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1. There are certain functions that it is right and proper remit for a national government to expend funds on.
2. Saving lives of people who are not citizens of that government is a legitimate expense, and it is proper to apportion some fraction of the national budget to accomplish that.
3. The national government also has other legitimate priorities among its own citizens, and it is also proper to apportion some fraction of the national budget to domestic issues.
4. Within the bucket assigned to help foreigners, “prevent malaria” is a more efficient means of saving lives than “drop bombs,” and thus we should prefer the former to the latter.
5. It does not follow from this that we should reapportion funds between the “help citizens” and “help foreigners” buckets, because the national government still has other legitimate priorities.

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My point is only that tracking is not illegal, tracks exist in lots of places (look at the parent post I was responding to).

I’m not defending the US school system in any way. The biggest take away I had in working with school boards is that even in very wealthy districts, the school boards are basically groups of incompetents.

Similarly, regards to interviews and IQ tests, I’m merely pointing out that companies are clearly not at all afraid of using pseudo-IQ tests to hire people.

We can argue about proper implementations, but I think we both agree neither different tracks, nor pseudo-IQ interview tests are illegal.

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“No, I know a lot of people in Texas, and none of them are like that.”

The only reason homosexual activity isn’t a felony in Texas is because the federal courts stepped in. Texas is rife with SOCAS violations, and being an open atheist is quite dangerous. Either you live in a liberal bubble, or your threshold for being a “Bible-thumper” is incredibly high.

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IB programs are like magnet schools, admission by parental decision, not by test score. Most magnet schools are a secret code that this is the place for ambitious parents to send their children to avoid the parents that are clueless. They are about race and especially class segregation. Smart kids whose parents are not clued into the system do not get recruited.

IB schools are much better because they are up front that they are about academic effort. Smart kids are much more likely to figure out that this is the place for them than with magnet schools.

But magnet schools often have enrollment limited and seats filled by lottery. Entering the lottery on time is a way of keeping out undesirables.

The difference between firefighters and microsoft is that government hiring is subject to strict bureaucratization. They have to have objective written tests to prove that they aren’t giving jobs to their friends. Whereas microsoft thinks the continual use of ad hoc IQ tests is worth the risk of nepotism. Google has institutionalized nepotism.

Yes, everyone tries to recreate IQ tests in hiring, but they do an awful job with their ad hoc tests. Similarly, parents try to modify school systems to produce segregation. They do a much worse job of emulating tracking because they aren’t even trying. Of course, if there were IQ based tracking, the parents might be trying to undermine it, too, because it is not exactly what they want.

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You could argue that maybe more tracks would be better, or that tracks should split off earlier/later but it seems silly to argue tracking doesn’t exist.

The gifted program for my county was ‘science and technology’ — which, in practice, meant nothing more than that all the gifted-program students were forced to take woodshop, but they called it engineering. Would have been useful had the shop teacher not been senile, nearly blind in his one remaining eye, and totally incapable of teaching. (Most of the work involved memorizing worksheets while he retreated to his office to do something that involved making repetitive thumping noises. There were no tools in his office, but there was a computer with an internet connection.)

There were maybe three hundred students in it, and it served a third of the county — but the other two schools hosting gifted programs had a terrible reputation, which was probably justified. (One is in a 92% black suburb; the other is in an 87% black suburb. The one I went to is in a town that’s only 48% black.)

Most of the smart parents in the area probably sent their children to private school — for good reason, since the public school is a dead end. I only knew two people there who didn’t end up in the state college, and they were both black. Also, Sergey fucking Brin went there, and guess where he went to college.

The place was a shithole, run and staffed by incompetents. The county school board is a third-world joke, and the only reason the school wasn’t as much of a disaster as every single other one in the county is that the former principal never listened to them or anyone. Then he got promoted, continued to never listen to anyone, and within two years the school system was in a lot of trouble with the ACLU. (This was partially my fault, but it probably would have happened anyway.)

Tracking nominally exists here, but it doesn’t do much good. It probably can’t do any good, given that it would have to operate within the constraints imposed by the fact that local politics are third-world as hell and will remain so for as long as democracy exists here, but it could be made better by, for example, having one magnet program for the entire county and putting it in a separate school.

On the other side of the Potomac, they have a school like that. But the civil rights types are crawling up their ass.

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As far as school programs go, talented and gifted programs are not often supplemental, they are often entire separate curriculums that happen to have share a school building (with magnet schools, they even have their own buildings.) Most of them have a separate teaching staff.

As I said, I’ve worked with several large city school districts all over the country, and every single one had accelerated tracks for gifted students, and all but 1 had vocational programs to split off the low performing students from the rest of highschool students. You could argue that maybe more tracks would be better, or that tracks should split off earlier/later but it seems silly to argue tracking doesn’t exist.

In several districts I worked in (for instance, Dallas, Texas) there was often defacto self-segregation. There were latino schools, black schools, white schools,etc (Lincoln high was primarily black and the highschool with a confederate colonel for a mascot was primarily black). In order to lessen the obvious segregation issue, one of the IB (a high achieving/gifted) highschool program was slapped into the middle of a latino highschool, which lead to a situation with a 90% white gifted program in the middle of a 95% latino ‘normal’ highschool program. No one is worried about getting sued.

Most decisions as to curriculums and what not are made by school boards staffed with members who have literally no qualifications (education, law or otherwise), or made at a state legislature level. Lawsuits are really not a consideration.

Its possible that people worry about suspending/disciplining students disproportionately. But given the defacto segregation of schools, it seems unlikely (of course the all black school suspends all kids, etc).

Regardless- tracking exists in school districts all over the US, and test designed to measure intelligence exist in large companies all over the US. Stating they are functionally illegal is probably not even hyperbole, its just wrong.

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To be fair, a later report suggest that this difference disappeared in multivariate analysis when corrected for behavioral problems observed by the teacher — but that uncritically accepts the teacher’s evaluation as accurate, which is the problem to begin with.
(http://www.onderwijsinspectie.nl/binaries/content/assets/Actueel_publicaties/2011/Onderadvisering+van+allochtone+leerlingen.pdf)

In addition, that report ignores the aspect of polling of student experiences in in secondary school. Those polls backup the original report, not the multivariate analysis.

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Do you have a source for your account of that Dutch school bias (immigrants given advice to apply for a lower level schools than whites with a same test score)? This sounds very relevant to my interests, but googling fails me, most likely because I can’t think of the right search terms.

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