize offering equal opportunity for every student to get the highest quality of education.

[Karrot_Kream]

It's not a matter of "handicapping", it's a multi-armed bandit problem where you only have N dollars to throw at the problem and you need to decide what distribution of N produces the best outcomes. I went to one of those low-income schools and without intervention I can guarantee you that over 60% wouldn't graduate. Even with a lot of help only 50% of my school graduated when I was in school (admittedly a while ago.) Even then, the number of folks who went to a four-year college was low.

The question is: do you help more folks graduate or do you help the 5% of stars succeed? I don't think it's as easy a choice as you make it out to be once you stop identifying with the gifted students (this is my primary annoyance with HN comments about most topics these days: it's just the commenter opining about themselves, disinterested in taking a systemic view on the issue).

[Spivak]

You're literally describing equity. The more interesting question what option will you choose when you're told that individual interventions as you describe are so expensive as to be infeasible.

I don't think it's an issue of a person's politics, Republicans tried the exact same thing with No Child Left Behind. Is the more important thing the individual rising to their highest potential, or is the more important thing the system where economic factors have created a cycle where only children of middle-class or better families are given the environment to rise and those kids run with the flywheel and become the middle-class parents.

I was literally never not going to be successful, I think I'm reasonably intelligent but that by far wasn't the biggest factor. My parents made damn sure I was on the gifted track, always got A's, and was set up to get into an in-demand major at a prestigious university. Was I actually that special or was I just the chosen one, in that I was chosen?

You can only be like "that's not true of everyone <anecdote>" but the exceptions fall away in the aggregate where your success is frighteningly well predicted by your zip code.

[lolinder]

> The more interesting question what option will you choose when you're told that individual interventions as you describe are so expensive as to be infeasible.

The top-level-commenter's point is that this is not necessarily the case anymore—the whole promise of educational technology was that we could finally scale individual intervention to every child, but efforts to do so have met with stiff resistance. I also work in EdTech and I've seen exactly what the OP is talking about.

We're at the point where we could extend the flywheel to more children than ever by integrating it into the public school systems instead of having it be something that upper-middle class parents have to provide as a supplement, but the culture has so thoroughly embraced the idea that "getting ahead" is unfair that we're not allowed to systematize it even when doing so would benefit poor students the most.

[Karrot_Kream]

I went to one of those low-income, garbage schools. I grew up in poverty. I was very frustrated by this attitude when I was in school but with a few decades of hindsight I see why this issue is complicated: do you focus on helping your poorest students graduate and not fall into indigence or do you focus on helping your brightest escape the flywheel of poverty and enter the upper-middle class?

I'm curious what exactly this "unfair"ness is. (I'm being genuine, my partner works in EdTech but I don't and I have very little idea what happens behind the scenes.) My impression in my low-income school was that the parents barely had any idea what was going on and if anything pressured their kids to leave school asap so they could get jobs and bring money home.

[Spivak]

Alright, I'm willing to hear this argument about. What do you think is the "best in class" solution in this space?

[mrandish]

"Bergeron" is one of those rare things that's just presciently ahead of it's time it's almost spooky (kind of like "1984").