| ▲ | KPGv2 5 days ago |
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| ▲ | phil21 5 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| The only reason I became anything today is because my parents who were poor but cared very much were able to "opt out" of the shit-tier local public school that pandered to the kids who would rather not learn before it was too late for me. Just a couple disruptive kids per class can ruin an entire generation of students for a grade level. And there were far more than just a couple. Not to mention kids who had no business being in those classes - when the class is half full of low-performers they drag the rest of the kids down with them as the environment completely changes. The focus these public school districts have put on the low performing and low achievers at the expense of those there to learn is astounding and perhaps civilization-ending if it continues. More resources should be spent on those there to help themselves vs. trying to shovel ever-more resources at people that will never provide a return on that investment. At this point the local district here spends magnitudes more on special education and catering to IEP students than they do any AP level classes or other high performer programs. In fact they continue to destroy any advanced track segmentation in the favor of equity, and the teachers union nearly killed public magnet schools off entirely recently. They will try again until they are successful. It's an obviously bad strategy, and apparently results don't matter. Dragging everyone down is not a plan for success. This is the single political hill I will die on. Removing the ability for poor but high functioning families to give their kids a chance to get out of their circumstances because it raises uncomfortable questions is downright evil. Other western countries everyone loves to champion so much have this figured out. Student tracks are a good thing. Put high achievers on an advanced track earlier than later and get them out of the general population of students before it's too late for them. And yes, it's obvious to anyone who's ever been to a decent number of different types of schools that the only thing that truly matters is the other students (read: parents) that go there. Anything else is a rounding error. As bad as it was 30 years ago when I was going to school, it's infinitely worse now from watching nieces and nephews attending their local public schools. Until they were able to transfer out to magnets at least. |
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| ▲ | Meekro 5 days ago | parent [-] | | There's one slow-motion conservative victory happening that's getting relatively little news coverage (and that's a good thing, lest there be more pushback): allowing more alternatives to public schools, funded by taxpayer dollars. Charter schools are the most obvious example, but I expect this to eventually be expanded further. If 10 homeschooler families want to get together and hire a professional teacher, there's no reason why the state shouldn't pay for it (provided the kids pass grade-level standardized tests). Like you said, 99% of what makes a "good" school good is the quality of the other kids who go there. Since there's absolutely no political will for expelling the troublemakers (even in most conservative districts), the only remaining option is to build more lifeboats. |
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| ▲ | lelanthran 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > the schools are able to kick out any underperforming students Being able to kick out disruptive students has a pretty big influence on the remaining students. How do you distinguish between underperforming-non-disruptive students and under-performing-disruptive students, especially as the almost all the disruptive students are going to be underperforming anyway. |
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| ▲ | 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | lupusreal 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | You make it sound difficult. It's not. Schools are filled with security cameras. When a student attacks another, expell him. And none of that "the victim tried to defend himself so we have to expelled him too, we don't care who started it" horse shit. The schools have cameras, use them. | | |
| ▲ | lelanthran 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I agree with all of that. What I was getting to WRT to the GP's post about how charter schools kick out under performing students in order to "prove" that the public school system is inferior. I'm trying to determine how he distinguishes between kids that are kicked out to make the school look better and kids that are kicked out because they are disruptive. I already know how to do that (cameras, etc), I'm just wondering why he doesn't consider that school that kicks kids out might be kicking out disruptive kids. |
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| ▲ | weitendorf 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't consider myself right wing, but I guess in this case I wouldn't care even if it were nominally right-wing, because it's more important to give students good educations than it is to perpetuate institutions (eg giant school systems with awful performance) that might ideologically better align with my beliefs but are clearly not working. Also, while I don't think students should be pushed out of charter schools purely for bad performance (if they are putting in the effort), I do think that poor minority parents should have the right to send their kids to schools that don't force students to share classrooms with disruptive or way-behind-grade-level students. When educational outcomes under the local public school system are really bad I think school-choice just makes a lot of sense as a way of figuring out what policies are popular/effective/unpopular/harmful. |
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| ▲ | cwillu 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The implication seems to be that charter schools are superior, but does that jive with other countries' successes? A commonly given alternative explanation is that the public options in the US are deliberately sabotaged via budget restrictions, and then the resulting poor performance is used to justify further cuts—a similar dynamic has been fairly recently executed in Alberta with public health care. | | |
| ▲ | nradov 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | There is very little correlation between per-capita student spending and student outcomes. We should fund our public schools adequately but no amount of funding can overcome a bad environment in a student's home or neighborhood. | | | |
| ▲ | cyberax 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Budgets are NOT a problem. Magnet schools in the US get the same or _less_ funding per capita than the average for the area. E.g. Lowell Heights in SF gets less than the average funding, and Stuyvesant in NYC gets the average amount. | |
| ▲ | kevinventullo 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I thought charter schools and public schools received the same $/student. | | |
| ▲ | rahimnathwani 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Charter schools generally receive less. | | |
| ▲ | ab5tract 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Source please. | | |
| ▲ | rahimnathwani 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Here's just one: Heape-Johnson, A., McGee, J. B., Wolf, P. J., May, J. F., & Maloney, L. D. (August 2023). Charter School Funding: Little Progress Towards Equity in the City. School Choice Demonstration Project. In some states and cities the difference is more extreme than in others. |
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| ▲ | weitendorf 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think the specific form of "charter schools" we have are mainly a US invention, but a lot of countries (like the Netherlands, where it's more common than not) actually just let students use public funds to go to private schools, which would melt the heads of most people who oppose charter schools because it's "right wing". Charter schools are I think a direct response to figuring out how to fix low performing, big school districts in the US. So while I have no idea if private or public schools do better in the Netherlands, I think we'd need to find something more like the Baltimore public school system in another country to make the right comparison. > A commonly given alternative explanation is that the public options in the US are deliberately sabotaged via budget restrictions, and then the resulting poor performance is used to justify further cuts I find this hard to address because it's not really a matter of policy but of ulterior motives or conspiracy. I personally have no secret plan to make public education even worse by posting about charter schools on hacker news. To me it's just about giving students the option to get educated by an independent institution rather than be forced to attend some of the worst public school systems in the country. |
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| ▲ | TimorousBestie 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Perhaps you believe the “nominally right-wing” thing is merely academic. It is not. https://freespeechproject.georgetown.edu/tracker-entries/neo... | | |
| ▲ | weitendorf 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Nazis drink water and post on internet communities too. And that's a homeschool network, not a charter school. Honestly, this might be a good opportunity for you to think about why you find charter schools such a nonstarter JUST because they tend to have more support among those on the right (which I'm not) than those on the left. That's actually one of the big problems I was trying to point out: people have extremely strong opinions on educational policy because of these ideological left vs right things rather than on what students actually need! | | |
| ▲ | davorak 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > why you find charter schools such a nonstarter JUST because they tend to have more support among those on the right So my general impression is that the republican party, nationally, note I am distinguishing the republican party form political right in the USA, has not been supportive of education in terms of financing or in promoting the necessary environment to ensure high quality and consistent education. My general impression is that the republican party is for charter schools. An argument that says trust/invest in the system promoted by the party that has been undermining/unsupportive of the current system does not invoke my trust/sympathy. This is not a topic I have done rigorous investigations on, but what little I have done normally shows a lack of hard evidence and apples to apples between charter schools and traditional public schools. | |
| ▲ | TimorousBestie 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > And that's a homeschool network, not a charter school. They were registered as an online charter school, which is why the Ohio DOE got involved at all. They wouldn’t have investigated an individual homeschooler. (Many “homeschool networks” or the like do this because it makes it easier for their clientele to prove they’ve met the meager legal requirements of homeschooling. Justifies the price tag, yknow?) > Honestly, this might be a good opportunity for you to think about why you find charter schools such a nonstarter JUST because they tend to have more support among those on the right (which I'm not) than those on the left You’ve imagined a whole backstory and character arc for me, which is sadly more interesting than the truth. I think charter schools are repugnant because they operate under little to no oversight and, around these parts, have a reputation for abusing students (see reason one). You seemed to imply earlier that the right wing connection was irrelevant or unimportant to the concept of a charter school. It isn’t, really. It’s an essential feature of the system, and why they’ve become so popular as of late after decades of failed leftist attempts at the same thing. | |
| ▲ | elktown 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | People should study charter schools here in Sweden where it’s common. It’s such a corrupt profit motivated segregation mess, it should be avoided at all costs. It’s taken a very well functioning public school system that had a high lowest standard across the board and segregated them by cherry picking cheap to maintain students. Then we also have the pure frauds, no education to the students until the finally gets shut down 5-10 years later when all inspections are done. etc etc. Why on earth willingly let in the profit motive into this? It was introduced right wingers in Sweden too ofc, boat loads of profit to their supporters. Now it’s also very hard to get rid of when state capacity has been reduced over the years. |
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| ▲ | monero-xmr 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why wouldn’t I want a school to be able to kick out bad kids? Violent and disruptive kids need to be warehoused away from actual future productive members of society, rather than forcing 90% of kids to have their education ruined by 10% of bad kids |
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| ▲ | brewdad 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Prepare to build a fuckton more prisons then. Most kids can get turned around from a bad path if they get the right support early on. I don't want to live in a world where we write off 7 year olds forever. | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | There was a famous study that tried to test this - the Perry Preschool Study. [1] Basically they enlisted a number of high risk children - black, low iq, low income children. Half were placed into a high quality specialized preschool program (that lasted two years for 2.5 hours a day) with small class sizes, half were not, and they followed what happened over the next 40 years. The results were definitely impactful, but not the sort of major turn around one might hope for. So for instance 55% of the control group ended up being arrested 5+ times by age 40, while 'only' 36% of the experiment group did. I think the thing this demonstrates is that intervention can help, but is also insufficient alone. Students who are in a sufficiently high risk scenario need ongoing support and treatment that they're not going to receive at a normal public institution. And not only that but they will remain disproportionately disruptive to other student's educations at normal institutions, even with years of ongoing care. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HighScope (overview) [1] - https://highscope.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/perry-presc... (detailed paper) | | |
| ▲ | yepitwas 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm surprised that 2.5 hours a day for 2 years was enough to make that big a difference on outcomes through age 40. Like... damn, that's a big effect! | | |
| ▲ | imtringued 5 days ago | parent [-] | | In Germany children only spend between 5.5 to 6 hours at school per day. You‘ve raised that amount to 8 hours now and the outcomes are not that much better since the number represents being arrested at least five times. If you get arrested four times, you would be considered a model student. | | |
| ▲ | yepitwas 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Reading the actual study, this appears to be a preschool program of 2.5 hours minimum, not adding on to an existing school day. There are also a lot more details about outcomes and they're wildly positive for an intervention period of just two years. The authors estimate the ROI (from increased productivity and savings on various costs) at an astounding 16x. There are way more metrics in there, including more crime stats. The one somenameforme chose to highlight has a ton of ambiguity, leaving it open to the reader to guess that maybe all the program participants were arrested merely four times by age 40, so in fact this program sucks (plus somenameforme's scare-quotes on "only"), but the paper itself contains far more information and paints a clear picture of outstanding success for a relatively small intervention. Somenameforme's characterization of the study doesn't match the contents. If that's the evidence a person's citing, the evidence they've cited is screaming "this works great", not the opposite, as implied. It may still not be true, but if so... cite different evidence to support that, because this study says this intervention was wildly successful. | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Make sure you're reading the study and not just glancing at their charts. They try to present their data positively to the point that it can be quite misleading. For instance you might see things like 67% of the experiment group having an IQ of 90+ at age 5, contrasted against only 28% of the control group. But read further down on the details and that difference disappeared almost immediately after the end of the intervention. It follows in line with a well known fact that childhood IQ is primarily driven by environmental factors whereas adolescent and especially adult IQ is primarily driven by the IQ of your parents - paradoxically, strengths or deficiencies in earlier life notwithstanding. And their decision to set the baseline for arrests at 5+ is obviously doing something akin to p-hacking. It makes it clear that near 100% of the entire sample (males at least) ended up in prison, likely multiple times. The ROI from the program had nothing to do with increased productivity - it was driven almost entirely by less time spent in prison. It led to the interesting fact that 93% of the ROI came from males, precisely because the females had a much lower baseline criminality rate. In a nutshell, the main benefit of the program was reducing the criminality rate of the experimental group to a level that is still orders of magnitude higher than for society at large. That is a good thing, but it also emphasizes that something like this would only be the beginning of special care needed to try to ensure these sort of people could live remotely decent lives. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 4 days ago | parent [-] | | http://bactra.org/weblog/494.html | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 4 days ago | parent [-] | | The person who wrote that site spent quite a lot of time writing, yet unfortunately little reading. Heritability is, by definition, the degree of variation in a trait, within a population, due to genetic variation. The heritability of an accent is zero. One clever way this is measured is twin studies, which also are not what most people, particularly those who prefer to write more than read, think. You don't search for twins separated at birth, but instead compare the differences in a trait between identical and non-identical twins. If the variation is greater, then the trait is generally significantly heritable. So for example - height would be an obvious one. By contrast the variation in accent between identical and non-identical twins would be zero. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 4 days ago | parent [-] | | The person who wrote that site is Cosma Shalizi, who very certainly knows what "heritability" is. Unfortunately, you appear not to. "Heritability" is simply the ratio of genetic variance to phenotypical variance. It's not genetic causality. Whether or not you wear lipstick: highly heritable. The number of fingers on your hands: not heritable. | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 4 days ago | parent [-] | | So it's a blog from some guy with no background in genetics. Your definition is correct, as is your statement that it's not genetic causality. But to discuss heritability you need to understand the most typical, and reliable, way it's assessed. That would immediately clarify to you why lipstick wearing (or your accent) is not heritable, yet the number of digits you have (at least at birth) most certainly is. Here [1] is Wiki's take. You can also pick up any textbook on genetics. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I don't think "Cosma Shalizi doesn't know what he's talking about" is a good hill to die on, and you've now expanded your portfolio of opponents to Ned Block, from who I shoplifted the heritability point. Direct genetic causality is not the only mechanism through which genes select for phenotypical traits. Genes also select and interact with the environment. | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 4 days ago | parent [-] | | A person you respect in one field is not necessarily all-knowing within that field and, most certainly, not outside of it. This is especially true on topics that become politicized. This is not just because of the 'our side' vs 'their side' stuff, but because these issues can and have destroyed the careers of high profile people who adopt the wrong opinion. Unlike the individuals you have cited, James Watson is a geneticist, spent his entire life studying and working on genetics, and in fact was even the person who discovered the structure of DNA. But because of his views on the genetic aspects of IQ (which inherently becomes intertwined into race, as race is just shared genetic ancestry), he was completely demonized, his career destroyed, and various honors revoked. Higher profile people speaking on these topics publicly know this all too well, so it mostly just turns into cheap virtue signaling as opposed to adding some genuine insight. In your case, the examples they've offered are simply wrong, as would be immediately apparent with the most typical method of measuring heritability! | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 4 days ago | parent [-] | | You're irritated because I gave you an output of the broad-sense heritability statistic that conflicts with your intuitive understanding of what "heritability" means. Now you understand how people feel when commenters randomly throw around the term "heritability" with respect to cognitive ability. This is a "not even wrong" situation. Is cognitive ability significantly genetically determined? Maybe, maybe not. A broad heritability statistic from a twin study isn't going to resolve the question. Here's a good link for you: http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html I promise, the author has studied and thought more carefully about the question than we have. Fair warning: you would not be happier if I cited a molecular geneticist on this subject. Your argument gets even harder to sustain once you bring GWAS into the picture. | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I'm not at all irritated besides the fact that you're relying on examples that simply are incorrect, and instead of responding to this issue in any way you're linking to walls of text from somebody who (1) has made plainly false statements on the topic already and (2) has literally 0 qualification in the field whatsoever. It'd be akin to arguing to somebody who wants to claim the Moon landing was faked, and after the rather straight forward rebuttal of their argument links to some blog in the tens of thousands of words from some statistician they claim is "very smart." It's silly. |
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| ▲ | 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | Biganon 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Imagine the moral dilemma of having to choose which kid goes in which group | | |
| ▲ | 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | ACCount37 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | For the experiment, you don't want it to be a "moral dilemma" at all. If the group-splitting decisions are made by humans, it inevitably introduces a systematic bias. That bias then will show up in the outcomes, and confound the very data you got out of your way to gather. The easiest way to avoid that is to split the groups randomly. |
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| ▲ | monero-xmr 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | If anything we need to double the amount of money paid to build high-intensity “schools” for those kids, and then reduce the amount of money needed for the good kids, because honestly all of that money is wasted now on the bad ones. We should also imprison criminals but that goes without saying. If we don’t have enough prisons to house violent criminals then we simply need more prisons, or release them only into communities that vote for such a thing (maybe rich liberal communities only etc.) | | |
| ▲ | Nevermark 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > We should also imprison criminals but that goes without saying. Obviously we need effective justice. But since we are on the topic of ineffective schooling, there is an argument to be made that US prisons are more effective at punishment than rehabilitation. Which seems to please some people, but just adds another undertow to society. A loss for criminal inmates, and everyone they impact, family or stranger, after they are released. Education is worth looking at with respect to an entire culture, with many important contexts beyond/outside school. From before school age (huge), onward. | |
| ▲ | ZeroGravitas 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There's a great early TED talk from a Lawyer trying to stop death row inmates being executed. He realises that the simplest and easiest intervention is to stop the violent crime happening in the first place, and the cheapest and easiest way to do that is to intervene in the future murderers childhood. The specific example he gives is a client with a schizophrenic mother who needed more support. | |
| ▲ | lupusreal 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Instead of imprisoning all criminals we should be streamlining the process to execute murderers, drug dealers, etc. | | |
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| ▲ | nradov 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Please stop spreading misinformation. Public charter schools aren't allowed to kick out underperforming students. |
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| ▲ | brewdad 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | They are allowed to screen prospective students up front. They also won't kick out under-performers for getting Ds. They will find a disciplinary reason to do so. Every one of us could have been kicked out of school at one time or another if we had fallen under the microscope looking for an excuse. | | |
| ▲ | nradov 5 days ago | parent [-] | | No, that's also misinformation. Public charter schools in most states aren't allowed to screen prospective students up front. Any parents can enroll their children, and when a charter school is oversubscribed they use admission lotteries. And they follow the same disciplinary procedures as other public schools. | | |
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| ▲ | TimorousBestie 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If you want to be exceedingly pedantic, a student at a typical charter school in the United States has much weaker due process guarantees than a student at a public school. The school administration at a charter school has much less government oversight by design, and in some states there is effectively none. | |
| ▲ | lazyasciiart 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Please don’t spread misinformation. Charter school law varies by state and you should not make blanket statements about what they are allowed to do. | | |
| ▲ | 1123581321 5 days ago | parent [-] | | They appear to be essentially correct. There is little variance by state in how they accept students from the public. Were you thinking of a particular state? Here's information on the admission laws for each state from Wested. https://wested2024.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/upl... | | |
| ▲ | lazyasciiart 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | In zero states can you show up at a charter school and say “I live next door, I want to enrol” and be enrolled. That is an enormous difference from public schools that immediately eliminates the most disadvantaged students from the applicant pool. Moreover, some charter schools require things like parental time volunteering, which eliminates more kids, or introductory essays - they don’t score the essays! They just require it to be done! By horrible coincidence this eliminates more cough lower performing children, who simply never submit a completed application for the lottery, so sad. This definitely happens in multiple states but here’s one specific example: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-charter-app... | | |
| ▲ | Chris2048 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > By horrible coincidence this eliminates more cough lower performing children If it's not scored it can't possibly eliminate low-performing children on that unconflated characteristic alone - a motivated underperformer will still get in. It eliminates the unmotivated, which correlates obviously with underperforming. While it can be a vicious circle, I'd say no-motivation -> underperformance is of much greater relevance than underperformance -> no-motivation. The obvious hint is how it tests the parents too. sure. maybe they are very motivated but just work so much they cannot volunteer or spare any time, but doesn't that also somewhat render their 'motivation' moot as well? | |
| ▲ | 1123581321 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | That is concerning, but the original post was claiming a significant variance of state law. The wested legal summary focuses on that. |
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| ▲ | TimorousBestie 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Your link is about the mandated lottery system that applies when too many applicants submit applications to the same charter school, so it clearly doesn’t protect students whose parents were strongly advised not to apply. | | |
| ▲ | 1123581321 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Are you thinking of a particular situation? Charters usually have to market to fill the school because it's expensive to operate below capacity. (That's not unique to charters; public school districts also market to maximize voluntary enrollment.) |
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| ▲ | cyberax 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| OK, here's a question. Should every sportball team in the US be prohibited from being selective? Everyone, regardless of their capability, should be able to play on the same field. Including paraplegics because it's not their fault. It's a lofty ideal, don't you think? |
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| ▲ | abenga 5 days ago | parent [-] | | If playing sports was essential to living to everyone across the board, yeah, they would be prohibited from being selective. | | |
| ▲ | cyberax 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Trans people in school/collegiate sports resulted in a lost US election for the Democrats (sports scholarships are a thing). That's how important it is. And no, I don't think that the advanced education is essential. General education is, but not advanced courses. And of course, everyone absolutely deserves a fair _chance_ to get the best possible education. |
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