SCOTUS Affirmative Action hearing.

[Levelfive]

Besides that, being a diversity hire/student/anything is like getting a participation trophy. It blows and can totally deflate self-worth knowing that of all the qualities you bring to the table your skin color/gender identity/[insert any immutable quality here] was deemed a deciding factor. I can’t stress enough how much that bites when we’re supposed to be beyond such things.

LOL I remember a similar discussion in class one time, and one of the male students said, "But wouldn't that feel bad, knowing you only got hired because of your gender?" And a female student responded, "You mean the way men have always gotten hired?" What posts like these never fail to give away is your baked-in presumption that the white person / man is inherently more qualified, which is itself an example of the systemic bias you're pretending doesn't exist.

- - - Updated - - -

Here's an important point to me: I'm white, but I'm not a legacy or a spectacular athlete. So your attitude of viewing each race as a monolith strikes me wrong. It's like you're saying that I should be happy that a group of other white people got preferential admission, because I'm supposed to root for my own race or something. So when the subject of affirmative action comes up, I'm supposed to be like, well, because there's a group of people over there that get preferential treatment that I'm not a part of, I should be ok with another group of people also getting preferential treatment over me!

I don't like either situation, personally.

What I'm saying is that white people vastly overestimate themselves and then whine that people they've vastly underestimated are being given the opportunities they always should have been. Unless you think less qualified black people took 'your' spot at Harvard, or 'your' job, or whatever, consider that people, yes, even black people, getting 'preferential' treatment over you are simply more qualified.

[Tyris Flare]

Another more controversial source of wasted funding is special education and overdiagnosis of disabilities. I could talk for hours on this specific subject, but the problem is it introduces a huge amount of procedure and invests a lot of resources in specific kids who are diagnosed because it's pay for play - it costs like 7 grand to get your kid a special ed evaluation, so most doctors are going to find something, particularly when there are so many disorders and the process for diagnosing them is faux scientific at best. No one wants to hire the doctor who tells you your kid is fine, so fill out a survey and if you check the right answers, tada, you have ADHD! What's your prize? Extra time on every test, separate setting to take the test, two teachers in all your academic classes, and a special tutoring class with only 10 kids and a teacher in it that meets 45 minutes every day. That costs a LOT of money for the school system, and the return is typically absymal - the student just becomes helpless because the system is now invested in yanking him through the system come hell or high water, (not to mention that the procedures around it waste a lot of time - teachers have to fill out reports and attend meetings during prep time fairly regularly, which hurts ability to teach effectively - prep time is super valuable!). Then of course, there's the few hundred thousand to millions a year in payouts from lawsuits plus the expense of hiring lawyers - a lot of time parents will hire lawyers to come to special ed meetings, so the district also hires one, and the meeting becomes a lawyer fight with the rest of the attendees sitting there watching the clock tick away on valuable prep time.

This type of stuff is all over and people are really in denial about it.

[Levelfive]

Affirmative action explicitly makes race a factor for judging how qualified you are. So it means that two people who are otherwise equally qualified will be distinguished if their races are different. I’m at a loss at how this makes the other person “more qualified”.

The only way this framework works is if you think in terms of races as these unified groups of people who are all on the same team. Not all white people have privilege, and not all black people don’t.

My preference is to have an educational system that promotes equality by finding and nurturing exceptional students who are attending low performing schools so that they can compete with students who attend high performing schools. Doing this promotes mobility between those groups. Right now we have the almost purposefully hopeless drive for “equity”, which is only widening the difference between have and have not schools.

Here’s another way to say it: say that affirmative action actually works (it won’t), and we have all races performing equally. We will still have a profoundly unequal educational system because there’s such a wide gap between the education available in different zip codes.

Right, instead of the implicit way that just benefited white people up until the last 30ish years. (And that's not even including the explicit consideration of race in governmental regulations that kept black people from buying homes, building generational wealth, consigning them to renting or owning in poorer neighborhoods with less property tax income funding schools simply because it's a black neighborhood.) As has been said many, many times, white privilege doesn't mean you haven't had a hard life, just that your race wasn't one of the things that made it that way. Wealthy black people are still subject to systemic racism, including in college admittance. And I'm not sure what's more indicative of a 'team' mentality than thinking if black people are finally being given opportunities *they earned* that it necessarily costs white people like you who weren't even involved. And let's be precise with our language--it's considering race as *one factor* in the exact same way as economic background is considered (and neither, actually, determines "how qualified you are"), a factor you are fine with weighting. The 'profoundly unequal educational system' you lament is a legacy of statutory racism that might be better addressed with more black people in positions of authority / wealth to affect policy, and since the bottom up solution (let's just keep hoping systemic racism fixes itself!) hasn't really worked and just maybe won't suddenly solve itself now, either, it's certainly worth a multi-pronged approach.

[Elegiac]

Agreed. But see my point above - affirmative action won’t fix inequality, it will just make it so the ruling class is as diverse as the underclass, and mobility between the two will still be incredibly low. Affirmative action is kind of a tacit admission that we have a class structure in this country such that it’s extremely difficult to change your station without a boost. I’d prefer to focus on fixing that problem instead of giving boosts to a specific few.

Or: how about we do both since systemic racism and economic class disparity are in fact two distinct problems however much they intersect, and much of that intersection has to do with the ways in which systemic racism ends up contributing to economic class disparity rather than the inverse.

For example, your point about school districts stems entirely from the fact that the reason local property tax funded districts exists is to create implicit racial segregation after it was explicitly outlawed during the civil rights era. The same thing applies to the rise of suburbs, the decline in generally accessible public spaces (like public swimming pools), etc.

Affirmative action is a portion of the package of necessary reforms, so arguing that we shouldn't have X instead of Y when both are necessary is just you bitching about incrementalism.

[Cthulhu 2020]

A lot of people seem to believe that racism just went away magically and doesn't exist any more. That or they have no idea what generational wealth is. Or perhaps both are true.

[Endus]

Like, look at this nonsense:

https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2015/7/23/2...cience-courses

If you were an educated parent, and you were told that your local school didn't even offer freaking Algebra 2 in its curriculum (which is a freshman level course for advanced students in my current district), why the hell would you send your kids to that school? Why would you vote for property taxes to support the school system? Wouldn't you do anything you can to get your kids into another educational environment?

Remember, you're the one who complained when I was pointing out the problem is deeply systemic to the entire American approach to education. You keep citing evidence like this that confirms that, despite your protests that educators are doing everything they can. If that were true, these problems wouldn't exist.

If you're failing to get students to meet curriculum standards by 7th grade, as the article stated was clear dividing point for entrance into specialized schools, that's nearly entirely on the teachers and their methods. Not the students. Outside of the marginally few with serious developmental issues or psychological issues for whom there should be special programs, every student should be graduating by meeting curriculum standards every year. If you're failing any significant percentage, that's the school's fault. We can discuss why the schools are failing their students so badly, but not whether they are or not.

[Elegiac]

My argument is that in the absence of racism, the same problems would show up.

While failing to justify why you think efforts to negate systemic racism (i.e. affirmative action) are mutually exclusive with efforts to improve the quality of education in public schools.

Then again, you already let slip your actual argument with this little line:

Affirmative action explicitly makes race a factor for judging how qualified you are. So it means that two people who are otherwise equally qualified will be distinguished if their races are different.

"Makes race a factor", i.e. assuming that race is not already a factor in judging someone's qualifications. You're kneejerking and trying to cover for it by pointing at other things which are actual issues but whose existence does not actually imply that systemic bias isn't something that needs correction.

[Endus]

Your argument seems to be that failing to reach standards is a uniquely American problem. You stated:



So my question is, how do you explain this?

https://globalnews.ca/news/9207930/o...ial-math-test/

"In 2018, 58 per cent of Grade 3 students met the provincial standard (compared to 59 in 2021-22) and a total of 48 per cent in Grade 6 (compared to 47 per cent in the latest results).

The results are even worse when compared to earlier years. Between 2015 and 2017, EQAO Grade 6 math scores were at 50 per cent, dropping to 49 per cent in 2017-2018."

I mean, you could have kept reading the article.

"“The pandemic took kids out of school and created mass disruption,” said Education Minister Stephen Lecce in an exclusive interview with Global News. “In every region of the world, math and literacy are regressing.”"

Ford's Conservative government since 2018 has also certainly not been helping anything.

There's problems. The difference is that the EQAO's role is to identify the failings of the system, and work to correct them. What they're not doing in there, you'll note, is trying to blame "urban" kids for just being "bad" and trying to find a way to abandon the education system's responsibilities.

Also, these are shortfalls for that particular grade's curriculum. It's not ongoing escalating exponential failure, which is what you were describing.

[Paranoid Android]

The Supreme Court is signaling support for a website designer who wants to decline same-sex weddings, in what is going to be a very influential First Amendment decision:

No ruling yet, so projecting here. This was the playbook when SCOTUS ruled for gay marriage back in 2010(?). Conservatives, not being able to take an "L" then decided to test their bigotry by making sure they couldn't make cakes now websites and whatever else cause of religion.

Melding many threads but the cover of religion as a weapon of being a bigot is the new and great take. Sadly here it will be used effectively.

Edit: Err I messed up was going to post in Roe V Wade thread on SCOTUS.

[Edge-]

The Supreme Court is signaling support for a website designer who wants to decline same-sex weddings, in what is going to be a very influential First Amendment decision:

No ruling yet, so projecting here. This was the playbook when SCOTUS ruled for gay marriage back in 2010(?). Conservatives, not being able to take an "L" then decided to test their bigotry by making sure they couldn't make cakes now websites and whatever else cause of religion.

Melding many threads but the cover of religion as a weapon of being a bigot is the new and great take. Sadly here it will be used effectively.

Oral arguments with Alito trolling are a fucking disaster.

Also, the plaintiff's lawyer really wants to make comparisons to Hamilton as if a musical stage-production and creating a web page are both equal in terms of a "creative work".

Also also, isn't this lawsuit being filed preemptively? Which is weird and dumb?

[unfilteredJW]

Tell me you have nothing to say without saying you have nothing to say.

The you should have read the fucking article.

[unfilteredJW]

I mean, I did. Feel like you need to elaborate more because you seem very angry but haven’t explained yourself.

Oh that guy cursed he must be mad. Grow up.

And there’s not much I really need to add. The other posters are easily showing why you are a failure of an educator.

[Draco-Onis]

Also also, isn't this lawsuit being filed preemptively? Which is weird and dumb?

Yes the lawsuit is preemptive this Karen doesn't build websites for anyone yet and that is not going to stop the supreme court from being bigoted religious zealots.

[Endus]

Still haven’t really said anything substantive - usually a symptom of someone who can’t make a strong argument just attack the writer without saying anything.

As far as I can tell, I linked an article and expressly quoted stats from 2018 because that’s pre pandemic, Endus said something about the pandemic, I said pandemic was 2020 and 2020>2018. Not sure what you seem to think I missed along the way.

Dude, I literally quoted the same article back at you. You didn't read past the cherry-picking, and that was the point. Because the explanations you were asking for were in the article you presented. It's on you for not reading the whole thing.

[Fugus]

The Supreme Court is signaling support for a website designer who wants to decline same-sex weddings, in what is going to be a very influential First Amendment decision:

No ruling yet, so projecting here. This was the playbook when SCOTUS ruled for gay marriage back in 2010(?). Conservatives, not being able to take an "L" then decided to test their bigotry by making sure they couldn't make cakes now websites and whatever else cause of religion.

Melding many threads but the cover of religion as a weapon of being a bigot is the new and great take. Sadly here it will be used effectively.

Edit: Err I messed up was going to post in Roe V Wade thread on SCOTUS.

That will also open the door for other companies refusing to offer services for those same companies for their views on gay marriage as well.

Will quite literally open the door to "I refuse to offer my services to these companies before they refuse to offer their services to gay people".

[Endus]

This started because of your assertions that in Ontario as a teacher, you get in trouble if even one of your students doesn’t meet standards.

I didn't say "in trouble", I said there'd be review of your performance, because it's problematic if you're consistently failing to meet curriculum standards.

Yes, we're in the middle of a problem period right now, and I never claimed we weren't.

I was admittedly curious so I googled performance scores in Ontario, and expressly looked for articles that contained some data about pre pandemic performance. I found this article which contains tons of information about Ontario having a long track record of low performance - the article has 3rd and 6th grade data from 2018, and also 2013.

And then you stopped reading the article. That's called "cherry-picking".

It also bears pointing out these assessments are only about failing current grade levels. It gets caught up. Here's graduation rates across Canada. Ontario's figures don't stand out here so I'm not shifting goalposts, we just get a wider view. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/...022002-eng.htm

That's north of 80% graduation rates for on-time graduations; that means graduating within three years of entering Grade 10. It doesn't include GED graduates. Bumping up to closer to 90% across the board with extended graduation (5 years after entering Grade 10).

There is no equivalent to the "just pass them through the system" like you were describing for the USA. There is no significant cohort falling 6-7-8 years behind.

This doesn’t square at all with my understanding of your earlier assertions, which led me to believe that in Ontario over 90% of students meet standards because you said that in all but very rare cases, that should be happening.

See above, 90% graduation rate. That's "meeting standards" by the end of their time in the system.

As far as I can tell it never has worked that way - there’s a lot of info about the pandemic and things they plan to improve going forward, but I mean, every school system always claims that in (insert current year)+3, everything is gonna be amazeballs, just wait.

As that source above shows, figures improved over the pandemic in most cases. The outliers are the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, and they're unique cases; both territories are fully rural to essentially wild with people living off the land pretty consistently. There's about 80,000 people split between the two. It's like the remoter sections of Alaska.

So what actually is it that I’m missing?

A lot, apparently. Including whole sections of the article you yourself cited.

[Endus]

I mean, I started out looking for data on pre-pandemic test results and I found it - that's not cherry picking, that's finding what you're looking for.

Looking for a specific data point absent context is literally the definition of cherry-picking.

And just as a point: I still can't find anything in your response that highlights what I actually missed, the only thing you mentioned from the actual source was that pandemic performance went up, which doesn't change the overall point that they're still low. But you still hit me with that I missed "whole sections", and uh, still haven't managed to back that up. But this is the politics forum so constructive conversation is too much to expect, right?

I already directly quoted from the article, the bit you skipped over when you expressed confusion as to what might lead to some complications, because it discussed that. And you skipped over it. The rest of this has been you gaslighting me.

We had a 90%+ graduation rate too, and we had teachers like you who believed that we were making progress and that the standardized tests didn't show it. So yes, Canada does better than the US, but there's also a major difference in how you and I have been characterizing performance. I'm a lot more pessimistic about what we were actually accomplishing because I trust the standardized tests that say less than half our students are on grade level (I've also taught algebra 2 in an inner city school, then taught it in a suburb and seen the difference between the curriculum).

This is my point; there is no such difference in curriculum in Ontario schools. You keep explaining that your system is broken and deliberately giving up on students, and when I challenge you on that, you say "nuh uh" and then cite more examples, like you just did right here saying you have different curriculum standards in different schools.

But in reality the systems aren't super different - you guys are at 50% grade level with an 90% graduation rate, we were at 40% with a 90% graduation rate.

You don't have any basis for this. You have two completely unrelated data points about wildly different grade levels and which are looking at different things, and then you made up a story for yourself. EQAO assessments of issues at early grade levels don't translate to an argument that those issues translate forwards to graduates.

[Levelfive]

My argument is that affirmative action allows the elite to ignore the major problem - profound lack of opportunity in our educational system. And I disagree with the idea that we have even tried a "bottom up solution" because most of what we've done in education over the past few years has increased the gap between wealthy and less wealthy schools. In the small city where I live, there has been a consistent erosion of opportunities for high achieving students in low achieving schools in the name of "equity". This has resulted in flight to the suburbs that has only accelerated over time. Currently, parents are faced with two choices:

1. Move to the wealthy district, spending an extra 500k minimum on the same house as you could get in the small city, and your children get an excellent education.
2. Live in the city, save your money, and you don't have access to an excellent education because the school system doesn't even bother trying to offer one. Until 8th grade, your kid will be in classes where a large portion of the students will be mathematically and also literally illiterate, and teachers will ignore them because they will be spending all their effort on the behavior problems. You will have to educate your kids yourself.

The increase in segregation that this has caused over the past 20-30 years (back to my days as a student in the city school system) is shocking when you see it.

You are describing problems that took our country's lifetime to create, that are the direct result of codified, systemic racism, and attributing their cause to a program--one aimed at alleviating some of the very problems you claim concern you--that's about as old as you are. Oh and blaming it for giving the elite a pass on ignoring problems they always ignored (not to mention created). That's just not worth taking real seriously, especially since you breezed right past evidence for root causes, right down to suburbs and white flight, and re-attributed them to affirmative action. Again, hard to take seriously when you blame AA for a "profoundly unequal educational system" due to zip codes as if it's some passive natural phenomenon, with no discussion of things like redlining and the sickening disparities in generational wealth and property valuations and taxes, etc., so you're either ignorant of it, or you're eliding it to paper over a racial agenda--and still have the gall to attribute "shocking" increases in segregation to affirmative action. Either way, see above. The possibility the elite might keep doing exactly the same things they've always done is not a sound argument for keeping black people out of it, an argument you are either deliberately or inadvertently making, so let's risk it. As to "I disagree with the idea that we have even tried a "bottom up solution"" I guess I wasn't being sarcastic enough when I described the bottom up solution as "let's just keep hoping systemic racism fixes itself" which seems to be your plan.

[NED funded]

Affirmative action is dumb. Leaving concerns abt how racist it is, its wild that rich kids are prioritized over poor kids just cuz they happen to meet a vague criteria as a way to adress injustice. I guess its fitting that the left has abandoned all pretenses it cares for the people and your race, sexuality, gender matter more

[Levelfive]

Affirmative action is dumb. Leaving concerns abt how racist it is, its wild that rich kids are prioritized over poor kids just cuz they happen to meet a vague criteria as a way to adress injustice. I guess its fitting that the left has abandoned all pretenses it cares for the people and your race, sexuality, gender matter more

If you think affirmative action is "racist," wait til you hear about the system that preceded it. Seriously, is there anything in the world that can stop white people WHO STILL ENJOY EVERY ADVANTAGE IN THIS COUNTRY (and largely the world over) from fucking whining that brown people might get an epsilon of the racial consideration that white people have always gotten and continue to get. Race has always been a factor. You are pretending it isn't or that weighting it as a factor more fairly somehow victimizes white (or in this case where you're using economics as a cover, which also completely fails) poor white people. Taking a wee tiny bit of the thumb off the scales that still heavily favors white people from start to finish is not victimizing you.

"Some will claim the white advantage is solely about money but wealthy black students don’t have these same advantages. White students whose parents are in the top 20 percent of income earners are accepted to elite colleges at higher rates than the top 0.1 percent of wealthy nonwhite Americans. And when the New York Times weighted college attendance by wealth, they found that “about four in 10 rich students from the top 0.1 percent attend an Ivy League or elite university,” which was roughly equal to the percentage of poor students who attend any college.

The reason why white students are overrepresented at top-tier colleges is not that they are smarter or better test takers. In fact, white students made up 33 percent of the top scorers on the SAT in 2015 but were 48 percent of Ivy League admissions; 62 percent of students admitted to the top liberal arts colleges and 49 percent of the people selected for flagship public universities, according to the New York Times.

There is a reason behind this racist madness and it is this:

It is all a scam.

For black children, education and money can’t overcome racism. Black students who graduate from elite college are less likely to find a job than a white graduate from any college. White high school dropouts earn more money than black college graduates. Black boys who grew up with wealthy parents are as likely to earn a high income as a white kid who grew up poor. Black men raised by millionaires are as likely to be incarcerated as white men raised by families earning $36,000 per year.

Whiteness is its own affirmative action. Poor white kids who go to elite colleges eventually earn incomes that are equivalent to the incomes of the wealthiest children in America. White college graduates are eight times wealthier than black college graduates. The children of white high school graduates are more likely to go to college than black children whose parents have PhDs.

None of these advantages has anything to do with hard work, determination or a belief in the American dream. It is not about wealth, morality or merit. Education, drive and even circumstance can never outpace the hustle of white supremacy.

In America, whiteness is its own reward.

That should be the scandal

https://www.theroot.com/separate-and...ame-1833273732

The fucking histrionics over sharing scraps you were never in the running for (because of performance, not any lack of wealth) is just so god damn played.