by PaulHoule | 2025-05-29 21:13:29+00:00
It's a horrific example which I think illuminates why "his side" is losing, see

https://www.newsweek.com/san-francisco-public-schools-equity...

People have different levels of talent, interest and motivation. In a physics course there might be 50 students, one of which will go on to get a physics PhD, you would think that person gets an "A" but somebody who gets a "C" will do something else. As an "A" student I would not feel bad if no "F"s were given out and the lowest grade was a "C", but if I can't earn an "A" while somebody else gets a "C", that eliminates a way that a person of modest means who faces some challenges can distinguish themselves and finds better opportunities -- some people who are in subaltern groups like to fantasize that in "holistic evaluation" people will realize how nice they really are but actually people will default to thinking people like themselves are nice so if you are the wrong race or gender or queer or whatever you start out in the penalty box meanwhile rich kids have so many ways to put a finger on the scale that poor kids don't even know exist. [1]

Grades, standardized tests and such can be flawed but they provide some people from modest backgrounds a chance to shine and for some rich kids to prove that they can't test their way out of a paper bag. [2]

As for student loans, what can I say? Maybe if I went to school a decade later or took a different academic path it would be different, but I went to a modest undergraduate school and got out without loans. Maybe it's not so easy today. A person who made different decisions from somebody else could well feel resentful that somebody else got $40,000 and that they didn't. I don't have strong feelings against student loan forgiveness but I can understand why somebody would.

This article contributes to the "talking past each other" phenomenon and dehumanizing discourse that is par for the course on the left side of the web, taking an anecdote that is already pretty weak and twisting it into an insult towards people they disagree with. [3] They might get some likes on Bluesky and think they really "stuck it to the man" but at best people will vote the same in 2028.

[1] Hate to bring it up because my Uni just won the NCAA lacrosse tournament and I think it's great to have a men's and women's sport to use our stadium in the spring, but some people say that "lacrosse is racist/classist" because if you go to a poor or average high school you probably don't get to play lacrosse. You certainly don't see as many black lacrosse players as you see in basketball and football. There is a huge amount of focus on inequities involving standardized testing because standardized testing is visible, but you might not even know my school has a lacrosse team or think that it matters. And I know there are 100 things like lacrosse at my school that I don't know about but that admissions coaches for rich kids know inside out.

[2] I often wonder if Steven Jay Gould was funded by Harvard Alumni who wanted to make the world safe for the bottom 10% of legacy admissions

[3] feeling resentful that somebody else got $40,000 when they didn't isn't the same as wanting them to fail. Neither is thinking "$40,000 is a lot of money and maybe there is something better we can do with it"