[frankish]

I don't think your point that root cause is lack of initial resources contradicts the article's view on the benefits of pursuing excellence in education over uniformity. It is plausible that more uniform starting conditions and pursuit of excellence can coexist.

[whatevergoes]

I would venture out to say that equality breeds excellence by reducing existential stress in families.

[BrenBarn]

Sure, I don't think they're incompatible. But I don't think pushing "educational excellence" will do as much for our society as will reducing inequality.

[amluto]

San Francisco and other left-leaning areas tried pretty hard to directly reduce education inequality over the last 20-ish years, as discussed in the article, and the results were poor, to say the least.

This is not to say that one should not try to improve equality, but I think that introducing intentional unfairness (e.g. tampering with school or class or job qualifications) or trying to reduce excellence is a valid way to do it. Instead, it’s possible to improve equality by increasing the fairness of some parts of the overall system.

Here’s an interesting example of a school district with a good approach:

https://www.the74million.org/article/dallas-isds-opt-out-pol...

It turns out that many students who are capable of performing above grade level don’t do so because no one signs them up for it. So Dallas ISD tried signing students up automatically, and it works! Achievement appears to be increasing as a result within each major racial group and there’s less inequality.

[BrenBarn]

> This is not to say that one should not try to improve equality, but I think that introducing intentional unfairness (e.g. tampering with school or class or job qualifications) or trying to reduce excellence is a valid way to do it. Instead, it’s possible to improve equality by increasing the fairness of some parts of the overall system.

I'm a bit confused. Was there a missing "not" somewhere in the first sentence? Your second sentence there begins with "instead", which makes it seem like you're saying you don't believe in "introducing intentional unfairness" but the first sentence says you think it is a valid approach.

Overall I agree that tinkering with specific details like test score thresholds is not a great idea, although I think my perspective is a bit different from what you're saying here. My view is that these various manipulations of educational parameters won't work because the differences in educational outcomes are largely a result of differences in parents' economic circumstances. Or, put another way, the "inputs" to the educational system, in terms of where kids are at when they enter it, are at least as important as what the system does once kids are in it. We cannot equalize the outputs without equalizing the inputs.

That's not to say that things like the Dallas approach you linked to are bad or will have zero effect, just that it can only get us so far.

[amluto]

>> > This is not to say that one should not try to improve equality, but I think that introducing intentional unfairness (e.g. tampering with school or class or job qualifications) or trying to reduce excellence is a valid way to do it. Instead, it’s possible to improve equality by increasing the fairness of some parts of the overall system.

I am indeed missing a "not". That should be "...is not a valid way to do it".

And I kind of agree with you. I spent quite a bit of time growing up kibbitzing conversations with people involved in the now-defunct University of California affirmative action system, and I learned a few things, or at least a few things that the people I talked to believed. There are plenty of things one can measure: SAT scores, GPA, race, parents' income (W-2, AGI, whatever is reportable on FAFSA), statistics about the high school that the applicant went to. And there are goals one can try to meet with one's evaluation and that one can try to estimate: aptitude for college, grit, race (of course), degree to which they outperformed expectations, etc.

So one can be fair in the sense of admitting people only based on their present measurements (SAT score, for example). Or one can be differently fair and throw parents' income into the mix, but this has issues: certain groups, in a manner that is highly correlated with race, have family wealth and resources that are not reflected in W-2 income. You can try to correct for that by throwing race into the mix, and that is a giant rabbit hole and now rather illegal. One can try to account for kids who have excellent aptitude but test poorly because they were at a bad school, and this is hard, and maybe one's analysis indicates that race should be a feature used for this purpose, and see above about rabbit holes. One can strive for racial equality (does that mean equal fraction black and white? or matching population demographics? population demographics where? or just less outrageously imbalanced?), but how does one go about this?

In any case, the laws and judicial opinions changed, and UC had been considering race, and they stopped. And I think this was for the best. Regardless of statistics, considering an applicant's race directly seems very unfair. And it forced the people who wanted to improve equality to find what I think are better approaches: outreach, trying to improve the pipeline, etc. And, frankly, I don't think I'd want my own race to be considered in my applications for things, regardless of whether that consideration would make me more or less likely to be accepted.

[BrenBarn]

I think I get what you're saying. Another way to think of it is to think about what is the domain in which we're striving for fairness.

We could say the rules of basketball are "internally fair" if what we're trying to do is determine which team played better. But if we start using the results of basketball games to, say, determine who qualifies for a mortgage, then maybe we would say that loan qualification system is not fair.

In a similar fashion, we could say that some hypothetical admissions scheme is fair in that it selects the students most likely to have the characteristics the school is looking for. (If it instead selects students most able to game the admissions process itself, then it's not fair in that way, but let's assume for now that it's fair in terms of selecting for on post-admission performance.) But the overall resource allocation in society, which depends in part on education, may be unfair even if the "internal fairness" of the educational merit system is fair.

My position is basically that it doesn't make sense to get too focused on that education-internal fairness specifically. I'm more concerned with the overall fairness of our society. And I think that if we made our society as a whole more fair, that would make education more fair as a byproduct. If, on the other hand, we do not make society more fair, making education more fair on its own is an underwhelming result. The main reason to make education more fair would be if you believe it will have knock-on effects that make society overall more fair. I think some of the people pushing for increased "fairness" in education (e.g., via affirmative action requirements) believe it can have large effects of that type; but I believe that, while it may have some effects, those effects will be relatively small.