[nine_k]

That is, they are biased towards top performers, not just high performers, even if one student's "merely high" is formally higher than the ceiling the other student hit.

(The "winning" strategy then is to move to an underserved high school after an elite middle school, and hit the ceiling.)

[xnyan]

You may be joking, but I have several high achieving peers whose families did this with good results. The choice was: did they want to be in the best high school with the highest level of competition, or did they want to go to an OK school that had good magnet programs and less competition. my sample size is only about three, but it worked out well for them.

[fn-mote]

I don’t think the GP is joking, but they may not have realized that this strategy is already well known. A lot of families won’t uproot themselves for it, though.

[osnium123]

They have local magnet/specialized programs in CA public schools that they use to attract good students to poorly performing schools for help goose up test schools.

[strbean]

This may be sampling bias as well. Having parents with the means, willingness, and involvement to do this is probably a strong predictor of success already.

[lubujackson]

This is the new meta, in SF at least.

Despite the "what are secondary effects?" school admins trying to "fix inequality" by creating school lotteries, ending gifted programs and focusing on "equality of outcomes not equality of opportunity", the only thing that has actually improved troubled schools is that smart kids with involved parents now actively seek out lower rated schools like Mission High so they can more easily rise to the top of the class and get a free ride to Berkeley or another UC.

There was an article about this exact phenomenon in SFGate a year or two ago so it is definitely a real trend.

[nine_k]

While I'm usually not a fan of ending gifted programs and such, I do believe that the kids in the lower-rated schools must feel a positive effect, mingling with highly-motivated, better-educated kids. It may do away with the whole "study is uncool, real kids hate school" vibe that holds many "bad neighborhood" schools back.

[wahern]

> I do believe that the kids in the lower-rated schools must feel a positive effect, mingling with highly-motivated, better-educated kids. It may do away with the whole "study is uncool, real kids hate school" vibe that holds many "bad neighborhood" schools back.

That's the logic, but it doesn't pan out. IMO it's because 1) by high school it's too late--kids already segregate themselves and the ones with strong study habits will tend to hide them. In America generally the culture is for upper classes to pretend they're anything but, coopting the styles and mannerisms of the lower classes, especially Black culture (which in American culture is almost by definition low status yet valorized).

I grew up poor, with zero structure at home. It wasn't until I was mid-way through college when I realized the people around me actually studied and did their homework. I just didn't see it because they all pretended otherwise, then snuck off with their higher class peers, almost like secret rituals.

Contrast that with, e.g. East Asian culture. I remember the first time I visited Singapore and saw a group of elementary school kids, without supervision, congregating at a McDonalds do to their homework together.

My daughter goes to a Chinese immersion public school in SF. It's mostly Asian, but there's actually a sizable minority of black students there. Like their slightly more numerous white peers, they tend have a parent (or relative--grandmother, aunt, etc) who made a very deliberate decision and who provides the necessary structure and support at home. Home support is key because, talking with those parents, not even by 8th grade does the feeling of being different disappear; it's very taxing, and without constant encouragement kids will slip back into their comfort zone. It's entirely unreasonable to drop a poor white, black, or 4th generation Asian kid off at that school and expect them to adopt and internalize the culture without significant support at home. By contrast, the recently immigrated Asians fit right in regardless of class or wealth.

Now imagine dropping a few smart students with strong study habits and support networks off at a school where most kids don't have those benefits. It's never going to move the needle.

I just got back from Malaysia, where the majority Muslim Malay population benefits from government programs in ways that would be unfathomable to all but the most leftist Americans. 50 years from independence, excepting for the most wealthy, cosmopolitan strata, the country is as racially and economically stratified and segregated as it ever was. AFAIU, the situation is similar in South Africa.

I'm onboard with the idea that diversity and breaking the structures of inequality are laudable goals, but so far nobody has figured out to socially engineer that outcome. Culture is like a newtonian fluid; you apply pressure and things tend to become even more rigid and less fluid. It's not just the privileged who push back, it's the social underclasses that also push back; they're no less invested in their identity. Change, when it comes about, tends to only happen organically in ways we haven't figured out how to induce.

I no longer advocate for affirmative action programs, though I don't like dropping what programs we have. Constantly changing the rules creates its own burdens and unfairness that probably exceed the costs of keeping them. Better to just let them quietly recede into the background where they can continue helping a small minority of people capable of leveraging them.

[paulryanrogers]

> ...so far nobody has figured out to socially engineer that outcome

Isn't forced busing a counter example? When I was younger it increased my exposure to different races and expanded my friend groups. By the 90s my family had moved a few times and the bussing had ended nearly everywhere. Things were far more 'naturally' segregated without some forcing function.

Coworkers with similar bussing experiences said their friend groups were also more diverse than peers or younger generations who didn't have it.

Civil rights legislation (and enforcement) also ended phenomenon like whites-only businesses and bathrooms. Changing some centuries old racism may just take longer than we expect.

[lateforwork]

> I'm onboard with the idea that diversity and breaking the structures of inequality are laudable goals

It is not OK to manipulate college admissions to achieve those goals. A student who worked hard in high school should get into the college he deserves based on merit alone.

[terminalshort]

Yes, but it should have nothing to do with how hard you worked, only what your performance is.

[sublinear]

Has this not always been "the meta" everywhere for all of human history (and nature)? It's the fundamental driving force in favor of "diversity" always winning out over time. It's diffusion.

It's definitely there in sports teams, jobs, politics, etc.

There's a natural limit to this effect. The downside is that being a big fish in a small pond means you may not leave the pond without a longer term goal beyond it, and there's a saturation point of talent beyond which any competitive advantage is minimal.

This ultimately does not really impact the lesser schools much unless they were starved for talent for too long and needed to raise the bar. Migration patterns have an ebb and flow.

[apparent]

One of the charts in TFA shows a discontinuity in admissions rate around 75% UPP. This means that if you send your kid to a HS that is underserved when you enroll, but drops below the critical 75% threshold because too many other families are doing the same, then the school could fall out of the strong-benefit category.

The kid would still have a better chance than if he applied from a high-performing school, but it wouldn't be as much of an advantage.

Socially, I'm guessing the kid could face some challenges because (1) other high performing students might not like him because he's a curve-breaker, (2) teachers would know what the family was up to and could view it as distasteful, and (3) if the student went to UCSD or another school where this is a well-known hack, there could be stigma for having gamed the system/being less-smart.

[kelipso]

No one cares what high school you went to in college, unless maybe you went to the same high school yourself.

[apparent]

Most of the time, no one knows. But if you're from a nice part of LA or SD but you went to a HS in a bad part of town, people might wonder why you went there, or figure it out for themselves.

I think in most cases fellow undergrads would see it as just playing the game, but some might see it as "cheating" or like you didn't earn your spot as much as they did (if they were from a HS that was from a good part of town).

[aprilthird2021]

> other high performing students might not like him because he's a curve-breaker

Not that common in high school to have classes and exams curved. Also kids don't care.

> teachers would know what the family was up to and could view it as distasteful

They also don't care

> if the student went to UCSD or another school where this is a well-known hack, there could be stigma for having gamed the system/being less-smart.

College kids also don't care and there are lots of other ways to game the system. Ocne you're at school, no one cares who gamed the system to get there and how they did it

[SR2Z]

Once upon a time, the SAT an IQ test, and it was a real achievement to score a 1600. That achievement has been hollowed out in tandem with the value of most college degrees.

We know how to test for merit. The greatest tragedy in this college admissions racket isn't the shadowy affirmative action policies, the mountains of student loan debt, or the entire college admission-industrial complex that's sprung up.

It's that even the tools we've used to use to measure if someone was _ready_ for college have been annihilated.

[JumpCrisscross]

> the SAT an IQ test

You’re thinking of a 2004 study that found “the SAT (and later, with Koenig, the ACT) was substantially correlated with measures of general cognitive ability and could be used as a proxy measure for intelligence” [1]. To my knowledge, this remains the case.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6963451/

[losvedir]

Time pressure is a crucial aspect of it, though. I think GP may be alluding to the alleged abuse of disability exceptions, allowing kids (who don't need it) to take longer.

[hackyhacky]

The SAT was never an IQ test, and it certainly doesn't measure "merit", whatever that is. It's a Scholastic Aptitude Test, and it isn't particularly good at that either.

If we had a good "test for merit" then we could directly assign people to their roles and ignore their actual performance.

[JumpCrisscross]

> It's a Scholastic Aptitude Test, and it isn't particularly good at that either

It’s a pretty good measure for how a student will do in their first year in college.

[fn-mote]

So is high school GPA.

[kelipso]

Not if you went to an easy school vs a difficult school vs a school that gives mostly As. Never heard of grade inflation or what?

[everybodyknows]

"Aptitude" was dropped from the name back in 1990.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#Name_changes

It may have become something of a dirty word ...