PS 411

[JasonL]

Right. Being imprisoned is part of being a kid. There are tweaks we can make here and there, but the essence of not being treated as an adult is you don't get to do what you want.

I just find it...odd that the brainwashing that "This makes sense and is reasonable" works on so many people. Like, why? Why would you stop feeling the way you did as a kid, and decide that what was done to you was reasonable and justifiable, unless it was as part of you doing it to someone else and continuing the circle of abuse?

It's like when my parents told me that eventually I would like having a brother but never presented any like, mechanism for that to happen. Why would that have happened? Why would I change my mind about these things just because I got older?

Your view of the sophistication of your mindset as a young person is very generous. My answer is "because you were stupid as all kids are stupid". That implies a narrow range of experience exposure, an unsophisticated view of self interest, a lack of appreciation for costs that you never have to incur, an undeveloped social sense - just dumb. Kids are dumb. Listen to 15 year olds for 2 minutes.

[Warren]

I'm not against socialization. I just think it can be done better than "You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. From this point forward you will service the collective."
Perhaps in a multi-generational tribal atmosphere.

???
Small town/tribal culture is especially stultifying. The smaller the group, the smaller the range of 'acceptable' behaviors. Many of the most offensive texts in Leviticus and Deuteronomy were the prejudices of small tribes of sheep herders.

Yes well. The key is to belong to the right tribe.

[nicole]

Right. Being imprisoned is part of being a kid. There are tweaks we can make here and there, but the essence of not being treated as an adult is you don't get to do what you want.

I just find it...odd that the brainwashing that "This makes sense and is reasonable" works on so many people. Like, why? Why would you stop feeling the way you did as a kid, and decide that what was done to you was reasonable and justifiable, unless it was as part of you doing it to someone else and continuing the circle of abuse?

It's like when my parents told me that eventually I would like having a brother but never presented any like, mechanism for that to happen. Why would that have happened? Why would I change my mind about these things just because I got older?

Your view of the sophistication of your mindset as a young person is very generous. My answer is "because you were stupid as all kids are stupid". That implies a narrow range of experience exposure, an unsophisticated view of self interest, a lack of appreciation for costs that you never have to incur, an undeveloped social sense - just dumb. Kids are dumb. Listen to 15 year olds for 2 minutes.

Do you...do you know any adults?

[Warren]

I hear what you're saying nicole. But adults are unforgivably childish. Actual children really are considerably worse if judged on a consistent metric. Though they can be allowed greater leeway.
Children are inherently immature.

[Ellie]

I think that in general the libertarian/self-ownership kinda philosophy doesn't have a great answer for the rights of people who don't have full agency or capabilities (eg kids and people with mental disabilities). But there has to be some special case. I mean, even if you as a child were already smart and aware enough that you feel you should have been in charge of your own life, you have to admit that didn't start at birth. There was some point where somebody else needed to be in charge because you couldn't grocery shop or drive yourself to the emergency room and you pooped yourself on the regular.

[tr0g]

Yeah, if I left important life decisions up to the tr0gling he would... well, end up like his biological parents or somewhat worse. "I don't want to wok on my letters!" Tough shit. You're illiterate. Get after it.

[Jennifer]

Yeah, if I left important life decisions up to the tr0gling he would... well, end up like his biological parents or somewhat worse. "I don't want to wok on my letters!" Tough shit. You're illiterate. Get after it.

Had I been allowed to make my own decisions at that age, my teeth all would've rotted out because I'd never have brushed them, I'd suffer multiple nutritional deficiencies due to an "all junk food, all the time" diet, I'd have died multiple times of various easily treatable infections rather than swallow yucky-tasting medicines, and of course I'd never have been vaccinated against anything because that would involve being stabbed by needles....

[Ellie]

And to me the argument lies less in that bad things would happen to kids if they ran their own lives and more that bad things would happen because they have little (and when young enough, absolutely zero) ability to understand what consequences they're consenting to when they do these things, and would probably choose not to have those things happen, but can't make the decisions on their own to achieve those ends. Like, if I want to eat candy 24/7 and be a fat fuck with no teeth, I am absolutely allowed to do it, because I own myself, and nobody (fuck you nanny state) gets to step in and say "for your own good!" But when Modspawn wants to eat candy for every meal he isn't saying, "I accept the consequences of being a fat fuck with no teeth." He isn't saying, "I know I might choke on this but I'm willing to take that risk". He's not even saying "I want candy now instead of having it for dessert because I understand those are my options." " He's just saying, "CANDY." And so somebody else has to step in and say "You probably don't want to be a fat fuck with no teeth, but until you can articulate that I have to make a guess for you, and so eat this sandwich instead."

[Ellie]

Okay, I thought of an analogy (that won't make me crave candy so much).

Imagine if you were driving along with your best friend. You take a wrong turn, drive off a cliff, and end up horribly mangled. Your friend says, "I knew that was a wrong turn and it would be dangerous." You might say, "Why the hell didn't you make me go the right way instead?" But you might also say, "Well, if I let you give me directions, you might send me somewhere I didn't want to go, and I know when driving there is always the risk of a crash, so even though this ended badly, on the whole I don't want people telling me where to drive."

This is a good model for adult self-determinism but not really for kids, which is more like:

Imagine one day you become horribly sick and it turns out to be arsenic poisoning. Your best friend says, "Oh, yeah, multivitamins are full of arsenic. I knew you were poisoning yourself but I didn't force you to stop taking them because it's up to you if you want to be poisoned or not." You'd probably say, "What the fuck? I didn't decide to be poisoned. I didn't even know it was a possible consequence. Of course you should have intervened if you care about me. Even if I decide another time that I do want to poison myself, it needs to be my decision."

(obvs this breaks down somewhat if you extend it much further, and I still want candy, harrumph)

[lunchstealer]

I'm a bit more optimistic about the impact of quality instruction at the margin in k-12. It's at least counter intuitive that students would learn no more with movie watching coach guy than inspirational super engaged top techniques lady. I'd be much happier if we all agreed that's what we should be trying to measure.

I'd be much much happier if the promise of k-12 included some kind of path for non college graduates into trades or whatnot.

I overall agree that you can't probably fix bad home bad neighborhood bad friends trifecta no matter how good the teacher is. I think the goal is something like, among the kids who are committed to overcoming those things, can we get them quality educations? That's first. Second order would be "can we get modestly engaged median students in bad environments some kind of skill path".

Could do like they do at some schools in Japan and sort classes based on academic performance. You'd also probably have to have teachers move rooms instead of students, and standardize course offerings a lot more than they are now, but it'd do better at getting the top 80% educated. Of course, you could never actually do it, because the parents of the bottom 20% would freak out, but it'd go a lot further toward your goal than what we have now.

Doesn't high school somewhat work like this, albeit with more coarse sorting. For basically all the core courses at my high school, there were at least two levels, honors and regular and sometimes three, honors, AP and regular. And aside from English, for the most part there were students of multiple grades in those classes. For example, honors Spanish 3 or AP physics had sophomores through seniors in them.

That's how my schooling was, for the most part. I am sure there are some advantages in some cases to mainstreaming (as throwing the slack-jawed yokels and gifted students into the same classes) but where it happened to me, I was even less motivated than I was normally. My level of effort was almost always proportional to the achievement level of the least achievy person in the class, so I always did best when I was segregated with the nerds.

[Hugh Akston]

Texas kindergarten sends kid home for having long hair

The boy's mother, Jessica Oates, 25, of Baytown, said she tried to appease school officials by putting her son's hair in a bun on Monday before taking him to school, but the boy wasn't even let out of the car because his long tresses violated the school's dress code. That meant Oates couldn't go to work and had to take a day off from her job at a local restaurant to care for her son.

[Warren]

Texas kindergarten sends kid home for having long hair.

The Barbers Hill Independent School District said in a statement that it would not change its rule.

Well what did you expect when you sent your kid to Barbers Hill?

[Kolohe]

Fuckin occupational licensing guilds.

[nicole]

Because otherwise jobs don’t involve training



Man, teachers don’t know shit, do they

[Aresen]

Because otherwise jobs don’t involve training



Man, teachers don’t know shit, do they

Unfortunately, we can't smack their bottoms with rolled up newspapers and push their noses in it.

(Though some of them might enjoy that.)

[dhex]

just find and replace "training" with "midwifing the next generation of the greatest heroes the world has ever known".

[Eric the .5b]

Because otherwise jobs don’t involve training



Man, teachers don’t know shit, do they

In the minds of a lot of people, professionals, as opposed to plebian workers who wear uniforms and name tags, don't get "training".

They're pretentious idiots to think so, but they do.

[Highway]

It's "Continuing Education" in our field. "Training" is something you do to others...

[nicole]

Holy fucking shit

For decades, the public schools of Edina, Minnesota, were the gold standard among the state’s school districts. Edina is an upscale suburb of Minneapolis, but virtually overnight, its reputation has changed. Academic rigor is unraveling, high school reading and math test scores are sliding, and students increasingly fear bullying and persecution.

The shift began in 2013, when Edina school leaders adopted the “All for All” strategic plan—a sweeping initiative that reordered the district’s mission from academic excellence for all students to “racial equity.”
...
The Edina school district’s All for All plan mandated that henceforth “all teaching and learning experiences” would be viewed through the “lens of racial equity,” and that only “racially conscious” teachers and administrators should be hired. District leaders assured parents this would reduce Edina’s racial achievement gap, which they attributed to “barriers rooted in racial constructs and cultural misunderstandings.”
...
The result of all of this? Four years into the Edina schools’ equity crusade, black students’ test scores continue to disappoint. There’s been a single positive point of data: Black students’ reading scores—all ages, all grades—have slightly increased, from 45.5 percent proficiency in 2014 to 46.4 percent proficiency in 2017.

But other than that, the news is all bad. Black students “on track for success” in reading decreased from 48.1 percent in 2014 to 44.9 percent in 2017. Math scores decreased from 49.6 percent proficiency in 2014 to 47.4 percent in 2017. Black students “on track for success” in math decreased from 51.4 percent in 2014 to 44.7 percent in 2017.

The drop was most notable at the high school level. Math scores for black students in 11th grade at Edina Senior High dropped from 31 percent proficiency in 2014 to 14.6 percent in 2017. In reading, scores for black students in 10th grade at Edina Senior High dropped from 51.7 percent proficiency in 2014 to 40 percent in 2017.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/inside-a- ... le/2011402

[tr0g]

You placed something other than teaching as your priority and look what happened? Derp.

There's an old Onion article about bottom 10% of last year's high school graduates ready to take on Saddam, which I always laughed at because I was in that percentile graduating from high school.

Our updated household joke after knowing way too many teachers is "Bottom 10% of last year's college class is ready to teach your kids".

[nicole]

The really weird thing is that this suggests public school interventions have any effect at all.

[thoreau]

At least the students are being prepared for careers in astronomy.

[JasonL]

The really weird thing is that this suggests public school interventions have any effect at all.

I totally believe you can consciously alter a high performing school and make it lower quality. I don't think interventions have randomly distributed effects, more like "high performing" is an unstable equilibrium and interventions seeking things other than high performance will tend to send things toward the median case.

[Andrew]

So changing from telling kids that "doing X, Y, and Z counts as excellence" to "you're excellent just as you are because of institutional racism" had the effect of telling them not to try. Let me find my shocked face.

[thoreau]

The really weird thing is that this suggests public school interventions have any effect at all.

I totally believe you can consciously alter a high performing school and make it lower quality. I don't think interventions have randomly distributed effects, more like "high performing" is an unstable equilibrium and interventions seeking things other than high performance will tend to send things toward the median case.

Mark this one in the history books, folks: Jason and I are in agreement about equilibria in an educational bureaucracy.