I personally am afraid to speak out against such things. I did in college and was viciously flamed by people who thought it was a good idea. You can shut down the entire conversation by just calling someone “racist” or “bigot”.
I don’t want to lose my job or be ostracized.
To be clear, my opinions are only that it seems wrong to me to discriminate against someone based on their immutable characteristics (like race).
It only seems inexplicable if you accept as reality the most extreme characterization of DEI programs, which personally I believe should be a tip-off that such a characterization might not be entirely accurate. The more ridiculous programs naturally get the most attention, regardless of how representative they are, and DEI programs as a whole are further strawmanned by politicians and pundits looking to trigger your outrage. The discourse thoroughly ignores all the programs working on DEI as a topic in ways most reasonable people would probably be OK with.
As an example right in this thread, the grandparent comment talks about the Dallas schools looking at the issue of children unevenly taking advantage of advanced courses and coming up with a solution that helped expand access across the board. This absolutely would qualify as a DEI program (they even used the equity trigger word), but did not do anything I would think many people would find objectionable.
On the contrary, I think most DEI programs suck and people know it. There's a few like the Dallas program that actually try to solve the problem in a reasonable way, and you won't find nearly as much pushback from people on those.
Well meaning if misguided attempts to address race and other social issues without improving pay or making structural changes to government and economic systems.
The amount of equity a society enforces should be inversely proportional to age. If a kindergartener is unable to succeed, we need to give them extra help. If a 45 year old is unable to succeed, they had their chances and it's their fault.
I agree with you that I was wrong to say "It's their fault." There are people who get screwed by life.
The main way they got screwed was when life taught them whining was better than working hard. We need to stop screwing people that way. We need to hold a hard line on the principle that they can succeed or fail in a free market, and we will not reward whining. This means eliminating all entitlements for adults.
I'll help kids learn to be successful adult. I'm a teacher, that's what I do. Let the kids and their families pick their schools from any school they can get to, including online schools.
I will not help some whiny adult who can not even train themselves when they have Internet access.
If you give money to whiny adults, who do you take it from? Do you take it from long-term investments in education? Do you take it from long term investments in our economy like paying off our national debt? Our (US) national debt eliminates many options we would otherwise have. It is more compassionate to provide the best education we can to the children, and let the adults pay for themselves.
Long-term benefits should outweigh short-term benefits. A society that educates and raises its children to be productive, the provides a free market will outperform a society that rewards whining.
Even if an older person’s situation is largely not their fault, it is much more difficult to correct, and society’s benefit for its investment is much lower.
On ramps for everyone are important, but as you say, far far more important and effective in people’s early years.
Children need to be educated well and given opportunities to guarantee the future of society, but ensuring adults are content or at least able to support themselves is important for stability today. More un/under-employed/unemployable people means more crime and social unrest, retarding growth and costing more resources than would have been spent supporting them.
Plenty of kids get away with being stupid. If those same kids knew that they would have to provide for themselves once they turned 18, they would be studying and learning to work.
Intelligence and education are different things. You can't train intelligence - you can teach some tools or frameworks for reasoning and such and that can help but some people will understand them and others won't.
As a simple example just look at how many people think math is useless. Even having spent 10+ years with people trying to bash it into their heads they still can't figure out any of the infinitely many useful things you can do with math.
Education is the result, intelligence is potential. Stupid people have less potential for results. Doesn't mean some of them can't pull a Forrest Gump, nor that they aren't valuable members of society. Just means they suck at learning (at least some) things so their time is better spent doing other stuff.
I know it’s vogue to ridicule DEI programs, but the reality is that as the blog post points out, these measures achieve the opposite of DEI (all 3 letters of those).
Even standardized tests. There is already evidence that standardized tests reduce equality. Which is not surprising at all because standardized tests are the one part of a college application that someone can excel at purely with concentrated hard work over a relatively short period of time.
An underprivileged kid motivated to go to a good college cannot make up for poor grades earned from K-8 when they barely had the ability to plan a day in the future, and so was driven to do whatever their friends were doing. And then that set them up behind the 8 ball in many ways from 9-12 as well.
Finally, real DEI requires listening to actual underprivileged people. The vast majority of underprivileged parents will not respond to data showing that their kids are underperforming by saying “make sure no one can do this”. They will respond by demanding the schools provide more resources so their kids can excel.
The OP wonders how Cambridge, Mass and CA are making such changes. But it’s not surprising at all because these decisions are being driven largely by upper middle class educated people who absolutely cannot relate to the under privileged people they claim they’re helping.
And this is an implementation of the worst of privilege. Making decisions for the underprivileged by the privileged without ever asking the supposed beneficiaries what will actually help them.
> They will respond by demanding the schools provide more resources so their kids can excel.
Right? Why would any parent want other kids in their class to be dumber so their kid is magically "smarter"? They want their child to grow up to be a competent person who is capable of competing in the world at large, not a wave-through at a "progressive" school.
Parents recognize that their children will be competing with the entire world for jobs, and easily see the folly of such a policy.
Such policy really does seem actively hostile toward the goals of such parents. For a group of educators to suggest that the solution is to do away with "mean grades and homework" is like saying, "We all know that you're kid isn't going succeed in advanced classes so let's not even pretend that they will."
rich white people introduce these regressive DEI policies so that smart poor and not-connected kids could not compete and enter elite ranks of society, and their (relatively dumb, but rich&well connected) kids could easily outcompete everyone.
1. It is incredibly hard for rich&connected kid to excel among smart & hard-working individuals
2. If barrier is lowered, and overall pool is "diverse" in terms of IQ and ability, then for a rich kid it gets much easier to outcompete and stand out (due to parent's $$$ and connections)
3. The only reason rich white privileged people want regressive DEI is to make it easier for their kids to stand out from competition
Stop using standardized tests to get in. And then just aim for the perfect "socially desirable" mix. Regardless of ability.