Thanks for compiling and posting this.
What is the source of the “Rank in Class” percentages? (I was under the impression that these varied from year to year.)
However, the sample size for lower GPA applicants was quite small and likely biased. For example GCs may have recommended that particular students who have lower GPA + something unique that Chicago likes apply, and recommend that students who have lower GPA without that something unique do not apply.
Which grouping(s) are the “lower GPA applicants?”
Is the bias unique to these lower GPA applicants or are you referring to GC admissions advice across all ranges?
Thanks.
(As for the asterisk admission, these charts are rolling, so the an admission from 2014 wouldn’t show up on later year stats, but it would show up on two previous years.)
HW is a 7-12 school. While some students take high school level courses while in 7th and 8th grade, their grades in those courses do not show up on their high school (9-12) transcript nor do they count for high school grade point calculations.
Yes, rank has variation from year to year. I arbitrarily chose the class profile from a midpoint year as a representation. To be precise, you’d need to do each year separately – 2014 % with 2014 rank, 2015 % with 2015 rank, …
I was talking about the groupings with smaller sample sizes. For example, only 11-12 kids applied in the 3.7-3.9 weighted GPA group, which appears to be approximately bottom 24-40% of the class. Only a small portion of bottom ~40% kids applied to Chicago… a smaller portion of kids applied from lower GPA groups than higher GPA groups. I suspect the few relatively lower GPA/rank students who applied to Chicago tended to have some unique characteristics, which contributed to them applying. It might be something that they or the GC thought would increase chance of being accepted. It might be thinking they had a unique characteristic that made them an especially good fit for Chicago.
The 3.3-3.5 weighted GPA admit appeared in the 2014-16 grouping but not the 2014-2015 grouping, implying he/she was in the year 2016. However, he/she did not appear in any other 2016 groupings, such as 2015-17 or 2016-18 – only 2014-16.
Agree that this presentation makes it look more like they are concerned just with getting the top half of the HW class. A scale of graduated weights can hide a B in a super-tough course; however, UChicago would be looking at the entire record not just the GPA so they’d make note of the difficulty level (particularly if above the average level of rigor) as well as the grade. Could that perhaps explain why the unweighted numbers looked more “meh” as they weren’t telling the whole story on the specific course choices?
We have the minority phenomenon of these dissident parents as described in the Bari Weiss piece, but it would seem that most parents wealthy enough to send their kids to HW and similar private schools are quite willing to go along with these CRT insertions in the curiculum. Yet these are the same parents who are highly focussed on using these elite schools as springboards to get their kids into elite colleges and thereafter into elite careers focussed on the acquisition of wealth and prestige. How is this explicable?
I suspect that the number of families really upset about this is being undercounted.
Many families sending their children to expensive private schools are doing so for two reasons. First, there is an explicit expectation that this will be a much better student experience than the toxic public school equivalent such as TJ, or Stuy, or Palo Alto High School.
Second, many have an implicit expectation that expensive private high schools improve admission chances to elite colleges. For the most part, that is not true, and that can come as a rude shock to many. Perhaps UChicago takes more, but that’s not enough to move the needle school wide.
Now with critical race theory, the explicit part of the contract, the promise of a better student experience, is also being violated according to those who disagree with it. But these families are already invested in the current school, and there are high switching costs.
The real question is what happens to the next set of potential students. Do wealthy families with bright children decide to pass on applying to Harvard-Westlake? Time will tell.
Everything is relative, though. The toxic publics are embracing CRT as well so it’s not like they suddenly become a better option. Although I can see a parent deciding not to spend $45,000/yr on poor student experience AND poor college outcomes when they can get that in the public schools for $0 marginal cost.
Most parents who send their kids to HW are savvy enough to understand that unless they have strong hook their kids are extremely unlikely to get into HYPS from HW, and that unhooked kids would probably have better odds at HYSP attending and excelling at a public or even a less competitive private (or by moving to North Dakota.) So why send kids to such a school?
Believe it or not, many parents send their kids to schools like HW because they want their kids to get a stellar education. More specifically, they want their kids to be surrounded by extremely bright, talented, and curious peers, and taught by outstanding educators who go out of their way to help the kids get all they can out of their educational opportunity. (Does any of this sound familiar to anyone? Or do you all think your child’s Chicago education is about nothing more than prestige and a stepping stone to of a high paying job?)
Besides, even if they don’t make it to HYSP, their prospects aren’t too bad. Kids who manage to get into the upper half of their class seem to have a good shot at getting into great schools like Wash U, USC, or Chicago, and looking at the matriculation, even kids in the lower half of the class seem to be going to excellent schools.
As for the planned reworking HW’s US History curriculum, maybe the parents see value in an education where their kids learn to think critically about the extent to which power dynamics have shaped institutions, society, and even their own lives. I imagine such a skill would come in handy in a variety of lucrative careers.
If anyone hasn’t had a enough of HW-Chicago connections, keep an eye on Lucas Giulito, who pitched a great game yesterday for the White Sox. (He’s one of three HW pitchers who started on opening day for their respective mlb ball clubs.)
There’s hardly anything new or very unsettling about the concept of power dynamics in history. But are you quite sure that that’s the only thing on the menu here? I’m thinking about the parts of DiAngelo and Kendi that reduce us to the color of our skins and tell us to stop being logical, thinking independently, and getting things done on time because that is, well, characteristic of people who aren’t the right color.
These are ideas hostile to a humane education and to so much else in our culture - to all that our greatest moralists and thinkers have had to say, to the accomplishments of our civilization, indeed to the very concept of accomplishment. Calling it “an education where kids learn to think about the extent to which power dynamics have shaped institutions,” etc. is like calling death by asphyxiation a suspension of the intake of air.
CRT tells us that disputing and disagreeing is off limits and just shows we haven’t got the message. Certainly doing that is not a good career move, whether inside or outside the classroom. Perhaps one’s adaptibility to that orthodoxy is a skill that “comes in handy in a variety of lucrative careers,” but it’s a skill that isn’t good for the soul. As an old Chicago prof used to tell us, “ideas have consequences.”
The important difference is that with the public schools, parents can complain loudly to the school administrators without fear that their children will be kicked out. And if that doesn’t work, raise it to the school board, or even run for the school board.
In contrast, these H-W parents feel they don’t have that power. But it looks like someone still does, and I suspect it is the wealthy donors who can signal privately if they approve or disapprove of a certain policy. Something happened that prompted Jim Best, head of Dalton, to leave a year after embracing CRT.
The stellar education part is available at many public schools across the country, usually in more expensive towns, but still less expensive than private school. My children went to one, and my D at UChicago felt she was much better prepared than most Horace-Mann kids she knew.
Something of this sort happened to a private school in our town as well. Reading between the lines, it’s clear that the issue concerned differences over the commitment to social justice and diversity. It’s ironic, since the school was founded on strong principles of social justice and equity in education and has a diversity level (racial, ethnic, nationality, SES) that rivals any school in the country. 50% of the student body is on scholarship! I’m curious to know what this guy proposed that was flatly rejected, but I can see a scenario where the fundamental principles of CRT would glaringly contradict the guiding and long-standing educational philosophy of this school. So I think it might have been more than just benefactors who were pushing back.
Exactly. That’s why much of the outrage against CRT strikes me as hollow.
So long as the school isn’t basing its curriculum on the overly simplistic caricatures pedaled by CRT’s detractors, I think it will manage to muddle through.
Congratulations on your access to a stellar public school, and to your daughter on feeling better prepared that most of the kids she knows from Horace-Mann! Not sure what it has to do with my post, though.
When people are spending ~$180k for an education that could be otherwise free, they expect some benefit as a result. For the sake of discussion, let’s classify the possible benefits as follows:
Superior academic education
More supportive environment
Improved college outcomes
Let’s leave aside point 3 for now, as there is general agreement that there is not much of a benefit here.
The point of my previous post is that a superior academic environment can be had at some public schools “for free”, which in reality means paying the higher housing costs of towns with excellent schools. But that is typically far less than $180k per student.
But my children will be the first to state that their high school was a “good place to be from”, rather than “a good place to be”. It was overly competitive. In contrast, their friends from private schools spoke highly of their highly school experience.
But if students are believing that CRT is targeting them unfairly, then the only real remaining benefit of a private school education disappears. And if that is the case, what is the point of paying $180k?
ETA: I suppose a fourth benefit of these elite private high schools are networking opportunities that continue long past high school. I expect that alumni of these schools continue to help each other during their careers.
I dislike almost all the explicit and central tenets and themes of CRT and think the U of C’s Richard Posner had it right when he described it as a way of looking at the world that “turns its back on the western tradition of rational inquiry, forsaking analysis for narrative.” However, I would be willing to see it dealt with as a bona fide perspective in the teaching of history or other subjects. It would be fine in my book if it were presented as what it calls itself - a theory. However, in the accounts I have read that isn’t the way it’s done in the classroom. It’s a strange theory that doesn’t brook dissent or even discussion. Its tenets are debatable, but no debate is allowed. It is more like gospel than scholarship. That’s the concern of the parents in the Bari Weiss piece. To say that they are posing as victims certainly comes out of the CRT playbook, but that’s the way it goes with this theory: everyone is either a hammer or a nail.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture included the most - frankly, shocking - graphic as part of their online Talking about Race exhibit a couple years ago. “White” traits such as rational thought, the scientific method, hard work, respect for authority, delayed gratification and so forth were highlighted. The Smithsonian has since apologized - due, I suspect, to unanimous negative feedback. Read about it here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article244309587.html The problem is that this graphic wasn’t meant to be a satire or irony. It was a completely genuine attempt to help people of color understand that to have adopted or developed some of these traits means that they are taking on “whiteness” or “white dominant culture.” It is a consequence of racialist thinking and an example of how CRT is applied to an educational exhibit at an otherwise respectable national institution.
The graphic includes the following statement: "White dominant culture, or whiteness, refers to the ways white people and their traditions, attitudes, and ways of life have been normalized over time and are now considered standard practices in the United States. And since white people still hold most of the institutional power in America, we have all internalized some aspects of white culture — including people of color.”
So when @mtmind - a proponent of CRT by their own admission - talks of the value in understanding how “power dynamics have shaped institutions, society, and even their own lives,” perhaps we can remember this graphic. Since power = whiteness to a critical race theorist, I’d wonder what any sort of curriculum redesign proposes to do with that knowledge.
I doubt the critical race theorists would object to Posner’s characterization. As to CRT as an actual theory - yes, history, literature, law, and other academic departments have their CRT scholars and they presumably compete in the realm of ideas along with others. Whether CRT by its design is capable of “competing” is another matter. Much of these fads sweep in and stick around for a few decades before dwindling. CRT has really caught hold among schools of education, but Ed schools and the like have been experimenting on children for decades now; classrooms are labs - and some K-12’s are even honest about their origins (eg the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools). Most of these are attempts to close the “achievement gap” but I’m not sure that CRT-inspired exercises are going to be successful there. Because of systemic racism, the thinking goes, there’s no way for students of color to close that gap under the current power structure (ie the dominant white culture). You have to reshape the culture and change the metrics. The result is stuff like the UC system’s recent decision to go “Test Blind.” I’m predicting that many other schools will follow now that the floodgates are open.
So when a moderator specifically asks the two of us to end our conversation, you simply transition to talking about me instead of to me? Really?
Let me be clear. At the Moderator’s request, I’m finished discussing this with you. This means I am not going to explain or defend every out-of-context CRT provocation you can dig up, nor am I going to speak on behalf of this museum or any other group I know little about.
Um, I was responding to @Marlowe1 and my reference was to your comment #108, which was well past the earlier debate. I think the discussion had moved on to other sub-topics.
And please don’t feel obligated to discuss anything you know little about!