DeBoer doesn't take it. Some of the theme answers work quite well. Remember, one of the theses of this book is that individual differences in intelligence are mostly genetic. Relative difficulty: Easy.
DeBoer starts with the standard narrative of The Failing State Of American Education. The district that wanted to save money, so it banned teachers from turning the heat above 50 degrees in the depths of winter. Billions of dollars of public and private money poured in. One of the most profound and important ways that we've expanded the assumed responsibilities of society lies in our system of public education. Treats very unfairly in slang nyt crossword clue answers for july 2 2022. But DeBoer shows they cook the books: most graduation rates have been improved by lowering standards for graduation; most test score improvements have come from warehousing bad students somewhere they don't take the tests. DeBoer grants X, he grants X -> Y, then goes on ten-page rants about how absolutely loathsome and abominable anyone who believes Y is. Access to the 20% is gated by college degree, and their legitimizing myth is that their education makes them more qualified and humane than the rest of us. He will say that his own utopian schooling system has none of this stuff. But then how do education reform efforts and charters produce such dramatic improvements? According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "KITING, " "meaning 'write a fictitious check' (1839, ) is from 1805 phrase fly a kite "raise money by issuing commercial paper on nonexistent funds.
This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. Then he goes on to, at great length, denounce as loathsome and villainous anyone who might suspect these gaps of being genetic. Earlier this week, I objected when a journalist dishonestly spliced my words to imply I supported Charles Murray's The Bell Curve. In the clues, OK, but in the grid, no. I don't know if this is what DeBoer is dismissing as the conservative perspective, but it just seems uncontroversially true to me. A better description might be: Your life depends on a difficult surgery. Treats very unfairly in slang nyt crossword clue today. If someone found proof-positive that prisons didn't prevent any crimes at all, but still suggested that we should keep sending people there, because it means we'd have "fewer middle-aged people on the streets" and "fewer adults forced to go home to empty apartments and houses", then MAYBE YOU WOULD START TO UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL ABOUT SENDING PEOPLE TO SCHOOL FOR THE SAME REASON. First, the same argument I used for meritocracy above: everyone gains by having more competent people in top positions, whether it's a surgeon who can operate more safely, an economist who can more effectively prevent recessions, or a scientist who can discover more new cures for diseases. The Cult Of Smart invites comparisons with Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education. The schools in New Orleans were transformed into a 100% charter system, and reformers were quick to crow about improved test scores, the only metric for success they recognize. But I guess The Cult Of Successful At Formal Education sounds less snappy, so whatever. How many parents would be able to give their children a safe, accepting home environment if they got even a fraction of that money?
There's something schizophrenic / childish about this attitude. The civic architecture of the city was entirely rebuilt. That's not "cheating", it's something exciting that we should celebrate. Treats very unfairly in slang nyt crossword clue smidgen. Sometimes people (including myself) talk as if the line between good and bad taste were crystal clear, yet the more I think about it, the fuzzier it gets. But even if these results hold, the notion of using New Orleans as a model for other school districts is absurd on its face. It's forcing kids to spend their childhood - a happy time! The overall picture one gets is of Society telling a new college graduate "I see you got all A's in Harvard, which means you have proven yourself a good person. And how could we have any faith that adopting the New Orleans schooling system - without the massive civic overhaul - would replicate the supposed advantages?
DeBoer's answer: by lying. So even if education can never eliminate all differences between students, surely you can make schools better or worse. These are two sides of the same phenomenon. I remember the first time I heard the word "KITING" (113A: Using fraudulently altered checks). A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. 73D: 1967 Dionne Warwick hit ("ALFIE") — What's it all about...? And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. But if we're simply replacing them with a new set of winners lording it over the rest of us, we're running in a socialist I see no reason to desire mobility qua mobility at all. I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. From that standpoint the question is still zero sum. But it doesn't scale (there are only so many Ivy League grads willing to accept low salaries for a year or two in order to have a fun time teaching children), and it only works in places like New York (Ivy League grads would not go to North Dakota no matter how fun a time they were promised).
I don't think totally unstructured learning is optimal for kids - I don't even think Montessori-style faux unstructured learning is optimal - but I think there would be a lot of room to experiment, and I think it would be better to err on the side of not getting angry at kids for trying to learn things on their own than on the side of continuing to do so. Social mobility allows people to be sorted into the positions they are most competent for, and increases the general competence level of society. Then he says that studies have shown that racial IQ gaps are not due to differences in income/poverty, because the gaps remain even after controlling for these. They take the worst-off students - "76% of students are less advantaged and 94% are minorities" - and achieve results better than the ritziest schools in the best neighborhoods - it ranked "in the top 1% of New York state schools in math, and in the top 3% for reading" - while spending "as much as $3000 to $4000 less per child per year than their public school counterparts. " When we make policy decisions, we want to isolate variables and compare like with like, to whatever degree possible. That just makes it really weird that he wants to shut down all the schools that resemble his ideal today (or make them only available to the wealthy) in favor of forcing kids into schools about as different from it as it's possible for anything to be. THEY WILL NOT EVEN LET YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM WITHOUT PERMISSION.
But... they're in the clues. He sketches what a future Marxist school system might look like, and it looks pretty much like a Montessori school looks now. So be warned: I'm going to fail with this one. This is one of the most enraging passages I've ever read. American education is doing much as it's always done - about as well as possible, given the crushing poverty, single parent-families, violence, and racism holding back the kids it's charged with shepherding to adulthood. I'm just not sure how he squares it with the rest of his book. It is weird for a liberal/libertarian to have to insist to a socialist that equality can sometimes be an end in itself, but I am prepared to insist on this. Even ignoring the effect on social sorting and the effect on equality, the idea that someone's not allowed to go to college or whatever because they're the wrong caste or race or whatever just makes me really angry.
Preventing children from having any free time, or the ability to do any of the things they want to do seems to just be an end in itself. Here's something to mull over—the good taste (or "JEWFRO") question arises again today (see this puzzle for the recent occurrence of JEWFRO in the NYT puzzle). Opposition to the 20% is usually right-coded; describe them as "woke coastal elites who dominate academia and the media", and the Trump campaign ad almost writes itself. And there's a lot to like about this book. For lack of any better politically-palatable way to solve poverty, this has kind of become a totem: get better schools, and all those unemployed Appalachian coal miners can move to Silicon Valley and start tech companies. EXCESSIVE T. A. RIFFS is the most inventive, and STRANGE O. R. DEAL is the funniest, by far. Its supporters credit it with showing "what you can accomplish when you are free from the regulations and mindsets that have taken over education, and do things in a different way. I think I'm just struck by the double standard. A time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder - sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they'll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole.
The story of New Orleans makes this impossible. But DeBoer very virtuously thinks it's important to confront his opponents' strongest cases, so these are the ones I'll focus on here. So we live in this odd situation where we are happy (apparently) to be reminded of the existence of murderous tyrants and widespread, increasing, potentially lethal diseases... just don't put them in the grid, please. Today, many parents face an impossible choice: give up their career in order to raise young children, and lose that source of income and self-actualization, or spend potentially huge amounts of money on childcare in order to work a job that might not even pay enough to cover that care.
Summary and commentary on The Cult Of Smart by Fredrik DeBoer. Some of the book's peripheral theses - that a lot of education science is based on fraud, that US schools are not declining in quality, etc - are also true, fascinating, and worth spreading. But you can't do that. Instead, we need to dismantle meritocracy. I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. It's a dubious abstraction over the fact that people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen.
Such people are "noxious", "bigoted", "ugly", "pseudoscientific" "bad people" who peddle "propaganda" to "advance their racist and sexist agenda". Reality is indifferent to meritocracy's perceived need to "give people what they deserve. Word of the Day: TIENDA (100A: Nuevo Laredo store) —. It shouldn't be the default first option.
If you prefer the former, you're a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. The others—they're fine. Intelligence is considered such a basic measure of human worth that to dismiss someone as unintelligent seems like consigning them into the outer darkness. Third, lower standards for graduation, so that children who realistically aren't smart enough to learn algebra (it's algebra in particular surprisingly often! ) 26A: 1950 noir film ("D. O. ")