Pedantic, but...why is this an assassination and not just a murder? Because he was more than likely targeted? Tupac was targeted (for some street-level bullshit), but I don't think anyone would call his demise an "assassination".
Assassinations are surprise killings of prominent individuals for political purposes. Targeted gang killings are an interesting case, because they are political within the context of intra- and inter-gang politics, but not viewed in that light in a broader context. If I was watching a documentary about two rival gangs, I probably wouldn't blink twice at someone referring to a hit on a rival leader as an assassination. In every day conversation, it would probably be weird, because the normal assumption is of the broader political sphere.
People are calling this an assassination because they are making the (probably reasonable) guess that the reason to shoot Charlie Kirk during a political speech is to make a political statement.
(Your account is far from the only one posting abusively in this thread, and it's probably random that I happened to see your posts, but still - this is not ok.)
In my experience, the "top tier of kids" is more cultural than school-specific. Even in schools like TJHST there's usually 10–30 students in the school that really care about achieving, while the other 90% don't put in much effort (beyond your typical public schooler). There are a few feeder (public) schools on the coasts, but most of the private schools differentiate by extracurriculars (fencing, rowing, horseback riding) rather than academic excellence.
Accelerated tracks would produce the top tier, which begin in elementary school - so it's a matter of how much your parents invested in your education before school. Any child can technically enter the accelerated track at any grade. The later they join, the more untaught expectations there are. The other students went over these things already in previous accelerated classes. There's no on-ramp.
In the normal track, you don't eventually take calculus in math, learn much about labwork in science, or even learn how to write a research paper until the last year of classes at 18. (Source: class of 2005, USA)
Gifted programs dropped from ~72% of elementary schools to ~65% by 2013, and probably have continued declining. Given it takes 10+ years to educate a child, the school culture to change, and so on, we should expect to see quite a lag between policy and outcomes.
The core problem is actually very simple. Education studies do not measure what they claim to measure. When they say, "education outcomes improve when..." they usually mean the pass rate, i.e. they only measured a signal among the bottom 20% of students. When they say, "test scores improve when..." they are, at best, measuring up to the 90th percentile. When they say, "the white/black attainment gap," or "socioeconomic disadvantages," they're usually just fishing for funding money, and their study will not actually attempt to measure either of those things. From a review of the literature on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2015:
> Only one study specifically examined the achievement gap for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Hampton & Gruenert, 2008) despite NCLB’s stated commitment to improving education for children from low-income families. African American students were often mentioned in studies of general student achievement but none of the reviewed studies focused specifically on the effects of NCLB for this subgroup. Again, this is a curious gap in the research considering the law’s emphasis on narrowing the Black-White achievement gap. Other groups of students underrepresented in the research on NCLB include gifted students, students with vision impairments, and English proficient minority students.
("A Review of the Empirical Literature on No Child Left Behind From 2001 to 2010", Husband & Hunt, 2015)
Everything you see going wrong is downstream of this. Yes, harmful ideologies have done a lot of damage to the education system, but it could easily survive this if we had actual signifiers of success.
Test scores do not measure directly what they purport to measure. They are a proxy, and when you have a system designed to optimize for a proxy of the thing you want to improve, then the system will always find ways to exploit the difference between the proxy and the underlying thing.
You can call it "juking the stats" or "overfitting", or whatever.
We can only ever have proxies. The issue (at least here) isn't Goodharting, it's that the proxy does not even measure what the researchers claim it measures. For example, pretty much the only study of its name, "High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB" (Lovelass, Parkas, Duffett) uses the NAEP, which only releases 10th, 20th, ..., 90th percentile scores. Gifted programs are ~95th percentile. Or, look at this lovely graph of 36 ACT scores:
When it increases by 30x in 30 years, it becomes very apparent that standardized tests are simultaneously being gamed by the students and the testwriters. Students (and school districts and states) are choosing the "easier" tests that make them look proficient, so testwriters are making their tests easier to get a bigger market share. And all along, the tests that only care about separating out the top show declining scores every year...
The core problem is actually very simple. Education studies do not measure what they claim to measure. When they say, "education outcomes improve when..." they usually mean the pass rate, i.e. they only measured a signal among the bottom 20% of students. When they say, "test scores improve when..." they are, at best, measuring up to the 90th percentile. When they say, "the white/black attainment gap," or "socioeconomic disadvantages," they're usually just fishing for funding money, and their study will not actually attempt to measure either of those things. From a review of the literature on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2015:
> Only one study specifically examined the achievement gap for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Hampton & Gruenert, 2008) despite NCLB’s stated commitment to improving education for children from low-income families. African American students were often mentioned in studies of general student achievement but none of the reviewed studies focused specifically on the effects of NCLB for this subgroup. Again, this is a curious gap in the research considering the law’s emphasis on narrowing the Black-White achievement gap. Other groups of students underrepresented in the research on NCLB include gifted students, students with vision impairments, and English proficient minority students.
("A Review of the Empirical Literature on No Child Left Behind From 2001 to 2010", Husband & Hunt, 2015)
Everything you see going wrong is downstream of this. Yes, harmful ideologies have done a lot of damage to the education system, but it could easily survive this we had actual signifiers of success.
Are your kids old enough to run amok at home instead of going to school? Would the police arrest you if you left them home alone instead of sending them to school?
I graduated from high school less than ten years ago. I'm sure screens have become a big issue in many (or most) schools, but that was not the case at my high school. It still was mostly daycare, not education, so banning screens will not be enough.
Particularly, the biggest incentives are test scores and passing rates, which incentivize attention only to the bottom 50% and 20% of students (respectively). This means:
- You do not diversify classrooms by academic ability---the high-performing students can be free tutors to the low-performing students.
- You inflate the GPAs and implement no-zero policies.
- You teach to the standardized tests, and don't worry about the material.
- You make lessons "fun and engaging" because you need the attention of the students least likely to give you their attention.
- You eliminate gifted or honors programs, because that's wasted money not improving your bottom line (bottom students).
Needless to say, these are not effective ways of teaching remedial and underperforming students.
Those pupils will generally need very structured lessons that directly provide clear information (often in a form that can easily stick in memory and be repeated, even word for word), and straightforward instructions that can immediately inform their practice no matter what their level. I.e. the exact opposite of a so-called "fun and engaging" approach. (Which of course ignores the fact that such students tend to derive the most fun and engagement from being taught in a clear and effective way!)
The underlying issue is that the "progressive" educational strategy taught in Ed Schools is very explicitly a "sink or swim" approach where the student is supposed to be teaching themselves and the teacher isn't doing any real work. The hidden attitude here, coming directly from the "Progressive" era of the late 19th and early 20th century, is that many students will indeed fail but this is not an issue because clearly they were not worthy of entering the educated class with the very best.
(Special Ed is the one remaining niche that still teaches more effective educational methods, but obviously not every remedial student is a Special Ed student, and we should not expect them to be.)
