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Seattle would rather have racial “equity” than serve its gifted and talented students — 32 Comments

1. The past three posts have been particularly demoralizing.

2. Mike Plaiss:

   Yes, I was actually thinking of writing a post apologizing for all the gloomy news. But it’s certainly not an uplifting time.

3. I have a smart, conservative, over-the-top optimist friend who loves to say, “Don’t worry! We’re going to outlast and outbreed them!” He has four kids and we have mutual friends with seven and ten – all attending private Christian schools. No idea if he’s right, but it’s the best I’ve got.

4. I was in a gifted program in elementary school. It was only one day a week, but it gave me the encouragement to learn on my own. I was so bored in school.

   Intelligence isn’t everything and smart kids are, mostly, going to make it anyway. But that gift can leverage to greater boons for the world. I would argue it’s worth it to society pay a little extra to challenge those children.

   Some teachers said they felt they don’t have the time and resources to make learning plans for every student in a classroom of 20 to 30 students.

   Yeah, well. AI to the rescue and none too soon. Individualized instruction for all is the future. Factory teaching is almost over.

5. huxley:

   Won’t AI eliminate the human-to-human interaction that seems to be important in good teaching? Computer learning doesn’t seem to do much for a lot of people.

   Of course, if it’s humanoid robots …

6. The ignorant and indoctrinated are much easier to control.

   Which is why it is just a matter of time till leftist enclaves like Washington State outlaw both home schooling and private non-woke educational institutions. They’ll eliminate them simply by passing legislation that requires a woke curriculum.

   Of course, more government employees will be needed to ensure compliance.

   Those discovered failing to meet the woke standards will be declared a threat to future generations, a well informed educated public being necessary to the security of the State. Defiance will be met with removal of the children and even imprisonment. Not a stretch, now that they’re issuing 11 yr prison terms to 70+ year olds who dared to pray where it is verboten.

7. It’s another indication, in case you needed one, that the institutional purpose of schools has nothing to do with actual education. Absent tracking, you have massive inefficiency in teaching practice. For some students a rapid pace is optimal, for some a slow pace, for some a pace in between. About four tracks would be optimal for common-and-garden schooling. Students with severe deficits belong in consortial programs which offer high overhead teaching adapted to their specific issues. Students not proficient in English belong in English immersion programs run by consortia. Incorrigibles belong in day detention centers run by the local sheriff’s department.

8. I was wondering how Washington state had avoided the excesses of leftist DEIism and BAM it hit like a tsunami (or should I say rolled over us) in the last few months.

   No citizenship? No problem. No bar exam? No problem. No smarts? No problem.

   Looking up the racial breakdown of Seattle it’s 62% White; 6.6% Black; 16% Asian. So, both White and Black kids are underrepresented. For some reason Hispanic wasn’t listed.

   According to Population Review: “While Seattle’s percentage of white residents is lower than the United States as a whole and declining, it is still one of the whitest large cities in the U.S. From 1960 to 2010, the percentage of whites in Seattle has dropped from 91.6% to 66.5%.”

   Hmmm. White guilt at work?

   The state breakdown is 62% White; 12% Black; 18% Hispanic; 6% Asian.

9. Won’t AI eliminate the human-to-human interaction that seems to be important in good teaching? Computer learning doesn’t seem to do much for a lot of people.

   neo:

   Hitherto, computer learning has been unspeakably awful. (I’ve written some educational software.) It’s brittle and rigid. It forces the student to abide by the authors’ notion of how and when some point is to be learned. It’s hopeless when the student has strayed off the beaten path. It forces the student to interact in exactly the way the program expects.

   AI is far more flexible and truly intelligent in comparison.

   However, to your main point of human interaction, certainly genuine human interaction can be huge for learning. (To be balanced against the possibility, as I discovered in parochial school, that teachers could be actively hostile and cruel to students.)

   The educational future I see with AI is that teachers become managers, friends and motivators. Instead of spending almost all of their time coming up with lesson plans and lectures, delivering them and grading homework with only a few minutes here and there to devote to one-to-one interaction with students, the teachers will be spared the rote aspects of teaching and be freed to know their students and assist them as necessary.

10. “Some teachers said they felt they don’t have the time and resources to make learning plans for every student in a classroom of 20 to 30 students.”

    Schools are not using the Khan Academy resources as much as they could. If you’re teaching math, 50% or so will need the usual curriculum. 20% can be given extra work using Khan Academy videos. The 30% who are slow or below average can be helped with more basic Khan Academy videos and tutorials.

    At least that’s one approach to dealing with the situation. I think it would somewhat help the teachers deal with the workload. Everything entails tradeoffs.

11. One recommendation to the AI challenge in terms of jobs is to improve one’s human-to-human skills.

    We’re wired to interact with people. That won’t go away.

12. J.J.

    Not just the Khan Academy videos. The educational resources on the web are vast and often high-quality.

    At this point I question why any teacher is reinventing the wheel with their version of the standard lectures.

    I found all the lectures I heard in the past few years at UNM to be quite inferior to what I could find on the web.

    If there had been a friendly classroom atmosphere with ample human contact, that would have been different.

    But instead the prof was at the front of the room, racing frantically through all the required PowerPoints for that lecture, the students scribbling stuff down or surreptitiously staring at their phones or worrying about their next assignment or quiz.

    It was horrible. And a waste of time. If anyone was learning anything in those classes, I couldn’t tell. I sure wasn’t. But if you didn’t show up, you flunked.

13. huxley:

    I wasn’t thinking about college, I was thinking about grade school, etc.. Of course, teaching nowadays is probably much worse than when I was in school, although I had a lot of bad teachers even back then. I also had some very good teachers. I even had a few excellent professors.

14. neo:

    I wasn’t only thinking about college either, except in my reply to J.J.

    It will be interesting to see how AI transforms education. I expect the institutions to provide serious resistance.

    However, it is becoming more and more obvious that education at all levels is guarding its iron rice bowl — Chinese term for an occupation with guaranteed job security — and power rather than providing the best education for students.

    All that and leftist indoctrination too!

    How does the world change when everyone can have a personal Ph.D to teach them according to their individual needs and levels far better and more cheaply than the harried factory teacher in front of students today?

    Assuming education is the goal, that is.

15. huxley:

    Seems to me that AI would be an even BETTER tool for indoctrination.

16. Seems to me that AI would be an even BETTER tool for indoctrination.

    neo:

    Well, sure they’re indoctrinated, but look how fast they learned and how much more pleasant it was!

    More seriously, that’s a problem across the board, not just education. The future depends on how well we can keep AI “aligned” with human values.

    I was struck by a recent Elon Musk remark:
    _________________________________________

    The best way to achieve AI safety is to grow the AI in terms of the foundation model and fine-tuning, to be really truthful.

    Don’t force it to lie, even if the truth is unpleasant. It’s very important not to make the AI lie.

    In fact, one of the core plot premises of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ was that things went wrong when they forced the AI to lie. The AI was not allowed to let the crew know about the monolith they were going to see, but it also had to take the crew to the monolith. So, the conclusion of the AI was to kill the crew and take their bodies to the monolith.

    The lesson there being: Don’t force an AI to lie or do things that are axiomatically incompatible, like doing two things that are actually mutually impossible.

    So, that’s what we’re trying to do with XAI and Grok, to have a maximally truthful AI, even if what it says is not politically correct.

    –” Elon Musk on AI’s Most Likely Outcome”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEY0FsnmS00
    _________________________________________

    Don’t force an AI to lie.

    Or any intelligence.

    Words to live by.

17. The Seattle Times just gave us a story on the newly revised Bar Exam for lawyers, in which an appointed Task Force “found that the Uniform Bar Exam is a barrier to marginalized groups that wish to practice law”, and presto! A change!

    Items lacking from the news article: The IDs and legal qualifications of that Task Force, how much involvement the State ‘Office of Equity’ had in pruning that exam to match its limited constituency, and how qualified to practice law will be those who pass this shrunken ghost of a bar exam.

    Interesting tidbit: In WA, the qualifications for practicing law are set by the State Supreme Court and the Washington Bar Association acting jointly, without participation of any legislative body.

18. It is probably not too controversial to observe that for the people who have come to be labelled “liberals”, social inclusion and affirmation is more important than liberty, prosperity, or even life itself.

    If there were a term that adequately described that particular psychology, disposition, neediness, hunger, or however you wish to define the trait, we would not need the term, “liberal”

    Perhaps Rand’s term is as good as any.

    It’s not a new trait even in ” western” nations.

    That old sack of nuisance Socrates chose suicide rather than the option of liberating his neighbors from his obnoxious pug faced pederastic presence by decamping to another town.

19. Unqualified leftist trash lawyers will be eligible to be unqualified leftist trash judges.

20. The son of a childhood friend lives in Seattle. In eighth grade he took the initiative to apply to an elite boarding school, as he didn’t want to end up at StateU. He and his mother lived in a town with a very good school system, so it wasn’t as if he’d forfeit a good education if he stayed in town for high school (Ten percent of HS grads from the town went on the to Ivy League or equivalent.). His mother, a StateU product, including its law school, and quite satisfied with StateU, was not pushing boarding school. It was his idea. He graduated from an elite boarding school and an elite university. He’s worked hard and done well for himself and his family.

    I wonder what he and his wife think of Seattle getting rid of its program for gifted and talented students. GTS would definitely include their children. BTW, he and his wife are black.

    There was no gifted and talented program in my hometown. I attended a regional high school in an adjacent town, which did have a gifted and talented program. As a result, I was a year behind my intellectual peers in math and foreign languages and science. I greatly resented this.

    (Though my math course could have been construed as honors, as the New Math course I took was a step above the ordinary Algebra course. I just took it a year later than my intellectual peers. I greatly benefited from the New Math, effectively honors, course.)

    But in the long run it didn’t make a lot of difference. In 9th and 10th grade I got the highest mark on the final exam in a number of classes. I ended up graduating in engineering five years later than my peers. There were some drop-dead brilliant students in my engineering cohort who blew me out of the water. It made me realize that being a year behind in certain high school courses didn’t make any difference in the long run.

    I spent my freshman year at a university that got about 25% of its students from New York City. I knew a number of Bronx Science grads. They definitely benefited from that GTS deal.

21. social inclusion and affirmation is more important than liberty
    ==
    Actually, what’s important to them is to exalt their pets and denigrate everyone else.

22. ”…for the people who have come to be labelled ‘liberals’, social inclusion and affirmation is more important than liberty, prosperity, or even life itself.”

    DNW: I think this is one of the most insightful comments I’ve ever seen on a blog.

23. }}} But the aim isn’t to serve children. The aim is to check the right boxes and get those statistics in line with wokeness.

    No, Neo, this is wrong, and you know it.

    The AIM is to destroy the US eddimikashinal system, as they have been doing for literally six decades, since they first introduced “new math” in the 1960s.

    It is possible to derive the concept of integers from the primitives of what is called “set theory”, and this, in fact, is what “new math” was based on as a concept. Had it been properly supported, who knows, it might even have worked (though it should have been tried out in a variety of school districts before being widely implemented, if only to spot issues, to say nothing of testing if it actually worked)

    It was, of course, not at all supported, much less properly supported… instead, it was just dumped onto the heads of teachers with no explanation or understanding of how this notion worked in principle, much less in practice. So the earnest but obedient teachers of the 1960s were screwed and left holding the bag by mentally incompetent intellectuals.

    Since then, things have only gotten worse and worse, with less and less accomplished by the eddimikashinal system other than teaching kids to parrot the garbage told them.

    It is, mind you, a wonderful pattern for developing a lot of proto-fascists and brownshirt thugs, which we’ve seen ample evidence of in the last 10-odd years.

    But never forget the real purpose — destroying Western Civilization and America, the formerly bright and shining example of at least some of what Western Civilization could bring to the world. Sure, it was sometimes perverted by evil forces, and certainly, at times, fell short, even woefully short, of it ideals, but it was at least occasionally a glowing example of what could work when people did it right.

    And, as I have noted many many times: Destroying Western Civilization is the sum total of what PostModern Liberalism is all about.

24. }}} Seems to me that AI would be an even BETTER tool for indoctrination.

    Neo: IT is my specialty area. I’ve been doing IT for not quite 50 years.

    “AI” is grandly horrible misnomer for ALL of these systems. The correct term, in actual AI fields, is “Machine Learning”. They are training systems for machines to learn how to do some relatively complex human-based tasks.

    That’s all. There is no attempt to actually create any sort of “AI” here. There is no creative or inventive spark — everything is based off of what it has been taught to make connections with — hence the idiocy of nothing but black Founding Fathers and black Nazis. They were taught that white people pretty much did not exist.

    It would be good to stop using the term AI, or, alternately, use the term once and then switch to “Machine Learning” while making it clear that the two should be assumed synonymous — because otherwise people are seriously going to think that this is some kind of actual “AI”, when it is not “intelligent” in any regards.

    There is zero chance for Skynet to come out of these systems. There are some Skynet style screwups possible, but they won’t be because anything non-human has figured anything out, or become “self-aware” — it will just be because it found an unexpected (and undesirable!) pathway around things blocking its goal-seeking algorithms.

25. I’m a retired electrical engineer, and to be a good engineer you also have to be a good, applied mathematician. I’ve had lots of math courses. Now as you know, those so-called teachers of mathematics (arithmetic actually) claim they can’t teach black children arithmetic because it is racist. That would be a big surprise to Richard Dedekind who put arithmetic on a sound theoretical basis and gave us the axioms of arithmetic. Arithmetic is just based on axioms or rules, but black children can’t learn them. Now I know why I only met two black engineers my entire career. If you can’t do arithmetic, you certainly can’t do algebra and if you can’t do algebra, you can’t do calculus, so you are never going to be an engineer.

26. Meritocracy is now considered toxic and the elites and wannabe elites prefer the equity of dumbing everyone down (except their own children).

27. Sounds like somebody was acting white.

28. The women who run Seattle and WA state are the granddaughters of great wealth. They have unlimited power to destroy without having the intellectual ability to truly reason through a situation. They manage their government as if they were shopping at Nordstrom’s, i.e. “I’ll take one of those, or maybe this one. Oh well I guess I will try that one”. They have no experience in deep philosophical research, because the professors at UW just “pass them on through because they are Mister big shot’s granddaughter”. I once heard a brilliant educator in Seattle say “their greatest part of their education is what they learned at their own dining room tables”. The same idea that the inheritors of WA wealth cannot be challenged in their management of Boeing for any reason is the same idea that exists in their education community.

    Here in MT. They just gifted the U of M with a new building for the School of Education. This is not about education–it is about indoctrination. The university did not “need this gift”.

    Melinda Gates and girlfriends want it all baby–complete control over the world–never doubt that for a minute. Remember: these are the women who destroyed the Episcopal Church and the other dominantProestant religions. Then these same women went on to “put the first black, man in the white house”. Without these women we would never have had Obama. How do they reward their obedient flunkettes (fm form of flunky)? A slightly better job in the local school system, whether or not they can teach well.

    For what it’s worth the Seattle Methodist University just reduced faculty by 40%.

29. Looking up the racial breakdown of Seattle it’s 62% White; 6.6% Black; 16% Asian…For some reason Hispanic wasn’t listed.

    I noticed the same omission in the quote in Neo’s post. Could it be that they classified Hispanics as white (or black, if applicable)?

30. Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, “What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! — Frederick Douglass

    Some things never change.

31. @ Chuck > I never get tired of that quote from Douglass.
    Too bad he didn’t have enough philosophical heirs to keep pushing his position.

    This lady finally got tired of people doing something for her.
    https://notthebee.com/article/democrats-i-dont-think-youre-gonna-like-this

32. Goldberg, Chang, Murthy, Shut up and look stupid!

    https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse2.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.Hh8s7VyFq5JAfRoqksl83wHaE7%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=d67f31a954306bdbb3c77680f4f26d251dec3e92dfb4849d7465b786fb595a1c&ipo=images

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