Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

And without the well-off students as their peers in the public schools, the poorer students won't improve, no matter how much money you throw at the situation.

I'm curious - are you postulating that the only way to cause poorer students to improve their educational outcomes is via peer effects with richer students?

I'd love to see data on this one way or the other.

While most people don't mind if their children associate with middle class black and Hispanic children, they certainly don't want them associating with minority children from the ghetto.

If the peer effects you seem to postulate above go both ways, there is a very good non-racist reason for this: while their children might improve the ghetto children's outcomes, the ghetto children might harm the richer children's outcomes.

View on HN

> I'm curious - are you postulating that the only way to cause poorer students to improve their educational outcomes is via peer effects with richer students?

What I'm really postulating that the only way to improve the educational outcomes of students that come from families who don't emphasize education is to surround them with students who come from families that do emphasize education.

So my initial statement assumes that poor students come from families that don't emphasize education, while rich students come from families that do. That is a generalization that applies primarily to black and Hispanic students, as there are many poor Asian immigrant families who emphasize education - their children have gone on to be quite successful. But as we all know, the educational problem is with black and Hispanic students. When you eliminate them from the picture, American students do quite well in comparison to European and Asian students[0].

> there is a very good non-racist reason for this: while their children might improve the ghetto children's outcomes, the ghetto children might harm the richer children's outcomes.

Yes, this is certainly possible, and is the most common argument utilized by the rich parents when faced with charges of racism towards poor blacks and Latinos.

0: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

>What I'm really postulating that the only way to improve the educational outcomes of students that come from families who don't emphasize education is to surround them with students who come from families that do emphasize education.

I was the product of one of these experiments. The school district I lived in was the result of a redistricting to pull in us white students into a large neighboring nonwhite school.

I can guarantee I didn't improve the educational outcomes for any of my classmates. And all I received from it was random beatings, violent attacks against me, and a subpar education. I did learn something though... Once out, I studied my ass off and work as hard as possible so that neither I nor my children will live through such an experiment again.

> The school district I lived in was the result of a redistricting to pull in us white students into a large neighboring nonwhite school.

Sounds like this was done the wrong way around. What percentage of the students at your school were white?

You got your ass beat because you were in the minority, and you were in their school. The best way to change behavior is to intimidate the students through intense peer pressure. If the minority students are going to a school where they are the minority (and properly integrated into the student body), the results will be very different from what you experienced.

Normal people feel uncomfortable betting their children to prove somebody's else theories...

"In perhaps the biggest surprise, Armor's studies found that black elementary students who go to magnet schools (which have the highest percentages of whites) score no better on standardized tests than do blacks who go to all-black nonmagnet schools.(97) In short, Armor found that, contrary to the notion on which the whole desegregation plan was founded--that going to school with middle-class whites would increase blacks' achievement--the Kansas City experiment showed that "integration has no effect."(98)"

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html

First of all, one person's opinion does not make a truth. Second, and more importantly, many of these desegregation programs do not achieve true integration. Sure the black students are in the same school as the white students, but they're not in the same classrooms as the white students who are doing well in their studies. This is exactly what I experienced.

You also have to ask questions like "Are these students receiving extra help to make up for what they aren't getting at home? Do they feel isolated because they're the only poor black student in the class, or do they feel motivated to find a way to fit in with the high-achieving white students?" That is the difference between desegregation and integration.

Yeah, I'm in a similar camp. I'm white, and a product of the LAUSD (Los Angeles) magnet program, which attempted to integrate schools well. Problem is, you're mostly integrating white kids with the minority kids who have parents motivated enough to put them in the magnet program.

My schools had both magnet and non magnet kids in them. What this wound up accomplishing was pretty obvious, there was segregation between the two populations. Walking out at lunch one could see the school was divided by a stark line, a line that was about 70% white where the magnet kids hung out, and mixed elsewhere.

It probably helped some people from minorities in the magnet, but I'm sure the dividing line just reinforced race and class barriers in the minds of those on both sides.

This idea also brings up a moral question - how do you justify forcing children of the rich to suffer in order to counteract the bad parenting habits of the poor?

The same way you justify progressive taxation, I suppose. Moreover, the government already does many (other) blatantly immoral things in the name of the (expected) results.

But I am less concerned with the morality of it and more concerned with the practicality. If the children of the rich do start suffering, they will simply pull their children out of the public schools, putting you back at square one.

It's not justifiable, but more than that, it's not even tenable.

Rich "enough" parents (for some value of enough) will invest to send their kids to boarding school in London or Zurich rather than let them be the "beneficiaries" of a social engineering experiment.

The poor are poor because they have an average IQ in the 80s, barely above mental retardation. Their children are the same way because it is genetic. The school busing amd integration programs are about political subjugation of the high class, not assistance to the lower class.

Demonstrably untrue and profoundly disturbed.

Demonstrate it then.

Look at the reply on the sibling comment. Your position is debunked and your willingness to believe it speaks volumes of your personal failings.

You're shitting me, right? Please show me the studies you draw upon.

The standard work is The Bell Curve. They studied many thousands of Americans of every race and subculture. They found that the only significant predictor of earned income was IQ. Race, location, parental income, and so forth did not matter (on average). College attendance in particular had little affect on income, it just determined whether the career was in an intellectual-style field.

The school bussing and integration programs were tried starting in the 1960s. No benefits ever materialized, such as improved test scores, imprisonment rates, cumulative earned income by age 30, or any other standard psychology metric.

Yet the programs were continued. Clearly the purpose in continuing them had nothing to do with "disadvantaged" students, because nothing changed for them. The only explanation remaining is that the real purpose was what was being done to the non-disadvantaged students. Their schools were being filled with yahoos to knock down their potential for achievement.

You could dismiss my claim as raving racism except for one thing: you know that at the same time they also introduced word-shape memorization reading instead of phonetics, New Math, eliminated practice drills, and so forth. They really did want to knock down intellectual achievement. School integration fits very nicely into those plans.

You wrote "The standard work is The Bell Curve" and that tells us that you haven't been reading on the subject since 1994, because The Bell Curve has long since been supplanted as a source on the subject. (It was decried as stupid by anyone who knew genetics from the moment it was published.) More recent sources on the issues of income, race, IQ, and related issues can be found in the publications of Eric Turkheimer, recent president of the Behavior Genetics Association, most of which he kindly shares as free full text on his faculty website.

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm

Note particularly his recent co-authored publication

Nisbett, R. E., Aronson, J., Blair, C., Dickens, W., Flynn, J., Halpern, D. F., & Turkheimer, E. (2012). Group differences in IQ are best understood as environmental in origin. American Psychologist, 67, 503-504.

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdi...

that directly disagrees with The Bell Curve on several points and yet was published in a leading journal for professional psychologists.

Many, many other researchers have gone beyond the amateur level of research published in the popular book The Bell Curve to grapple with the issues that book brought up and refute it. A good bibliopraphy on the general subject can be found in Wikipedia userspace at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...

with plenty of recommendations for current reading in reliable sources.

The other way is to turn the family that doesn't emphasize education into one that does.

Example: Harlem Children's Zone. http://www.hcz.org/

I think this works to some degree, but could depend on ratio. One can't ship underperformers into PaloAlto High or Cupertino and overwhelm the student body --it's not as if the influence is one-way.

>Yes, this is certainly possible, and is the most common argument utilized by the rich parents when faced with charges of racism towards poor blacks and Latinos.

I think looking at homogenous societies (or even states) and looking at achievers vs performers attitudes in those societies. How do parents there deal with these issues? If this argument is used, and those societies are homogenous, then it can't be racist but classist (or even pedagogical).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com