<story><title>Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/us/politics/asian-students-affirmative-action-harvard.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>40acres</author><text>This argument, while important, is the low hanging fruit of the affirmative action debate in my opinion.&lt;p&gt;We would not need affirmative action if legacy based admissions wasn&amp;#x27;t so prevalent in top schools.&lt;p&gt;We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding to support teachers and enable smaller class sizes, test prep for students to take specialized exams, and after school extracurriculars, both academic and non-academic to prepare them for college.&lt;p&gt;The best elementary schools in the nation are driven by property taxes, how many people do you know bought their house because of the school district? You probably did. Yet we really don&amp;#x27;t take these things into account when having these discussions. Everyone wants a fair and equitable opportunity for students to get a quality education but to really do so we need drastic reform to really enable that. There&amp;#x27;s enough political will to tackle the symptom that is AA but very few people want to tackle the causes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nostrademons</author><text>&amp;quot;The best elementary schools in the nation are driven by property taxes, how many people do you know bought their house because of the school district?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I wonder how much of this is everyone mistaking causation vs. correlation.  School districts with high property taxes tend to have a number of other features in common, like: stable 2-parent households; high incomes; ability to afford private tutors and enrichment opportunities; highly-educated parents; exposure to a wide social network of high-achieving peers; lack of environmental stressors; and probably genetic endowments for health &amp;amp; intelligence.&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of studies that have tried to tease out how much effect the educational system actually has on student outcomes, once you&amp;#x27;ve controlled for parental wealth&amp;#x2F;intelligence&amp;#x2F;education&amp;#x2F;etc?</text></comment>
<story><title>Asian-American Students Suing Harvard Over Admissions Win Justice Dept. Support</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/us/politics/asian-students-affirmative-action-harvard.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>40acres</author><text>This argument, while important, is the low hanging fruit of the affirmative action debate in my opinion.&lt;p&gt;We would not need affirmative action if legacy based admissions wasn&amp;#x27;t so prevalent in top schools.&lt;p&gt;We would not need affirmative action if every school district in America recieved proper funding to support teachers and enable smaller class sizes, test prep for students to take specialized exams, and after school extracurriculars, both academic and non-academic to prepare them for college.&lt;p&gt;The best elementary schools in the nation are driven by property taxes, how many people do you know bought their house because of the school district? You probably did. Yet we really don&amp;#x27;t take these things into account when having these discussions. Everyone wants a fair and equitable opportunity for students to get a quality education but to really do so we need drastic reform to really enable that. There&amp;#x27;s enough political will to tackle the symptom that is AA but very few people want to tackle the causes.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>educationdata</author><text>Your assumption is wrong. Even if there is no legacy based admissions, even if every school district in America received proper funding for everything, Black students will still have significantly low educational attainment and achievement. It is because the extremely high percentage of Black kids living under single parenthood family [1], and there is no educational &amp;#x2F; societal intervention can reverse its impact on Black kids&amp;#x27; education and many many other aspects in their lifes.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nces.ed.gov&amp;#x2F;programs&amp;#x2F;digest&amp;#x2F;d16&amp;#x2F;tables&amp;#x2F;dt16_102.20.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nces.ed.gov&amp;#x2F;programs&amp;#x2F;digest&amp;#x2F;d16&amp;#x2F;tables&amp;#x2F;dt16_102.20.a...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>