Because intrinsic ability is such a vanishingly small part of the equation that we can't know who could actually be the best until we actually give everyone a fair shot.

There might be the rare generational talent that, starting in their discipline at age 18 with no prior exposure and poor nutrition, education, health, exercise, etc, could outcompete your average loser brought up with every advantage and private lessons from age 6, but in general I wouldn't expect talent to out in those circumstances.

And school's not supposed to be about filtering for rare generational talents, at least not first and foremost. It's supposed to be about getting everyone as far as they can go, and if we separate people into "smart" and "dumb" buckets before they're old enough to ever have actually gotten a chance, some people will be stuck in the "dumb" buckets their whole life that could've been a solid contributer to society if society ever cared enough to invest in them.

Or, another way of looking at it: Everything else is made to put a thumb on the scale. Everything else is designed from the ground up to advantage the advantaged. Public school is supposed to be one of the few institutions that mitigates that, that tries to put a thumb on the other side at least a little, to help level things out. And the people with the advantages hate that, and try their hardest to thwart it, whether through private schools, through pushing public schools to make different "tracks", or whatever.

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.

This broadly true but economy isn't run on NBA, NHL, MLA, i.e. a few 1000 of 5 standard deviation talent where separation is mostly genetics. Academia need to develop magnitude more passable high end workers, the genetic pool for that is large and system biases towards culture to fill 1,000,000s of 1-2 standard deviation brains. You need to hammer minor leaguers to see if they make it to rookie league or whatever level below AAA that system has demand for. Reasonable system would be to herd everyone through filtering process and throw drop outs into vocational training or soft subjects that should not be elevated on same level of STEM, not because they're less valuable people blah blah, but the pipeline should distinguish and prioritize strategic sectors.

I think it's because mental ability and personal worth is pretty strongly tied in the modern world, in that way calling someone deficient is like insulting them. I don't know if you can escape that dynamic, intellect is just very important in modern work and culture. To judge someone as mentally deficient is essentially relegating them to the bottom rungs of the modern economy and status hierarchy in a way that judging athletic ability doesn't do, so naturally it's not comfortable for people to make that judgement.

There's a huge difference in how much intrinsic athletic ability matters depending on the sport. It's a bigger factor in a sport like baseball or tennis where eyesight and coordination are so critical; you can only train those things to a limited extent. But for sports that rely more on strength and endurance than technical skill pretty much anyone has the potential to reach a high level of performance (not Olympic level but like NCAA division 3 level) regardless of intrinsic ability. It's mostly a matter of being disciplined and grinding out the workouts every day for years.

Don't kid yourself. I can tell who is and isn't a good athlete from 50 yards away just by how they walk. Hard work matters, but its more about eliminating those with talent rather than allowing those without talent to compete favorably. Also, its a self reinforcing cycle. You have talent, you win, winning is fun, you work harder to win more, goto step 2.

PS The cutoff from HS to college sports is about as extreme as the jump to the pros...its less than 1% each time.

I'm not kidding myself, I've seen it. Most people never even come close to reaching the limits of their "talent" or genetics.

athletic games are fun and there is some money in these small circles but that's not what runs the economy. So it's only affecting a very small percentage of society vs. mental ability which affect most of society. The french revolution, communism, capitalism, etc.. It is a very heated topic and it's about who gets to control/have power.

No one is saying there isn't, but it's objectively a stupid massive oversimplification of how complex things like a human brain and human learning really are.

For one, people used to be a lot better, do unless you think people are actively dumber, you argument doesn't hold.

School capabilities also correlates massively with things like access to resources and wealth of parents, and inversely with mental health.

We also have very strong incentives as a society, as an economy and as a democracy to have as many educated people as possible, to work on setting the best conditions possible for people to learn

What do you mean people used to do a lot better? As far as I know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect was a thing until recently.

The human body is quite complex as well.

Graduating a for profit private college that is aiming to maximize profit, by churning out specific degrees does not mean you are educated. Having a college degree is not synonymous anymore with well educated.

The measure (college degree) became a target, and thus it stopped functioning as intended.

Before devices and AI came. we're seeing a reversal of the Flynn effect trend