While rhetorically appealing, the idea that poor funding is responsible for disparate test scores between races doesn’t actually make any sense when examined. If monetary investment in students is returned in academic success, then we should expect the primary predictor of academic achievement to be school--and not race. But that isn’t what we see at all. Go to any suburban upper middle class high school like the one I went to, where this variable is controlled for, and you’ll find the same thing: Asians at the top, blacks at the bottom.
I’m reluctant to start arguments with people clearly much smarter than me, such as Gates, but even his own anecdote about his chess club seems to contradict his premise. He had good teachers and received a good education; he didn’t need lavish funding to beat the white schools in chess, or to outperform them on tests.
Good schools are important. Funding plays a role. But the idea that investment is anywhere close to the primary explanation for the major achievement gaps in this country is obviously shallow. Wilfred Reilly would post his chart of “hours spent studying by race.” I’d link it here, but let’s be honest--we all know what it’s going to show.
All that said, Gates is an amazing speaker, and this was a great episode.
The relationship between money and educational quality doesn't have to be a perfect 1-1 linear one to have some validity. There are a lot of really bad schools in America, but it could be, for example, that past a certain basic threshold (which some schools are well below), spending provides diminishing returns.
What they don't address is the notion that in "elite" education now, kids are being actively misinformed. It would appear that Stanford law students are actually worse off than if they had never gone to school at all.
I don’t know… I went to a pretty mixed high school (both ethnically and economically) and the biggest predictor of success was wealth more than race. The top of the class were mostly immigrants who worked really hard, especially the most affluent immigrants. All six of the kids in my graduating class with 4.0 or higher were born in other countries (not all Asian) and most of the kids I’d gone to elementary school with (one of the poorest in the district at the time) either didn’t graduate, graduated from the “alternative” high school program, and/or didn’t continue on to college.
I currently live in an affluent area of a mixed district and though per student funding is the same across the county there are huge difference in resources at the schools. My kids’ elementary school PTA annual budget is over $50k with $20-30k carryover because it is too much to spend. The teachers get at least twice a year class gifts worth multiple hundred dollars. On the less affluent side of the district kids don’t always have shoes, haven’t had breakfast or enough to eat on weekends, may have trauma and behavioral issues, etc. With the exception of the rare do-gooder, where do you think the best teachers would prefer to work?
While rhetorically appealing, the idea that poor funding is responsible for disparate test scores between races doesn’t actually make any sense when examined. If monetary investment in students is returned in academic success, then we should expect the primary predictor of academic achievement to be school--and not race. But that isn’t what we see at all. Go to any suburban upper middle class high school like the one I went to, where this variable is controlled for, and you’ll find the same thing: Asians at the top, blacks at the bottom.
I’m reluctant to start arguments with people clearly much smarter than me, such as Gates, but even his own anecdote about his chess club seems to contradict his premise. He had good teachers and received a good education; he didn’t need lavish funding to beat the white schools in chess, or to outperform them on tests.
Good schools are important. Funding plays a role. But the idea that investment is anywhere close to the primary explanation for the major achievement gaps in this country is obviously shallow. Wilfred Reilly would post his chart of “hours spent studying by race.” I’d link it here, but let’s be honest--we all know what it’s going to show.
All that said, Gates is an amazing speaker, and this was a great episode.
The relationship between money and educational quality doesn't have to be a perfect 1-1 linear one to have some validity. There are a lot of really bad schools in America, but it could be, for example, that past a certain basic threshold (which some schools are well below), spending provides diminishing returns.
What they don't address is the notion that in "elite" education now, kids are being actively misinformed. It would appear that Stanford law students are actually worse off than if they had never gone to school at all.
I don’t know… I went to a pretty mixed high school (both ethnically and economically) and the biggest predictor of success was wealth more than race. The top of the class were mostly immigrants who worked really hard, especially the most affluent immigrants. All six of the kids in my graduating class with 4.0 or higher were born in other countries (not all Asian) and most of the kids I’d gone to elementary school with (one of the poorest in the district at the time) either didn’t graduate, graduated from the “alternative” high school program, and/or didn’t continue on to college.
I currently live in an affluent area of a mixed district and though per student funding is the same across the county there are huge difference in resources at the schools. My kids’ elementary school PTA annual budget is over $50k with $20-30k carryover because it is too much to spend. The teachers get at least twice a year class gifts worth multiple hundred dollars. On the less affluent side of the district kids don’t always have shoes, haven’t had breakfast or enough to eat on weekends, may have trauma and behavioral issues, etc. With the exception of the rare do-gooder, where do you think the best teachers would prefer to work?