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Comment by burfog | Hacker News Reader

The big losers would be the bright and willing children.

It's hard enough being a nerdy kid today. Such kids almost always are in decent places because kids tend to be like their parents. Kids with the potential to succeed come from parents with the potential to succeed.

Education doesn't work if the classroom is full of kids who can't behave. Education doesn't get very advanced if the classroom is full of kids who aren't bright and willing to study.

Mix things up, and what do you get? A few strangely poor-yet-viable kids will move from very bad schools to slightly bad schools (nice but insignificant) while all the bright promising kids will end up in less-effective schools. The best schools will cease to exist. (by changing that is; they don't physically go away)

It does make us more equal, largely by inhibiting the success of our brightest and hardest-working students. Is this what you want?

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It may be possible to make educational opportunity depend less on parents' wealth (as the GP wants us to do) while still avoiding the problem you raise here.

My public middle-and-high schools were attended by a very wide quality-range of students, and they did an excellent job segregating students within the school into different classes according to academic ability.

There was mobility in that students who performed very well in the B-level classes were able to join A-level classes in subsequent semesters while poorly performing students were advised to move downward. Most of the subjects had three ability levels (A, B, G). There were even some students who would excel in one subject and take AP english or history while remaining at a more normal level in the STEM subjects.

Most importantly, I am convinced that the A-level students at my highschool received just about as good an education as they could find at any public school in the country. At the same time that G level and some B-level students were preparing to graduate and not go to college, most of my classmates in the A group were graduating having completed college-freshman-or-sophomore-level calculus and many were receiving acceptance letters from Ivy-league universities.

I don't know for sure whether or not this type of arrangement is common, but it seems to me like it shows that having a mixture of academic abilities in the same neighborhood need not be a disaster.

There's much to like about this comment, and I thinking tracking within a school is a good idea that deserves to come back after some time in the wilderness.

That said, I'd quibble with your first sentence. While I'd certainly agree that making educational opportunity depend less on parents' wealth is a very good thing, that wasn't the thrust of my comment. The main point I was raising had to do with how coupling housing and schools makes the housing market inefficient and so collectively costs society. Imagine if what school a child went to was determined by what car his parents drove. People might well go out and mortgage their futures, as described in the article, in order to buy Ferraris so that their children could go to the best schools. And the price of Ferraris would increase in commensurate fashion. But even if a chunk of that cost was paying for the school access they want, they'd also be buying cars they might not necessarily want. It would make much more sense for all concerned if people could buy the thing they wanted directly, perhaps by paying for private school, than to have this proxy good.

I suspect part of the problem is that private schools seem too elitist for many American's democratic tastes, but what exactly is the difference between a private school and a "public" school where the price of admission is the purchase of a multi-million dollar home? As in so many policy areas if we could talk honestly about what we want and what's going on, we could have less convoluted and more straightforward policy arrangements to further our goals.

Interesting! I definitely didn't think hard enough while reading your last post.

You're suggesting that, if we switched to funding what-are-now-public schools directly through tuition payments made by the students attending them, then that might amount to a more just (or at least generally more satisfying) system than what we have now?

Or is there another policy you think would be better?

I wouldn't want to go to an all private pay system, that would leave children without means out of luck. I do think there is a role for private schools, I went to one myself for high school and was very happy with the experience.

Anyway, there are a variety of different ways we could imagine loosing the tight coupling between housing and schooling. I mention downthread that I think school choice / vouchers is a promising approach, but I am open to other ideas as well.

The difference is the tuition will be gone, but a house will still have its value. And since the house is in an area with a good school system, its value has probably risen :-).

It's certainly not a fair system.

Short of assigning cities to people via lottery, there is no way to make schools equal. Good schools are made by having good people (students, parents) and good people will pay a premium to be among other good people.

The fairness depends on what "fair" means. You seem to think it would be fair for the people who create good schools (primarily by providing good students) to get stuck with mediocre schools. They put in all the extra value, but get nothing much in return. That doesn't seem fair to me.

The mortgage interest on a million dollar home is more than private school tuition.

Many families buying these homes have several children. Property tax scales only loosely with family size, but tuition is typically linear.

Perhaps. Seems like the interest on an 800K loan would be about 30K in the first year, which is less then private school tuition around here. But you can't really compare the full amount as you've got to live somewhere, and you get a tax deduction as well.

And once you have 2 kids...

Aside from your circular reasoning (kids that are sucessful are successful), you could transpose this argument back half a century and have faulty rationale that many whites used to justify segregation of academic institutions at all levels. The success of Jewish students from "less successful" backgrounds once anti-Semitism was largely dismantled demonstrates how this was absurd on its face.

It's not circular. It's like this: You can burn coal in a fire, and you can make the fire bigger by adding coal. You can call that circular, but it's provably true. Kids tend to succeed if they are surrounded by success. Parents set demands, peers provide competition, etc.

As for the Jewish students... well isn't it nice that the law does not block them from moving into the better school districts? The same applies to anybody else. If you are successful, you can move into the good school district. This has been true for about 47 years in the USA. Nobody is stopping anybody.

Don't want to pay? Clearly you don't care about education, and your child would likely degrade the educational environment. Can't pay? It's pretty much the same thing, but with a small non-zero chance of being wrong, and maybe you should homeschool.

There is no perfect system. :-(

It's not circular at all, it is simply a fact that the education system works that way. Why is Harvard prestigious? Because it has a policy of only admitting people who would be successful whether they went to Harvard or not... And "Harvard dropout" carries as much cachet at "Harvard graduate", which should tell you something.

It don't believe that's how it works. Here's another question to demonstrate this: How did the University of Michigan become a prestigious public university? In part, by accepting all the bright Jewish students that Harvard blocked from admission because of racial quotas. The subsequent success and honors of their alumni built up their reputation and donor base to what it is today. So aside from this argument being unfalsifiable and circular itself (those who went to Harvard would've been successful if they didn't go to Harvard, but they went to Harvard...), we would have to accept that all the Jewish students rejected from Harvard we're just never going to be successful anyway, which the historical example invalidates.

... In other words they were successful despite not going to Harvard!

I didn't say it was a good system; just observed that it is how it is.

So basically you are saying that poor kids have no "potential to succeed" and should be kept segregated?

The most important factor in the success of a child is arguably the stability of their home life. A poor kid with two dedicated parents can very easily get further in life than the wealthy child of a nasty divorce. And left in the dust is the kid that was "raised by the wolves," so to speak, in a ghetto, no matter how much government assistance the family receives to normalize their situation. Higher income of course confers countless perks that the highest achievers can take advantage of, but when understanding the majority of the population it is most useful as a heuristic for stability of home life.

It is nearly impossible to do justice to both sides when they are starting from such different places in life. How do you level the playing field when one was read bedtime stories to since they were a toddler and the other entered school not knowing how to read? How does the kid from an average nuclear family fare with the kids whose parents cannot even be trusted to feed them? How does a kid sheltered in a quiet suburban neighborhood feel safe around a kid that grew up fighting on the streets?

For decades the focus of the system has very clearly been on trying to offset the damage incurred in the home life of these children. And sadly, it has utterly failed at fixing multigenerational poverty. Indeed, policies stemming from No Child Left Behind seem to have made the problem even worse, raising generations of problem children who have been emboldened by weak administration that provides little consequence for consistently disrupting classes or assaulting students or even teachers!

The sad truth is that you can't fix home problems at school, and that our educational and social policies have only enabled the proliferation of broken homes.

You just said that rich kids are too weak to survive in the real world, and the solution for that is to crack down on poor kids.

Yes. We do the exact same with disabled students. Yet no one talks about them. I suppose because it is because "looking out for the poor" makes people feel good.

Aren't public schools supposed to have special education resources? I don't know about other schools but the schools I grew up in had disabled students. They just often weren't in the same classes as the higher-achieving kids. But that's no different from students being in different accelerated, AP, or IB classes.

Interesting. How do you plan to keep the plebs from revolting once you eliminate the last vestige of social mobility?

They are exhausted from working minimum wage jobs, and the police will clean up any rabble-rousers.

This is how it is in England; its called the Comprehensive System. Dreamed up and implemented by people who make very sure their own kids go to Grammar schools, of course.

It does make us more equal, largely by inhibiting the success of our brightest and hardest-working students. Is this what you want?

A. The brightest folks are not always the hardest-working. "Hard-working" in a student means blowing time on stupid worksheets and memorization instead of devoting resources to playful exploration of knowledge.

B. There is more aggregate value in having everyone do a bit better than having an occasional student who's amazing and pampered. Especially if they then proceed to go leave and never interact with the local economy again.

C. If your society is predicated on the notion of the occasional brilliant genius popping up to care for the slavering morons, maybe your society should fail.

> B. There is more aggregate value in having everyone do a bit better than having an occasional student who's amazing and pampered. Especially if they then proceed to go leave and never interact with the local economy again.

It's not that easy. For a well-functioning society it is indeed better to invest educational resources broadly to have everyone do a bit better. However, in many scientific disciplines (and especially in areas such as mathematics and theoretical physics) it seems most progress comes from a small number of high impact individuals (e.g. Newton, Einstein, Feynman etc). Thus, for robust scientific progress you should actually direct your educational resources towards the most promising kids.

Ultimately then your preferred distribution of educational resources depends on your values. If you care more for scientific progress than for social issues, then it is rational to favor targeted rather than broad spending of educational resources.

I personally do care about both, but faced with a choice I'd go for scientific progress because ultimately advances in science, technology and medicine prove to be the best way to reduce human suffering.

Pitting social issues against scientific progress is a false binary. Feynman, for example, was a Jewish kid from a remarkably normal family whose genius flourished in the more progressive atmosphere of New York City (less anti-Semitism and good public schools). Since genius of this kind seems to manifest infrequently and anomalously, making sure wherever it appears it isn't crushed under prejudice or denied sufficient opportunity seems like it should be a high priority.

"The brightest folks are not always the hardest-working."

I sure know it, because I was a bit lazy, but they do tend to go together. Even if they didn't, I'm fine grouping them together. The distinction doesn't matter for my purpose. Crudely, say that success potential is the product of those two. Multiply hours of effort by IQ if you like. Anyway, it doesn't matter for my purpose.

"There is more aggregate value in having everyone do a bit better than having an occasional student who's amazing and pampered."

That all depends on the trade-off. How much will you hurt the top 10% and how much will you help the lower 50% by the proposed change? If the hurt is great (likely) and the help is minor (likely) then the result is a loss.

This is some pretty blatant elitism. A domination loop is utterly apparent in your comment. As is typical, it uses it's consequences to justify it's continuation. Success is a fundamentally relative designation. It basically means winning. Which implies the exclusivity of success. Only some people get to have it.

> Kids with the potential to succeed come from parents with the potential to succeed.

There's another designation. One you have a genetic incentive to profess. Shame on you. Honestly. We should improve education by... improving education. As in the process by which we educate any arbitrary person. This "who deserves it" business is a distraction that perpetuates itself.

Rejection of the elite is destructive. Without the elite, we would have at best a 3rd-world situation. We need the elite.

There is no "process by which we educate any arbitrary person". Some won't succeed, no matter what portion of our resources we blow on them. The mere attempt causes our best teachers to leave the profession; few enjoy being powerless babysitters.

Your "who deserves it" terminology has a problem. It suggests that we are dishing out reward or punishment, but really could provide the best for everybody. We can't actually provide the best for everybody. This is partly because resources (including non-clonable human teachers) are limited, and partly (mostly) because the less-capable students interfere with education for the more-capable students.

> A few strangely poor-yet-viable kids will move from very bad schools to slightly bad schools (nice but insignificant) while all the bright promising kids will end up in less-effective schools

I may have overstated my position. I know there are some intractable kids that can't be educated. I just don't think the success of parents is a good measure for us to be using here. Not because it isn't a good one. It is. But because it disincentives anyone without such parents from even bothering to try. They will always be measured as the child of a not-successful person. Many such "poor-yet-viable" kids become indistinguishable from the intractable kids very quickly when they become aware of such attitudes. It is far more destructive. We only need an elite in proportion to scarcity. It is in fact only when we can provide an even playing field that the elite can be elite and not merely aristocratic.

>Education doesn't work if the classroom is full of kids who can't behave.

Education doesn't work, full stop. Or at least, it doesn't do what you think it does. The point isn't to provide a learning environment, or provide resources for students to learn. After all, education isn't paid for by an equity slice of the alumni's human capital. No, it's paid for and administered by government officials, working on the behalf of employers and parents. And what they want isn't bright, curious, and inquisitive people - they're happy when they get them, but they've got much bigger concerns. Obedience, reliability, conformity, conscientiousness, and pliability are all much bigger things that they want to cultivate.

Like, it speaks to the success of the educational system that you think it's hard to be a nerdy kid in today's educational environment and that school is a poor learning environment for so many children, and you don't immediately follow that up with something like "and that's why my children aren't going to school".

Education doesn't work, full stop.

Most Americans learned how to read, write, and do math in schools. They aren't perfect, but I think you underestimate how much learning goes on just to become a functioning citizen.

Most Americans hate doing math, do not read for pleasure, and rarely write outside of work. That's not anywhere close to success. The most important skill for getting good at something is enjoying it, and our current educational system is actively counterproductive on that axis.

Most Americans hate doing math, do not read for pleasure, and rarely write outside of work.

But even you don't deny that they can. For some reason you seem to think that teaching those things is trivial or easy.

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