While it seems obvious that some students should be redirected to remedial classes, the evidence is that very few students made it past those courses. IOW, the obvious solution wasn't working.
Being an engineer, my instinct would be to fix those classes so that they did work. However, legislators think at a different level and reasoned that the remedial classes constituted a false promise that costs students dearly (time, money, hopes, and dreams).
I have been really puzzled by this situation and haven't been able to stop thinking about it since last night. I spent a long time chatting with an LLM and reading articles published by community college instructors and university faculty in California, and looking for examples in other states, the research (in California and other contexts) that examine the related problems with remedial courses.
I've learned a lot, but the one example I want to raise is one I learned about how some other community colleges have addressed the same problem. In some states that where the solution wasn't mandated or constrained by legislation, schools replaced their conventional placement test and remedial courses track with repeatable, low-stakes testing. When you fail the test, it points out where you were weak and directs you to study material, and then you can study only the parts you struggled with and retake it as soon as you want, as many times as you want, for free. If you fail repeatedly you're offered a kind of integrated online course that is self-paced rather than a fixed semester length and has a really favorable class size (15 students, 2 instructors). It's sold as a service community colleges can buy into, and I really know nothing about it, so I don't want to name the vendor. I don't know if their particular tests are actually good, of if their streamlined course recapitulate any of the failings of conventional remedial courses.
But the general outline seems... pretty good, right? It isn't expensive for the students, it isn't a lengthy detour, and it doesn't work by lowering standards or potentially fraudulently promoting unprepared students (which I imagine adjunct professors at community colleges are systemically pressured to do at institutions where administrators care about their pass rates).
I'm not sure if "Come back as soon as you're ready, here's where you struggled, here's where to get extra support if you need it, all of this is free" should be considered fixing the remedial courses or bypassing them, but it seems doable and like it addresses the time, money, and stigmatization/discouragement problems with old-school remedial tracks.
Anyway I hope California can get more creative here and try to get serious about measuring success (i.e., actually do more testing of learning outcomes when they make changes like this, instead of just looking at course completion rates). It seems like a solvable problem.
Fixing them is completely doable, and the solutions are obvious, as you point out. But the political will to accept the obvious consequences just isn't there.
Meaning, the demographic distribution of students taking (and re-taking) the entrance exam is likely to not match the distribution of the state as a whole.
Rather than seeing this as a positive because it leads to the advancement of those who would be otherwise held back from high paying jobs, it will be denounced in coded language.
You've done a nice job articulating why people support equity programs.
The sticking point is that there is a big difference between theory and practice. We end up with elimination of 8th grade algebra in SF, abandoning graduation requirements in Oregon, the Chicago teachers union tweeting that "testing is white supremacy", promoting kids before they have achieved grade level performance, political indoctrination in classrooms (both parties do this), dividing kids into identity groups (oppressors and oppressed), promotion of whole language learning over phonics, and active attacks on the concept of merit.
I will of course agree that equity programs are completely susceptible to flawed design and implementations, like everything else.
What makes it difficult to have productive conversations, is that it's very difficult to untangle who has a problem with a given program, versus with the concept of equity (as a theory to make things fair), versus with the fundamental goal of making things more fair, since not everyone even knows for themselves what side they're on, and they freely swap arguments and forces. This is, of course, hardly unique to equity programs, but I think that schools are somewhat unusually susceptible to strong, uninformed opinions, since everyone has to interact with them at some point in their life, and is affected by how they're run for the rest of their life, but not everybody has actually recently bothered to look under the hood. But, I will agree that there is nuance, and we may find that our current approach to thinking about equity programs is fundamentally flawed, and there's even some broad benefit to some level of tracking. I just want to push against people that follow their intuition and present that as established fact.
I will leave you with perhaps my most controversial opinion on the matter, and open myself up even further to criticism by saying that I don't have children, and don't currently intend to ever: People love to throw around the truism that it's natural for parents to want the best for their kids, that you can't ever blame parents for doing whatever they can to give their children every advantage, that, on an individual level, you shouldn't expect altruism from parents if it involves any sacrifice on their kids part. I strongly disagree. I think that parents should be able to recognize when granting their children an advantage disproportionately harms other kids, should value challenging their kids, pushing them to step up, to make their own sacrifices for the sake of others. If nothing else will motivate them, it should at least be clear that their kid will have to live in a world populated by other people's kids, and so we should want those other children to also be happy, healthy, functional, and well educated. Their child may face more competition, but that will also be healthy for them, and help them grow and develop as an adult. I think it's asinine to argue that parents should have a free pass to behave antisocially for the benefit of only their own kids, that it's a bit of a thought-terminating cliche that excuses parents from prosocial expectations. I understand that parents are, fiercely motivated to protect and nurture their children, and I don't think that instinct is wrong, but I think it can easily grow unhealthy, and that they have every bit as much of a responsibility as everyone else to think of others. Maybe more, since those others will eventually be the people that shape their children's world.
I am not convinced that separating students by ability harms anybody's academic performance. I think it's a false premise that a parent who wants their kid in advanced classes (or advanced schools) is behaving "antisocially."
When there is too great a difference in ability in a single classroom, teachers struggle to serve everyone's needs. I don't believe anyone is well-served by this.
>I am not convinced that separating students by ability harms anybody's academic performance.
You're not convinced that it can do that, that it typically does as currently implemented, or that it always will do that?
Presumably you agree that as long as a student is capable of keeping up with the material, they'll do better (in the long run if they get placed in) in a higher level class. Otherwise there would be no benefit in separating the students in the first place! I assume you also agree that we don't have any perfect tools for assessing a kid's potential. Thus, when separating kids, we will necessarily get some wrong, to their detriment. So, I hope, you're willing to concede that this could harm their academic performance.
Now, the extent to which that happens under any given paradigm is very much up for debate. But hopefully this illustrates how separating students by "ability" could harm "anyone's" academic performance.
History of women in the Python world: In 2006, the first two women were voted in as PSF fellows, Laura Creighton and Anna Martelli Ravenscroft. In 2008, there were two women on the PSF board, Gloria Willadsen and Allison Randal. The woman mentored by Guido was Emily Morehouse-Valcarcel. She is now on the steering committee but was not featured in the film. Less prominent in the documentary was Carol Willing who was on the initial steering committee. Also featured were Mariatta Wijaya and Lisa Roach-Carrier who were mentored by another developer.
And what projects do they have besides buying BTC like the parent comment mentioned? What tech have they built?
And yeah, BTC went up huge amounts, but certainly they were a large part of the buying pressure to get it there. But like you asked, how do they realize anything? Unless they get US government to start buying and shift their bags to the US tax payer, how do they do anything with their BTC? Besides using it as collateral to borrow even more money to inflate a even higher bubble?
