For what seems like months now, an absolutely endless time, the media outlets in Chicago have positively obsessed over the admissions process at the University of Illinois (it's never clear from the stories whether their issues with it apply to the entire system or just to the main campus and I won't speculate but just leave it at the U of I). Some sort of magical practically mythical creature came across the positively shocking fact that admissions at the undergraduate level were not solely based on test scores and GPA. Actually, I don't know what all these people think admissions are based on and hence, why they're terribly upset, but I haven't laid out the story yet.
Issue here being that U of I had an identified class of applicants, something along the lines of, Class I, or something, that meant that someone someone cared about had inquired or written on their behalf. So the Tribune started with politicians, then looked at Trustees, has now gotten itself to faculty members and will eventually get to the heart of the issue, I must assume, which is that the only people who can really guarantee their children a place in college are people who can donate lots of money. The rather odd part about this, and something that was really only discussed in a table format in a Chicago Sun-Times interactive piece, is that we're not talking about a 100% acceptance rate. It's not as though you write a letter and you're someone important and this student is accepted. When I saw the acceptance level I was a little surprised actually at how low it was, since as a general rule, people don't call on behalf of people who are totally unqualified as it undermines their ability to recommend candidates in the future (see earlier, only rich people can really guarantee admissions - everyone else is just recommending that the admissions team review the documents again based on additional information about the candidate).
An alternative the school has would be to go to a strict GPA/ACT (because this is evidently the test the school accepts, which is odd just because it's sort of a ridiculous test, but whatever) standard. Of course, that's ridiculous, and something I've often had an issue with since comparing the GPA of someone who went to a good school to someone who went to a bad school is insane. They release these statistics saying X% of students were in the top 10% of their class. Which is totally irrelevant, since the entire population of some schools could outperform that 10% with a hand tied behind their individual backs. There's also the matter of complete disparate grading systems and the reliance on the "admissions team" (very very often, graduates of the school who could not get other jobs) to identify the academic strenousness of the individual schools and somehow rank them.
Of course, step back a moment and ask whether grades and test scores have anything to do with actual academic achievement, let alone life achievement (the latter, I believe it is a given, is unconnected). I've interacted with many extremely intelligent students who could have blossomed at a good school but who couldn't be bothered to prepare for a standardized test. I would even estimate that the majority of children who would do well in such an environment never even try. Some would blame the children for this, I assume they're idiots who've never left their middle-class suburban semi-gated communities and are themselves extremely unremarkable, but they need to recognize that a child of around 16 did not become disinterested in performing well on a standardized test as a result of a lack of effort or intelligence. The child either, doesn't live in a society that values/respects/understands the potential utility of this or is himself more or less alone and simply reacting to the negative influence of tyrannical teachers who would do anything to keep control over their classrooms and prove they are more intelligent than everyone else.
Yes, I went after the teachers.
Teachers, as a class, are people who think they are terribly important and deserve to be in charge of large numbers of people. Because they are unable to do this in reality, they become teachers so they can enforce their will on children and thereby reinforce their weak egos. Essentially, because they cannot be superstars among their peers, they look to the adulation of children to supplement this and treat it as though they were adults.
The rub is, the very intelligent child who actually is much smarter than the teacher. Or, moderately intelligent. Or, even, who will get a decent job and doesn't have significant control and ego issues. Teachers totally flip out on these children. They beat them down, grade them down, grade them disproportionally, and will even place them in remedial classes in an effort to minimize their ability to undermine the need for the teacher to feel superior. It's really extremely tragic.
There is also a tendency for teachers to engage in "relative grading," in which a student is not graded objectively, based on his/her abilities against say, someone with a 100 IQ score (also totally flawed and irrelevant test, but just to use as a basemark) but rather against what the teacher believes the student is capable of doing. While that is charming and could potentially have some motivational benefits assuming the student cared at all what the teacher thought of the student's work and was thereby motivated to work harder to improve grades, it completely obliterates the utility of the GPA as a way of measuring a student's ability to contibute to a school and gain from its opportunities.
These are a few things I've observed in schools over the years and the ways in which I have seen some of the brightest minds go off to do absolutely nothing with their lives.
But back to U of I, why this extended tirade above? The problem isn't so much that an important person called on behalf of an applicant but rather that all applicants aren't getting the second review that comes to such an applicant. It isn't the case that there is automatic admission (as is shown in the data) but rather that the admissions' team actually looks at what the grades the school gave mean, what other things the student does, where the student excels, and, to be controversial, how the student has interacted socially with people who know how to engage others and be successful in business even before the student attended college. That last one is not something to scoff at, not in the least. If you have an 18-year old that someone is willing to call on behalf of, that 18-year old left an impression. And that's a special kind of spark that no test will pick up and only a rare teacher will admit in a recommendation.
At the end of the day, U of I is simply too big. It needs to engage in a significantly more individualized process that has little to nothing to do with GPAs and standardized test scores. It also doesn't matter what grades the student gets in college (or now graduate school, as the Tribune continues its grueling investigation...) - no one can claim with a straight-face that those are a proxy for success. If newspapers would return to their obligation, investigative and informative journalism not based on sensationalism, then perhaps we could move forward as a society and recognize the gifts and values of what should be the top 10% of our country, almost all of whom are no where near that. It is terribly complex, but this nonsense about politics is not at all where the problem is.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
NYT downplays disrimination against whites, highlights potential impact on Sotomayor
This morning, I scanned the Chicago Tribune and saw the following headline: "Ruling for White Firefighters May Alter Hiring," the article itself having been taken from the L.A. Times.
I was very interested in this case the first time I heard about it because it was an actual live breathing version of what semi-privileged white people generally refer to as "reverse-discrimination" and I was deeply curious to see how it would turn out. Not just for the effect it would have on the ability of the European-descended neither rich nor poor nor connected to continue to claim discrimination had occurred in the attempt to eliminate discrimination, but more importantly, to see what the courts would do in the face of something that clearly was discriminatory. Courts play games with the law, especially at the highest levels, and usually these games have more to do with public sentiment and wordsmithery than what the "law" actually is (while a fervent supporter of the impact of Roe v. Wade, please see said case for an example of a total invention of legal rights from whole cloth to effect social change).
As a very simple summary, in New Haven a number of years ago, firefighters were given the opportunity to gain a promotion based on the taking of a test. They took it very seriously, studied very hard etc. When the results came out, it turned out that white (and hispanic, although only one hispanic was among the plaintiffs) people had done much better than other people and the fire department, fearing a lawsuit based on action taken based on the results, threw out the test and no one got promoted. The firefighters who had done well eventually found out (if you know any firefighters, you'll understand why that was inevitable and whoever threw out the results should have known that too and just hired and lawyer and taken a leave of absence until this as all straightened-out) and then sued based on discrimination. Which makes sense, since they were denied promotions they were told they would be entitled to based on their performance on a test merely because of their race.
The Supreme Court ruling was close, 5-4, but the white firefighters won, seven years later, which isn't bad, really, in terms of time (which says a lot about our justice system, but that, for another time). Now that alone is a huge story. Absolutely fascinating. What it means for our country, our society, our culture, it's huge.
Here is where the media got interesting.
Yesterday afternoon I was scanning the New York Times home page and saw under the new important news section among one of four links, Supreme Court Justice Nominee's Decision Overturned. I saw that, and like any rational person familiar with Sotomayor and the current make-up of the U.S. Supreme Court, I totally ignored it. I would expect the Supreme Court to overturn a decision of hers. It's totally uninteresting. It's only interesting it you note that it's the white firefighters case. So why did the New York Times do that?
The major stories on the case came out in today's newspapers, so it wasn't that the decision had been sufficiently analyzed on its own merits and it was time to delve into related consequences. That would have been reasonable. Like, for example, when the news mentioned yesterday, several days after his death, that Michael Jackson's children were temporarily going to be in custody of his mother. A few days later, delve into related consequences, that's the main story. But not on day one. Imagine if instead of the headline saying "Michael Jackson dead" it said "Michael Jackson's children temporarily going into mother's custody" - first, you wouldn't have read the story right away, if at all, since it's totally logical (just like the Sotomayor thing) but second, that isn't the story at all. And to write it that way shows a very weird bias. So what is the NYT's bias here?
Let's imagine you're a reporter for the New York Times. This decision comes down. You've presumably lost what you were going after, since white people can't be obviously discriminated against anymore and this is all the more galling since as a New York Times journalist, you probably have no respect for decent working class people like firefighters and think they're racist and that this is why they brought their suit. So that's a write-off. But then you're like, but oh no! this was Sotomayor's opinion, so not only will white people have established rights, this is a strike against her potential rise to the role of justice. Ergo, the news bulletin I saw. That's the best I can figure, since it's extremely bizarre.
I likely would have forgotten or not even noticed this, but for the fact that at dinner last night, someone mentioned that Sotomayor's decision had been overturned. Everyone had exactly the same reaction as me - of course it was, it's a conservative court, what do you expect. But no one knew what the case was. And it gives me a bit of an icky feeling as I can't help but feel there is an undercurrent of what I outlined above in our society, at least the educated urban-sphere - that middle-class working white people really do deserve to be treated poorly in some ill-devised attempt to straighten things out, but really, it's a form of xenophobia directed against people who are most innately American. Who get up every morning and work hard and struggle to raise families and put food on the table and give their children the best future they can. I don't claim that these people don't have flaws; I know nothing about them, but I have to assume they do, since we all do. But do they really deserve to be completely written-off in this way by society, such that they are a punchline in jokes and a mockery for those who were lucky enough to know how to get into good colleges and find cushy jobs and who had a support network that told them how to do it?
The New York Times continues to disappoint me. Although I imagine that what I am really disappointed with are Americans who should know better than to be so close-minded.
I was very interested in this case the first time I heard about it because it was an actual live breathing version of what semi-privileged white people generally refer to as "reverse-discrimination" and I was deeply curious to see how it would turn out. Not just for the effect it would have on the ability of the European-descended neither rich nor poor nor connected to continue to claim discrimination had occurred in the attempt to eliminate discrimination, but more importantly, to see what the courts would do in the face of something that clearly was discriminatory. Courts play games with the law, especially at the highest levels, and usually these games have more to do with public sentiment and wordsmithery than what the "law" actually is (while a fervent supporter of the impact of Roe v. Wade, please see said case for an example of a total invention of legal rights from whole cloth to effect social change).
As a very simple summary, in New Haven a number of years ago, firefighters were given the opportunity to gain a promotion based on the taking of a test. They took it very seriously, studied very hard etc. When the results came out, it turned out that white (and hispanic, although only one hispanic was among the plaintiffs) people had done much better than other people and the fire department, fearing a lawsuit based on action taken based on the results, threw out the test and no one got promoted. The firefighters who had done well eventually found out (if you know any firefighters, you'll understand why that was inevitable and whoever threw out the results should have known that too and just hired and lawyer and taken a leave of absence until this as all straightened-out) and then sued based on discrimination. Which makes sense, since they were denied promotions they were told they would be entitled to based on their performance on a test merely because of their race.
The Supreme Court ruling was close, 5-4, but the white firefighters won, seven years later, which isn't bad, really, in terms of time (which says a lot about our justice system, but that, for another time). Now that alone is a huge story. Absolutely fascinating. What it means for our country, our society, our culture, it's huge.
Here is where the media got interesting.
Yesterday afternoon I was scanning the New York Times home page and saw under the new important news section among one of four links, Supreme Court Justice Nominee's Decision Overturned. I saw that, and like any rational person familiar with Sotomayor and the current make-up of the U.S. Supreme Court, I totally ignored it. I would expect the Supreme Court to overturn a decision of hers. It's totally uninteresting. It's only interesting it you note that it's the white firefighters case. So why did the New York Times do that?
The major stories on the case came out in today's newspapers, so it wasn't that the decision had been sufficiently analyzed on its own merits and it was time to delve into related consequences. That would have been reasonable. Like, for example, when the news mentioned yesterday, several days after his death, that Michael Jackson's children were temporarily going to be in custody of his mother. A few days later, delve into related consequences, that's the main story. But not on day one. Imagine if instead of the headline saying "Michael Jackson dead" it said "Michael Jackson's children temporarily going into mother's custody" - first, you wouldn't have read the story right away, if at all, since it's totally logical (just like the Sotomayor thing) but second, that isn't the story at all. And to write it that way shows a very weird bias. So what is the NYT's bias here?
Let's imagine you're a reporter for the New York Times. This decision comes down. You've presumably lost what you were going after, since white people can't be obviously discriminated against anymore and this is all the more galling since as a New York Times journalist, you probably have no respect for decent working class people like firefighters and think they're racist and that this is why they brought their suit. So that's a write-off. But then you're like, but oh no! this was Sotomayor's opinion, so not only will white people have established rights, this is a strike against her potential rise to the role of justice. Ergo, the news bulletin I saw. That's the best I can figure, since it's extremely bizarre.
I likely would have forgotten or not even noticed this, but for the fact that at dinner last night, someone mentioned that Sotomayor's decision had been overturned. Everyone had exactly the same reaction as me - of course it was, it's a conservative court, what do you expect. But no one knew what the case was. And it gives me a bit of an icky feeling as I can't help but feel there is an undercurrent of what I outlined above in our society, at least the educated urban-sphere - that middle-class working white people really do deserve to be treated poorly in some ill-devised attempt to straighten things out, but really, it's a form of xenophobia directed against people who are most innately American. Who get up every morning and work hard and struggle to raise families and put food on the table and give their children the best future they can. I don't claim that these people don't have flaws; I know nothing about them, but I have to assume they do, since we all do. But do they really deserve to be completely written-off in this way by society, such that they are a punchline in jokes and a mockery for those who were lucky enough to know how to get into good colleges and find cushy jobs and who had a support network that told them how to do it?
The New York Times continues to disappoint me. Although I imagine that what I am really disappointed with are Americans who should know better than to be so close-minded.
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