Few things are more ridiculous, immoral and dumb than the progressive approach to education. People like this DiBlasio fellow don’t care about students or education or anything but making themselves look good in the eyes of their idiot peer group.
This NYC school that I know nothing about and have no interest in learning is just a symptom. We are seeing this approach at work everywhere, and it’s extremely destructive.
I remember once driving such a progressive education freak to an attack of tachycardia by asking, “Is it possible that they didn’t pass the exam because they don’t know the material?” In his world, the only reason why anybody fails at school is because they are oppressed by evil forces and not given enough of a chance. The existence of students who simply are not prepared is utterly impossible for them to accept.
Clarissa's Blog 
Students aren’t prepared to go to this high school because they didn’t have access to a good middle school. And they couldn’t get into those because no access to good elementary schools. And that because parents were disadvantaged, and so on. You have to start fixing the system somewhere, isn’t it?
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Intellect is 70% inherited, 30% acquired. Learning habits are acquired within the family with extremely rare exceptions.
I grew up more disadvantaged than anybody in the US can imagine. I had no access to any school except the Soviet, which is no school at all. And I ended up going to Yale.
There is no social remedy for this problem other than encouraging people to read to their kids at least an hour a day from the time they can sit up, talk to them, take them out, avoid screens, fill the house with books, etc. I’ve been teaching for a very long time. This is the only thing that will help.
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\ Intellect is 70% inherited, 30% acquired.
Is it your personal opinion, or has it been proven somehow?
Why not 75% or 85% inherited?
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I’m sure it’s an approximate number.
The idea that students are not doing well academically because they didn’t go to “good schools” is very strange. As if those “good schools” were good not because of the people who are there but because of some magical inhuman force that visits goodness on random geographical locations.
Of course, it’s easier to believe that a child isn’t doing well because he didn’t get to go to such a magic place and not because one chose to duckface on Instagram instead of taking him to the library or reading to him.
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—Intellect is 70% inherited, 30% acquired.
Let’s combine this statement with the statistics from the article in question: 75% of Stuyvesant students are Asian, 4% are Black and Latino combined, and the rest, apparently, White… Maybe there are a couple of Native Americans somewhere… What mechanism you propose, given this belief system of yours, that explains these statistics? 🙂 Are Asian kids genuinely that much smarter? Or are their families to such an extent more likely to be educated (and thus provide proper environment) and to support their children’s intellectual pursuits than not just poor Black or Latino families, but White families as well? I am sorry, but I bet this statistics is heavily influenced by some Tiger-mom sort of phenomena…
I am far from suggesting that Stuyvesant should admit any unprepared kids in the name of racial diversity and social justice. I just find that in this context one should discuss not only the obvious deficiencies or outright failures of many New York middle schools, but also what exactly is rewarded by the admissions procedure in the top-rating schools? Is it something our society wants to reward in the long run? Are we creating a reservation for the smartest ones? Or for those relentlessly pushed by their parents? Even if we can somehow ensure that the accepted kids are the smartest ones – is that kind of a reservation a good thing or at least partially a questionable thing? Are we deliberately avoiding something by pretending that we are dealing wiht a meritocracy here?
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The only way to make this more egalitarian is not to shuttle kids around but to promote the kinds of things I listed in the thread.
As for why at this particular school more kids are “Asian”, I don’t think it’s an important or interesting question. It’s just one school among many. I’ve been to the best school in my region. Nobody is Asian because of the demographics. The school is the best because these are the kids who saw their parents read books, etc.
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It’s just because Asians are more richer and value more education than others.
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Only “richer”
More richer, bleaaaaaahhhh…
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I’m sure there is no shortage of rich white families in NYC. But that isn’t helping bring more white kids to the school. It’s just not about money.
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It’s also about giving more value culturally to education.
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Clarissa and David, I agree with both of you, except here one has to explicitly define what “giving more value culturally to education” means for/in different cultures. Once this is understood, one could analyze what exactly this or that education and selection systems actually promote.
I will write more under the “idea schools”…
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You have to start fixing the system at the base, not at the top.
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Keep looking and learning, lady!
You’re going to turn into an intelligent conservative any day now. 🙂
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In many ways I am, it’s no secret. And then in other ways I’m not.
This is so weird because people seem to be using magical thinking here. They seem to think it’s the school building or the grounds or something that magically produce great results.
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I don’t think anyone really thinks the soil composition or exact latitude and longitude are actually relevant. “Good school” is code for a school in a wealthy neighborhood or where mostly the kids of well-educated professionals go for other reasons (i.e., cost).
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An intelligent conservative cannot vote for Trump.
https://polldaddy.com/js/rating/rating.js
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An intelligent conservative cannot vote for Trump.
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You’re close of what some call a « Civil Libertarian », except for open borders.
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I’m honestly as far as one can be from a libertarian. 🙂
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Civil libertarians are like libertarian for civil rights (that’s why you hate authoritarian SJWs), but they support state welfare, education, healthcare, like liberals.
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“The existence of students who simply are not prepared is utterly impossible for them to accept”
Some progressives have trouble accepting others as moral agents who are capable of making their own choices (which may have bad consequences).
People from cultures that are based on oral give and take and maintaining personal relationships are often going to have problems with the essential isolation that intellectual development requires (and making that isolation possible is one of the most precious gifts parents can give their children). You can hone social skills by engaging with others orally but you can’t hone abstract reasoning skills that way.
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It’s a fake egalitarian measure that, in reality, is simply cruel. It will make him look good to a bunch of clueless rich donors and that’s about it. Obviously, he has no reason to care about anything else.
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