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Comment by aabajian | Hacker News Reader

The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically. The stratification is more granular than Asian versus Black or White versus Native America. For example, Jewish students excel beyond the Caucasian average while Cambodian and other Southeast Asian Immigrants perform significantly below the national average for Asian Americans. The challenge for large and heterogeneously diverse nations like the U.S. is to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement. There is also the need to provide quality education to adult learners, a wholly different, but equally important topic in the area of rapid technological change.

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> score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically.

Test prep has diminishing marginal returns.

On the flip side that means just 1 hour of prep makes a big impact.

This is what research has found and why a lot of focus is on getting kids to do any studying for anything at all.

Many kids do zero homework and zero studying. Getting them to 1 is the hardest part.

This is the biggest actionable problem for these exams. It doesn’t require race or culture or whatever at all. The research says it requires specialized instruction during school - something to achieve focused studying, as opposed to merely watching the clock go down. Difficult for the hardest students but on average, in aggregates, performs well.

My point is that there are a lot of Asian students at Harvard who did 10 hours of test prep for the SAT. They didn’t go to cram school. There are also students who DID go to cram school. I myself studied about 10 hours for the SAT.

You don’t need cram school to improve test scores. You need some studying instead of none at all.

Right, I think this is true. I scored really well on my SAT despite being a poor student and having parents that did not give a fuck at all, b/c I did just some minor prep for the test.

Yeah, this is interesting, and it's close to my experience. Just by working through the questions in the official SAT practice booklet a couple weeks prior to the test (which I think was "free" upon signing up), and learning a couple lessons from my first sitting (set a faster pace and guess rather than leaving questions blank), I probably raised my score by 300 points into the 1400+ band on my second sitting. An instructor could easily teach those lessons in a single prep session that starts with a short mock test.

The hard-core, months-long, daily prep courses for super-high-achievers seem like extreme overkill. The kids who need that are probably the ones in the 700-900 range, who need to learn a baseline level of math and English for the first time (of course, if that were possible, it would have already happened in school).

Just want to make sure, and correct me if I'm wrong, but is this your argument? "some students did X and their outcomes were good, therefore doing X is all anyone needs to have a good outcome"

How can you in read that comment in good faith and come to that conclusion?

There is a commonly held belief that "Asian students do better because their parents push them really hard".

The parent comment is arguing that the "really hard" part is not necessary. They are stating that if you condition on "studied at all" (above some minimum threshold) you'll explain away most of the group variance.

They're also not even arguing against the claim that studying more is better, just that the biggest improvement is in studying at all.

The final conclusion is spelled out clearly: If you want to improve test scores across the board you don't have to "push kids really hard", rather you have to work to get all students to get over the initial hurdle of studying some minimum threshold.

Now the parent might not be correct, but it's hard to see how you're even coming across with the reading of that comment you are.

5-10 hours of test prep may add a couple hundred points to someone’s score, but probably won’t take someone from ann 850 to 1200.

Looking at the math section, you might get a 600 if you don’t study but could know all the material but don’t know how to take the test.

But to get a 600 requires you to know a certain amount of material and know how to take the test. Most kids at my HS couldn’t get a 600 math even with 40 hours of math prep.

It's kind of the opposite. I was a highschool dropout, highest level of math was basic algebra. I was able to change my mind about the whole education thing by buying a "prepare yourself for the SAT" book, studying it for a couple of months, doing well, and getting admitted to college. Ended up doing a math + physics dual major.

(I'm really grateful that that avenue to college existed -- I could not have written an admissions essay, done extracurricular activities, or generally been a "good boy" if my life depened on it.)

Jim Webb who was a Marine officer in Vietnam, a journalist, a novelist, and then a Democratic senator from Virginia saw standardized tests as his route to social mobility from a poor background in the rural south.

It's a damn shame Jim Webb stepped away from politics.

I've long thought that our intuitions about IQ tests are backwards; they are the most fair and least biased method we have to sort applicants for things. The more 'holistic' the process, the more that subjectivity (and therefore bias) creeps in. The only way around it is affirmative action, which leads to the current state of affairs.

I think some of the persistence of hating on standardized tests is that standardized tests are one of the few barriers against the worst rich kids inheriting status from their parents.

Sure, a little bit of test prep will help many people, if you’ve never seen a standardized test before some familiarity is good for you. But some of these kids could not test their way out of a paper bag and the only hope for them is hire a ringer to take the test in their place.

Yeah I mean we just had a whole college admissions scandal a few years back with rich parents trying to get their not-so-smart kids into elite colleges.

Not even elite colleges! UCs...

Are you suggesting that we should close schools and ship that book to every family? Might have worked for you, but I can guarantee you that it will be disastrous for most students.

Nah, not at all -- just that the SAT is a reasonable test of ability that is in fact accessible to people w/o rich educational backgrounds.

If you're born poor or somehow outside of the social mainstream, standardized testing is your friend.

(I wasn't commenting one way or the other on K-12 education -- I had a mixed experience personally...I think it could've been done a lot better. My wife had a great experience. But she went to private school.)

SAT math is geometry,a 10th grade class for average students. Scoring below 700 isn't due to lack of "push" it's lack of some combination of intelligence, nurture, health, teaching.

Due to the cost and complexity of transcontinental migration, most Asians in US now, and Jews last generation, come from elites from their previous family homeland who successfully migrated to escape bad government or seeking greater opportunity, when it was tactically hard to do so for the average person. It's a natural filter for smart, capable, effective people who can raise children to be same.

The effect tends to fade over time (shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, or docks to docks, in three generations). Now that Jewish immigration has mostly ended, their great-grandchildren (and the descendants of previous generations of Asian immigrants) are, as a cohort, not performing academically as well as today's Asian immigrant children and chidren of immigrants.

The math contest winners and teams, deep into the bench, are nearly all children of immigrants (and Polgar-esque homeschoolers who get to avoid time-wasting distractions of school)

> Jews last generation, come from elites from their previous family homeland who successfully migrated to escape bad government or seeking greater opportunity, when it was tactically hard to do so for the average person. It's a natural filter for smart, capable, effective people who can raise children to be same.

The large majority of the US Jewish population came after the 1850s. They were not selected for wealth. Like the Irish immigrants were negatively selected. They were less educated than those who stayed at home, on average. Similarly Italians in the relevant period of mass migration. The middle class were doing well so they were more likely to stay home.

> The effect tends to fade over time (shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, or docks to docks, in three generations).

This has no basis in evidence. Every psychological trait I’m aware of is strongly heritable, including ones with obvious impacts on earnings like intelligence, conscientiousness and extraversion[1]. Social class is so heritable the only society to make a dent were the Chinese during the cultural revolution[2]. If you want to know more about the extraordinary persistence of social class see Gregory Clark’s work[3].

[1] Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits

https://utahpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/bouchard.0...

[2] Persistence Despite Revolutions

http://davidyyang.com/pdfs/revolutions_draft.pdf

[3] https://faithandheritage.com/2017/06/the-heritability-of-soc...

It's not clear if you're trying to contest with the parent or agree with him, but you are doing the latter.

> you are doing the latter

Not necessarily. If intelligence is genetic, then by OP's hypothesis, immigrants are more likely to be intelligent and pass that on to their children - whereas GP's hypothesis (seems to suggest) that intelligence is effectively random but determination is what's passed down from parent to child. Of course, it's probably a combination of both.

It depends on the degree of regression to the mean, and to which mean the children are regressing to. Due to selection criteria bias of immigrants they are more likely to be outliers than non immigrants. While it's very likely that the outliers have a genetic advantage it seems that important combinations of genes are often lost and on average subsequent generations do regress to the mean intelligence of the general population that they come from more. If intelligence was a single gene or the average of multiple genes what would normally be expected would be an average of the parents intelligence. It appears that the actual results are the mix of the two which could be readily explained by important combinations of genes not being lost some of the time.

In the future when the important combinations of genes yielding more intelligence are known it'll be possible to select for certain combinations and children selected this way would be expected to have a higher intelligence than either parent. i.e. making multiple draws from a distribution and picking the highest value.

And I'd argue it doesn't really matter because whether it is one or the other, it is highly transmissible, and there isn't much you can do about it as a matter of public policy, unless you take away children from their parents.

> Now that Jewish immigration has mostly ended, their great-grandchildren (and the descendants of previous generations of Asian immigrants) are, as a cohort, not performing academically as well as today's Asian immigrant children and children of immigrants.

Source? Judging by elite college representation [1], they're doing at least as well if not better than Asian Americans (which granted, is not limited to just Asian immigrant children).

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24166064

Judging by elite college representation

Elite college representation is a poor metric because of legacy admissions, influence of donors, and the reported efforts to limit Asian admissions.

Look at schools with more merit-based admissions (MIT, Caltech, etc.). Asians are overrepresented to a much higher degree.

Just a quick note on the word 'push'. We all now the 'tiger parenting' trope. Those parents exists and it makes a difference (with clear 'pushing', which I see as a negative).

But with maths I think it's a bit more subtle. Just the tiny things (even just 'talk' math) you do in early education can make a massive return later. There is no 'mean' in maths education even in ages 4-10 (my kids). We live in the Netherlands, that scores quite well in the table. And still I think math education is at least unambitious for the higher percentiles.

With just a few minutes here and there I've managed to get some pretty abstract concepts in their thinking (say: zero and the empty set, that's something small kids understand intuitively / or the first algorithms with russian multiplication or divide and conquer). There's no need for pushing, and still I think I've already help lay a good foundation of math in my 10 year old. No more than 30 hours invested in math his life.

maybe pushing is the wrong word but i would say parents who care about their child's education have children who score substantially higher than children who don't have parents who care. And "caring" is highly related to family stability and the education level of one or both parents. Where education level manifests itself is in how a parent cares. My uneducated mom (who is asian) asked us to study and get good grades (an asian cultural value), but she couldn't really tel if we were actually "studying" since she was uneducated. Now the asian values meant that i at-least got "bare minimum" grades compared to other races of people but i never had enough "care" to excel (which i think i could have done). Now imagine a group of people with neither cultural values emphasizing education nor educated parents who might have their child's best interest and tell them to 'study and work hard' but given the circumstances and how kids will be kids, it is very very difficult for those kids to achieve.

I see that there is a finite bucket of cognitive energy. Learning higher-order concepts, as well as dealing with unstable family dynamics takes away from this bucket.

If you’re scraping the bottom to deal with family (or mental health in the parents, restricted finances, less-than-ideal living conditions, etc.), then your capacity to integrate abstract concepts becomes fairly limited.

These issues often feed into each other, and it becomes difficult to break out of this cycle, leading to trans-generational opportunity loss.

I saw a similar effect teaching at a coding school for adults: one of our strongest predictors for success was whether or not the student had someone close to them who was in tech. Having someone outside the system to practice lingo, talk about culture, or give an opinion on what topics matter makes a huge difference. I see no reason why grade school math would be different - I know my parents made a huge difference for me, not by "pushing", but by just being there to talk.

Kids are incredibly perceptive as to "what matters in this family". If parents show an interest in how the kid is doing in school, kids see that school is important. If parents show an interest in whether they won or lost a sports game, kids learn that's important. If parents show no interest but someone else does, whatever that person values takes on an outsized importance in the kids' life.

"Just being there to talk" is more than half the battle (but also more than half the time investment) pretty much no matter the topic.

Part of the struggle, at least in the US, is you have parents trying to help their kids with math being taught in ways they never learned.

My wife literally cannot help our 7 year old with her math because we were raised in a school system that taught rote memorization. I was too, but I suck at memorization and have had to rely on fundamental understanding in order to survive in math. So luckily I can help with things.

And parent involvement helps a ton. When our kid got 50% on the practice test I spent a few hours going over the material she didn't understand. She ended up getting 100% on the real test.

> We all now

As a non-native English reader, it took me a while to understand that this means: We all know.

I think native speakers hash the words in their brain based on how they sound. And people who learned English at school primarily by reading and writing, hash the words by how they are written. The latter data structure makes it difficult to find that "know" and "now" are almost the same word.

Now and know sound nothing alike, so hashing by character composition would get you much closer than the hypothetical native speaker.

Sorry. Non-native so you figured me out. This was a pure error though. My mental pronunciation is quite different.

I volunteer tutor teens in the SAT and the problem is a bit deeper than just parents. A few of my students have a similar amount of base intelligence as me, and if they studied as much as I did, they would have no problem with finding a path of least resistance to the upper-middle/lower-upper class. The problem is that even if I'm 100% sure this path exists, they are skeptical because it seems like I'm in a entirely different world from them, so I'm not different than an MLM influencer promising them $10k a week. I knew a lot of people who spent all their time studying and on extracurriculars, but the same isn't true for my students. It would require a Herculean amount of self-discipline to commit yourself to that much work when no one else you know is taking the same path.

This is why (imo), test prep should be a class you take at school. Why should it be a separate thing and a multi billion dollar industry? A lot of the SAT/ACT prep for HS students is about understanding how the tests work and how to approach questions.

We already have a bunch of federally mandated AYP testing (no) thanks to No (ALL?) Child Left Behind, why can't this just be old copies of the ACT or SAT. By the time kids are ready to apply for college, it will be second hand and not another extra thing they have to learn.

That is probably the reason it isn't taught at school. School itself does very little to encourage class mobility, starting from being funded by local property taxes.

You can already get 8 free SAT practice tests and Khan Academy offers a free online class. If you go through all of them and learn from your mistakes, that should be more than enough to get a decent score. With tutoring and classes, you're mainly paying for someone to pressure you to put the effort in, similar to with fitness classes.

these are standardized tests, taking normal classes _is_ prep for them

> The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically.

I scored very high in both. Believe me, as new immigrants we were completely clueless about the heated race to top spots. In my case, credits goes to my makers (mom and dad :) and the fact that Iran had fairly good public schools.

Culture is important. Two relevant shockers for me (as a very young new arrival to US):

- disrespect for teachers.

- practically institutionalized disdain for the smart kids. I am talking cultural products here.

So I honestly think cultural backgrounds that feature things like special social and personal regard for those who teach, and special regard for individuals in STEM professions (for example "mr. engineer"), are more at play here than merely ambitious parents. And guess what is driving those ambitious parents? Culture has a lot to do with it.

> disrespect for teachers ... disdain for the smart kids

I've gotten the impression from every high-achieving-country immigrant that I've ever talked to that schools in those countries just kick out the troublemaking kids before they have a chance to disrupt the environment for everybody else. Nobody gets kicked out of US public schools, for any reason - so the kids who don't want to be there and spend all of their time trying to ruin it for everybody else are always there.

That's very much true. I remember very clearly that when I was a new 1st grade student in a poor southeast asian country that the kid that yelled back at my teacher in my 60-person class didn't come back next week, whereas I suspect the same would not fly in US public schools. The things I've read (threatening violence, etc) would've never happened in my home country's schools, and if it did would've led to corporal punishment (caning was regularly practiced) and expulsion, not necessarily in that order, and very quickly at that.

My impression is also that the academic culture is very different - even in my poorly funded primary school full of poor kids, there was a sense of academic accomplishment being of the highest importance -- all the students knew the importance of good grades, and students that disagree were socially shunned. Smart kids were the popular kids, and the people who ranked the top 10% got into a special class and were widely admired.

This is how it should be here too.

Inequality is accepted in so many other places in the USA, in ways that are far worse than this.

The anti-intellectualism is a very, very real thing in the USA. In not good schools, you WILL be bullied for being cerebral.

At this point, no amount of understanding of "oh the bad kids grew up in poverty and had social/economic reasons for being bad" is going to fix these kids up.

You want to disrupt education for the rest? Teachers will disrupt the rest of your earning potential. Seems like a fair trade too, since the criminals are all getting laid and the MIT kids are all staying virgins. It takes 15 years to mint another "elite" educated individual. Just a few bad apples can destroy all of this work of trying to get someone to the MIT level. Get the bad apples out.

> practically institutionalized disdain for the smart kids. I am talking cultural products here

Escaping this is certainly a piece of why people pursue "good" schools in wealthy areas, gifted programs, and private schools. Obviously it's not a guarantee you can avoid this attitude, but there are obvious differences between educational environments.

I went to a good public school K-8, where I was part of the gifted program (what amounted to a handful of students in my year who had a few special class session per week), and then a top private high school.

One of the biggest differences from a typical American public school that I saw in the gifted program and private school was that being smart/curious/interested/engaged/academically ambitious was generally admired and encouraged. I was endlessly curious but never a particular diligent student, and had a tendency to "coast" in school, but I think being in this environment helped frame things for me in a really positive way.

It got a bit ridiculous at the end of high school as my classmates started aggressively competing for limited slots at top universities, but I feel the environment–being among people who valued ambition and using your brain–was super motivating and raised my internal bar for success in general. I'm reminded of something a tennis coach told me as I was first learning to play: the best way to improve your own game is to play with others more skilled than you.

> Culture has a lot to do with it.

If you admit this, you'd be saying one culture is worse and needs to change. One party in the US is against saying anyone but white men (and Karen) can do anything wrong, so the problem is everyone else. But it obviously isn't, some groups have cultures which denigrate learning and the consequence is those groups do not succeed academically or economically.

All of the USA has at least some cultural issues (drunk driving is popular, for example). So who could we really trust to drive cultural change? Current teachers seem to be reinforcing victim mindset in children, the entire educational system is setup to keep kids away from people doing better than them -- grade separation alone, for example, prevents kids from learning from peers who already understand the material. The churches are corrupt and fractionated. Who would have the moral authority to drive cultural change for the better?

No so broad a notion of 'culture', mainly cultural 'content'. This can be, and it is tweaked (worldwide), as needed. Cinema/TV in US has always been a leading indicator of societal change, rarely a lagging indicator. So it has always been, in a sense, understood and used as a pedagogical platform.

They actually tried this in US starting in late 80s and 90s, when we got a slate of 'geeks who get babes, and social acceptance' movies - War Games, Real Genius, Revenge of the Nerds, Weird Science, Hackers, etc.

[p.s. didn't finish that thought! /g]

But imho this was the wrong set of adjustments. The inducements - sex, money, and social acceptance -- are certainly attractive, but any kid with half a brain can note that there are far easier and certainly more exciting ways than learning -- culturally celebrated ways, yo -- to get that very same set of inducements. It did however get us to the geek hero celebrity stage, with Jobs and now Musk.

[edits]

My daughter credits the test-taking techniques they taught in her SAT prep course for a big boost in her SAT score. She says the test-taking techniques were orthogonal to how well she knew the material. I'm happy for her but at the same time it seems unfair that my ability to afford the SAT prep course gave her an advantage not available to families with lower incomes.

Those techniques are things like skipping questions or calculated guessing which can help but certainly won't get you into elite score territory.

They increase speed, which buys you time to work on harder problems. I bet a nonzero number of 2nd tier students could get a 1st tier score if given an extra 10 mins on each section.

I attended prep courses and they didn't have an impact on my scores, measured by before and after practice testing (~1500 in the late 90s).

What did help is that I was encouraged to read a lot from a young age, which seems fairly accessible to most families.

Support your local libraries.

MY SO is a professional tutor, and she often has clients for standardized testing prep.

From what I have gathered it seems a lot of students really need a confidence boost. Once they realize they are capable to doing well, they tend to improve their performance.

There is also like tricks and gimmicks, but that is a different discussion.

Our [public] school gave a 1-hour class on the basics of the SAT test mechanisms and how to get your score to what I'd call "reflective of your ability". If kids are showing up to the SAT barely knowing how a #2 pencil works, that's bad. If they've had 1 hour on "if you can eliminate even a single answer that you know is not correct, do not leave the question blank" and "D means that no can determine which is greater not that you have no idea which is greater", that puts them in a position to demonstrate their ability and that's well within the reach of any school district that gives half an ounce of care for their students.

I legit think that my parents' successfully instilling a strong sense of fair play and honesty in my from a young age hindered me more than a little. The world's simply not like that. The ones who win take every advantage—if a test is trying to measure you, you'd damn well better study its "game", because you're competing against kids who did and they will receive zero negative consequences for doing so, only benefits, even if doing so seems against the spirit of the thing and feels dirty.

... which is part of why having parents who have themselves succeeded at these things is an advantage. Mine were from poor (quite poor, in one case) backgrounds but were worked-hard-and-eventually-did-OK sorts, not early-success sorts. So they taught me fairness and honesty in all things, and didn't know they should clue me in that some things are just bullshit games that you should do whatever you can to beat short of taking too-large risks. I mean, they hadn't even played most of those games, so how could they know?

I bet it would never occur to kids from an upper-middle-class background (doctor parents, lawyer parents, business exec parents, that kind of thing) that test prep is a bit dirty. Wouldn't even cross their minds. It's just what you do, obviously.

If SAT prep was effective, then it would be an educational miracle, because a good SAT prep course is under $1,000. American schools spend 10 times that much money per student every year and barely move the needle.

Test prep is effective at getting you an accurate score.

One bit of knowledge improved my ACT score from 27 to a 33: internalizing how long I have for the tests. I was so used to being able to finish school tests with a comfortable amount of time remaining, so I took the test at a casual pace which means I didn't finish. The second time, I sprinted through the test as fast as possible and my score improved dramatically.

I doubt I could have done better with more coaching or prep.

Similarly, a single 30-minute lesson taught me what I was doing wrong on the ACT Science section (trying to understand the science instead of treating it as 'find the answer in the text'). Brought my overall score from 32 to 35 (I was already a good test taker, but those 3 points made a big difference),

You can get the same improvement by reading a test prep book. You need to know the 3-4-5 triangle, this list of word definitions, a handful of other stuff. How much time you have. Now take a few practice tests, also freely or cheaply available anywhere. All of it should be a review of methods and skills you already have from school. That is the point of the test after all.

To me, those test prep places always seemed to be struggling with legitimacy. It's not like hiring a tutor to help you learn difficult concepts for the first time.

> The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically.

Is there any way to prove/disprove this? Also doesn’t this also beg the question as to why non-Asian parents apparently won’t teach their kids to be good academics?

Yes there is a way, you put kids in test prep and see if they do better. They generally do not improve much.

The SAT is an IQ test, and IQ is mostly inherited from your parents.

> The SAT is an IQ test

In that case I weep for the future, because I’ve met plenty of dumbass people who managed to get a high enough SAT score to get in school.

I also weep for people that extrapolate too much meaning from an IQ test.

(I'm not talking about you).

So you are saying that Asians have higher intelligence, and not just a little bit higher, but significantly higher than other race?

of the ones present in Michigan, yes.

The Asians present in North America are not a random sample. A large portion of them came here specifically to work in STEM or other fields requiring high levels of intelligence and education. It's very probable that the ones here are, on average, significantly more intelligent than both the average American and the average Asian in Asia.

For that matter, the Asians you see in studies of the average test scores in somewhere like “China” aren’t representative of the educational ability of the average rice paddy farmer, but of more urbanized populations.

I feel this must at least be a factor.

Is this supposed to be a "Gotcha"?

There is no way the SAT is a purely IQ test, when i didn't get a hot score on my first SAT, i practiced for 1 week straight and substantially improved my scores (like 300 points range). The way i liken this to is if a MLB pitcher throws the same pitch at the same velocity and i know this ahead of time, i could practice for a year and when the time comes i could hit that ball. Does that mean i'm a major league level batter? Heck no, it is the same way with the SAT's, Leetcode and other tests, they measure how much you want it more than raw IQ.

Using that logic, everything is an IQ test :-)

Extensive test prep can do a significant amount to increase SAT scores, but the test is designed to minimize it.

People do see over 100 point increase ~20 hours of prep, and extensive as in 3+months can push that to 200 though with diminishing returns at the top of the curve. Which shouldn’t be surprising as increasing speed, even just from not needing to read instruction, provides an advantage for most people.

Yes there is a way, you put kids in test prep and see if they do better.

For this to be a real test, you'll need parents of twins willing to send only one kid to test prep..and not send the other one..you know..for science. Doubt there is a parent who would do that.

> For this to be a real test, you'll need parents of twins willing to send only one kid to test prep..and not send the other one

What's the issue with testing someone without prep, then giving them a week to study up, and then testing them again? People take SAT multiple times, you know, and it is a brand new set of questions every time.

I did that myself (took it 3 times total), and I can say this: taking it without prep and then taking it later with just a week of studying on my own for about an hour per day made a massive difference. Even before I got my results back on the second try, I already felt i did much better, as I was second guessing much less and felt more confident about my answers. And the final scores reflected that really well.

However, studying beyond that (which I did for my third attempt, months later) didn't help much and just marginally changed my scores by +-20 in different categories (out of 700 total max in each of the three categories, which is how it was scored at the time). I didnt feel any more prepared either. Judging by my acquaintances, it was a similar pattern. Massive boost in scores on the second try, marginal or non-existent in scores on attempts beyond the 2nd.

I don't think the SAT is an IQ test. I'm sure IQ helps but parents clearly have a pivotal role - the single biggest external factor to explain variation in score perhaps. Surely the biggest factor in SAT scores is how much you the student _care_ about the SAT score. Why do you care? Maybe because your parents care, maybe because your parents don't care? At the end of the day parents are crucial to the success of their children positively and negatively.

This paper found a 0.82 correlation between general mental ability g and SAT scores

https://archive.org/details/ScholasticAssessmentOrG/page/n1/...

That’s relatively low considering what kind of test it is. Elementary school sees a 0.7 correlation between IQ and academic performance.

.82 is an insanely high correlation in any kind of social science

A benchmark of everything across all of social sciences is extremely broad when comparing two different tests of mental performance designed to correlate with other tests of mental performance.

It’s like being shocked that resting heart rate and VO2 Max happen to correlate quite well relative to other health indicators. Yes they are testing different things, but not that different.

> Also doesn’t this also beg the question as to why non-Asian parents apparently won’t teach their kids to be good academics?

Because they don't value their kids being good at academics.

I've lived in multiple countries. In the non-US ones, people don't brag about being bad at math (even when they are bad at it). As an adult, if you couldn't add/subtract/multiply two large numbers on paper without a calculator, that would not reflect well on you.

> Because they don't value their kids being good at academics.

Yes, my memory of high school is that everyone including the adults celebrated sports, and hardly anyone gave a crap about the high academic achievers, who were often social outcasts.

I spent a lot of my childhood trying (though largely failing) to pretend that I was not so smart. I can't speak for other countries, but anti-intellectualism is widespread in the US.

Not my experience at all (Midwestern small city, ~90% white). Parents with Honor Student bumper stickers, subtle humble-brags, and general celebration of academic ability were all around me.

I have a (completely unresearched, unfounded, probably not accurate) theory that the exceptional prosperity in US that the boomer/early-gen-x generations saw, which had ultra-cheap housing relative to income across the US, ultra-cheap everything in the US, industries expanding so fast that schooling became less important in the US, all of that was a fluke.

For a couple decades a majority of people in the US had effectively gotten coupons for half-off everything they desired.

It wasn't normal, but it made those generations in the US so mentally lazy that it effectively poisoned huge swaths of the following generations, fooling them into thinking it was always going to be that easy. So now we're trying to sort out exactly why those born and raised in the US are doing so poorly now.

After WWII, Europe's industry was effectively destroyed. The USA enjoyed prosperity as it was the only industrial power left standing. The unemployment rate from 1951 to 1953 were 3.3, 3.0, and 2.9 percent. [1]

Anyone who wanted a job got a good paying job. It was possible in those days for the average American to support a household as the sole breadwinner. What is happening now is that those halcyon days are over. Things are more competitive. We have not approached the cut throat levels as they have in South Korea. American jobs today pay less and have less benefits than in the 1950s. We are headed towards a two tier economy. Full time employees with benefits. Gig workers who wander from job to job with no benefits.

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

Not only that, where one lives can impact the funding available to even provide basic education. We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools.

Funding schools based on local property tax was institutionalized as a way to ensure rich people don’t have to pay for poor people’s education.

Except local property taxes only pay for about half of k-12 education. The other half comes from federal and state governments and the way they give out funding is to selectively counteract that misallocation such that 47 states actually allocate more per-student funding to poor areas than to wealthier ones on average according to this article [0] and it has been this way since at least 1995.

[0]: https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-...

> only pay for about half

That's a lot. From your own link, a vast majority of schools are regressive, i.e poor people get less.

The 50:50 figure is in aggregate. You would not be able to infer if the distribution is a regressive based on that number alone. The linked article does not say that the vast majority of schools are regressive.

"A handful - Nevada, Wyoming and Illinois are weakly regressive, and the majority have a weakly progressive distribution of funding to poo vs non poor students"

I see, I didn't realize the graph of progressive / regressive changed as your scrolled the page.

Actually, looking at the data further, you can't really draw a conclusion about whether or not the funding is regressive or progressive. The local funding is definitely regressive, but you'd need to know how state and federal funds were distributed across schools to know if the end result was progressive or regressive. For instance, if federal funding was evenly distributed to every school, that would still be regressive.

Some of the worst districts in my state have the most funding and highest teacher pay.

The best teachers still don't want to work there because being called the c-word by 1st graders or having a 3rd grader threaten to stab you (and seem like they really mean it) and not being able to do anything about it because the two fights and one baggie of drugs admin's had referred to them by noon today has them too busy to spend any time on "minor" stuff like that, plus having lockdowns with police patrolling the halls and yelling at anyone who so much as pokes a head out a door without clearing it with them first, due to credible threats of violence, several times per year, makes you want to do literally anything else as a career in a hurry. 15-20% higher pay than the next-best-paying district doesn't make it worth it.

Schools can't fix poverty and ghettos no matter how much money you give them, but trying that is simpler than fixing the real problems that cause very, very "bad" schools, so that's what we do, even though it will never work.

1. School funding is actually somewhat progressive: https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2017/06/22/no-us-school-f...

2. People who are concerned about the allegedly regressive character of public school funding would do well to spell out their model of how spending affects basic math and writing performance. For almost all of history, every educated person studied under conditions that made the most impoverished reservation school in North Dakota look like Andover.

This takes a consequence of a decentralized government and attributes it to the intent. The origins of public schools in America take their form from the structure of American government in the era when they formed. 200 years ago American government was virtually non-existent at the state and federal level. The oldest public education law in America comes from the Massachusetts Bay Colony which required every township of a certain size to establish a basic grammar school. The reason it was done at the local level is that there was no state wide administration to capable of collecting and managing the taxes, budgeting and administrating schools in that era. Thus it was handled at a very local level.

While a lot of modern education funding reforms in America focus on redistributing funds to support poorer communities, this is not an immediate win. In states like California where local property taxes have been effectively abolished by a voter backed constitutional amendment, there are big challenges in fairly negotiating the allocation of resources across the different regions of the state.

And it has continued for decades even after being declared unconstitutional in Ohio. So it is hard to change the attitude many people who live in suburbs have. The movement for integrated schools (https://integratedschools.org/podcasts/) is one group of people trying to fight the racial inequity aspect of this but considering the magnitude of the problem it is a big hill to climb.

I'm not sure where you live, but where I live, school funding is taxed and allocated at the county level. The county contains both extremely impoverished and extremely wealthy areas, in roughly a bell curve distribution. Schools are funded on a per-student basis within the county.

"We are too comfortable letting poor areas have underfunded schools."

Explain Baltimore.

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2019/comm/larg...

Baltimore has stronger challenges to overcome, so funding it more makes sense. It can be the case that we're paying a lot for Baltimore students and also that we're underfunding them.

This is a commonly held myth but the numbers don't bear it out. Poor areas tend to be in cities and cities tend to have lots of commercial buildings that pay tax but do not send kids to school. Atlanta, where I live, spends 30%* more per pupil in APS than the surrounding suburban counties do. That's typical for American cities.

*Or so. I'm going off memory.

But urban schools are more expensive to run for many reasons including social pathology (metal detectors became widespread in some cities in the 1980s) as well as generally high operating costs.

> Atlanta, where I live, spends 30%* more per pupil in APS than the surrounding suburban counties do.

If you look a bit deeper at public school funding in more well-off areas and you will usually find a system of tax-deductible private donations to the school, organized by a PTA or similar organization. Much of the spending difference vanishes when you consider that.

When you count the value of the PTA volunteer time by professional parents (which doesn't appear on the books), it tips the scales even further toward greater spend in well-off areas.

>If you look a bit deeper at public school funding in more well-off areas and you will usually find a system of tax-deductible private donations to the school, organized by a PTA or similar organization. Much of the spending difference vanishes when you consider that.

Do you have a cite with those numbers?

Here is an article that explicitly breaks down the phenomenon with LA public schools:

https://laist.com/news/education/los-angeles-unified-parent-...

California is unique in that it intentionally gives less funding to higher-family-income public schools, expecting them to make up the gap with private fundraising. The result is that after adjusting for private donations, per pupil spending in CA is roughly equivalent across income-disparate schools, as can be seen in the charts in that article.

Here is a visualization of the disparities in Georgia's school spending by county:

https://wallethub.com/edu/e/most-least-equitable-school-dist...

Pick one of the "High Income / Low Expenditure" counties - Forsyth - as an example. It has an average household income of $112,834. In that county, there is an entire parallel non-profit organization that raises private donations to fund programs in the school district. Here is an article describing their work:

https://www.forsythnews.com/news/education/education-foundat...

This is in addition to other private fundraising at the individual school PTA/PTO level, and via charities like the United Way (https://www.unitedwayforsyth.com/civicrm/contribute/transact...)

Here is the same type of organization but in Michigan: https://www.bloomfield.org/support/about/bhs-foundation-faqs

What all of these have in common is that the capacity for private fundraising is a function of local household income.

In places like California with progressive school funding, this private fundraising serves to "bridge the gap" in state funding between schools in richer (receive less public funding) and poorer (receive more public funding) areas.

In other states where state/local per-pupil public school funding is flat or even regressive, it can exacerbate the disparities between districts.

>Parents in these 34 most-affluent LAUSD elementaries donate an average of $876 per student, our analysis shows.

That's like 1/5 of the gap between APS and the next highest school district. It looks like the wealthiest in LA are able to make up for the difference. But I am suspect of this article. The parental contribution is only 0.4% of the LAUSD budget but somehow it's making up a 20% funding gap between low and high income schools. Very suspicious that they're cherry picking but I don't have the time to dig in.

>Pick one of the "High Income / Low Expenditure" counties - Forsyth - as an example. It has an average household income of $112,834. In that county, there is an entire parallel non-profit organization that raises private donations to fund programs in the school district. Here is an article describing their work:

Google says APS spends 17k per pupil while Forsyth spends 10k. For 20 schools with 200 kids they'd need 28 million in contributions to equalize. Raising $115k by selling ducks is a drop in the bucket in comparison.

Also, APS does their own fund raising. Brief googling reveals that they've raised 7.4 million through this one site alone:

https://www.donorschoose.org/aps?active=true

> The parental contribution is only 0.4% of the LAUSD budget

> but somehow it's making up a 20% funding gap between low and high income schools.

Where are you getting the 0.4% coming from? Parents don't generally donate directly to public school district budgets. They donate to school PTAs and school-affiliated non-profits.

Perhaps you are referring to https://achieve.lausd.net/donorschoose but that's totally unrelated to outside PTA fundraising via the parent community, and it's usually tiny amounts used to pay for things like classroom supplies.

It's pretty straightforward. The article says $876 in private PTA donations are raised per year per pupil in the wealthier schools, and that is still $300 shy of what poorer schools spend overall per pupil. So the wealthier schools only make 3/4 of the spending gap.

I know this from direct experience since I write a check annually to my kid's California public school PTA for roughly the same amount.

>Where are you getting the 0.4% coming from? Parents don't generally donate directly to public school district budgets. They donate to school PTAs and school-affiliated non-profits.

It's in the article:

>In 2018-19, PTAs and booster clubs at LAUSD schools brought in more than $36.9 million in revenues. Compared to LAUSD’s annual $9 billion operating budget, that’s not that much money

36.9 million divided by 9 billion is 0.4%.

>The article says $876 in private PTA donations are raised per year per pupil in the wealthier schools, and that is still $300 shy of what poorer schools spend overall per pupil. So the wealthier schools only make 3/4 of the spending gap.

>I know this from direct experience since I write a check annually to my kid's California public school PTA for roughly the same amount.

Ok, but even if you and every other parent does that it still doesn't make up the difference between city spending per pupil and the surrounding suburbs.

> >In 2018-19, PTAs and booster clubs at LAUSD schools brought in more than $36.9 million in revenues. Compared to LAUSD’s annual $9 billion operating budget, that’s not that much money

> 36.9 million divided by 9 billion is 0.4%.

Read the article again. That's $36.9M raises mostly over the 126 most affluent schools, which is a quarter of the elementary schools in LAUSD, or over $500k raised per school, which would bridge that gap.

Furthermore a significant chunk of school district budgets go to pay for pension and health care obligations for retirees, building maintenance, law enforcement, etc.

> Ok, but even if you and every other parent does that it still doesn't make up the difference between city spending per pupil and the surrounding suburbs.

Not sure I understand what you are saying, but the affluent surrounding suburbs near me spend even more per student from privately raised donations. Some of their PTAs ask for $2k/student per year.

This is not the case here, since in Michigan the Detroit Public Schools not only have the worst test scores in the nation, but the highest funding per pupil in the state.

The SATs also allow for children with non parental involvement but talent to excel because it's a simple process: take a test

It's hardly simple to prep for the SAT. It requires time and money and space.

So you'd rather use a holistic process where kids with rich parents can go off to Africa and start a volunteer school or fly across the country participating in Sailing competitions?

One process has a more level playing field, the other is clearly rigged in favor of rich well connected kids.

Please stop putting words in my mouth. I said nothing of the sort.

I'd prefer we provided the food, housing, education, and healthcare that would enable anyone to succeed on the SAT by eroding the worst disadvantages some kids face.

I dont buy this argument for a second. You can buy a used sat prep book for cheap or even borrow one from a library.

Practice twice a week leading up to the test with practice tests once every two weeks.

taking a prep course will help, but thats not necessary at all.

Practicing won't teach you language and math.

practicing means practicing problems and learning ones you don’t understand. with the abundance of youtube videos/free sources on the internet, today there is no excuse except for a parent not teaching a kid what to prioritize in life imo.

I was homeless my senior year of highschool and I didn't have many adults helping me. There's a fair amount of kids on paths like mine.

It's cold comfort to be told my parents fucked up. That's true, but it doesn't actually help.

Practice is the only way to learn language and math, subjects which children are initially wholly ignorant of before learning through practice.

I keep hearing this, and I don't doubt that statistically access to test prep helps, but amongst all the tests I've seen, the SAT is still the easiest to do well in if you're willing to self study.

I got in the elite range simply by buying SAT prep books. I memorized the vocabulary, and the book had enough tricks for me to do well.

Granted, I always excelled in math in school. I, however, did not excel in English (my 10th grade score was a well deserved C). But I still did great on the verbal section, and it was primarily due to reading 1-2 SAT prep books.

If you think you're going to start prepping 1-2 months before the test and do well, it won't work. For both the SAT and the GRE I started about 12 months prior (but very low intensity - a few minutes a day). I did even better in the GRE, scoring well in the top 1% nationally.

If you treat the SAT as a possible golden ticket for your future, you'll take it seriously and start prepping early. If it's merely a "Meh, that thing I need to do to get into a college", no amount of prep will help.

Also, wanted to point out that all the people around me who did great on the SAT used only the prep books - none took one of those dedicated classes. Right or wrong, we all thought tutors and tutoring institutes were for struggling students - because none of the top students utilized them. The notion of a great student becoming even better with the help of a tutor was foreign to us. It was only years later did I learn that tutors for top students existed (basically dedicated 1:1 instruction by a "true master").

It's easier to prep for the sat than any other hoop to jump through to get into college like GPAs, various deadlines, FAFSA, knowing which clubs to join, knowing how to right a catching essay, etc

Time, yes. For space you just need a desk. And if you have an internet connection, it doesn't require any money beyond what you've already paid your ISP.

K, not every kid has access to a desk and the internet. Those things take money not every family has.

Both of these can be had for free at your local library. And to be pedantic, you don't even need a desk to study you can do it on a park table or the sidewalk. If someone doesn't have access to a desk (they're homeless?) or an internet connection, I doubt they're even taking the SAT.

I was homeless my final year of highschool, and basically homeless the year before. I took the SAT, but it was hard to figure out how. Even harder to bring myself to study rather than work.

Exactly. You can’t hide a high IQ, even though parental and societal involvement will always act as a multiplier on what a kid can naturally do.

You can hide a high IQ with starvation, sleep deprivation, withholding books from a child, and stress hormones from an unsafe environment.

IQ is highly correlated with nutrition. Very likely, being food-insecure has a direct causal effect of lowering IQ. It isn't a thing fixed from birth.

Do Asian Americans have better nutrition than other categories?

It would seem so. CDC statistics show that people who identify as Asian have a lower obesity rate compared to other racial and ethnic categories. Obesity is known to cause decreased cognitive function.

https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html

Correlated, yes. Highly correlated - I doubt it. Einstein didn't get that way by eating enough blueberries and salmon oil or whatever.

Now of course, if you are raised on a diet of sugar and lead-laced air and water, you won't reach your natural genetic potential. And if you are raised by billionaires with a live-in chef and nutritionist and tutors, in a place with squeaky-clean air and water, you might reach your full potential.

But those things merely optimize, or impede, the raw material you were born with.

So is height, and historically there have been large differences in height between the rich and poor. In modern developed countries, however, there doesn't seem to be any significant difference based on socioeconomic level. That leads me to believe that these "nutritional deficiencies" don't exist and are not what is causing any observed gap in IQ or academic achievement.

> high IQ

Therein lies the rub, the controversy mostly comes from people who reject the very premise of IQ.

Interesting.

There was quite a significant difference between my IQ results and my standardized testing scores (based on percentile rankings -- IQ => higher rankings).

(FWIW, I think both test are utter horseshit anyway.)

But if the education system provides quality education with parental involvement, doesn't that imply that it provides quality education without parental involvement? You know, since parental involvement is not a part of the education system.

Or, in other words, if parental involvement IS a part of the educational system, then it's impossible for the system to provide good outcomes without parental involvement since, you know, it's part of the system.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm confused why some people seem to blame the educational system for lack of parental involvement in some demographics.

> to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement

That seems very naive to think that school overcome the impact of parenting. If a child doesn't have its physical and psychological needs met then there's not much the school can do. School can't make children do their homework at home either.

The only way I could see your plan of offering identical schooling opportunities for everyone is boarding school, ie taking kids away from their parents. How are you going to stop/force a parent from helping their kid with homework?

I may be the exception to this: my parents did not care at all, and I still scored really well on the SAT. I don't remember exactly what b/c I can't look up the score anymore, apparently, but definitely above 1500.

I also did not care much as a student. I don't think I am remarkable here, I think I just took the test really well. I did do one short practice course that taught some of the small tricks to the test (most common problem patterns, to leave blank if you are really not sure, to come back to the question at the end, etc..) which I think probably helped for like 100pts at least.

Don’t forget apathy. I easily qualified for every college in my state with my scores and out-of-state tuition meant there was no reason to ever push any harder for a better score.

> to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement

This sounds good in theory, but it can have unintended consequences. One way to read what you are saying here is that we should have a system where parent involvement has no impact.

I may be biased (as a parent), but I think parental involvement should be encouraged, not disincentiviezed. Parental involvement is one of the forces of nature. It should not go to waste.

Another factor is parents' choice of where to live. Every real estate web site now prominently displays standardized test scores for the local public schools. Parents who care about academics will sacrifice financially to move near the highest scoring schools (or even cheat with a fake home address), thus creating a positive feedback loop.

> The challenge for large and heterogeneously diverse nations like the U.S. is to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement.

It's a challenge, for sure. Should it be the overriding goal? Maybe if we weren't competing with other countries on the world stage.

>> The SATs, particularly the mathematics score, is very much a reflection of your parents' willingness to push you academically.

What is the equitable solution to this then? You seem to be implying that SAT score differences are not inequitable but we know from recent research this is not true.

Standardized tests aren't perfect but there isn't anything better. There's no better way for a poor kid with high drive to compete with rich kids. That's why MIT decided to bring back scores in admission. There isn't a better solution.

Lower the ceiling and admit by lottery. End the artificial scarcity in education. Tax the rich to fund it.

How does that change anything? Kids who barely miss out on MIT arent sleeping on the streets. They are at good state schools or other top privates.

Indeed, and there are some studies to back that up.

Excerpt from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-ma...

But what appears obvious may not be true. In November 2002, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a landmark paper by the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger that reached a startling conclusion. For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.

At the end of the day the only real solution to the problem of inequity/representation will end up being hard quotas that roughly maintain a demographic balance at top institutions.

At that point you can make most competition intra-racial with obvious carve outs for socioeconomic, sexual and gender minorities.

the devil is in the details as to how such a controversial system could be implemented but it’d be a trial-and-error process for sure.

Ah, so you mean discriminating against Asians for their success?

May I remind you that Asians in the USA did not participate in mass enslavement of black and brown bodies.

Why should they have to give up spots for less qualified individuals? Have they not struggled enough? Most of their great grand parents were building our train tracks!

Your success in life is partially a reflection of how you were raised, just like your success in math.

> an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement.

I do wonder if this is possible. If you up the baseline of school provision, won’t involved parents provide a further advantage over and above that?

Not if the test difficulty stays the same, and you get more 800s and lotteries (or, dare we say it, more seats?!) for next level positions, at college or career. Tides, boats , bars.

When you talk about some of the least served communities, there is a lot of moving from school to school as people move from one housing solution to another. My wife taught in public school and out of the 35 students in a class there might have been a third to 40% who stayed with her the whole semester. She would have two extra pages of names of students who came and went throughout the year.

Involved parents will likely always improve the scores of students, but the disparity between those who do and don't need not be so dramatic.

It's fun to read biographies of 20th century scientists. Quite a few of them came from humble backgrounds and credited their success to education (and perhaps libraries). They often did not have well educated or motivated parents. Nick Holonyak is one such example. Carl Sagan is another.

And this is even more apparent when I look at the British ones. It's a bit funny given how rigid and uninspiring the British education system was.

That's reductive. My parents were white liberal hippies who didn't push me at all. I got C's in school and a perfect math SAT and SAT 2.

To be fair, I did spend a lot of time thinking about math because I liked it.

> To be fair, I did spend a lot of time thinking about math because I liked it.

Spending childhood doing things you enjoy and which also have economic utility is a secret power.

Most people in the top 5th percentile of academic things also happened to spend a truly absurd amount of their youth obsessing over that academic thing. They may also be gifted, but spending all that free time in youth thinking about things is probably way more important than IQ.

(For me it was programming and law... I was reading legal briefs and slinging code most evenings of middle school through high school, which set me up with a rather absurd advantage over my peers once I got to college.)

BTW: elite unis/programs are looking for those types of people. It's not the extra curricular box checking that interests them, it's evidence of thousands of hours of practice at high value add skills. The practice can be forced with absurd amounts of grit, which is why it's a secret power when it comes out of intellectual curiosity.

Legal theory is a joy I discovered much later in life. The LSAT brain-teaser questions are also pretty fun. I've considered switching careers (now in my 30s), but I expect the realities of the job are much less thought-provoking.

Law is cool because it's like math, but because language is less precise than math, the rules are more malleable, and there is more room for creativity.

I am not saying the US education system is good but there is only so much you can ask from schools to offset a dysfunctional environment. And the solution isn't to take children away from their parents. You need to change the culture, and culture is hard to change. I always refer to Poland which, out of 50 years of communism, is the most religiously and socially conservative country in europe.

> The challenge for large and heterogeneously diverse nations like the U.S. is to offer an educational system that provides access to quality education regardless of parental involvement.

But don’t your stats show that we already do?

We “provide access” to everyone. Otherwise it wouldn’t matter how much the parents pushed the children.

If your argument is that the system should push the children harder, how do you propose that? Give less hard working kids lower grades? I think we’ve tried that and decided it’s unfair.

> how do you propose that

All the proposals I've ever seen have been to handicap the students whose parents try to give them an advantage. It's a popular sentiment, growing in popularity every day.

This response smells strongly of FUD. Could you possibly elaborate?

California trying to remove math tracks and to make it harder/impossible to take advanced math in the final two years of high school.

Look this up, it's been discussed here extensively.

We don’t provide free access to test prep. We don’t provide equal access to parents and friends who are enthusiastic and pushed to do well on these tests. We don’t provide equal access to a culture that values academics over, say, sports and entertainment.

What would the end state of the latter part of look like? Taking kids away from their families at birth and raising them in state not-quite-orphanages?

Even the concept that academics should be valued over other topics should be a matter of family choice. If you want to prioritize music, art, sports, food, entertainment, fitness, religion, or something else over academics, should society over-ride that?

> What would the end state of the latter part of look like? Taking kids away from their families at birth and raising them in state not-quite-orphanages?

In other words, Plato's Republic.

Free after school programs, free lunches, Medicare for All, public housing. These are all things that would level the playing field for poor kids and allow them to make the same decisions that wealthy kids get to make.

It’s not about choosing for them, it’s about lifting the boot on these kids necks enough so they can choose for themselves.

> Free after school programs, free lunches, Medicare for All, public housing.

Poor kids in America already get all of these, even free healthcare. The families of middle class kids have to pay for all of that, but not the families of poor kids.

Quadruple all these programs and you'll still have a situation where some kids want to do well but simply don't have the brains for it, and some kids who could do well but have shitty parents.

Early childhood (0-3) nutrition could probably productively use more expenditures. Setting that aside, I think your last point is a very large part of the problem (which also includes the nutrition point).

I believe the model you're talking about is a Kibbutz, though I don't think they were state run.

If it's not state-run (or otherwise mandated), I think you'll still see significantly unequal access to friends (and family members) of different attitudes and aptitudes.

The really interesting thing about Kibbutzes is that they're radically communal - to the point where children are not supposed to belong to any individual, but to the community.

I'm sure it's impossible to factor out the human element of relationships, but it is interesting to me as an example of the spectrum that human societies will build.

Free SAT preparation is available through a partnership between the College Board and the Khan academy. https://www.khanacademy.org/SAT

> We don’t provide equal access to parents and friends who are enthusiastic and pushed to do well on these tests. We don’t provide equal access to a culture that values academics over, say, sports and entertainment.

Who is “we” in this case?

Are we talking about government solutions here, or something else?

> We don’t provide free access to test prep.

There's tons of sample tests, vocabulary flashcards, and advice on test taking strategy available completely free online. There's no secret information or techniques taught in these expensive SAT prep classes that you can't find on Youtube, Google or Khan Academy. I didn't spend a single cent on SAT prep (and not much time either) and still managed to get a 1500.

We don't provide access to everyone. If you are a kid who doesn't get fed at home, and you don't get a school meal until lunch, do you have the same access?

If your school can't afford state of the art computers or technology, do you have the same access?

If your school has class sizes of 35 and mine has class sizes of 18, do we both have the same access?

The financial solution chosen to drive equality is likely to be "you must fire half of your teachers, resulting in class sizes of 36 for you, which we think is close enough to 35".

Does that actually help anyone?

Or "we tax wealthy people more", which sounds fine to me. (As a wealthy person.)

That’s somewhat straightforward for states (and property tax is a weak proxy form of it), but wealth taxation at the federal level is debatably but likely unconstitutional.

You could tax high-incomes more federally in a straightforward way, which is almost surely therefore easier to implement.

> If you are a kid who doesn't get fed at home, and you don't get a school meal until lunch, do you have the same access?

My rural school district provided free breakfast for precisely this reason... is it not a common thing?

Public schools have been giving free breakfast to poor kids for as long as most people in this thread can remember; it's been a federally funded program since the early 70s.

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