Epic Beard Man
Bearded Philosopher
Have you ever attended college?
-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
SAT adversity score
- Thread starter Enoch07
- Start date
Have you ever attended college?
Epic Beard Man
Bearded Philosopher
He has an agenda and apparently reading his own source isn't on that agenda.
The problem is, you have to find some way to fund school districts locally. Around half of a school's budget comes from local taxes, and close to the other half is from state taxes. Federal funding is only about 5-10%.
We do have national education standards in the form of Common Core, so a lack of national standards isn't the issue. What we need is to provide teachers more opportunities for professional development, reduce teacher turnover (50% in the first 2-3 years, 90% in the first 10 years), pay student teachers at least minimum wage (currently teacher candidates working 40+ hours a week for student teaching at university get paid nothing for working what by all rights is a full-time job), hire more teachers to reduce class sizes, and allocate funding to getting up-to-date teaching and learning materials.
Shad
Veteran Member
Sports is a poor comparison as there are more factors than merely making the team. A veteran player will demand more money and years than a nobody. A team may have no interest in an expensive veteran due to a rebuild. The team may have budget caps be it league or ownership thus can not afford player A. Schools are not limited by funding in the same way. Goals are different. More so the student pay from an almost unlimited source of funding only restricted by how much the student is willing to take out in their loans
Do note you said hire.
Personally I'm fine with changing the funding balance away from the local level. That is part of the problem, because rich (and let's be honest, mostly white) areas have well funded schools and poor (mostly minority) areas have terribly funded ones.
If we're going to continue funding schools predominantly at a local level, we must be serious about reducing income inequality: progressive tax structure, increasing the minimum wage, tuition free college, and so on.
This is not an area I know nearly enough about, but I'm not sure Common Core is robust/comprehensive enough, and was just implemented a few years ago. Schools also have to have the resources to teach up to those standards, as you mentioned.
I'm a fan.
Last edited:
No agenda, just pointing out some racist activities.
Yeah, it's a big problem. But let's not forget that rural schools (which are also predominantly white) also struggle with underfunded and under-resourced schools. Both urban and rural school communities have a problem with teacher retention and attracting well-qualified teachers. Also, both urban and rural schools account for 15% each of the total US population, with the suburbs making up 70%.
We already have a progressive tax structure. Maybe the brackets need adjusted, but maybe the money also needs to be allocated better; almost none of the people making major decisions about our education system have any experience in it themselves whatsoever. Lawyers and businessmen don't understand how children learn or how the school systems work.
Increasing minimum wage can also backfire horribly, as we're starting to see in retail and food service industries. What positions can be automated, will, and then we have far more people out of jobs than before.
Tuition-free college won't work in America as long as 2/3 of all Americans continue to go to college. (Near) tuition-free university in Europe only works because only around 10-20% of the population goes to university; there are enough people not going to university to be able to reasonably foot the bill for the small percentage who do. We can talk about tuition-free college once we have a robust system of trade schools and apprenticeships, because let's face it: University was never designed to be a fit for everyone. It caters to very specific kinds of individual looking for very specific kinds of jobs, i.e. those which involve primarily theoretical fields of knowledge. The fact that American universities have grown to incorporate fields outside of those paradigms actually disadvantages the people who are best cut out for those lines of work. I can tell you, having both been a university student and an instructor, that there are tons of people out there who are just not cut out for university, and that's okay. It doesn't mean they're stupid, it doesn't mean they can't be successful, it just means that they are smart and skilled in ways that are outside the scope of what universities are meant to prepare people for.
Case in point, I have friends who make 50-60k a year working as meat cutters in my local grocery store, in a state where the minimum wage is somewhere around $7-$8 per hour, and they have 6 weeks' paid vacation per year because of their union contract. They never went to university a day in their lives and never had to pay back tens of thousands of dollars in debt. One of my friends is in his late 20's, has a wife and stepson, and owns his own house in a good city. I, on the other hand, with a bachelor's in education and most of the work completed for my master's, am currently 70k in the hole and will be making substantially less money as a teacher for the first 10 or so years of my employment than my friend who works in a freaking grocery store.
Whoever tells you that you need to go tens of thousands of dollars into debt for the sake of a piece of paper that doesn't even guarantee you'll get a job in the field you went to school for in order to be considered a success in life is either a liar or brainwashed. We need to restore the respect of trade jobs that make easily as much as many positions that require a university degree, and we need to stop thinking that kids who choose not to put themselves into crippling debt are somehow not smart enough and not good enough.
The standards are plenty robust, and for the most part common sense. Home | Common Core State Standards Initiative All it is is a list of things students should be able to do and know in each core subject area by the end of any given grade level. The great thing about Common Core is that the implementation of how one gets their students to achieving these learning standards is left up to each individual state, district, and even up to each individual teacher. This means that each teacher is free to differentiate their instruction to each class and each student in order to get the most optimal results. If the traditional way of representing addition with multi-digit numbers doesn't work for a particular student, the teacher isn't beholden to teaching just that way of adding; they can find or create resources that approach it in a different way that might work better for that particular student. Common Core just tells you what to teach; it doesn't tell you how to teach, which is amazing. It means I can always resort to the methods which are backed up by the latest research and data.
The real problem with Common Core is making sure that teachers have the professional development, tools, knowledge bases and resources to be able to respond flexibly to the needs of each student and teach in a way that will best help them.
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
They'll just use the Asian cleaning lady and omit the Asian molecular biochemist.Hey. White folks are not at the top. How come we get all the white privilege BS thrown at us when Asian folks clearly outperform us. It's them we should be angry at.
Believe me, I have witnessed this in spades as a graduate instructor teaching first-year students. I have seen students who come to class, sit down and don't even think to take out a pen and paper to take notes. They don't do homework, they don't try, and it's clear that they have no plan for what to do in university. University is for academic types, and in our current culture we are sending millions of people whose brains just don't work in an academic fashion and won't be getting jobs that require academic knowledge or skills.
Right, so why should race be included in the measurements at all? Asians, for example, are by no means a monolith; just between China and India you have around 2.5 billion people, let alone the two dozen or so other countries, which often are not nearly as wealthy or affluent as the aforementioned. You cannot look at a Filipino, a Vietnamese, a Laotian, a Thai, a Mongolian, a Japanese, a Korean, a Far East Russian, a Kazakh, an Iranian, an Arab, a Kyrgyz, a Nepalese, an Uzbek, an Indonesian, a Malaysian, an Afghani, a Pakistani and a Pashto and treat them as one monolithic entity called "Asian". It's unfair to everybody involved. A poor immigrant from Afghanistan or Cambodia is being unfairly held to the same standard as wealthy Chinese- or Indian-Americans.Actually, while I don’t have a subscription to the WSJ, one only has to read the second paragraph of the teaser you cited in the OP.
“....calculated by using 15 factors, including crime rate and poverty levels from the student’s high school and neighborhood....”
This way the measure really is about background hardship that they had to struggle through to get close, rather than race.
And if the past is any source of information, the schools won’t be totally ignoring the SAT scores.
Everything gets weighed in.....again back to the soccer player question.
Likewise, you have poor whites and wealthy whites, recent immigrants and those who have lived on this continent for 400 years. It's not fair to hold all whites to some higher standard because they have a lack of melatonin in their skin and their ancestors (recent or distant) come from a certain continent. Same thing with blacks and Hispanics.
People are not their skin color. They are much more, and affirmative action programs like this are quite simply racist.
I don't think that 'race' should even be on a job application or college application.
I agree it shouldn't even be on there to begin with. What does my ethnicity have to do with anything regarding my a job?
Right, you have to 'want it' to some extent to be successful. America is not that impoverished that someone who really wants it and has aptitude can't be successful.
Also, I think it is a part of the overly-liberal (in my opinion) ideology that there are no differences either in natural aptitude among individuals and American society is what is to be blamed for different outcomes.
I think it is racist to put it on there. It is in effect saying that if you are of a particular race, you are not capable of making it on your own intelligence or merit. To me, that is offensive.
And these folks aren't helped, just used as fodder for white trash jokes.
As someone who works in a rural area, I'm well aware of this from firsthand experience. Suburbia, though, is predominantly white.
You're right, I should have said more progressive.
Very true, neither do many politicians who send their kids to private school.
I hear a lot of conservative fear and anecdote about this, but it's not actually substantiated by the evidence I've seen. Minimum wages increases in most studies have little to no impact on unemployment rate.
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
Automation is going to be a problem whether we increase the minimum wage or not. The question is whether we as a society are willing to stomach allowing people to be paid wages that cannot support them until we get to a point where automation replaces a huge number of jobs. At that point, we're going to have to rethink our entire relationship to work. This idea that we have to work to earn a wage to live is going to be unnecessary and outdated.
Considered in a vacuum, I have no problem with that idea. The problem is that, for better or for worse, in our society today, the Bachelor's degree has become the new high school diploma. It is a bare minimum most employers look for in job applicants other than entry level. We're not putting that toothpaste back in the tube. More vocational training is great, but it's not going to replace a BA in the minds of most employers, especially as automation replaces jobs that require less education, as we just discussed.
Great anecdote to support the idea that we need to strengthen unions in this country, which I fully agree with.
Interesting anecdote, and as someone who also has a Master's degree but makes much less than he probably should, I feel your pain. But there's no denying the reality that, on average, higher education translates to higher wages.
Thanks for link, I will do more research. You may well be right.
Also, thanks for being a teacher. We need you!
Daemon Sophic
Avatar in flux
Well then, good news.
Apparently the academics are a move ahead, and there is no Race aspect to this process.
True, the OP made it seem like a race issue,
but it is not.Here is an informative article. The Reasoning Behind the SAT’s New ‘Disadvantage’ Score
“One of the most notable aspects of the disadvantage level score is that there’s no explicit mention of race— the scoring system is mainly focused on capturing one’s economic reality. (Though, considering that poverty rates and property values have often been affected by racist policies, the score will likely capture some of the economic disadvantages that fall hardest on people of color.) The omission of race from the score is particularly notable given that the racial-discrimination suit brought against Harvard by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) is still underway; Selingo says that admissions departments have been bracing themselves for the case to move to the Supreme Court, where a conservative majority could potentially ban the consideration of race in admissions altogether. “I’m feeling that this whole effort, and the reason that College Board has this product, is if there is a day in the future when race can’t be used in admissions,” Selingo says. “This could be used as a tool in the admissions process in a post affirmative action world.”
This race-blind system was not an accident, Betterton told me, but it wasn’t necessarily a result of the current anti-affirmative-action movement. Because states like California and Florida have banned racial preferences in public college admissions, the College Board wanted to make sure that all admissions officers and College Board member schools would be able to use this score.”
This race-blind system was not an accident, Betterton told me, but it wasn’t necessarily a result of the current anti-affirmative-action movement. Because states like California and Florida have banned racial preferences in public college admissions, the College Board wanted to make sure that all admissions officers and College Board member schools would be able to use this score.”
Feel better?
Epic Beard Man
Bearded Philosopher
But this wasn’t about race though. I’m curious do you have a college education from a four year university?
Yes it is. The chart for the adversity score is based on race. I even posted a screenshot in the OP. Its racist towards Asians (by lowering their score based on race). Its also racist towards Hispanics and African Americans (by raising their score based on their race- soft bigotry of low expectations). They lower Caucasian scores as well, but only lowered a small amount so it's the least egregious of the offenses here, and I am not too concerned with a -50 on a SAT.
Shad
Veteran Member
The only issue I have is students will not see the score thus there is no transparency.
Epic Beard Man
Bearded Philosopher
From the New York Times
"The College Board, the company that administers the SAT exam taken by about two million students a year, will for the first time assess students not just on their math and verbal skills, but also on their educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, entering a fraught battle over the fairness of high-stakes testing. The company announced on Thursday that it will include a new rating, which is widely being referred to as an “adversity score,” of between 1 and 100 on students’ test results. An average score is 50, and higher numbers mean more disadvantage. The score will be calculated using 15 factors, including the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s neighborhood.
The rating will not affect students’ test scores, and will be reported only to college admissions officials as part of a larger package of data on each test taker.
The new measurement brings the College Board squarely into the raging national debate over fairness and merit in college admissions, one fueled by enduring court clashes on affirmative action, a federal investigation into a sprawling admissions cheating ring and a booming college preparatory industry that promises results to those who can pay.
Source:SAT’s New ‘Adversity Score’ Will Take Students’ Hardships Into Account
The adversity score is clearly giving context to the “disadvantage level" of a student including environmental factors that influence a student’s home and school life—including neighborhood crime rates, housing values and vacancies, the community’s average educational attainment, and poverty levels—to calculate this disadvantage level, which is scaled from 0 to 100 and is based on census data from each student’s neighborhood. A person's test taking ability is multifactorial, as one cites in TheAtlantic article:
“It is giving us a look at how poverty and inequality directly affect students’ college destinations, as it relates to [test scores]” Jack said. “When students sit down [to take] the SAT, that doesn’t mean that everybody’s at the same starting line.”
Source:The Reasoning Behind the SAT’s New ‘Disadvantage’ Score
When it comes to proper preparation of tests environments play a key factor in a potential college student's ability to successfully score high on a test or not. Nowhere in the articles I've read mentioned race.