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Jean Renard Ward
David:
You are right, this is a lot of longish back-and-forth.
Perhaps we might take mercy on the other readers of the forum, and save some of this until the next re-union?
... I don't think many of these topics will have gone away by then!
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(Jean, previously:)
--> As a practical matter with our kids, we have always felt we were part of our kids' intellectual and philosophical educations, by interacting with them at home. Our kids classes and youth group programs at our church did, as well. Education is not limited to one's week-day schooling.
(David, previous response:)
--> I wish I had taken a more active role in my children's philosophical education.
(Response:)
If that is the *only* thing you regret about how you raised your kids, you did FAR BETTER than we did!
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(David/Lance, about some high school awards not being "earned", but just given for what you were already)
--> Disagree. Example: Ron Peshock and Tommy Thomas shared the outstanding math student award. Both are very bright guys, but is it possible that they outworked you and Don Fussell?
(Response:)
Actually, I was not in any math courses that year, so I wasn't even eligible. Under doctors' instructions I dropped out of several things, like the AP Calculus class and my (freakish) election as class Secretary. In no way would I want to imply that Ron and Tommy specifically had not earned the recognition.
I'll volunteer at least *some*of the recognition I got as being just for some knack I had, not something I had to work to get. Not All-State Orchestra though -- I worked for that one!
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(David:)
--> Separately, of the 12 National Merit semifinalists in our class, I believe that four became physicians, four became attorneys, and one earned a PhD and became a professor. Both of the two of us who finished one point out of the running earned PhDs.
(Response:)
I agree, I am among the low-achievers in that crowd.
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(David:)
--> By the way, I see that M.I.T. is reinstituting use of the SAT. Part of the justification is to help identify minority students who would benefit from an M.I.T. education. Here is my translation: “We will identify the top students in a color-blind way, using the SAT. Then we will have a second, lower standard for minority students to show that we are good people.” By minority, I don’t include Asian students who are vastly overrepresented at top schools because they are, well, better than the white students as a group. We have three high schools in Plano, and the valedictorians and salutatorians are always Indian-Americans and Chinese-Americans.
(Response:)
I suspect it's a bit more complicated. M.I.T. sent out a notice in the alumni news in 2020/2021, they they were temporarily suspending the requirement for SAT math scores during COVID, because so many of the SAT tests had been cancelled, until the tests became available again. So, no policy change. I think they said they had worked out some "statistical proxy" for the SATmath scores -- M.I.T. folks tend to be good mathematical modeling, so not surprizing they would try something that "tracked" SAT math scores.
Related: all M.I.T. classes went virtual during COVID, with students not required to be in residence, strict testing and isolation rules for those that were -- like most of the other colleges around Boston. I recollect reading that the biggest practical problems at M.I.T. were the biochemistry and biology lab sources -- hard to do virtually!
As a point of reference, my recollection is that M.I.T. had done studies at various times over the decades about the best predictors to apply when considering students for undergraduate admission. The performance metric was how well a predictor correlated with actully finishing an undergraduate degree at M.I.T. within some number of years -- so a student transferring out was counted the same as a drop out.
Of all the factors evaluated -- private vs. public high school, parents' income, parents' acaemic status, extracurricular record, gender/sex, teacher recommendations, section of the country, ethnicity/race, US vs. internanal student, high school GPA (adjusted for academic level of the school) -- the only thing with a reallly strong positive correlation was SAT math scores.
... I suspect that that could be seen as just being consistent with the need to have a "knack" for math, just because of the subjects students tend to major in at M.I.T. It would also be consistent with identifying applications who might be successful, regardless of background -- again, specific to the SAT math scores only, and specific to M.I.T.'s particular situation.
Just curious: I read UT had switched to admitting the top two students of every public high school in Texas, regardless of test scores. Any word on that?
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(David:)
--> There were two particular incidents when Martha taught in low socio-economic, low-achieving schools.
--> 1. In about 1975 in Austin, she had a conference with a mother and suggested that she work with her kindergarten child on his colors and numbers. The response: “I don’t teach him nuthin’ at home. That’s what I send him to school for.”
--> 2. In about 2005, at the end of the school year she sent a note to parents with a suggested reading list for the summer. One mother’s response: “Don’t you think he’s read enough this year?”
--> With regard to education, it takes a lot of effort and money to overcome what is lacking in the home.
(Response:)
I agree with that last sentence, with the observation that it might point out where and how the social investment should be made.
Also that parental respect for education is vitally imporant.
My spouse is from a different country, and describes her family background as working class (if not just "peasant"). Neither of her parents had any schooling past the 8th-grade basic education track for non-academic students.
So, we talk about differences in the educational systems there and here. For example:
*) U.S. schools teach rote memorization more, and teach acritical thinking and political history less, at all levels.
*) U.S. schools rely much more on test scores when assigning students to tracks, there they rely on personal teacher recommendations. (Which can have its own side-effects.)
*) U.S. schools are run and financed by the local towns or districts, versus run and financed centrally at the state level. Here, this leads to greater differences in school quality depending on where you live, which is a proxy for how much money the family has.
*) U.S. has a lot more private schools and universities, financed by better-off parents. There they have always had a lot of not-for-profit independent schools and universities, but they are more like public charter schools with the tuition costs (including boarding) paid by the local state, so the parents' income doesn't really play a role.
*) The U.S. is generally *terrible* at trades education.
She has commented that the huge changes of more and more students over the last decades going to university there, have been successful -- not because of money being spent directly on the schools, but because of national social programs to reduce economic inequity, basically by giving working class families a middle-class living. That could be seen as consistent with your observation about home background being so important. It also might be like how the G.I. Bill after WW II worked: in effect, that was a national social program, because right after WW II almost everyone qualified as a military veteran or family member.
... plus, like we have heard about Latin America, over there public school teachers are (still) highly respected, and comparatively well paid. You are right that family respect for education is important.
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