NYC public schools revamp Gifted & Talented, eliminate testing

[get these nets]

I don't have the data or links at hand, but different immigration patterns and the amount of education they received in their native countries impacting economic and academic outcomes is an accepted concept in economics.

I'll give a hypothetical example since I don't have the data, if China sends migrants to NYC and about 70% of those migrants had college education and/or access to credit/cash then they will likely have better overall outcomes than Guatemalan migrants where only 20% of them have college degrees and moat have limited access to credit/cash. And this type of disparity helps explain the academic disparities.

You seem to be emphasizing hard work, but immigrants who work hard and consistently dealt with complex, abstract, and adaptive systems in their native countries will outperform those who are unable to deal with those systems yet still work hard.

This is not quite what you're talking about, but it details what the poverty rates are in the city.
I think the mayor made free lunch available to all students, but in past eras your family had to fall under a certain income threshold to qualify. I read articles years ago, about the % of students qualifying for free lunch at the specialized schools not being much different than the other schools in the same zip or borough. Bronx Science might have been the exception, if I recall.

At any rate, chapter 2 breaks down poverty levels along demos.





Would like to know your thoughts. You too @Rhakim

 

[Professor Emeritus]

"Selected elite" here is a deflection by Rha. The immigration process tends to attract ambitious, resourceful people from other countries. He suggested that somehow this was exclusive to those coming from certain countries in Asia, and implied that they had financial and social capital that immigrants from other places didn't.

I didn't say it was "exclusive" to those nations, but different nations have extremely different immigration patterns. This is basic knowledge to anyone who has spent any time studying immigration or achievement gap issues.

The annoying thing is this is BASIC shyt in academia. I studied it 20+ years ago and it comes up in every relevant class. Everyone knows that immigration demographics are different from different national origins, and that groups who immigrate from relatively advantageous positions are uniformly higher achieving than groups that immigrate out of desperate necessity. Literally everyone reads John Ogbu and his critics and debates the merit of their differing theories.

No matter what theory you subscribe to, I expect you to at least be familiar with the material. But you aren't even familiar with the fundamental facts on the ground. That's why it's annoying to see you come in and try to lecture others on a subject that you've clearly never studied at any level. You're just arguing what you wish to be true based on your own affiliations (as a high-achieving immigrant) and your own subjective experience.


Here's a question - if it all comes down to "better culture", then:

1. Why were Chinese considering low-achieving criminal elements in the 1800s when they were importing laborers, but were considered high-achieving intellectuals after the labor imports were shut down and only STEM students/grads and the wealthy could it in?

2. Why are Koreans and Buraku considered low-achieving in Japan (where their demographics are general) but are even more high-achieving than mainstream Japanese when immigrating to America (where only high achievers immigrate)?

3. Why are Panjabi-speakers higher achieving than Hindi-speakers on average in India (where almost all the poorest regions are Hindi-dominant), but Panjabi-speakers are lower-achieving than Hindi-speakers in USA and UK (where Panjabi immigration patterns included a lot of early laborer immigration while Hindi-speaking immigration patterns were more dominated by recent student/STEM immigrants)?

4. Why do India, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines have such awful education systems and relatively low standardized test (including IQ) score results in their home nations, yet are considered high-achieving model minorities in the USA?

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Completely disagree. There's a real value in advanced classes because most classrooms are moving at too slow a pace for advanced students. This isn't about these classes being bad but that they're being exploited by parents with the assets to give their kids a head start or pay for tutoring/special teaching. It's like SAT training and tutoring you can take that WILL boost your score.

Outside of situations where the mainstream classes just plain suck (which is terrible for all children regardless of ability level), there is very limited evidence for the benefits of placing kids in different tracks at an early age. For the most part, they find that tracking students severely hurts the disadvantaged kids while doing very little for the advanced kids. A well-designed curriculum challenges all the students, and even though it "goes slower" the faster kids can be helped by a combination of extra reading/projects along with the intellectual challenge of learning to work together with peers of other ability levels, often including helping them understand the material which is one of the most intellectually challenging and long-term beneficial activities a high-achieving student can engage in.

And I say this as someone who not only has done the research, but also who went through 11 years of non-tracked education in a below-average school as an extremely gifted student, and who then myself was a teacher in non-tracked classrooms where I had to engage students of differing ability levels.