”The actual purpose of much that is called education is not to teach a trade, or take you stumbling to the limits of the undiscovered but to put you in a position to laugh at people.”
2) From Thomas Sowell’s Ever Wonder Why?
”Anyone who is serious about wanting to help minority young people must know that the place to start is at precisely the other end of the educational process. That means beginning in the earliest grades teaching reading, math and other mental skills on which their future depends. But that would mean clashing with the teachers’ unions and their own busybody agenda of propaganda and psychological manipulation in the classrooms.
The path of least resistance is to give minority youngsters a lousy education and then admit them to college by quotas. With a decent education, they wouldn’t need the quotas.”
3) From the Brookings Institution’s SAT Math Scores Mirror and Maintain Racial Inequity
”Relying on a three-digit number to assess a student’s math ability clouds their drive, their resilience, and may impact their confidence in pursuing postsecondary education….
…..In 2019, the SAT developed an adversity score to contextualize students’ scores to their school and neighborhood. Under pressure, the College Board then abandoned the single statistic in favor of an Environmental Context Dashboard, which provides information like the portion of students at a high school receiving free and reduced lunch, median family income, and advanced placement enrollment.
Colleges are starting to consider socioeconomic status in a more systematic way, and the College Board is too. This is vitally important, given how far achievement has already splintered along racial and class lines by the time students are about to graduate high school.”
I will add that at the end of the Brookings’s article that the authors do detail ways of boosting disadvantaged students actual pre-college performance. That’s what is called in the trade as CYA, but ask yourself which is more likely to happen in the post-Fair Admissions v. Presidents and Fellows of Harvard world? Hiding affirmative action programs under some version of an “Environmental Context Dashboard” or actually breaking the rice bowls of the K-12 establishment?
More vouchers please.