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Comment by duaneb | Hacker News Reader

So shame them for being classist and racist. Public education is a public investment.

You're welcome to shame people moving their kids to better schools as classist and racist. It might work!

With that said, I have some doubts that such a policy would accomplish what you might hope for. Most people, even those who wish people wouldn't, understand and sympathize with parents trying to get the best possible education for their kids.

First let me say that by moving my family with two young kids to Oak Park, I was almost definitionally participating in the phenomenon that turn suburban public schools into de facto private schools. People move to Oak Park because it's on the Green and Blue CTA lines; it's a suburb that feels like living in a particularly nice residential part of Chicago. You move to Oak Park because you want all the perks of Chicago without exposure to its school system.

So with that having been said, and recognizing my own role:

Why exactly should we sympathize with parents who react to problems in their school systems by using their economic leverage both to exempt their own kids from those problems and also, by altering the tax base for their original school system, making those problems worse? Why is that praiseworthy? It doesn't seem praiseworthy to me. It seems to me like just another of those little pragmatic immoralities we all undertake regularly.

We have few problems seeing the problem when it takes the form of kids going to Choate and Bowdoin. But at the smaller scale we all deal with, we seem unable to recognize the same thing happening. We seem to believe can't possibly be a part of the problem. But, of course, we are.

I don't mean to crucify anyone for doing it. After all, I did it too. But I think we can reasonably draw the line at rationalizing or valorizing the de facto privatization of good public education in our country.

I don't know if I'd call it praiseworthy. I do think it's the sort of pragmatic immorality that a great many parents are happy to take on for the perceived benefits gained. As a result, it's easy to oppose for the large-scale effects but difficult to oppose as individual choices.

I think we should be careful about the difference between rationalizing and understanding the decisions parents make. The two are readily confused on the best of days, and political discussions about school quality generally don't happen on the best of days.

We all seem to have an enormous moral blind spot when it comes to our children competing with other children.

This is a tricky topic, but I wouldn't call it a moral blind spot per se. I think that we would have a problem with certain forms of unfair competition. You can't hire a smarter kid to take the SAT for your kid and expect others to feel ok about it. On the other hand, you are welcome to hire a tutor to help your kid score better on his own(1).

I think that most people tend to think that parents have a responsibility to help their kids as much as they can within fairly wide constraints. Parent's loyalty to their children above the children of others is one of the fundamental building blocks of our society like it or not.

1. Though some studies seem to indicate this won't really help.

It's hard to see a bright line where competition becomes unfair, but straightforwardly buying your own children into a better life than will be made available to children without means is problematic.

This is a mountain range of slippery slopes, of course, but the fundamental moral point here seems pretty obvious.

I agree that there is no bright line here. Nor are there bright lines in many other areas of life where inequality rears its head.

Is it fair that I can straightforwardly buy myself a better life than is available to others without means?

Is this more or less unfair than than what I can buy for my child? If anything I would say that the personal luxuries I buy for myself are more unfair than the educational opportunities I can buy for my kid. At least the latter is in pursuit of human capital formation and not just luxury spending.

I think there's a moral difference between what you do with the product of your achievements for yourself and what you do to impact the opportunity of the next generation.

Which is essentially just a long way of saying that the moral weights on inequality and mobility/opportunity aren't the same.

I dunno. I hear what you are saying and I agree that lack of opportunity is a problem. I just have a hard time convincing myself that making sure my kid goes to a good school and gets a good education is morally fraught. Tough subject for sure.

Like I said: I made sure my kids went to a decent school too (I drew the line at private school, but, like I said, my kids go to what is essential a de facto private school based on the neighborhood they live in).

I'm not prepared to crucify people for making these kinds of moral compromises, but I think it's important not to go the other direction and valorize them.

Uh, yes? It is entirely reasonable to prioritize one's own children over the children of others. You're not required to be philanthropic all the time, especially not at the expense of your family.

People tend to be very short-sighted about their children versus everyone else's. Tragedy of the commons readily results.

the fundamental problem seems to be tying public school funding to taxes at a very local level. i was surprised when i found out that was the system in america; it seems like a very blatant rich-get-richer measure.

You're assuming that this results in upscale cities and towns having better outcomes by spending more per pupil. In fact, yes, the outcomes tend to be better; the schools are often better by both objective and subjective measures. But the correlation with spending is very murky.

"Bad" urban schools with often poor student outcomes often have significantly higher spending per pupil than the tony suburban schools. There are lots of reasons why this would be the case of course. But it's not exclusively, or even primarily, a matter of relative spending levels.

Not only that but you will find some people in the US go though ridiculous mental gymnastics to claim that money makes no difference to education. While at the same to they put huge effort into moving into a neighbor with high spending on schools.

It is not enough to defend privileged with taxation, institutions and laws but they must use astounding double-think to convince themselves that the result is somehow fair. Part of that self-indoctrination is putting huge effort into convincing everyone around them of these absurd views.

"Better schools?" They'd be the same schools, just with some additional lower income kids.

I am operating in the context of a *parent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12694649

I'm open to the possibility that the measured quality of a school does not change if you make significant changes to its constituent populations, but it seems like a large enough question to not be assumed in passing.

Sure going from 1% low income to 10% low income will have the short term effect of changing the overall average test scores. But how will it change the quality of education for the existing students? It'll be the same teachers, same curriculum, same facilities, etc.

The educational experience of students is not dictated wholly by teachers, curriculum, and facilities.

You are coming dangerously close to implying that children in poorly performing school districts are intrinsically unschoolable.

That can't be what you mean to imply, so I think maybe step back and examine how you've ended up in an incoherent position.

"intrinsically unschoolable" might be going to far, but I think it's generally agreed upon that children in poorly performing school districts are (on average) more difficult to teach. It's also generally agreed upon that students have an impact on their peers. This is the whole rationalization for better integrated schools in the first place.

We can certainly debate how many (as a % or raw number) challenging students a "good school" can import before overall quality begins to degrade. But I don't think that it's especially controversial to say that degradation will happen at some point.

Yes, but it's not agreed upon why that's the case, and that's Rayiner's point. If the problem is that students are forced to compete academically while being raised in broken neighborhoods, moving them out of those neighborhoods might be a better solution than pouring more money into the schools.

I don't know that I agree with the intervention he's recommending, but the underlying point he's making makes sense.

There is considerable evidence showing this is more or less true. "Intrinsically unschoolable" is a strong and incorrect statement, but "less schoolable" yields similar conclusions and is well supported by research.

Consider Raj Chetty's work; he shows that the primary determinant of student performance is intrinsic student qualities, but that teachers also matter a fair bit.

http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/value_added.pdf

http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/w19423.pdf

Why would you consider this factual claim to be an "incoherent position"?

The papers you've cited make essentially the opposite case as your comment does. Chetty's work suggests that a single year of teaching under a high quality teacher raises the lifetime earnings expectation of a student by $50,000.

The papers show large and significant effects from student quality as well, a position you described as "incoherent". The fact that teachers also have an effect doesn't change this.

If you were actually correct, and teacher quality was the primary determinant, then we could skip VAM and just use raw test scores to measure teacher quality.

I.e., if teacher A had a class of underprivileged black students while teacher B had a class of rich Asian students, and teacher B got higher test scores, that would be evidence teacher B was a better teacher. Is this actually your belief?

Can you point out the section of the major Chetty VA study that distinguishes student circumstances from student intrinsic quality?

The context of the thread you've jumped into is what the best intervention to circumstance might be to improve outcomes for students. You appear to be begging the question.

I don't know what you mean by "intrinsic". Kalium said:

The educational experience of students is not dictated wholly by teachers, curriculum, and facilities.

You seemed to disagree with his claim. Due to this apparent disagreement, I interpreted "intrinsic" to mean something other than teachers, curriculum and facilities. The Chetty paper, and the entire need for VAM (as opposed to just measuring raw test scores), shows this to be true. Do you believe this to be false?

Maybe somebody else can restate the point I'm trying to make in a form that will make more sense to you.

Ironically, yummyfajitas definition of "intinsic" to mean "not teachers, curriculum, nor facilities" would thus include life circumstance.

For example, the kid's quality of life outside of school. Which is demonstrably improved by helping poor kids with rent. Which I believe he is trying to argue against.

Is it clear to anyone else that 'yummyfajitas is implying that the kinds of students who attend poorly-performing schools are genetically incapable of academic performance?

I may be misreading. I'd like a second opinion. I'd rather not assume people I'm arguing with hold revolting core beliefs. This would not be, like, the first time I'd jumped the gun on something like this: I myself hold a (probably faulty) core belief that the median HN participant is likely to host retrograde beliefs about race, which is unfair of me too.

I'm genuinely curious why you are asking third parties to put words into my mouth. Why not just ask me?

If you want a summary, I don't share your religious faith that God ensured an identical statistical distribution of genes across all subpopulations when he created man. But Kalium's argument is not dependent on this - there are more things in the world than simply teachers, curriculum, facilities and genetics. For example, poor people might be disproportionately bad parents (perhaps they exhibit many bad behaviors which also make them poor) and this might cause their children to be disruptive in school.

That's a concrete theory that's directly compatible with your secular faith in statistically identical genetic distributions, but still supports Kalium's claim.

If you do _not_ believe humans possess "identical statistical distribution of [academic performance] genes across all subpopulations" why hide such insight? It'd be interesting to hear where in the gnome the "academic performance gene" sits.

And have you also "discovered" a correlation between this academic performance gene and melanin content? Or gender too? Surely you don't want to deprive us of such important "discoveries".

My question still stands.

I don't think anyone is unschoolable. I do think that changing populations can mean changing how resources are allocated, and this can affect more than just the part of the population that has changed. For example, I've seen schools cut special needs education programs because populations have shifted and resources haven't.

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