Isn’t hubris the driving force of progressivism? The idea that the current elite are smarter than the accumulated wisdom tried and tested through generations, smarter even than biology?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SICa0tWHzJQ&feature=youtu.be

In his Saturday speech in South Carolina, Sanders plans to endorse the NAACP’s claim that charter-school expansion has had an adverse effect on African Americans who suffer from the resulting lack of funding for public schools. In order to combat this alleged harm, Sanders will call on the government to cut off public funding for all charter schools until an extensive audit has been conducted.

While other 2020 Democratic contenders have expressed skepticism about the role of charter schools in improving America’s educational standing, Sanders is the first aspirant to explicitly call on Washington to cut off their funding.

Sanders’s plan would also limit charter schools’ ability to develop innovative curricula by mandating that they comply with many of the same oversight measures applied to traditional public schools.

Opponents of the plan argue that it would harm the very people it intends to help, namely low-income African Americans and other minorities who continue to struggle with high attrition rates and disproportionately low standardized-test scores.

https://www.thenewneo.com/2019/05/16/harvard-and-ronald-sullivan-the-dancing-bears-of-the-university-give-in-to-student-pressure/#comment-2435161

There’s no “fair” way for poor people to get the benefits of middle-class virtues without putting in the work to live the middle class lifestyle:
1) Finish high school (and be able to read, write, and do arithmetic)
2) Not have children before getting married
3) Keep a job for at least a year.

Virtually nobody in the USA is “poor” who has followed these three rules. But #2 is especially hard — the only safe behavior to avoid children before marriage is to avoid sex. And the consumer sex (-crazy) society pushes all teens to be more sexually active. Especially still strong in the black community.

The world is not fair – reality is not fair. The unfairness of “life” is NOT a matter of justice, and there is no justice based way to compensate for the unfairness. Still, most folk do think that those who are born disadvantaged “deserve” some extra help.

I think a rich, civilized society WILL and SHOULD provide extra help. Still, extra help is not a “right”, nor is it really a matter of “justice”, altho it’s not unreasonable to call it “social justice”. Unfortunately, any help that’s available can be combined with LESS effort by those “being helped”, with the result being continued poverty. Plus, if help is given, “how much” is given to “whom” become important political questions.

Makes me want to support “reparation rewards for poor blacks” — those who reach age 18 or over, and have done the top 3 requirements (HS, no kids before marriage, keep job for a year) should get a college tuition no-interest loan of $40k/ per year, for 4 years. Whether they go to college or not.

A problem mentioned above is that this adversity score helps those who fail to help themselves, and hurts those who do help themselves. This is a common failure of all gov’t, and most non-gov’t, programs of aid and assistance — as well as being the reason “aid” for Africa has failed so miserably.

What the market capitalist system does is to reward those who give back what others really want — want enough to pay for. That’s how it’s know that it’s really wanted. Producing things people really buy. Working for bosses in ways the bosses, who pay them, really want. And capitalism rewards success, usually based on hard work, smart work, and luck.

It’s too bad about the luck, even “unfair”. But it’s real. At least it rewards those who help themselves, and that is what poor blacks need to do more of, as well as poor whites, and even the few poor Asians.

This is an issue, to me at least, in the field of social work. In terms of title protection, some in the field don’t see it as an issue since their reasoning is “as long they can do the job then it shouldn’t matter.”

An interesting metaphor, well developed and disturbingly accurate.

In his introduction Carlson outlined many problems with the whole idea:

It’s kept a secret. “Trust us,” in effect, they say. There is no appeal possible. And as a black box whose inner workings are secret, it becomes an ideal vehicle for engineering the racial results admissions offices desire.

It is easily gamed – fake addresses, even possible income manipulation (by claiming a lot of depreciation, for instance, the way that Donald Trump reported negative income in the 1980s)

And it provides perverse incentives, rewarding victim status, not achievement. Parents who start out with no advantages and work hard to provide a better life for their kids will now be handicapping them if they have high incomes and live in nice neighborhoods with good schools.

But leave it to Heather Mac Donald to cut to the chase: all of this diversity engineering is driven by the seemingly intractable racial achievement gap. If we could close the gap by changing culture, the whole diversity discussion would go away.
…
She says that the idea that privilege, not hard work, persistence and discipline drive better scores is ridiculous. She adds that blacks kids know that they are not held to the same standard, have less incentive to push themselves, making the problem worse.
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Some further thoughts from me:

Since college admissions are a zero-sum issue (for every person who gets in, another person is denied submission), what is called an “adversity” score used to grant an advantage becomes a “privilege” penalty for those who do not have an adversity plus added to their admissions file. This is precisely why the federal prosecutions of families that paid bribes to gain advantages for their children in elite college admissions are harming the public. Their crimes have victims. So does the SAT’s scheme.

Heather Mac Donald states that David Coleman, the head of the College Board (and also called “the architect of the common core curriculum in the media) has “thrown the College Board into the excuse-making grievance industry,” which is true. But it is important to add that the financial self-interest of his organization is at stake. The College Board is reacting to demand from colleges, many of which are making use if the SATs optional, or even dropping the requirement entirely, precisely because it does not yield the desired racial distribution of scores. Fewer students taking the test, because colleges don’t require it, means less money for the College Board.

By adding the adversity score and therefore a veneer of pseudo-science to the racial engineering of outcomes, the College Board is feathering its own financial nest. So it’s not only about hypocrisy, racial engineering, and achievement gaps, it’s also about the money.

The College Board’s adversity score will give students a boost for coming from a high-crime, high-poverty school and neighborhood, according to the Wall Street Journal. Being raised by a single parent will also be a plus factor. Such a scheme penalizes the bourgeois values that make for individual and community success.

The solution to the academic achievement gap lies in cultural change, not in yet another attack on a meritocratic standard. Black parents need to focus as relentlessly as Asian parents on their children’s school attendance and performance. They need to monitor homework completion and grades. Academic achievement must no longer be stigmatized as “acting white.” And a far greater percentage of black children must be raised by both their mother and their father, to ensure the socialization that prevents classrooms from turning into scenes of chaos and violence.

At present, thanks to racial preferences, many black high school students know that they don’t need to put in as much scholarly effort as non-“students of color” to be admitted to highly competitive colleges. The adversity score will only reinforce that knowledge. That is not a reality conducive to life achievement. The only guaranteed beneficiaries of this new scheme are the campus diversity bureaucrats. They have been given another assurance of academically handicapped students who can be leveraged into grievance, more diversity sinecures, and lowered academic standards.