Considering what happened to the GOP I’m not sure the left should be striving for their own Tea Party style ideological purge.
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Sorry, I’m not an American, what’s wrong with SATs? Aren’t they just a bog-standard college placement test like you get everywhere?
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I can’t like this enough. You are abso-fucking-lutely correct.
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IKR? Who could have guessed that 40 years of systematically defunding the education system actually has real world effects!
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Yeah, but most of the other fucked up countries didn’t vote themselves into the mess Amerikans find themselves in today. They didn’t have a choice, we willingly voted for imbeciles to run the nation… into the ground.
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They’re great if you’re rich enough to afford SAT classes or to take the exam more than once to improve your score. They’re very regressive, and it’s amazing no one at the Jacobin considered that.
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or if you’re really smart and know latin.
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But if you’re rich, you can get around those requirements. And if you’re poor, your school still won’t teach Latin.
Hence: regressive.
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The DNC-approved argument that moderate Democrats are more likely to win is unproven, given that they haven’t. The argument that left-wing Democrats can win due to energizing people to actually come out to vote is thus, at a minimum, equally valid.
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That makes sense though in a devil’s advocate sort of vein you might say that’s not a problem with the SAT but with a poor education system. The SAT-equivalent prep classes were free in my tinpot little country. Hell, they even found some money to teach us Latin, no less.
SATs job isn’t to be regressive or progressive. It’s to measure something. Scholastic Aptitude, allegedly. How well it does so is one can of worms (allegedly it correlated to g quite well according to some light research I did), but the fact that it measures a smaller value with people who have been prevented from reaching their full intellectual potential is not a strike against it so much as society that lets human talent go to waste to the ruin of us all, ultimately, but especially those it chooses to abandon.
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I’m with you, Why vote for A over B when A damn near equals B? If enough people (5%) thought like you and I, the dominant parties would have to acknowledge mainstream (labor economics) concerns.
Voting for turd vs. vomit eliminates any concern for better than…well, that.
Hey, and name your terrible state!
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…because the DSA is not an electoral party, and has never run any candidate.
What the DSA does is (1) grassroots community building, and (2) endorsement. There are quite a few DSA-endorsed Democratic candidates.
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Jacobin is fairly centre-left these days; most of the radical left think they’re a joke.
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I doubt the center-left wants to claim the Jacobin either. Maybe there should be a parody-left category for them…
Why Manchin-style VichyDems are unnecessary and counterproductive:
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Last august, the author wrote this:
https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/08/18/standardized-tests-are-tools-of-inequality-not-equality/
so he may have changed his mind.
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I wish this was true, pockets of sanity in the world would give me hope. From the little guy with the mustache to Brexit, even major western countries have repeatedly voted themselves into the ground. (I would argue that Brexit is even worse than Trump, in that people voting for Trump did not believe they were voting for a radical change in their form of government.)
My experience as a Democrat in 8 states is that teachers form the largest single active block in most state Democratic parties, and of course the national leadership is voted in by (and often comprised of) the state party leaders. Drawing a distinction between teacher activism and the Party doesn’t make sense.
Ah, the sort of thinking that guarantees the oligarchy of the of the two party system.
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your logic is peccable
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That’s not what the issue is.
Indeed, them.
