Life at the Bottom
"Life at the Bottom offers a searing account - probably the best yet published - of life in the underclass and why it persists as it does.". "Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychiatrist who treats the poor in a slum hospital and a prison in England, has apparently seen it all. Yet in listening to and observing his patients, he is continually astonished by the latest twist of depravity that exceeds even his own considerable experience. He uses a remarkable gift for reportage to recount the behavior of his patients and to analyze its implications in underclass life and for our society as a whole."--BOOK JACKET.
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What Hacker News says
- > I noticed that one of those two methods you linked to is the VAM method used in Houston, EVAAS.
Yes, and the other method mentioned on the same page was student growth percentiles, which is much closer to what I have been advocating. You seem to have a habit of focusing on what you want, regardless of what the person you are talking to is actually saying.
> And yet grades are still more effective at predicting college success than standardized tests.
I'm not sure why you say this like it's a mic drop. The point of saying "standardized tests help anchor GPAs" is to say that, without standardized tests, GPAs would become a worse predictor of future success. So, even if GPA alone is better, standardized tests help it be that way. More importantly, GPA+standardized test is better than either alone. You keep conveniently forgetting that last part when you advocate for the removal of standardized testing.
> And, umm, standardized tests are normed.
Only some of them are. Otherwise, you couldn't make claims like the following: https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2019-10-...
The tests in my state are not normalized but are instead standards-based: https://www.texasassessment.gov/en/staar-about.
> We don't trust teacher unions to decide who to fire. School districts decide.
Now you're just getting into semantic games. Unions help define the regulations that make it impossible to fire teachers, and they also use their money, influence, and legal might to fight against many firings.
https://www.americanexperiment.org/teachers-agree-teachers-u...
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ineffective-public-sch...
"They argue that existing public schools are not beyond saving. They suggest that reformers “commit to taking the tenure process seriously, rather than rubber stamping every eligible teacher for approval” and explain how this has been done in some New York City schools, where teachers immediately granted tenure fell from 94 percent to 56 percent. Such reforms are welcome, but they usually run into roadblocks from unions and stubborn regulators."
> Non-union charters schools haven't proved any better.
The data in this book beg to differ: https://www.amazon.com/Charter-Schools-Enemies-Thomas-Sowell...
Some charter schools in New York produced 10x or more as many students proficient in math and reading relative to nearby public schools, including public schools that shared the same building. There was no socioeconomic or racial diference between the schools.
Not all charter schools succeed, but the point is to find the ones that do and replicate their success: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20190259
> We now have, what, a full generation of students that have gone through high-stakes testing? When do we decide it's not worthwhile?
When do we finally settle on the fact that it is in fact worthwhile?
> In my view, all this noise about testing and teacher evaluation is meant to justify school privatization, so private companies can profit from all that public school money, and rich people can get tax-payer subsidized good private school education while poor people are left with the dregs.
Your world view is corrupt. You think private organizations are greedy and evil and yet somehow public organizations are magically saintly. You think apparently standardized scores in the U.S. are getting worse over time, despite there being more welfare programs than ever before, because kids aren't getting enough food benefits. Even the left-leaning Brookings institute can do better than that: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/12...
"Over the last 30 to 40 years, the United States has invested heavily in education, with little to show for it. The result is a society with more inequality and less economic growth; a high price."
One of my parents grew up in the 1950s before welfare reform. He got C's and D's in school because he spent most of his time working jobs to feed himself. Very few children are starving today at the level my parent did. Most of the "poor" today are richer than the middle class of 100 years ago. The reasons for lack of achievement go far beyond alleged malnutrition and far beyond an alleged lack of funding in schools.
I suggest you read "Life at the Bottom" by Dalrymple to get a better understanding of what many students are up against. The greatest predictor of academic success is whether or not the child is growing up in a stable 2-parent home. But that doesn't fit the progressive leftist narrative that seeks to destroy both religion and family.
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-47057787
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/S10680-017-9424-6
https://www.christianpost.com/news/2-parent-families-are-bes...
Some claim that socioeconomic status is the greatest predictor. But, guess what? 2-parent households do better socioeconomically. And, studies from countries with universal daycare like Sweden are showing that generations of students suffer from psychological problems due to not having a mother in the home: http://www.imfcanada.org/archive/1107/swedish-daycare-intern...
And, of course, religious is also highly correlated with better grades: https://www.marripedia.org/effects_of_religious_practice_on_...
As one person I admire has said, errant do-gooderism is akin to straightening the deck chairs on the Titanic. If you are a bad doctor, you see symptoms, diagnose the wrong illness, prescribe the wrong medication, and make your patients sicker. This allegory aptly describes the modern progressive movement, as well as most modern education fads.
The best thing we can do to improve education in the U.S. is school vouchers. This will allow more diversity in school makeup, better support religious schooling, which religion correlates with improved education, increase competition, which almost always benefits society, and improve the lot of socioeconomically disadvantaged parents who are currently stuck with poorly-performing public schools.
> That statement alone is meaningless.
Meaningless and high-level aren't the same thing. A statement doesn't need to go into specifics to provide meaning.
- I agree on this. Poverty, in this sense has, more to do with being than with having.
A friend of me recommended to me on this subject the book: Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_at_the_Bottom).
- I would heartily recommend "Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass" by Dr. Theodore Dalrymple.
It gives keen insight into the cultural mindset of victimization that produces the persistent underclass. From the overview: "Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychiatrist who treats the poor in a slum hospital and a prison in England, has seemingly seen it all. Yet in listening to and observing his patients, he is continually astonished by the latest twist of depravity that exceeds even his own considerable experience. Dalrymple's key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims. This culture persuades those at the bottom that they have no responsibility for their actions and are not the molders of their own lives."
- If you're interested in this topic, two other books on the same subject from very different angles:
Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1566635055
Eichman in Jerusalam by Hannah Arendt https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0143039881/
- For anyone who wants to understand the mindset underlying poverty (whether cause, or affect, or a mixture of both), I recommend "Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass" by Theodore Dalrymple. He's British psychologist who spent his life working with the poor, and came away with some insightful observations about the culture of this population.
https://www.amazon.com/Life-Bottom-Worldview-Makes-Underclas...
- The author has a couple arguments, some stronger than others.
The argument that changing constraints dramatically change system function, and thus enable top down control, is good. It is why we can program computers without being quantum physicists. Additionally, the point that if determinism is true then all texts were encoded in the initial conditions is also good. And finally, his point that determinism undermines the rationality of morality is also good. The book "Life at the Bottom" maked this point vividly, where criminals seem to be unanimous that their actions are out of their control.
Where his argument falls apart is explaining the source of top down causation. The author makes the supervenience fallacy, conclusively demonstrated by Jaegwon Kim. There is no logical possibility of top down causation within materialism.
