This discussion makes perfect sense in the world we all thought we lived in until about 20 minutes ago, a world in which merit and individuals mattered. Unfortunately, the NYC mayor and his ilk seem to have a very different agenda, one that does not value excellence and personal responsibility, and could well lead us to a very dark place. Think Bolshevik Russia and 1930s Germany. I don't know if Glenn is interested in venturing off the "race beat" a bit, but if he is, I'd love to see him engage with some thinkers from other disciplines who have given considerable thought to the question of why this happening in the West now, for example, Jordan Abbot,Jordan Peterson, Michael Shellenberger, David Romps.
Glenn has been fairly courageous in his discussions around race, IQ and culture. He has almost come close to acknowledging there is a relation between race & IQ. I think Charles Murray and others have made some very interesting observations based on research over the past 30 years.
How is it that this group of people continuously scores above average, on average - for decades? While another group of people on average continuously score below average? Why is one group fairly peaceful while another so violent? I think these disparities clearly indicate there is a difference between the races... most notably in sports and athletics.
I believe in things like the marshmallow test and test scores taken around the world for the past 70 years. On average, we know Chinese are excellent at deferring their gratification at very, very young ages. Genetics or Culture? What about measuring testosterone? Why are Chinese crime rates so low? They are the least violent group in our society. Is that because of culture? Is it Tiger Mom's? Or is it genetics where millions of lab tests show Chinese have lower levels of testosterone africans have the highest? Is it outlandish to consider their success a result of their intelligence passed down via genetics and it's their intelligence that drives their culture?
There is a lot of grey area in the ways that humans develop. The answer to the culture/IQ question has a lot of grey as well. However, we know it is a mixture of both IQ and Culture. In order for true change to happen you have to 100% brutally honest about the problem.
We see in similar animal species that live in different regions develop different beaks that serve different purposes depending on the food available. We see different tail size, limb size, color, gestation periods in same species different locations. We know eastern Africans have developed different proportions in leg and torso size and a different angle in their pelvis which makes running long distances easier because they are more efficient resulting from thousands of years of hunting and gathering in the sub Saharan region. We know 100% there is human variation in the shape of the birth canal is significant between races.
We see and acknowledge the science of evolution in sooooo many areas, in so many creatures on so many levels - except in modern day humans. It's taboo to admit the races are different - except when it comes to sports.
In the scheme of things according to nature our differences are perfect and beautiful. Does bad exist in nature? Or is good/bad a social construct? Our differences, regardless of the labels and stigma we want to put on them should be honestly discussed and completely embraced. Who said IQ is better than athletic prowess?
There is a lot of grey because there are so many things that make us up as humans in this world today. Just like with Covid, you can't ignore the importance of natural immunity. We can't ignore IQ as a factor.
I remember reading this article from way back in 2005. Not sure if its still valid today but the article pointed out that admissions to schools like Stuyvesant was skewed more towards students who exhibited lopsided math/verbal performance, i.e. very strong in one area but less so in the other, rather than more balanced scoring profiles.
I guess in the context of Stuyvesant presumably that meant that many of the immigrant Asian students got in by scoring very high on the math portion and less so on the verbal portion. Obviously some of that depressed verbal performance is due to the immigrant effect, but since you mentioned Charles Murray I'm sure he would also argue that a large part it is due to the unbalanced cognitive profile of East Asians as indicated by IQ testing that suggests a skew towards superior visual-spatial performance which is obviously highly correlated with math ability.
Sort of repeating what I said down below, but I ultimately find these kinds of questions of nature vs nature to be irrelevant towards public policy as far as maintaining the current standardized testing system for admissions to elite NYC high schools. Nature vs nature is certainly an interesting and valid academic question that should be studied by the social scientists and geneticists, but regardless of whether the ultimate root cause of the ethnic disparities in NYC is due to environmental deprivation or systemic bias or perhaps reflects some sort of cultural or genetic deficit, I don't see how dismantling the meritocratic admissions system remedies any of those possibilities. Keeping the current system place is the right thing to do in all possible worlds.
Thank YOU for being extremely reasonable, incredibly courageous, completely honest, insanely provocative... You are so friggin smart. Not just in your field of study or because of your career accolades. I think it is because of your life experience. It all comes out in the wisdom of your words.
I bet you have more students clamoring for your "lessons" outside your classroom than ever in your career. You are an incredible conduit for a people wanting intelligence and reason to help them navigate this life and its situations we live daily.
In the end, I feel bad for agreeing with some of your observations, some of your guests, with some of your perceptions... because I don't want life to play out in some of the ways portrayed. However, I don't feel bad about admitting and embracing the truth. I had to do it in my own life when I struggled and made tremendously poor choices. You've told your story about your struggles and poor decisions. To me, that's what makes you highly credible. You've shown you are human. We all are. When will our society, our social construct, allow this simple fact to be what bonds us?
But will the unwritten rules of nature (driving our primal nature) allow us connect? I just don't think so.
It seemed like Wai Wah Chin avoided answering too directly Glenn's question about how if one denied that there was anything wrong with the system then the only logical conclusion was that there was either something wrong culturally or genetically with the Black and Hispanic communities in NYC. Ms. Chin did talk about how we needed to start preparing kids early and that merely upending the system of meritocracy wasn't going to magically bestow skills upon kids who didn't otherwise possess them. And she also mentioned that some of the racial gaps have actually increased in recent years after having narrowed in prior years. Overall though, my impression was that she was slightly evasive on the specific question posed by Glenn of nature versus nurture.
My guess is that some non-trivial percentage of people who are in the anti-affirmative action camp ultimately harbor what might be described as a biological realist perspective, i.e. that some meaningful proportion of these ethnic gaps are ultimately biological in nature and not significantly amenable to environmental intervention. I won't go so far as to say that these people constitute the majority of those who defend meritocracy, but I'm almost certain it's a meaningful minority at the least. But as Glenn alluded to, this is often the unspoken subtext around these kinds of conversations, rarely if ever directly stated for fear of social or political suicide.
I guess my personal belief is that these tests are a fairly good measure of the intrinsic aptitude necessary for success at these elite high schools. I don't believe they're in large part biased and as others have pointed out many of the Asian students who do well on them come from relatively impoverished immigrant communities in NYC. Whether or not these kinds of ethnic gaps are in any way genetically determined is fundamentally irrelevant in my opinion. At the end of the day we should provide kids with the opportunity to showcase their talent and if they can do so on the admissions exam we should admit them to these high schools. Upending a system of meritocratic admissions isn't going to remedy any possible cultural or genetic deficits so what would be the point in doing so?
I guess maybe what I'm arguing for here is that this focus on nature versus nurture is ultimately a distraction. We should put our heads down, crank away, and let the chips fall where they may, the same that we do in athletics where for instance I've never heard anyone complain about racial imbalances among players in the NBA or the NFL and question whether these imbalances are the result of nature or nurture.
Neither "objective" entrance exams nor IQ tests come to us on stone tablets written by the Almighty. They are written by people whose communities they serve.
It is really annoying to hear "Asian" when your interlocutor [first time in my life I get to use this word out side of an exam setting] uses it to mean Han Chinese almost exclusively.
Initially, Ms Chin suggests that anyone even poor students can succeed on this test but later on she admits that success comes only from preparation and some sort of "pipeline." Compare the recent domination of spelling bees by Indian-Americans. Is it because of inordinate talent or because the Indian community has created a whole ecosystem to train their kids to excel at specifically this task?
Poor students _do_ succeed on this test. The poverty rate of the specialized high schools is quite high. The pipeline she's referring to is a combination of gifted education, extra-curricular academic prep centers like Kumon, and focused test prep that isn't free, but quite accessible. In fact, NYC gives it away to under-privileged kids. But the "pipeline" she's referring to is an early start. You can't just hope to master all of it in the 8th grade when the test is given any more than you can be competitive at baseball by learning the rules 3 months before the big game when everyone else has been practicing throwing, catching, and swinging for many years prior. I don't know where you assume it's all Han Chinese. South Asians and Koreans feature prominently at these schools, cf. her point on the non-homogeneity of "Asians".
As for the creation of the test, it's contracted out and overseen by NYSED. You think the content should be changed? Sure - we can have that debate. But that's not the debate that the opponents are looking to have.
Ms Chin states "So you could have been playing hooky, not going to school at all, and you can also be doing pretty poorly in your middle school with grades that are not top, but if you can perform well in this one test, then you are allowed to get in." She clearly does not refer to financial poverty. I was a far better test taker than my peers and it got me accepted into Bronx Science (in 1967}. My parents did not allow me to go because of the long commute between Queens and the Bronx. Plus they thought the Bronx was too dangerous. In regular high school I quickly discovered that my math skills would never adequate for success in a STEM field.
I don't understand what you're aiming at. Yes, this is a true statement. An admission-earning score on the SHSAT can be earned either by two types of people broadly: those with natural ability at test-taking (given that you know enough of the core content) who can otherwise slack off in middle school, or by practice and hard work on the part of a person who has _some_ natural test-taking ability, but perhaps not enough to get by without focused prep, and everywhere in between on that spectrum. Now that said, as you're alluding to, just because you can get into an SHS does not mean you'll thrive there. People who can get into one largely without studying, and who have poor study habits, will probably hit a point of real struggle. But this seems a wholly separate issue from your initial point which I interpreted to be whether you need substantial wealth in your family to stand a chance on the exam. That is demonstrably false. Take a look at the Economic Disadvantage indicator for the top 3 SHS:
The statistics you have helpfully included are based on w-2s, 1099s and similar official documents. Most immigrants today come from societies where banking is only available to the wealthy. For generations, these folks have moved and worked in cash economies where lending, borrowing and investing are done informally based on family connections, personal relationships, and group connections mediated by mosque, church, temple and other institutions. They do the same thing after they arrive in this country.
Consider this from a friend who worked in financial aid at the College of Staten Island in NY: some immigrant students were claiming family incomes of 20k for a family of 5 and more yet their home addresses indicated they lived in neighborhoods of multi-million dollar homes. So the rules were changed to require they submit copies of their family tax filings. Then it was discovered that the submitted copies were fake. So, as of two or three years ago, students must request official IRS transcripts to be sent directly to the school!
But the point of my original post was entrance exams are not "objective." I think Glenn was way too accepting of her statements. But it is his show.
This is not correct. "Asians" in the context of NYC's selective schools includes not only Han Chinese, but also Koreans, Vietnamese, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.
Poor students can succeed -- it is not a question of wealth. The vast majority of the attendees in these schools are immigrants and poor. The key is preparation for the difficulty of the exam. Since the 1990's, urban pubic schools have effectively ceased to their educational mission. They have focused on new fangled education approaches. For example, Common Core math is atrocious and so is English education (as John McWhorter points out -- phonics is much better).
So, what happens is that families with "educational capital" (to paraphrase Glenn) can overcome these short comings, but families with one parent at home or with little educational capital are lost.
Interesting conversation. I appreciated her direct manner. When she said we need to get over the idea that everyone is equal (around 29:00), I laughed and noticed Dr. Loury raised his eyebrows. It's clear what she means, and I don't really disagree, but imagining her saying those words to a cable news anchor is amusing.
I'm all in favor of smart, hard-working kids getting into the best schools, but I have to admit the obsession of people in NYC (and some other places) is foreign to me. Is it good to live your life like that? If you are a super smart kid, but not quite brilliant, say, is it best for you to scratch and claw and sacrifice so you can wind up among brilliant students who don't have to work as hard as you do? That's a recipe for misery. Who is being served, the kids or the parents?
Glenn posted a "Roland Fryer Primer" a few months back. Roland had incredible academic abilities, obviously, but what he loved and focused on in his school years were sports and socializing. Academically, he did only what he needed to get by. He also worked as a kid; he even faked his age to get one job. He went to college to pursue sports but wound up falling in love with economics and jettisoning sports. The rest is history, as they say. If you haven't seen the video, you really need to watch it. He tells the story way better than I have here, and you need to see how effervescent he is. What's the phrase, joie de vivre?
I support the test Wai Wah Chin discussed. And I admire the kids who work so hard on academics at such young ages. But that's not the only path to the top. I'm probably biased, having grown up in Texas like Roland, but his way seems much the better to me.
Bronx HS of Science has 8 Nobel winners, 7 in Physics and 1 in Chemistry. Science, Stuyvesant and Tech combined have 14 Nobelists. There's another HS in France that has 8 Nobelists.
I am interested in hearing the counter argument to Wai Wah. It's probably some anti merit bull crap.
FYI, James Madison HS in Brooklyn ( a non exam school in a traditionally Jewish neighborhood) has 5 Nobelists plus the dubious distinction of graduates such as Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
keep in mind that the phenomenon of over/underrepresentation goes both ways, and people don't like the demographics of special needs schools either, which ends up harming the most vulnerable
This discussion makes perfect sense in the world we all thought we lived in until about 20 minutes ago, a world in which merit and individuals mattered. Unfortunately, the NYC mayor and his ilk seem to have a very different agenda, one that does not value excellence and personal responsibility, and could well lead us to a very dark place. Think Bolshevik Russia and 1930s Germany. I don't know if Glenn is interested in venturing off the "race beat" a bit, but if he is, I'd love to see him engage with some thinkers from other disciplines who have given considerable thought to the question of why this happening in the West now, for example, Jordan Abbot,Jordan Peterson, Michael Shellenberger, David Romps.
Glenn has been fairly courageous in his discussions around race, IQ and culture. He has almost come close to acknowledging there is a relation between race & IQ. I think Charles Murray and others have made some very interesting observations based on research over the past 30 years.
How is it that this group of people continuously scores above average, on average - for decades? While another group of people on average continuously score below average? Why is one group fairly peaceful while another so violent? I think these disparities clearly indicate there is a difference between the races... most notably in sports and athletics.
I believe in things like the marshmallow test and test scores taken around the world for the past 70 years. On average, we know Chinese are excellent at deferring their gratification at very, very young ages. Genetics or Culture? What about measuring testosterone? Why are Chinese crime rates so low? They are the least violent group in our society. Is that because of culture? Is it Tiger Mom's? Or is it genetics where millions of lab tests show Chinese have lower levels of testosterone africans have the highest? Is it outlandish to consider their success a result of their intelligence passed down via genetics and it's their intelligence that drives their culture?
There is a lot of grey area in the ways that humans develop. The answer to the culture/IQ question has a lot of grey as well. However, we know it is a mixture of both IQ and Culture. In order for true change to happen you have to 100% brutally honest about the problem.
We see in similar animal species that live in different regions develop different beaks that serve different purposes depending on the food available. We see different tail size, limb size, color, gestation periods in same species different locations. We know eastern Africans have developed different proportions in leg and torso size and a different angle in their pelvis which makes running long distances easier because they are more efficient resulting from thousands of years of hunting and gathering in the sub Saharan region. We know 100% there is human variation in the shape of the birth canal is significant between races.
We see and acknowledge the science of evolution in sooooo many areas, in so many creatures on so many levels - except in modern day humans. It's taboo to admit the races are different - except when it comes to sports.
In the scheme of things according to nature our differences are perfect and beautiful. Does bad exist in nature? Or is good/bad a social construct? Our differences, regardless of the labels and stigma we want to put on them should be honestly discussed and completely embraced. Who said IQ is better than athletic prowess?
There is a lot of grey because there are so many things that make us up as humans in this world today. Just like with Covid, you can't ignore the importance of natural immunity. We can't ignore IQ as a factor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/12/nyregion/admission-tests-scoring-quirk-throws-balance-into-question.html
I remember reading this article from way back in 2005. Not sure if its still valid today but the article pointed out that admissions to schools like Stuyvesant was skewed more towards students who exhibited lopsided math/verbal performance, i.e. very strong in one area but less so in the other, rather than more balanced scoring profiles.
I guess in the context of Stuyvesant presumably that meant that many of the immigrant Asian students got in by scoring very high on the math portion and less so on the verbal portion. Obviously some of that depressed verbal performance is due to the immigrant effect, but since you mentioned Charles Murray I'm sure he would also argue that a large part it is due to the unbalanced cognitive profile of East Asians as indicated by IQ testing that suggests a skew towards superior visual-spatial performance which is obviously highly correlated with math ability.
Sort of repeating what I said down below, but I ultimately find these kinds of questions of nature vs nature to be irrelevant towards public policy as far as maintaining the current standardized testing system for admissions to elite NYC high schools. Nature vs nature is certainly an interesting and valid academic question that should be studied by the social scientists and geneticists, but regardless of whether the ultimate root cause of the ethnic disparities in NYC is due to environmental deprivation or systemic bias or perhaps reflects some sort of cultural or genetic deficit, I don't see how dismantling the meritocratic admissions system remedies any of those possibilities. Keeping the current system place is the right thing to do in all possible worlds.
Thanks for the powerful comment...
Thank YOU for being extremely reasonable, incredibly courageous, completely honest, insanely provocative... You are so friggin smart. Not just in your field of study or because of your career accolades. I think it is because of your life experience. It all comes out in the wisdom of your words.
I bet you have more students clamoring for your "lessons" outside your classroom than ever in your career. You are an incredible conduit for a people wanting intelligence and reason to help them navigate this life and its situations we live daily.
In the end, I feel bad for agreeing with some of your observations, some of your guests, with some of your perceptions... because I don't want life to play out in some of the ways portrayed. However, I don't feel bad about admitting and embracing the truth. I had to do it in my own life when I struggled and made tremendously poor choices. You've told your story about your struggles and poor decisions. To me, that's what makes you highly credible. You've shown you are human. We all are. When will our society, our social construct, allow this simple fact to be what bonds us?
But will the unwritten rules of nature (driving our primal nature) allow us connect? I just don't think so.
It seemed like Wai Wah Chin avoided answering too directly Glenn's question about how if one denied that there was anything wrong with the system then the only logical conclusion was that there was either something wrong culturally or genetically with the Black and Hispanic communities in NYC. Ms. Chin did talk about how we needed to start preparing kids early and that merely upending the system of meritocracy wasn't going to magically bestow skills upon kids who didn't otherwise possess them. And she also mentioned that some of the racial gaps have actually increased in recent years after having narrowed in prior years. Overall though, my impression was that she was slightly evasive on the specific question posed by Glenn of nature versus nurture.
My guess is that some non-trivial percentage of people who are in the anti-affirmative action camp ultimately harbor what might be described as a biological realist perspective, i.e. that some meaningful proportion of these ethnic gaps are ultimately biological in nature and not significantly amenable to environmental intervention. I won't go so far as to say that these people constitute the majority of those who defend meritocracy, but I'm almost certain it's a meaningful minority at the least. But as Glenn alluded to, this is often the unspoken subtext around these kinds of conversations, rarely if ever directly stated for fear of social or political suicide.
I guess my personal belief is that these tests are a fairly good measure of the intrinsic aptitude necessary for success at these elite high schools. I don't believe they're in large part biased and as others have pointed out many of the Asian students who do well on them come from relatively impoverished immigrant communities in NYC. Whether or not these kinds of ethnic gaps are in any way genetically determined is fundamentally irrelevant in my opinion. At the end of the day we should provide kids with the opportunity to showcase their talent and if they can do so on the admissions exam we should admit them to these high schools. Upending a system of meritocratic admissions isn't going to remedy any possible cultural or genetic deficits so what would be the point in doing so?
I guess maybe what I'm arguing for here is that this focus on nature versus nurture is ultimately a distraction. We should put our heads down, crank away, and let the chips fall where they may, the same that we do in athletics where for instance I've never heard anyone complain about racial imbalances among players in the NBA or the NFL and question whether these imbalances are the result of nature or nurture.
Neither "objective" entrance exams nor IQ tests come to us on stone tablets written by the Almighty. They are written by people whose communities they serve.
It is really annoying to hear "Asian" when your interlocutor [first time in my life I get to use this word out side of an exam setting] uses it to mean Han Chinese almost exclusively.
Initially, Ms Chin suggests that anyone even poor students can succeed on this test but later on she admits that success comes only from preparation and some sort of "pipeline." Compare the recent domination of spelling bees by Indian-Americans. Is it because of inordinate talent or because the Indian community has created a whole ecosystem to train their kids to excel at specifically this task?
Poor students _do_ succeed on this test. The poverty rate of the specialized high schools is quite high. The pipeline she's referring to is a combination of gifted education, extra-curricular academic prep centers like Kumon, and focused test prep that isn't free, but quite accessible. In fact, NYC gives it away to under-privileged kids. But the "pipeline" she's referring to is an early start. You can't just hope to master all of it in the 8th grade when the test is given any more than you can be competitive at baseball by learning the rules 3 months before the big game when everyone else has been practicing throwing, catching, and swinging for many years prior. I don't know where you assume it's all Han Chinese. South Asians and Koreans feature prominently at these schools, cf. her point on the non-homogeneity of "Asians".
As for the creation of the test, it's contracted out and overseen by NYSED. You think the content should be changed? Sure - we can have that debate. But that's not the debate that the opponents are looking to have.
Ms Chin states "So you could have been playing hooky, not going to school at all, and you can also be doing pretty poorly in your middle school with grades that are not top, but if you can perform well in this one test, then you are allowed to get in." She clearly does not refer to financial poverty. I was a far better test taker than my peers and it got me accepted into Bronx Science (in 1967}. My parents did not allow me to go because of the long commute between Queens and the Bronx. Plus they thought the Bronx was too dangerous. In regular high school I quickly discovered that my math skills would never adequate for success in a STEM field.
I don't understand what you're aiming at. Yes, this is a true statement. An admission-earning score on the SHSAT can be earned either by two types of people broadly: those with natural ability at test-taking (given that you know enough of the core content) who can otherwise slack off in middle school, or by practice and hard work on the part of a person who has _some_ natural test-taking ability, but perhaps not enough to get by without focused prep, and everywhere in between on that spectrum. Now that said, as you're alluding to, just because you can get into an SHS does not mean you'll thrive there. People who can get into one largely without studying, and who have poor study habits, will probably hit a point of real struggle. But this seems a wholly separate issue from your initial point which I interpreted to be whether you need substantial wealth in your family to stand a chance on the exam. That is demonstrably false. Take a look at the Economic Disadvantage indicator for the top 3 SHS:
https://data.nysed.gov/enrollment.php?year=2020&instid=800000046741
https://data.nysed.gov/enrollment.php?year=2020&instid=800000045625
https://data.nysed.gov/enrollment.php?year=2020&instid=800000043516
The statistics you have helpfully included are based on w-2s, 1099s and similar official documents. Most immigrants today come from societies where banking is only available to the wealthy. For generations, these folks have moved and worked in cash economies where lending, borrowing and investing are done informally based on family connections, personal relationships, and group connections mediated by mosque, church, temple and other institutions. They do the same thing after they arrive in this country.
Consider this from a friend who worked in financial aid at the College of Staten Island in NY: some immigrant students were claiming family incomes of 20k for a family of 5 and more yet their home addresses indicated they lived in neighborhoods of multi-million dollar homes. So the rules were changed to require they submit copies of their family tax filings. Then it was discovered that the submitted copies were fake. So, as of two or three years ago, students must request official IRS transcripts to be sent directly to the school!
But the point of my original post was entrance exams are not "objective." I think Glenn was way too accepting of her statements. But it is his show.
This is not correct. "Asians" in the context of NYC's selective schools includes not only Han Chinese, but also Koreans, Vietnamese, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.
Poor students can succeed -- it is not a question of wealth. The vast majority of the attendees in these schools are immigrants and poor. The key is preparation for the difficulty of the exam. Since the 1990's, urban pubic schools have effectively ceased to their educational mission. They have focused on new fangled education approaches. For example, Common Core math is atrocious and so is English education (as John McWhorter points out -- phonics is much better).
So, what happens is that families with "educational capital" (to paraphrase Glenn) can overcome these short comings, but families with one parent at home or with little educational capital are lost.
I don't disagree with your statements. It's just that your 'reply' has nothing to do with what I actually wrote in my comments.
Interesting conversation. I appreciated her direct manner. When she said we need to get over the idea that everyone is equal (around 29:00), I laughed and noticed Dr. Loury raised his eyebrows. It's clear what she means, and I don't really disagree, but imagining her saying those words to a cable news anchor is amusing.
I'm all in favor of smart, hard-working kids getting into the best schools, but I have to admit the obsession of people in NYC (and some other places) is foreign to me. Is it good to live your life like that? If you are a super smart kid, but not quite brilliant, say, is it best for you to scratch and claw and sacrifice so you can wind up among brilliant students who don't have to work as hard as you do? That's a recipe for misery. Who is being served, the kids or the parents?
Glenn posted a "Roland Fryer Primer" a few months back. Roland had incredible academic abilities, obviously, but what he loved and focused on in his school years were sports and socializing. Academically, he did only what he needed to get by. He also worked as a kid; he even faked his age to get one job. He went to college to pursue sports but wound up falling in love with economics and jettisoning sports. The rest is history, as they say. If you haven't seen the video, you really need to watch it. He tells the story way better than I have here, and you need to see how effervescent he is. What's the phrase, joie de vivre?
I support the test Wai Wah Chin discussed. And I admire the kids who work so hard on academics at such young ages. But that's not the only path to the top. I'm probably biased, having grown up in Texas like Roland, but his way seems much the better to me.
Bronx HS of Science has 8 Nobel winners, 7 in Physics and 1 in Chemistry. Science, Stuyvesant and Tech combined have 14 Nobelists. There's another HS in France that has 8 Nobelists.
I am interested in hearing the counter argument to Wai Wah. It's probably some anti merit bull crap.
FYI, James Madison HS in Brooklyn ( a non exam school in a traditionally Jewish neighborhood) has 5 Nobelists plus the dubious distinction of graduates such as Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Go figure.
An interesting discussion.
keep in mind that the phenomenon of over/underrepresentation goes both ways, and people don't like the demographics of special needs schools either, which ends up harming the most vulnerable