Freddie deBoer

This type of argument about meritocracy and class, although important, is missing the point.

It's not as if you eliminated all class contributions to elite school attendance suddenly problems with meritocracy would disappear.

The problem is that we overvalue superficial indicators of ability or human capital as if they were perfect, and ignore more significant, directly relevant ones.

Not too long ago, there was a linked article about selection bias in education (https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/03/29/why-selection-bias-is-the-most-powerful-force-in-education/). Lurking in that insightful essay were even darker problems, though: if you look at Figure 1 of that piece, what you might notice was the huge spread in CLA scores as a function of SAT, revealing how imperfect SAT is. But it goes further than that, because each of those points is a mean, and behind each point is an even wider distribution. What we tend to do is take something like SAT, and treat it as if it were a perfect rank ordering of ability, when it's not. I'm not saying SAT is all it takes to get into an elite school; what I'm saying is that we overvalue things like SAT in evaluating outcomes, and ignore all the vicissitudes of life. It's not a class-based issue, it's much broader than that.

This extends much more broadly in my opinion than education, though, to licensing laws, regulatory capture, patent abuse, corporate management, etc. There's a kind of "winner takes all", or "the end justifies all…

"I would genuinely enjoy someone explaining how dismissing the right-wing as sexist is any different than dismissing all of feminism as sexist because there exist sexist feminists."

You just said OP is demonstrating othering and slander and then you expect intellectual honesty? And then you get ferociously downvoted? I think you're better off spending time with the following writer than expecting a serious response to your question.

"Conservatives have made incredible hay out of the perception that liberals sneer at people who don’t live in coastal enclaves. These arguments accept that frame even as they dispute its conclusions, which is not a good argumentative strategy. Additionally, many of these tweets have replies sneering at “rednecks.” Why are you doing that? What is the political value? Aren’t you trying to win elections precisely in the places where these statements would appear most insulting? This is the unfortunate reality: neither the Electoral College nor the Senate are going anywhere anytime soon. They are facts of life. You can refuse to do what’s necessary to win back power in a country structurally designed to make red states disproportionately powerful while Republicans set about implementing an agenda. Or you can develop a strategic political discourse that demonstrates a sensible attitude towards how you frame your appeals. I get it: these aren’t campaign slogans or TV ads for Democrats. But the communal rhetoric of an ideology matters. The…

>> Journalists have essentially become socialites. They don't want to publish articles that will rock the boat

Here's how Frederik deBoer puts it (https://fredrikdeboer.com/2020/10/30/only-the-club-remains/):

"The social capture of media plays a huge role in how media operates, dictating what gets reported and which voices are heard. To some degree this is overt – if you you have drinks with the right people in media, that improves your ability to get published. That’s a fact; just a fact, a plain fact. And if you retweet the right people’s tweets that helps too. But there’s a deeper and subtler element to this. What you must show is not that you are talented, or that you’re principled, or that you’re hard working, or even that your arguments are correct. You have to show that you are one of them. You have to have the right social and cultural signifiers. They are innumerable and stretch from performing the right woke posturing and commenting on the correct TV shows to (especially, especially) telling the same kind of shitty, inside-dealing jokes, the kind that say to everyone “I am a member of a club, and it is very important.” Professional, political, and moral considerations have been consumed. There is only idenitification with the group, now. The sole criterion for having a successful career in media today is the degree to which you can signal to the crowd that you are one of them, that you share their values and petty obsessions."

I tend to think of Strunk and White like training wheels: eventually you should take them off and break the rules (as George Orwell said in his similarly-maligned "Politics and the English Language", "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous") in pursuit of clear, beautiful prose, but for a beginner the rules can be a lifeline. If nothing else, their constraints provide a new writer a framework on which to hang their thoughts, and force them to think carefully about how their prose is constructed. The experience of thinking about one's writing structurally, and how that structure can be used for stylistic effect, is something that I suspect does not come naturally to new writers, and it's what I found most valuable about Strunk and White when I was taught it in high school.

I also, someday, would love to try my hand at teaching writing style using Freddie de Boer's technique:

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/12/07/teaching-style-to-freshmen-why-how/

But being a CS professor I doubt I'll have that opportunity any time soon :)

No.

Readable academic blog post

https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/04/12/study-of-the-week-computers-in-the-home/

http://www.nber.org/papers/w19060

Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Home Computers on Academic Achievement among Schoolchildren
Robert W. Fairlie, Jonathan Robinson

Computers are an important part of modern education, yet many schoolchildren lack access to a computer at home. We test whether this impedes educational achievement by conducting the largest-ever field experiment that randomly provides free home computers to students. Although computer ownership and use increased substantially, we find no effects on any educational outcomes, including grades, test scores, credits earned, attendance and disciplinary actions. Our estimates are precise enough to rule out even modestly-sized positive or negative impacts. The estimated null effect is consistent with survey evidence showing no change in homework time or other "intermediate" inputs in education.

I didn’t see anything about this in the article, so I ask here in the hopes that someone more knowledgeable can comment: how are they controlling for selection bias? Is there any way to select into or out of this school, or is it purely the standard districting system? Even if it’s the latter in many other places it’s still possible to move into the area. Do we know to what extent that has been happening?

Edit: Oops, I was tricked by an advert. The article continued to say that the students were admitted by lottery. The only question I’m immediately left with then is whether they had to enter the lottery, or whether it was automatic? And was their admission contingent on their parents’ willingness to participate in these extra classes?

https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/03/29/why-selection-bias-is-the-most-powerful-force-in-education/