People have asked me what happens when thousands of kids are using the app and the entire college landscape is changed. I think that will be great. We should put the decision in the hands of students and families. But that’s also a huge mind-shift. That takes time to do. It can’t be mass produced.

So what I heard them saying to me is that, in grade 7, my son would not be given what he needed for the job he wanted one day. All because he did not write his name on the correct line and because he needed to scoot over four inches when he gave a presentation.

Educational sociologists like Prof. Allen set out to answer a pretty broad question: Do schools solve, create, or replicate inequities? If I put myself in that category of scholar, I will say that schools create and replicate, and with questions like what Prof. Allen posed for us, they could solve inequities.

We correct or confirm that these algorithms are correct when we do the behavior that it predicted. In data science, put simply, the percentage of correct predictions is called entropy. So a programmer should set entropy at a high enough rate to make the thing true, or valid.

There are so many dilemmas with this. So many…I mean, a tremendous amount. But I am only going to focus on two. I am most interested in how racism shows up in these and the types of information bias that occurs and why.

I initially wasn’t going to say anything on affirmative action. That isn’t because it is a hot topic or because I feared internet retaliation. While legitimate concerns for myself, I initially thought people who are so invested in a topic, must know a lot about it. I have quickly realized that this isn’t the case. In our current climate, weighing in on topics that one knows nothing about is a popular way to operate. And, unfortunately, the less compassion and understanding one exhibits when they operate in this way, the better. This means that we only hear from ill-informed, mean people. Therefore, I decided to write something about affirmative action, but make it less about academic and legal arguments (I’m happy to plug my thesis, if you’re interested in academic and legal arguments) and focus more on what well-intentioned folks need to know.

If this were even five years ago, the above question wouldn’t be seen as politically charged. But today it is. And that in and of itself is a political tactic. One side says here are the solutions to racism. The other says racism doesn’t exist. Then you end up arguing about the existence and not the solutions. They’ve won without providing any solutions. It’s distasteful because it assumes you are too lazy and too stupid (honestly) to notice what they did. And there are people who think this is especially entertaining on television or social media. And there are those who think the mere mention of centuries of enslavement, holocaust, and genocide is more hurtful than being the descendants of those who experienced that. And again, we let them get away with that thinking when we don’t educate ourselves, find some humility, and act with empathy. And you also have to remember that the people who are saying these things know they are lying to you, because they went to law schools where critical race theory was part of the core curricula AND where the theory was developed. But they’re counting on you to be too lazy to figure that out. So here goes my attempt at describing critical race theory.

There is some misconception about who is underserved. In short, I think about underserved in education to mean a student does not have robust access to the resources needed for success in education. That does include funding, but there are many more ways that students do not have access to these critical resources.