My top candidates for what is up here are:
1) fabrication as part of a social experiment on how credulous we are
2) fabrication by a sociopath with a very odd idea of self-entertainment
3) incredibly erroneous interpretation of what is going on by a crank
But it is SO full of red flags that I would be surprised if it is not intentional. Call it 66% chance it is intentional hoax.
And it is so far from the mark of a true post that I would be very surprised if it had more than a glancing connection to the truth, call it 95% that it is barely connected to actual facts.
I have kids in California public schools. I have read, over the years, many critiques of public schools and public funding generally. As bad as things are, they are quite obviously nowhere near as bad as this article suggests in the schools my kids have gone to and are now going to. Further, I am quite good friends with a long time teacher, administrator, and union officer in NYC. I by no means share her respect for the union and DO believe documented horror stories of “turkey farms” where truly impossibly bad teachers are stored while being paid rather than following the more expensive process of firing them. I do believe other horror stories. But I can tell you for sure, while things are not amazingly wonderful in California public schools, they are simply not even vaguely close to that bad in many real Calfifornia schools I am exposed to.
So at bare minimum, if there is any truth to the allegations in the original post, the idea that these things are universal, or at least pervasive in American public schools is wrong.
Next argument: many of us reading this board, and even being taken in by this post, went through the American public school system ourselves, and by my standards, (I’m 55) many of you went through quite recently. Many of us, I dare say, were in advanced classes. Does the OP fit even vaguely with what you saw with your own eyes? It is miles from my 40 year old experiences.
Next, there is a thriving critique of publicschools in this country. With the amount of negative attention public education has drawn, is it really plausible that NONE of this critique has discovered the depths of waste and stupidity described as routine by this post? It is not plausible to me.
Next, public spending and public education tends to be a pretty open process. If these are Government grants, there is a crap load of information that has to be public.
Finally, to make such extreme claims with absolutely NO linkage to any source other than the post itself, would require remarkable naivete about how an intelligent audience should perceive claims like this, an innocence which is belied by the beautiful craftsmanship of the post itself. Really, EVERY program discussed needs to be obfuscated? No agency involved can be mentioned?
I googled “black men ipad education grant” hit nothing similar to the OP claimed program.
The real question is how long before the trap is sprung and we are told we were naive to believe this at all and we are really no better than birthers and creationists when the story fits our fears. I think it is better than 50% we will get such a message, but we’ll see.
The variation in educational standards and practices between districts in America is too large to make generalizing from one’s own experience very useful except insofar as it demonstrates that the critiques given in the article cannot be universal.
When I talk to friends who went to decent schools (which is pretty much all of my friends,) their experiences, cynical though they might be about them, don’t reflect the sort of scandal the OP describes. When I talk to acquaintances who work as teachers for seriously disadvantaged schools through programs like Teach For America, the general consensus appears to be “No matter how bad you think it is, it’s always worse.”
Next, there is a thriving critique of publicschools in this country. With the amount of negative attention public education has drawn, is it really plausible that NONE of this critique has discovered the depths of waste and stupidity described as routine by this post? It is not plausible to me.
Every scandal was at some point not yet known. Consider an apropos contemporary news event: the Memphis cheating ring, which embraced an entire school district in cheating far worse than merely sustained incompetence and racism. It apparently may have started as early as 1995, and only began coming out in 2009.
FWIW I estimate 30% chance something of the sort is going on; if so, my guess is that the OP is actually a … well, I suppose he might use the term “racial realist” … who wants to show how those lefties on Less Wrong will believe even the most ridiculous claims if they allow them to blame underperformance by “blacks and poors” on systematic mistreatment rather than natural inferiority.
I have never worked in California, nor New York, and cannot speak for your experience.
Next argument: many of us reading this board, and even being taken in by this post, went through the American public school system ourselves, and by my standards, (I’m 55) many of you went through quite recently. Many of us, I dare say, were in advanced classes. Does the OP fit even vaguely with what you saw with your own eyes? It is miles from my 40 year old experiences.
Really? I myself went through the advanced classes. In my “Calculus AB” class, there were 28 whites, 1 hispanic, and 2 blacks. My school was probably around 30% black, 20% hispanic, 50% white. There are two possibilities. Either whites are 5⁄3 * 28⁄2 = 23 times more likely than blacks to be prepared for Calculus, or there is some kind of institutionalized racism going on.
Nobody issues grants to help the academically gifted kids who are already doing well. Most grants come as “dropout prevention grants”, or are otherwise targeted at students unlikely to end up on Lesswrong. So I would ask you: in your advanced math classes, were minorities represented as a proportion of the school’s population? Or was the ratio of the percentage of minorities in your school’s population to the percentage of minorities in your advanced classes higher than 1? Perhaps higher than 2? For me it was 23.
The real question is how long before the trap is sprung and we are told we were naive to believe this at all and we are really no better than birthers and creationists when the story fits our fears. I think it is better than 50% we will get such a message, but we’ll see.
Eh. I wish citations were easier to find; it’s kind of ridiculous, honestly. Just trying to find math placement criteria for any given school system on the internet is impossible, much less a random assortment of school systems such that my location is anonymous.
My top candidates for what is up here are: 1) fabrication as part of a social experiment on how credulous we are 2) fabrication by a sociopath with a very odd idea of self-entertainment 3) incredibly erroneous interpretation of what is going on by a crank
But it is SO full of red flags that I would be surprised if it is not intentional. Call it 66% chance it is intentional hoax.
And it is so far from the mark of a true post that I would be very surprised if it had more than a glancing connection to the truth, call it 95% that it is barely connected to actual facts.
I have kids in California public schools. I have read, over the years, many critiques of public schools and public funding generally. As bad as things are, they are quite obviously nowhere near as bad as this article suggests in the schools my kids have gone to and are now going to. Further, I am quite good friends with a long time teacher, administrator, and union officer in NYC. I by no means share her respect for the union and DO believe documented horror stories of “turkey farms” where truly impossibly bad teachers are stored while being paid rather than following the more expensive process of firing them. I do believe other horror stories. But I can tell you for sure, while things are not amazingly wonderful in California public schools, they are simply not even vaguely close to that bad in many real Calfifornia schools I am exposed to.
So at bare minimum, if there is any truth to the allegations in the original post, the idea that these things are universal, or at least pervasive in American public schools is wrong.
Next argument: many of us reading this board, and even being taken in by this post, went through the American public school system ourselves, and by my standards, (I’m 55) many of you went through quite recently. Many of us, I dare say, were in advanced classes. Does the OP fit even vaguely with what you saw with your own eyes? It is miles from my 40 year old experiences.
Next, there is a thriving critique of publicschools in this country. With the amount of negative attention public education has drawn, is it really plausible that NONE of this critique has discovered the depths of waste and stupidity described as routine by this post? It is not plausible to me.
Next, public spending and public education tends to be a pretty open process. If these are Government grants, there is a crap load of information that has to be public.
Finally, to make such extreme claims with absolutely NO linkage to any source other than the post itself, would require remarkable naivete about how an intelligent audience should perceive claims like this, an innocence which is belied by the beautiful craftsmanship of the post itself. Really, EVERY program discussed needs to be obfuscated? No agency involved can be mentioned?
I googled “black men ipad education grant” hit nothing similar to the OP claimed program.
The real question is how long before the trap is sprung and we are told we were naive to believe this at all and we are really no better than birthers and creationists when the story fits our fears. I think it is better than 50% we will get such a message, but we’ll see.
The variation in educational standards and practices between districts in America is too large to make generalizing from one’s own experience very useful except insofar as it demonstrates that the critiques given in the article cannot be universal.
When I talk to friends who went to decent schools (which is pretty much all of my friends,) their experiences, cynical though they might be about them, don’t reflect the sort of scandal the OP describes. When I talk to acquaintances who work as teachers for seriously disadvantaged schools through programs like Teach For America, the general consensus appears to be “No matter how bad you think it is, it’s always worse.”
Every scandal was at some point not yet known. Consider an apropos contemporary news event: the Memphis cheating ring, which embraced an entire school district in cheating far worse than merely sustained incompetence and racism. It apparently may have started as early as 1995, and only began coming out in 2009.
Wait, systematic cheating is far worse than systematic racism? That seems, uh, non-obvious to me.
FWIW I estimate 30% chance something of the sort is going on; if so, my guess is that the OP is actually a … well, I suppose he might use the term “racial realist” … who wants to show how those lefties on Less Wrong will believe even the most ridiculous claims if they allow them to blame underperformance by “blacks and poors” on systematic mistreatment rather than natural inferiority.
I have never worked in California, nor New York, and cannot speak for your experience.
Really? I myself went through the advanced classes. In my “Calculus AB” class, there were 28 whites, 1 hispanic, and 2 blacks. My school was probably around 30% black, 20% hispanic, 50% white. There are two possibilities. Either whites are 5⁄3 * 28⁄2 = 23 times more likely than blacks to be prepared for Calculus, or there is some kind of institutionalized racism going on.
Nobody issues grants to help the academically gifted kids who are already doing well. Most grants come as “dropout prevention grants”, or are otherwise targeted at students unlikely to end up on Lesswrong. So I would ask you: in your advanced math classes, were minorities represented as a proportion of the school’s population? Or was the ratio of the percentage of minorities in your school’s population to the percentage of minorities in your advanced classes higher than 1? Perhaps higher than 2? For me it was 23.
Eh. I wish citations were easier to find; it’s kind of ridiculous, honestly. Just trying to find math placement criteria for any given school system on the internet is impossible, much less a random assortment of school systems such that my location is anonymous.