I’m looking at this guy’s substack. He looks like a secret reactionary. “Anti woke identity politics”, yuk.
Honestly, it’s the substack of a non researcher. We don’t have to give a fuck about his non published findings. Also his Wikipedia page makes him look terrible.
this was a particularly funny post of his. i almost kind of get his frustration, there isn’t a cohesive left wing political project in the US, so you look silly acting like there is. This century’s “woke” is last century’s “hippie”; he’s getting mad at a shifting sense of what’s polite, what’s considered right and wrong; there’s no earnest political movement behind it, just cultural evolution.
I have no idea wtf they’re talking about. Standardized testing has always been a scam to sell more standardized testing. Idk or care if it accurately measures anything, that’s never mattered. It’s only ever been used to tear chunks out of public school funding so private firms can feast, and to re-implement segregation by starving “under performing” (minority) schools of resources. Literally no living human being except this nerd actually cares of standardized testing actually measures what it claims to measure.
It’s only ever been used to tear chunks out of public school funding so private firms can feast, and to re-implement segregation by starving “under performing” (minority) schools of resources.
The old “the purpose of a system is what it does”
In a socialist society, standardized testing could be useful, but as it is its purpose Is to segregate schools and steal money from children’s education.
But you see, you can tell it’s a great idea because of how much american education has improved in the last few decades!
I also love to bring this point up when talking about antidepressants.
dudes tilting at, i don’t even know, something less of a presence in real life than windmills
first two paragraphs: ‘oh i’m not talking about: literally every valid complaint about standardized testing—i’m talking about people (fucking WHO??) insisting the very concept of tests are invalid’
and then all this hogwash to disprove these definitely real ‘liberals’—which seems mostly to consist of explaining what and how assessments are. i’m sure a descriptive argument would get you very far with someone philosophically opposed to the idea lol
Right? He painstakingly goes over the minutia of how test are made, then at the very end admits that
[tests show] deep inequality along racial and class lines
but he has no broader analysis. He’d rather take apart the most vapid 150-character tweets than generously consider why people feel so negatively about tests.
Like, yes, test show racial and class inequality, and they have done for a very long time. But we’ve never done anything with that insight. Instead, the test are used to dole out grants and resources to the highest performing schools and students. We could use the tests as a tool for measuring and iterating on our institutions of education. But we don’t. We just use them to decide who gets full ride scholarships. Most people understand that, even if they can’t articulate it well. Even he understands that! He just isn’t interested in that conversation.
i kind of get it, when you know the subject and people talk about it in ignorant ways it can stick in your craw. but before you pen a 30 page screed you gotta step back and think whether you’re dealing with some clumsy rhetoric or deeply held conviction.
maybe ‘tests’ is generally implied to mean ‘standardized tests’ and it isn’t spelled out every time? use some context clues instead of fabricating a mass anti-intellectual movement?
De Boer
But jokes about racist sounding names aside: Of course they’re predictive! The entire smokescreen of “meritocracy” is built on these numbers. If access to higher education “certifications” and employment were suddenly gatekept by, say, one’s 100m sprint time, that would be remarkably predictive too
This person writes like a reactionary 16 year old that gets dunked on so hard on Twitter that they go have straw men shower arguments in their head and then save them for eternity on their little blog.
meme: what no theory does to a mfer
high level: This article hand-wrings and does grievance politics about decades old critiques of standardized testing without explaining them or addressing them. Also if you’re gonna be mad at liberals or whatever it should be clear that you’re a leftist and this article takes the facts-and-logical guy approach which is a red flag.
low level: The author is literally wrong seemingly every other sentence and it’s only hidden by circular reasoning. Many sentences are essentially: “People with higher SAT scores were better at getting into college, so the SAT is good at predicting whether someone will get into college.” Ironic given that this guy clearly wants to be really ‘looking-at-the-numbers’, ‘data-driven’, etc, etc. If he actually tried to stay on topic and not immediately complain about ‘liberals’ being mean to his friends, the SAT, the article would start breaking down immediately because he has nothing to say besides “how dare people question established power.”
“Educational Assessments” are not equivalent to “Standardized Testing.”
This is most commonly and directly expressed as resistance to the SATs, but opposition to educational assessment writ large has become a key part of liberal cultural identity and is a growing concern in leftish climes, driven in part by affluent parent resistance to state standardized tests that frequently confuses fair questions about the extent of testing and its uses with misguided swipes at their effectiveness in assessing and predicting student ability.
Hey guys, is it leftist to want your kids’ teachers to assess the kids they teach based on the courses they develop instead of a third party assessment program that requires teachers to throw away any educational plan they make and teach exclusively to the test the third party makes?
liberal skepticism towards educational assessment is totally unjustifiable through reference to the evidence
I did not go to public school in a liberal place, everybody complained about the standardized tests in the deep red state I grew up in.
They attack the tests for **revealing ** racial stratification without acknowledging that literally all educational data (grades, SAT/ACTs, state standardized tests, NAEP, graduation rates, disciplinary rates, and a vast number of ancillary indicators) show racial stratification, which suggests that the tests are more valid rather than less.
No, Freddie, the tests don’t just reveal racial stratification, they enforce it. That’s the critique. We already know there’s racial stratification, nobody needs the calipers measuring a kid’s head to figure this out.
To put it simply: liberal skepticism towards educational assessment is totally unjustifiable through reference to the evidence.
Education assessment is not the same thing as standardized testing. Me getting a bad grade on a vocabulary test and getting a low score on an IQ test will not have the same consequences for my life. One gives my teacher some means of figuring out if I need to work harder to learn the vocabulary, of it there is some issue that is keeping me from learning the vocabulary. Your SAT score isn’t something that tells somebody where you need to do more learning, it categorizes you individually or as a group and allows for that score to be used as a shortcut in deciding whether you get into another educational program.
Just completely ignores how our political systems shape academia and science. Even just ignoring the highly pertinent facts that funding is the most influential aspect of research and that western academia is rife with shoddy work and outright fraud, the framework through which you approach any science is going to color every aspect of your research and your findings. For example, from the literature, you could 100% make the statement that “ABA has been shown to be the most effective treatment for autism in an overwhelming amount of studies.” This is true because this research is coming from a liberal capitalist framework that views neurodivergence as a disease to be eliminated because it conflicts with our society and our systems. ABA definitely accomplishes that goal the best of all the different “treatments.” Obviously, the counterargument would be that ABA does a horrible job of actually improving the lives of people with autism, which is ostensibly a self-proclaimed goal of liberalism (and also a good opportunity to bring in the “the purpose of a system is what it does” statement to point out this contradiction).
You can see this when the author talks about “the SAT is actually a great predictor of future success.” Well, yes, because the point of it is to identify people who will succeed in the current system; a system of greed, corruption, anti-intellectualism, abuse, etc. Obviously, we argue against this because we want to change what it’s measuring and what is being rewarded. It also doesn’t examine the degree to which these scores function as the ends unto themselves, i.e. you are successful because you have a good SAT score, not because of the underlying intelligence or ability it is supposed to measure. Also does not take into account the degree to which these scores are a product of your wealth, race, parents’ educational attainment, etc. If we wanted to measure actual educational attainment and ability, not simply those who succeed in liberal capitalist society, we would find that the SAT and similar assessments do a very poor job of that.
Sorry for the rant lol, and there’s a million other ways to take this apart (I could talk about other “unmeritocratic” processes like grant funding as well), but I hope this makes sense.
I think traditionally this type of non-research position paper is called a “white paper”, and that seems incredibly apt.
I think this is another left-puncher who has completely and utterly failed to engage with the argument against him. You can’t just make up a guy to get mad at. Go read The Mismeasure of Man or whatever and then try to say that shit about g again.
I have some thoughts, yeah.
So there is extremely solid evidence of cognitive differences.
This is uncomfortable to liberals, but who cares. That’s nothing to do with is it true or not.
There was a guy called Charles Spearman about 100 years ago who gave groups tests on various cognitive abilities:
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General knowledge. What’s the capital of Bolivia?
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Visualising: which of these shapes can be made from these shapes?
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Give people 100 arithmetic questions like 13×37 to answer in three minutes. The questions are easy, but how many can you get in three minutes? It’s a test of speed.
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Vocabulary: do you know what ‘bellicose’ means?
It turns out there is a correlation between a person’s scores on these categories. Someone who scores high will score high across the board. Someone who scores low will score low across the board. Of course the correlation is not 100%, people have comparative strengths/weaknesses.
There’s no negative correlation, which would be a trade-off, e.g. being sharp verbally reduces your visual intelligence. Cross-culturally, girls and boys score the same.
This finding is extremely well replicated and solid. It is true cross-culturally: find a classroom of kids in Kerry, Caracas, Korea, and there’ll be bright/sharp kids in the class, and not-so-bright ones. That’s a robust finding regardless of how it fits anyone’s political views.
So yeah, we can test cognitive ability pretty well, there is a real phenomenon there.
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