High-quality schools can increase academic achievement among the poor (2010) | Hacker News Reader

High-quality schools can increase academic achievement among the poor (2010)

scholar.harvard.edu

173 pointsMaysonL218 comments

The kids were a self-selected group because attending the school required that the parents had to do something active to get their kids into this school.

They try to control for this by comparing those kids to kids who lost in the lottery. But this only tells us about kids who have engaged parents. You cannot generalise to kids who have non-engaged parents.

Having engaged parents is the single most important condition for getting a good education.

Secondly, not having disruptive kids in class.

And only thirdly are quality of teachers.

If "free dental, medical, and mental health services" were all it took, then no school in Scandinavia should have any problem with poor kids. But we do have problems because some parents don't care at all about their kids education.

> If "free dental, medical, and mental health services" were all it took, then no school in Scandinavia should have any problem with poor kids. But we do have problems because some parents don't care at all about their kids education.

It is probably true that those aren't sufficient, but things like getting enough to eat and not having serious, untreated dental or medical problems are basic prerequisites to a good education that aren't met for a lot of American children.

Also worth considering that the vast majority of parents who don't care simply can't afford to care. Working 2+ jobs, they may not have the time or emotional effort to invest in the same way that more privileged parents with elaborate PTO schemes have access to.

Free dental & medical (Medicare for All or similar) would go a long way to alleviating the pressure on parents and allow them the space and time to care. As would stronger labor laws to ensure all workers have access to a reasonably flexible working environment.

As De Boer puts it, if there's any possibility at all that an education result came from sample bias, it's definitely sample bias.

The standard narrative for "better schools" is that a trial program works great, everyone gets excited, and then it declines to mean the instant it's expanded. If they had lotteried people in entirely at random and still gotten better outcomes, I'd at least be curious.

https://fredrikdeboer.com/2017/03/29/why-selection-bias-is-t...

Essentially this.

It's not really the schools or teachers - they are generally decent. Some better than others ... but teaching is not rocket science. Basic education is not some magical, mysterious thing. It's mostly straightforward, and a little mundane.

If you have decent students, prepared to learn a bit - which mostly comes from a reasonably positive and stable home - then all you need is basic things to get them to a decent level of literacy.

Surely some systems are better than others but I think it's far more about homes and communities than it is dumping 'bad teachers' and certainly not about making teaching 'competitive'.

>>> but teaching is not rocket science

I actually think teaching children is a really difficult and important part of society but I think many people don't value the contribution incredible teaching can make to individual students lives.

A great school and teacher obviously can change the lives of children in poverty but it's astonishingly difficult and requires immense talent to achieve. Not commenting on the quality of this study however.

I taught high school for almost 10 years and I agree with both of you. You don't have to be a genius, some of the best Algebra 1 teachers I worked with couldn't teach calculus because they didn't understand it. Getting the students to understand the material is generally the easy part, their brains are highly receptive. If a student wants to learn the subject, you can basically just sit there and answer their questions. Engaging and motivating them to want to do it is the part that takes a lifetime to master.

I didn't say it was easy, or that it wasn't hard work, or that I didn't value it.

Teaching is 'hard work', it requires educated, dedicated people, and it's very important work.

But it's not rocket science. Doing it is not risky - especially if you're teaching something that's been taught a million times before. Most well educated people I think could teach at least one subject, though they may not have the wherewithal or stamina to stick it out, or may not have the empathy/social skills to do it well.

> Doing it is not risky - especially if you're teaching something that's been taught a million times before. Most well educated people I think could teach at least one subject

I think this is something that many well educated people think, right up until they are placed alone in a class-room of 30 children who aren't desperately interested in what they have to say.

The five year teacher attrition rate is under 20% based on this study: (https://edsource.org/2015/half-of-new-teachers-quit-professi...) That's rather low and includes many who don't like teaching even if they have the skills. Which suggests most people really can do it.

Granted, that's not the first time these people have been in a classroom, but collage Education degrees don't see high attrition either. Also, "97 percent of teachers who earned more than $40,000 their first year returned the next year, compared with 87 percent who earned less than $40,000."

You are correct. http://blog.mrbigler.com/2016/04/23/those-who-can-do-those-w...

Being a schoolteacher is risky - kids kill themselves over things that happen at school, or they metaphorically throw their life away with other stupid actions. A good, engaged teacher can help to steer children through that minefield. It's not just about teaching a subject.

The idea that one only needs to be good at a subject to teach it well is bunkum.

It's not rocket surgery, it's potentially far more important.

Most well educated people I think could teach at least one subject

And in essence you have hit on the problem. Everybody thinks they can be a teacher. And for some value of $teacher they can, but it's hard to be really good.

You might watch LeBron James play basketball and think "I can do that," go out on the court and take a few shots, and think you're pretty good. But you're likely not.

This is why assessing teachers is soooooo important. We need reliable, verifiable ways to separate the good from the bad.

And yet, assessing teachers reliably is a very difficult task.

As a teacher, the moment that a reliable assessment method is introduced there will be significant push back; however, it will also be the key to broad improvements in the education system and the further professionalisation of teaching (and, by extension, teacher retention/compensation).

I also believe that this starts by enabling classroom teachers to assess their students with the reliability of standardized tests but within their individualized curriculum. That's not an easily ask - but it is an exciting concept that I return to every few months.

I disagree a bit here, but I do have a limited understanding of the history of education. US high schools lag significantly behind international averages [1] across almost all metrics, and are used for socializing more than other other countries.

It's so easy for us to blame teachers, or to wishfully think they could turn it around on their own, but the approach has to extend beyond the classroom. Non-school factors are estimated to have 4-8 times the impact as teacher quality. [2]

We should work on removing vocational program stigma and drop the illusion that everyone should aspire to a 4 year degree, even if in disciplines with terrible job markets, to "succeed".

I really wish there was some way of incentivizing parents to be more involved, or moving to year round all day education to mitigate their impact.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/02/high_sc...

[2] https://www.rand.org/education/projects/measuring-teacher-ef...

"US high schools lag significantly behind international averages"

This is a red herring - to the point where it is misleading.

A) Start with US 'students students' are behind maybe instead of schools. Because the comparison scores are PISA and they measure people not institutions.

But more importantly:

B) It's ethnicity. (And I'm not attributing anything to race here).

'European Americans' have been doing the same for the last 40 years. They are doing a little bit better than Europeans from Europe.

'Asian Americans' have been doing the same since we've measured them as a group, they do a little bit better than European Americans, and tend to do a little bit better than Asians from Asia.

African Americans fare the worst, Latino Americans fare better, but both groups have been doing a little bit better over time. They do a little bit better respectively than Latinos from South America and Africans from Africa.

Demographically, there are considerably more Latinos, and a few more Asian and African Americans in the country - which tilts the data.

So you see: any group from anywhere in the world actually fares better in America than they would in their place of origin. Which is really a different way of looking at it, no?

Because of the social and economic disparity between these groups, it lends well to the notion that it's about the students and not the schools.

Small but slightly less relevant note: the top American students tie the top UK students as being among the best in the world. The US/UK have a little bit of an elitist function going on.

So consider this: I'm Canadian, always proud that 'we fare better than the US' on PISA testing, but really, once you normalize for ethnicity (we don't have large groups of Latinos and African Americans) - then we do about the same.

And of course I should add I don't think this is racial issue at all, however I do think that the social + economic status of any group is tied to things like outlook on education, history of literacy in the family yada yada.

All of this is based on PISA scoring which is available on their site and other places.

I saw something like this years before, but have absolutely failed to come up with the source of the data. Do you know how I can get my hands on it? If it's true and honest then we need to focus on the real problems- at least the aspects that we can solve.

Other than the PISA scores comment - I agree with everything you've said. It's a multifaceted problem and, in many ways, the problems of schools are not strictly educational problems but the broad problems of society.

That said, educators are the tip of the spear - and I do believe that there is opportunity for additional technological mediation in improving the teacher's professional practice. It could also obsolete significant chunks of our multi-billion dollar standardized testing industry (a benefit to both the operating enterprise and the budgets of school districts).

The way we measure educational attainment across cultures is by PISA scores.

The whole basis of 'US is doing worse than OECD or Greece' or whatever is based on PISA scores.

It's very crude, but it's what we have.

My concern is that without some form of broad standardized testing, we won't have proper metrics to measure the success of programs and/or teachers against.

I agree (though I challenge the utility of current standardized testing to fulfill that job-to-be-done). My position is that we are already paying tens of thousands of teachers to assess the ability level of their students everyday while maintaining a secondary assessment industry that is able to exist because teacher's assessments are not able to be trusted. If we can make teachers' assessments trustable (for ranking/sorting/certification of skill & knowledge) then we won't need the very expensive secondary assessment industry to nearly the same degree. Likewise, many of the negative externalities of standardized testing could be mitigated by ubiquitously assessing student ability rather than relying on traditional "snapshots" as is the status quo.

I agree. If we ever get there then this will be the way that top teachers finally start making the money they deserve. The caveat, of course, is that they will be in limited supply so we'll need a way to extend their influence.

Yes - but we will actually have a tool upon which to make effective evaluations and offer individualized learning goals for teachers. Understanding my weaknesses is the first step in strengthening them (or leaving the profession if I can't).

The difficult part is being able to inspire the kids to be interested in the subject; the subject matter is fairly boilerplate. Wanting to learn a subject is much better than being forced to learn a subject.

In other words, it's much more about soft skills than hard skills. Think of a good speaker. Two people can talk about the same subject, but one leaves you with the inspiration and curiosity to learn more, the other makes you want to break for lunch.

Of course, you have to get rid of the disruptive kids. US schools are so scared of getting sued, the principles just bounce them back to the classrooms. When I was growing up, they had a school for bad kids so they wouldn't disrupt the ones that were there to learn. They closed that program down. My state is in the lower half of the school system.

Money also matters. You can't each in a classroom full of 30-40 kids at the high school level. Teachers can't be spending their money on school supplies the state won't budget for. Earning a college degree for a profession that doesn't pay very well isn't a great option, so fewer people do it.

For something so critical to our civilization, it seems many states treat education as a cost center.

Disclaimer: Both my parents were teachers as were many in the family. I am not, but if things were better, I certainly would consider it. I'm a programmer by trade.

The risk is turning away young minds.

> A great school and teacher obviously can change the lives of children in poverty but it's astonishingly difficult and requires immense talent to achieve.

Teaching children in poverty is a specialization. Teachers can excel at teaching children at upper middle class schools but fail miserably at an inner city school. People complain about privilege on teacher quality difference between inner city and good schools. The truth is that the "good" teachers at an upper middle class school wouldn't be much of an improvement over the "bad" teachers at inner city schools. The "good" teachers only know how to teach well-behaved, studious students!

That is why integration failed. The environment at good schools are good for children with familial support and low behavioral issues. It is not good for children with behavioral issues without familial support.

Is there empirical evidence for this?

There are many, many schools that are not decent. There are plenty of others that are 'decent' but have no resources to support any student who has even a minor learning deficient. In order to pull themselves up and compete on an even playing field with the rich/elite kids the majority of students need more than a 'basic education'.

Yup. Good teacher don't scale.

My son is in a charter school the controversial Success Academy which do really well (top 3% in new york state) even with kids who are homeless and living in shelters.

But this is because

1) Parents have to apply for the lottery and if they get in they have to be engaged 2) School is run almost like a Catholic school in how strict it is (but with a much more effective reward/punishment system) 3) Teachers aren't part of the union which means they can fire bad teachers. They are also fairly young.

This is a very different school than the one I attended in Denmark where I grew up but I have to say it's working remarkedly well.

My hope is that the school will provide my boys with an understanding of self-discipline and then I will take them to a more free-form school (like alt school) in the second part of their educational lives so that they can benefit from the freedom to explore and find their own perspectives using their basic skills (reading, writing, math & music)

Have no idea if this will work but that's how I am going to do it.

> They try to control for this by comparing those kids to kids who lost in the lottery. But this only tells us about kids who have engaged parents. You cannot generalise to kids who have non-engaged parents.

> Having engaged parents is the single most important condition for getting a good education.

If that was true then there would be no significant difference between the students in the study, since all of them had engaged parents.

Your claim is not true. If you factor out the most significant variable, some other variable becomes the most significant one.

Yeah, maybe more expensive teachers, for example.

Or more talented kids.

Richer or more connected parents maybe

> there would be no significant difference between the students in the study

I didn't say this. I say that you can't generalise to students NOT in the study, i.e. students with parents who didn't care to participate in the lottery.

Of course you can. You can control for the factor/variable you said was the "single most important", which is done through the design of the study, by your own admission. And then look at results from the other factors.

Whether your factor is important or not doesn't even enter the picture.

Just because something is the most important condition doesn't make it the only important condition.

But it makes it the most significant condition. It was in the stated initial premise.

And if they're all important (according to GPs list) then maybe more expensive teachers, better properties/real estate, supplies, etc is important enough anyways.

> > Having engaged parents is the single most important condition for getting a good education.

> If that was true then there would be no significant difference between the students in the study, since all of them had engaged parents.

This does not follow. Just because something is the most significant condition doesn't mean that two things meeting that condition will have no significant differences.

EDIT: For example, let's say breathing is the single most important thing to do in order to stay alive. That doesn't mean eating isn't important to do as well. If two people breathe, but only one of them eats, they will have significant differences in outcome even though they both met the single most important condition.

Sure, but OP ranked them specifically to downplay the effect of teachers (and other factors caused by wealth).

You can't have it both ways.

Either engaged parents is significantly more important, or the other factors are still very important.

And this discussion is entirely sidestepping the fact that OPs list is entirely arbitrary.

I think this is pretty simple and folks are talking over each other.

Involved parenting is a blocker issue, not just a critical one. There may be other critical issues in the queue, but those are blocked on that first one.

So the other issues being resolved may not matter at all if the first isn't completed first.

That's more or less how I see GPs argument. My rather diverse education background certainly lets me see that hypothesis as absolutely true - but I have my own personal biases due to experiences.

Man, when I listen to my mom tell me all the things she does for my sister's kids, who she's raising, it boggles my mind, and makes me a little jealous.

With all she's doing, there's no way those kids can't not succeed in school, yet it's a level of effort that really precludes having a career. Engaged, stay-at-home parents amazingly raise the quality of life, not just of kids, but of entire neighborhoods and it's one of those things that you can't fake or buy cheaply.

This comment is gold. Sample bias might be at play here and still that is encouraging.

Poor people do not love to be poor and are actively looking to get out of poverty. One of the ways they do this is by taking unusual risks and imitation. (Trust me I was poor). Public education system takes away both these tools from them. The school you will go to will be determined based on where you live and nothing else. Because of this stupid constraint you lose a very critical market signals that other schools could have used to filter out better kids and nurture them better.

I think poor children should have access to charter and private schools too but those schools should have 100% freedom to discriminate. Say for every certified poor kid that is admitted to private/charter school government gives a $10K voucher and you can admit only at max 25% of total capacity with such students. The poor kids and their parents line up outside the school. They have to prove that they are worthy of the seat by showing things that matter to the school. E.g. my kid is not a bully, parents of the kids have no criminal history, that parents are happily married, parent doing 2 jobs, parents have not done drugs etc. At least bare minimum parents willing to take efforts to enrol them into better schools and doing research of which schools are better.

Assuming it is the case that quality schools will only work for the subset of kids with engaged parents, that is still a huge net positive.

We should make every school high quality. I'm not sure why anyone is opposed to this idea.

>Secondly, not having disruptive kids in class.

If that turns out to be the 2nd order thing we can make that happen with sufficient effort too.

> We should make every school high quality. I'm not sure why anyone is opposed to this idea.

In the abstract I don't think anyone is; what's contentious is what measures make a school "high-quality."

And what the cost is. We can reduce traffic fatalities to zero by lowering speed limits to 25 and building cars like tanks, but we don't. Why not? It's not a reasonable expense to achieve the goal.

Everyone wants to do better. Just because people don't agree on means doesn't mean they are cold hearted bastards or something.

==We can reduce traffic fatalities to zero by lowering speed limits to 25 and building cars like tanks, but we don't. Why not? It's not a reasonable expense to achieve the goal.==

Except we have lowered speed limits and mandated security measures on cars, just not to the arbitrary level you stated. We followed scientific studies that showed positive results of lower speed limits in certain areas and implemented car safety requirements for manufacturers.

Right, but 40,000 people still died from traffic accidents in the U.S. in 2017. To get that number to zero, the U.S. might have to drastic things that probably wouldn't be a good tradeoff. The existence of a discussion about tradeoffs and costs doesn't mean that some people are anti-safe-driving or something.

Sure, but just because you took an unrelated example to the extreme to show that everything can't be done doesn't mean nothing should be done.

With car accidents, a problem was identified, scientific research was consulted to craft solutions, they were implemented, the numbers improved. This is likely because everyone, regardless of income level faces the risks of driving. Bad schools can be avoided by having more money and living in an area with good schools.

I appreciate the first point which I believe is a vital factor. Regarding the order of the second and third though, wouldn't the quality of teachers determine whether there are disruptive kids in the class in the first place?

Not likely. My sister teaches in a magnate school in a poor urban U.S. district.

The amount of bad behavior with which she must contend is shocking. It's entirely foreign to me from our childhood, and she has relatively little freedom in how she can handle chronically problematic students.

If it is theoretically possible for the teachers to keep the disruption level low enough for much learning to happen, then the formula is a secret.

It's very depressing, and it has left many teachers bitter, burned out, and I suspect more racist.

Yes, I see what you mean - it's easy for the collective level of class disruption to overwhelm the teacher, however good he/she may individually be.

> Not likely. My sister teaches in a magnate school in a poor urban U.S. district.

Couldn't we draw the conclusion then that wealth plays an important role? Which in turn also affects the pay of the teachers in the area, also affecting the quality of said teachers?

> It's very depressing, and it has left many teachers bitter, burned out, and I suspect more racist.

I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying, but what I think is depressing is that it leads to racism, instead of anger over systemic inequality.

The teachers who can't hack it, or don't care enough to stay at the bad schools leave. Good riddance, right? Most of the teachers at bad schools I've met are good teachers.

Wealth is highly predictive of educational attainment but I think there is more going on than just how much they can pay the teachers.

Disruptive behaviour is usually due to external factors I imagine - are you struggling with your parents' divorce, are you over tired from gaming all night, are you on drugs, suffering teen angst, ...

Disruption because the class is above or below your level is also, to some extent, uncontrollable by the teacher - they have 30 kids (typically in UK) to cater to.

Teachers can be entertaining, but that isn't always conducive to the subject matter.

There was a good blog post and discussion about your point here on HN 9 months ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15007942

Outside the US most public school systems are vastly more successful narrowing the education gap between rich and poor students.

The hundred billion dollar question is how do you scale it? High functioning schools are magnets for the best teachers, savviest families, and external support. It's just meritocracy applied to the bottom quintile. Show me a school model that's succeeding with the most at risk subdemographic within disadvantaged communities and then I'll be impressed.

I think the simple truth is that there's no free lunch. If we actually believe every child deserves an excellent education, we have to acknowledge it's going to take radical investment at the deepest levels of poverty, working upward from there. It's not impossible. Cuba sent teachers to every remote corner of their island to eradicate illiteracy, and largely succeeded. It's one of the few successes of the revolution.

We spend astronomical amounts of money incarcerating the more people per capita than anyone else in the world. Imagine if we applied that level of thoroughness to education.

> The hundred billion dollar question is how do you scale it?

Its been done. Its called a funded welfare state.

> Show me a school model that's succeeding with the most at risk subdemographic within disadvantaged communities and then I'll be impressed.

Absolutely right, because it takes much more thatn just a good school to eradicate poverty. If you really need to help children, you need to start by helping their parents: national healthcare and decent well paying jobs.

Parents will have time to dedicate to their children if they are not busy and drained struggling to keep their head above water.

Germany is a welfare state and yet children from poor parents perform worse in school.

The US is a welfare state. Its welfare programs consume a larger share of GDP than the welfare programs of Canada or Australia, and is just below Switzerland. The US is spending 19.3% of its GDP on social welfare programs, just behind the UK at 21.5%.

https://i.imgur.com/JQfZ5vi.png

Inflation adjusted per capita income transfers have roughly doubled since 1990, from ~$4,400 to ~$8,600 in 2016.

So where is all the money going? The UK has a (diminshed) NHS and spends less as a % of GDP.

I suspect that a big part of it is that money is being wasted (the Fed.Gov cannot negotiate drug prices!), and not reaching the intended beneficiaries. My perception is that there is an industrial-welfare complex that diverts the money.

It's going towards cost disease, waste, bureaucracy, nepotism, lawsuits, etc.

Of course they still perform worse, a school cannot magically change the parents of those students into middle class parents.

A better question would be: Is the performance gap between poor students and middle class students lower in Germany?

Indeed but they perform much better relative to the difference between poor and rich students in the US.

It used to, and then Schröder passed the Hartz reforms and the German welfare state has never been the same since.

Literacy is a low threshold. This study is talking about eliminating achievement gaps between populations. Their method is intense intervention in every facet of the students' lives. So who receives these services? Is it "fair" to only provide them to certain populations, those deemed most in need? If these methods are successful, why should any student be deprived of them? And if all students receive them, what then becomes of the achievement gap? Does it re-establish itself?

> Literacy is a low threshold.

Truly! But not low enough for the USA to be failing.

> Is it "fair" to only provide them to certain populations, those deemed most in need? If these methods are successful, why should any student be deprived of them?

The fact is, in the upper half of the American class system, educational needs are fantastically well served by redundant layers of investment. I went to an extremely well resourced public high school that made my mid-tier undergrad education a breeze.

That's not saying my school was perfect. Even it did a poor job of addressing the needs of the students at the highest risk. But this is my point. We need an attitude and behavioral shift toward truly embracing the concept that no child should be left behind without a fight.

I don't mean to sidestep your question, but you're identifying a purely hypothetical problem when we're in an ongoing educational crisis. It's kind of like saying, "won't those firehouses cause water damage to the carpet?"

>The fact is, in the upper half of the American class system, educational needs are fantastically well served by redundant layers of investment.

And in the lower levels, we attempt to pick up the slack by spending more money. Unfortunately, this is not a problem money can solve. Motivated parents are the only real solution, assisted by more efficient use of resources.

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/04/25/468157856/can-mor...

As a teacher at a tough school in Baltimore, almost every parent or guardian I dealt with wanted nothing more than a bright future for their kid. The lengths some of these parents went through were beyond impressive. But these are families who are often suffering the compounding effects of poverty and living in impoverished communities. That means they often didn't have a high quality education themselves or social capital or political pull.

Today's "nonideal" parent is just the kid the system failed yesterday. Any solution has to acknowledge the debt we have built up.

I read the article you linked. It's a great article. But what it doesn't say is "unfortunately, this is not a problem money can solve", and I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion.

Of course there are ways of spending money that don't have good "outcomes". But the article both cites examples where monetary investment has paid off and also challenges the reader to take an expansive view of what the "outcomes" are. Which I 100% agree with, because schools in impoverished carry far more of the load of holding together communities and providing essential services than in well off areas.

And if you push this logic to its extreme we would have to take children away from under achieving families to break the reproduction of under achievement cycle. Will probably work but not exactly desirable.

Perhaps, if humans are mostly fungible commodities that respond uniformly to inputs. And RIP if you dare suggest the inverse: subsidizing the reproduction of high achievers.

What does "subsidizing reproduction" entail, exactly?

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/09/fall-meritocracy/

Subsidise embryo selection for IQ for the poor:

Any given couple could potentially have several eggs fertilized in the lab with the dad’s sperm and the mom’s eggs. Then you can test multiple embryos and analyze which one’s going to be the smartest. That kid would belong to that couple as if they had it naturally, but it would be the smartest a couple would be able to produce if they had 100 kids. It’s not genetic engineering or adding new genes, it’s the genes that couples already have.

Aside from the nasty eugenics overtones of this concept, it's flawed from the perspective of how warped the reward system of America's brand of capitalism is. All of our forms of measuring merit are deeply distorted. We pour advantages upon those who have already benefited from previous advantage and then congratulate ourselves for our foresight in identifying how deserving they are when they continue to flourish. The result is a lot of mediocrity elevated and "unrecognized" talent squandered. Scare quotes, because the interlocking circles of privilege and protectionism are how our system is designed to work. We are a deeply elitist society mascarading as a humble, objective meritocracy. No one with advantages actually wants fair competition.

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It kind of doesn't given lower fertility rates of wealthier people. Which is fine with me, since I'm not a eugenics person like the other poster.

Doesn't that mean that the reproduction is "subsidised" more:

If you're wealthy but less fecund you have more wealth to support each child than someone who is either more fecund or less wealthy.

The results of this paper and its refutation of racism do not surprise me in the slightest.

I recently opened book Economic Indeterminacy by Yanis Varoufakis and apparently, he was conducting some experiments in the past that support his theory about economic origins of discrimination and dominance hierarchy.

Basically, what he seems to claim is that while discrimination might be completely unfounded in reality, it will set in as a mechanism to determine and stabilize equilibrium in some economic games. And once the equilibrium is determined, discrimination will actually start to make sense for the game players, ex post facto.

The book is unfortunately quite technical, but I have to say I was impressed, Varoufakis certainly is a smart guy. I wish somebody would write a more approachable popular summary of this and other conclusions in the book. Perhaps Varoufakis did himself in his other books, I didn't read any, but I think I will have to at some point.

Now and then we read about a public school that achieves spectacular results, often based on the work of a charismatic and driven teacher or principal. Nobody has ever been able to scale these.

"Stand and Deliver" is an example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_and_Deliver

When reading about alternative school systems, many publications show really improved performances by students, but many of these studies suffer of the same bias: teachers who volunteer to teach differently, and parents who volunteer their kids to try a new approaches, are usually the main cause of good metrics.

Indeed, the challenge is to get even mediocre teachers to be able to teach better. We lack even mediocre teachers, so making a better system only for good teachers is not a solution.

We lack even mediocre parents- when you talk low SES you mean kids living in cars, parents in jail, kicked outside all night because mom wants to party with her new boyfriend. Not all of them, of course, but enough in those types of situations that no amount of classroom management or enthusiasm is going to overcome it.

As a former mediocre teacher, I strongly don't believe that mediocre teachers are our problem. It shouldn't take superheroes to teach. But that's what's required given the way our educational system is set up. That strategy has no hope of scaling.

I wish American politics would focus on education 5000x more than anything else.

Goes everywhere actually. Today it should be common knowledge that education is the foundation of a strong and prosperous society.

Yet we keeper our focus elsewhere.

To make it sound maybe a bit more enticing to the money holders, investing in education is literally investing in the future.

The "money holders" already have access to great schools turning out great students. They literally don't see the problem.

Yeah, they're covered for their offspring. But we have to make them see that investing in everyone's future is a net gain.

Then we obviously just have the small problem that you can only be obscenely wealthy if you have a lot more wealth than the average person. Elevate a large number of people, and the über-wealthy people's relative wealth go down.

Regrettably, they would apparently rather have a violent uprising and be forced to help other people, than do it voluntarily.

I wish they spent more on it but made it less of a a focus in their ideological battles.

That's wishful thinking, but if only we could all agree on doing what is demonstrably better for the kids and their future, that would be great...

I wish the opposite. Education should be entirely apolitical and atomized to give those with the most skin in the game the most control. Traditionally, this has been the American way and I do not find a more politicized approach has gained us anything other than divisiveness and contention. The more local the matter, the less the Rs and Ds matter and the more the actual names and people they represent do.

Exactly! Let’s leave education up to local government.

When the silly federal government wasn’t meddling in local schools they could avoid teaching evolution. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epperson_v._Arkansas

They could keep people with dark skin complexions in separate but equal schools. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education

With less federal intervention you are resoundingly correct that the academic circulum will represent the local community.

> When the silly federal government wasn’t meddling in local schools they could avoid teaching evolution.

Could they? Only with the consent of the parents.

You are actually highlighting the OPs point. Government bureaucrats made a crazy ruling and people with actual skin in the game had to go along with it.

You are just saying "Hold up hold up. Not those bureaucrats. You should be forced to listen to these other bureaucrats instead".

> Only with the consent of the parents.

Why should the consent of the parents matter when designing the curriculum? If the parents in an area suddenly decides that they all believe the earth is flat, would you be okay with that being the science education?

> If the parents in an area suddenly decide

And if a bureaucrat decides that flat earth theory must be taught to kids would you be ok with that being the science education?

It's the difference between a state run economy and a capitalist one. Of course the capitalist one is not infallible but it has been proven time and time again to provide better results over time.

How are parents better than bureaucrats in this case? There are countless towns in the US that if left to their own devices would soon resemble Sunday Schools and would utterly fail at educating students to a reasonable level.

> There are countless towns in the US that <snip> would utterly fail at educating students to a reasonable level.

There are currently countless inner city schools that utterly fail at educating students to a reasonable level.

California with its immense wealth, it's progressive views, and some of the most intelligent bureaucrats has one of the worst school systems in the country.

> would soon resemble Sunday Schools

Why do you think that?

Parents want their kids to do well. They understand the scientific method is important for a wide range of careers.

Conservatives are on equal footing with progressives when it comes to science except for belief in evolution.

Would you find some schools refusing to teach evolution? Yes, but they would be in the minority even in deep red states. And even then the majority of those schools would still be teaching the scientific method. They would just drop evolution from the curriculum.

I think you have a very poor understanding of education culture and attitudes towards science in the US.

give those with the most skin in the game the most control.

Who would that be?

The local people that must utilize the local schools of course.

The US varies to a great degree from the top 10 states to the bottom 10 states, economically. Massachusetts is at $75,000+ GDP per capita, on par with Norway. Mississippi at the bottom is at $37,000, half that of New York, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts. The gulf isn't nearly as wide as that of the EU ($70k Ireland vs $13k Croatia), however it's still a considerable difference.

How would one propose the Federal Government's massive bureaucracy manage such wide variances in prosperity when it comes to states & counties? Maybe a dozen large school system zones, each semi-locally managed, encompassing several states. Otherwise, the best option is for states and counties to retain large amounts of control over local education.

Isn't the disparity between states (which is even more pronounced at the municipal level) an argument for more federal intervention? How can Mississippi ever afford an education system like Massachusetts has? How else would the best ideas make it to more insular communities?

Of course there needs to be some local control, some variation to help the students succeed in the environment they'll actually live in (agriculture classes in Iowa, for instance), but the federal government has an important role to play in preventing local systems from falling very far behind and spreading knowledge about what works in comparable systems.

It's not an all-or-nothing proposition, and certainly it does require a lot of money and people and procedures. Education is complicated and critical to both the present and future functioning of society.

> Isn't the disparity between states (which is even more pronounced at the municipal level) an argument for more federal intervention?

I believe it's an argument for financial subsidy, not an argument for large amounts of control transfer away from local and up the chain to some far away bureaucrat.

The system I'd envision would have large amounts of local state + county control/influence, Federal subsidy to boost poor states who lack the tax resources, and a certain number of Federal supervisory school agency zones that would coordinate with the states in that zone to keep results high and represent the Federal Government's money (the US tax payer's money in theory). The idea would be to stay away from having bureaucrats in DC directly telling people in Idaho how to operate their education systems or how to fix their local problems (the Federal school zone overseeing Idaho would operate more locally and would be accountable to the member states; these Federal zones or agencies would be partners with the states conceptually).

FYI Missippi has a GDP per capita similar to Germany, France, and the UK.

According to the numbers on Wikipedia Mississippi seems to be about $8-12k GDP per capita below the countries you mentioned.

Shoot, you're right. I saw somebody upthread mention ~$40k for Mississippi and didn't bother to verify. Still, it's not exactly like Mississippi is a 3rd world country.

White people.

The most important methodology of the school:

> Like many charter schools in New York City, the Promise Academy has an extended school day and year, with coordinated after-school tutoring and additional classes on Saturdays for children who need remediation in mathematics and English Language Arts skills. Our rough estimate is that Promise Academy students that are behind grade level are in school for twice as many hours as a traditional public school student in New York City. Students who are at or above grade level still attend the equivalent of about fifty percent more school in a calendar year.

The students are working twice as hard as others and attend remediation classes.

Other inputs:

> The schools provide free medical, dental and mental-health services (students are screened upon entry and receive regular check-ups through a partnership with the Children’s Health Fund), student incentives for achievement, nutritious cafeteria meals, support for parents in the form of food baskets, meals, bus fare, and so forth, and less tangible benefits such as the support of a committed staff. The schools also make a concerted effort to change the culture of achievement, emphasizing the importance of hard work in achieving success.

These inputs are claimed as characteristics of a "high quality school" in the abstract:

> We conclude with evidence that suggests high-quality schools are enough to significantly increase academic achievement among the poor.

"High quality schools" (high quality meaning high test scores) generally do not fund many of these services for their students. What the study demonstrates are characteristics of schools that can help underprivileged children with less than adequate familial support.

This is an argument in favor of segregation. These services can only scale and be cost effective if a large portion of the students will use the services. This would not be cost effective if the majority of the school was not underprivileged.

This seems exceptionally obvious.

"Better nutrition can increase athletic performance among the poor"

Well no shit!

Education lawmakers are typically the scummiest, grimiest, awful people. Lots of school districts are sabotaged by privilege politics bordering on rye educational equivalent of separate but equal.

That's a strong claim, but I work with a few young men that grew up in rough neighborhoods in Chicago and Boston, and their situations have a lot of similarity when it comes to how school was.

I know the language in this comment is strong, but America is really fucked when it comes to public education. Shit like common core is the tip of the incestuous, corrupt iceberg.

Bad schools lock down neighborhoods within a generation, and are a huge burden on the socioeconomic development of the people there. It's as important in communities as affordable groceries.

Are the my using black and poor interchangeably?

How did you get that impression?

If it's because of "black-white achievement gap": https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/studies/pdf/sc...

Is "black-white achievement gap" still there once you control for parents' education and incomes?

Yes, that's why it's not the "rich-poor achievement gap", which is also quite large, but significantly smaller than the black-white one.

Got any data? I googled a bit, but couldn't find by both socioeconomic class and color. It's either one or the other.

I wonder where's the disparity. Are well-off black kids doing worse? Is it poor whites doing better than their peers? Are white poor- communities doing better than black ghettos? How is it correlating to street crime and violence?

This guy has collected all the data on it, and answers a lot of your questions:

https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/unde...

Wow, every post on that blog seems to be a wealth of data. This should be its own post.

Not sure how that conclusion isn’t obvious or self-evident. Obviously, if you have a high quality school with motivated students, chances are their achievement will be an order of magnitude higher than students at a poor quality school.

The more important question is, how difficult is upward social mobility in 2018?

Plenty of people have argued that the problem is not the quality of the school but the quality of the students attending it - a.k.a the "culture of poverty" https://thesocietypages.org/roundtables/culture-of-poverty/

In fact, some of them are referred to in the study itself as an example of the debate they are addressing - "Advocates of the community-focused approach argue that teachers and school administrators are dealing with issues that originate outside the classroom, citing research that shows racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps are present before children enter school (Fryer and Levitt 2004; 2006) and that one-third to one-half of the gap can be explained by family-environment indicators (Meredith Phillips, James Crouse, and John Ralph 1998; Fryer and Levitt 2004). In this scenario, combating poverty and having more constructive out-of-school time may lead to better and more-focused instruction in school. Indeed, James Coleman et al. (1966), in their famous report on equality of educational opportunity, argue that schools alone cannot treat the problem of chronic underachievement in urban schools. "

Considering the free medical and dental care, one might argue that that position isn't really in conflict with the success of this school

if you have a high quality school with motivated students

Sure, but how do you motivate the students? Does that come automatically with a high quality school or is there more to it? How big a part of a achievement is the motivation and how big part is the school? If you take a failing kid from a poor school and 'force' him to go to a good school is that enough to get the desired improvements? Could you achieve similar effect by just focusing more on the motivation side?

While I do have lots of hunches and guesses, I don't see any obvioulsy self-evident answers to any of the questions.

There is an even greater need to empirically prove the "obvious" and "self-evident" as those are the very things no one sufficiently questions.

Education is only going to get more important with progress. It's such a shame that in the US, you have to be rich first before you even get a chance to prove yourself.

How about proving yourself by getting rich anyway? And what are you proving if you started with good chances?

This comment is not meant to insult anyone, even if it may sound like that. It is meant as giving an alternative perspective to the problem. I know that in the US it is a lot harder to get rich if your parents aren't, but I also think that giving up, because the chances aren't fair, isn't helping anyone.

> ... giving up ...

You are putting words in my mouth. I was talking about conditions surrounding education, not about consequences or conclusions any individual might draw from them. And “giving up” is only one of many possible conclusions.

> what are you proving if you started with good chances?

You are still competing with others who “started with good chances”. Poorer people still suffer disadvantages that have nothing to do with their capabilities. Having rich parents is not your merit.

> How about proving yourself by getting rich anyway?

Isn't that putting the cart before the horse? Is getting rich the only, or most important, goal in scope?

Its designed that way. How else are the rich going to preserve their wealth?

You live in a cartoon. There isn't some collective of rich white men ensuring that we keep people uneducated so that they can preserve their wealth. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Companies like Google and Apple don't benefit and get to keep their wealth by having an uneducated population.

Rich parents have the time and money to push for better schools. Companies have little to do with it. Even in Google's hometown, the elementary school with the most low income kids has lead in its drinking water.

https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2018/02/09/elevated-lead-level...

A functioning wellfare state requires that you tax the rich. If everyone should get the same opportunities as the rich kid, their parents need to help paying also for the poor kids' opportunities.

Wealth is a catch-all for all sorts of things. Some forms of wealth behave more like zero sum games (when resources are limited or where network effects means that winner takes all). Other forms of wealth are less like that (knowledge?). Even some forms of knowledge seem to be zero sum (having nuclear weapons and preventing your enemy from having them).

You are wrong.

Betsy DeVos Donald Trump Koch brothers

They promote for profit schools but the vouchers they propose wouldn't cover the cost of better private schools.

Google Koch pro school choice voucher Arizona. 90% voucher of previous cost.

The kids were in school twice as long, received free dental, medical, and mental health services as well as free meals and transportation for their parents. That is quite a bit more than high-quality schooling. And does the touted "closing" of the black-white achievement gap persist if white students receive the same treatment?

Well, it might be more than just 'high-quality' schools, but maybe that is necessary. That way you release the kids from their uneducated parents in some respect.

The problem with uneducated parents is that they are still very valuable for the children in terms of emotional development. The problem however is, that they tend to make critical mistakes which sometimes affect the children's development.

And to bridge those two aspects, this 'high-quality' school model might be a very good answer.

Just to be clear: Not all uneducated parents are the same and some of them might be very good parents, its just that the probability of finding problematic behavior is much higher for uneducated parents.

This is a think I wish more people understood: There is no equality of chances. Unless you give every kid the same standardized education and childhood experience, which implies a society no one wants.

The only alternative is to recognize the people who start at a disadvantage and offer them compensation for that.

>The only alternative is to recognize the people who start at a disadvantage and offer them compensation for that.

I don't know exactly what you mean there. Do you mean - let the kid develop sub-optimally and then when they grow up, give them a job even though they are less qualified?

Because that is an idiotic alternative. Much better to do our best to get kids as close to equality of chance as possible by providing everyone with a high quality education and health care.

No I mean that kids will be advantaged or disadvantaged because of the environment they grow in. We should identify people who are having a big handicap because of their environment and give them tools that others don't necessarily have to get over it.

If you are born out of two drug-addict parents, even if you are given the same education tools as some from middle-class parents, you will likely perform less well. It is not a breach of equality to offer special classes to such kids.

Likely they mean good ole original Marxism.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is a slogan popularised by Karl Marx.

> Unless you give every kid the same standardized education and childhood experience, which implies a society no one wants.

I've always personally been open to this idea. I find families to be tribal and often problematic. I think it be nice to start seeing all children as your own, the children belong to society, and maybe we should all pay for them.

>> the children belong to society

That's the dangerous way of thinking that we should avoid. Children belong to their parents, until they come out of age when they start "belonging" only to themselves. Seeing children as belonging to society is typical for totalitarian regimes (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Youth)

No, it's typical for any society. There's social services in most if not all industrialized societies, that can take children away from their parents for the sake of the child if the parent(s) are ill-equipped to raise them. That's not a bad thing.

The problems start when "ill-equipped" is defined as expansively as possible. See the various cases of CPS getting involved when parents try to teach their kids basic independence by letting them walk to the playground on the corner and play there.

I think the way CPS is currently done in the US is actually causing a great deal of harm to current kids whose parents are totally reasonable parents...

> That's not a bad thing.

For the record, I don't consider this obviously true. If you search "cps horror stories", some of the results are about horrible family situations that Child Protective Services has encountered, and others are about family situations that CPS has horribly mishandled. A couple of links focusing on the latter:

https://parentalrights.org/child_protective_services/

https://lfb.org/confessions-of-an-ex-cps-agent/

I'm not sure if anyone has tried very hard to make a case that the good of CPS outweighs the bad.

I just checked the definition of "belong" I didn't like the idea that parents own children . I did find to meanings: "be the property of" and "be a member of". So I really prefer to say that children are part of a society than children are owned by their parents.

Could we say that children are part of our society and that parents are their guardians and primary educators? I would like to convey that we have shifted from the "pater familias" model to something different were we recognize that children are no more properties.

Belong doesn't always imply ownership, it is more nuanced. "We belong together" doesn't mean that there's a contract of sale putting one of us in the others ownership.

Children belong with their parents. Parents belong with their children. It's mutual.

That aside:

High levels of intellectual learning are not the be-all-and-end-all; ie should not be the ultimate goal. Fulfillment of the person, and in turn of those around them, is a better outcome IMO.

Schools often focus on intellectual outcomes to set kids up for their future; but parents should watch that the kids have a measure of fulfillment now -- this is why the huge focus on attendance as the primary statistic in UK schools is so damaging IMO. Kids need an education (not necessarily in a school) but a family holiday can be a part of that education and provide a measure of enjoyment to life.

"What is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare, ..." (W H Davies)

As a non native speaker i just reacted to "belong to" and I think "belong with" is really better in the context of parent-children relation.

I 100% agree that intellectual outcomes (and even more fitness to the job market) shouldn't be the ultimate goal. We should look back to a well rounded education. And you re quite right that education is provided in a lot of way. "It takes a village to raise a child"

"Society" is just another tribe, one that may wish to eradicate your culture. In a multicultural society, whose tribe is deemed "problematic" and whose is "normal?"

Even by being open to the idea, it is easy to see that such a project will garner so much opposition as to be politically non viable.

It is also very hard to achieve, as even if you break up the family structure, there will be a disparity of compétences accross the education institution and will also magnify genetic advantages and handicap, things that as a society we do not feel legitimate to attribute merit.

I am open to the idea of banning inheritance though, which seems to me the most unfair family advantage out there.

Your alternatives are bounded by a lack of imagination.

Pray tell which ones I missed.

Probably the ones that involve been cruelly indifferent to their fates.

Most people would welcome a government that is merely indifferent to them.

Note that one of the services that Harlem Children's Zone provides is teaching parents what they can do to help their kids succeed. See their "Baby College" for example.

"That is quite a bit more than high-quality schooling." Yeah, it sounds almost like European-level. Seriously, nothing mentioned there should strike as exceptional in a rich country.

"And does the touted "closing" of the black-white achievement gap persist if white students receive the same treatment?"

That would be surprising, seeing how many other biased factors there are to handicap these kids. Even pre-natal conditions are a factor there! (Uneducated and poor women are more likely to smoke while pregnant)

OT: I'm really annoyed, in the UK things like free school meals to the neediest are being taken away, along with cuts to transport, we're heading towards the US.

Now I have a child it's tempting to leave the country.

The barrier to a decent quality of life in the UK is getting higher and higher.

Anecdotally - growing up a single parent on <£20k a year was enough for me to have a good childhood.

Today my household will have a combined earning of nearly 3x that and the quality of life isn't 3x better. Probably only 1.5x-2x (I can now go on 2-3 holidays a year instead of 0 in my first 20 years)

Also, it would be good to know if the children were randomly selected for this program from all the children in Harlem or if ambitious parents who cared more about their children's education could jockey for position and placement.

Enrollment to the program is apparently done by lottery among everybody that applies and the study compared kids that applied and got selected to kids that applied but didn't get in. So that should at least go some way to account for the parent factor.

It fails.

In the special school, 100% of the kids/parents actively took an interest in education. In the alternatives, less than 100% did.

School quality is largely determined by the students in the school. This doesn't just mean that the performance of student X is determined by student X caring about school. The performance of student X is also determined by the fact that student Y cares or doesn't care about school.

So in all the non-special schools, there exist the sort of uncaring disruptive students who will drag down everybody. It isn't that the special school is itself somehow wonderful, but that the bad influences are excluded.

Simply put, one can not scale this solution. Providing the supposed quality school to everybody is not possible because the quality of a school is largely determined by the students.

You're asserting without any evidence that every student Y who "doesn't care about school" would not respond to the protocols described in this paper? This is an extraordinary claim and probably wrong. It needs to verified with data. The paper does provide the basis for a logical next step: imposing these protocols on all students in a region and measuring the impact.

> You're asserting without any evidence that every student Y who "doesn't care about school" would not respond to the protocols described in this paper?

No. They are simply stating the truth that there is no evidence it will work.

It is basic selection bias.

I don't know a proper name for the problem, but I don't think "selection bias" is really it. The problem is that the control is getting damaged by the experiment. The control is intended to be similarly-selected students (the lottery losers) in non-special schools, but there are also other students (never applied to the lottery) in those non-special schools who interfere with the experiment. The control students don't get to have those non-special schools to themselves.

I don't know a proper name for the problem

I think "confounding variable" would the describe the problem. Basically there are two variables that seem to affect the outcome, but since they only controlled for one of them, they can't tell if the second variable is affecting the experiment or not.

White kids already receive this kind of treatment signficantly more often than children of color. This underlies the aforementioned achievement gap.

Curious -- is this something that you're not aware of? I find it odd that you end your post with "of white students receive the same treatment?"

You haven't answered his question.

What exactly is the gap that has been closed?

Is there still an achievement gap between these kids and white kids at similar high-involvement charter schools?

There is more to it than that, they try to isolate the effect of the school from social programs.

There are two pieces of evidence that, taken together, suggest that high quality schools are enough to significantly increase the achievement of poor minority students (see also Atila Abdulkadiroglu et al. (2009) and Angrist et al. (2010)). First, students who live outside the Zone garner the same benefit from attending the Promise Academy as the students inside the Zone, suggesting that proximity to the community programs is not important. Second, siblings of Promise Academy students who have access to the same community programs but were ineligible for the Promise Academy because of their age show no detectable gains in achievement.

Nazis and white supremacists are not welcome here.

[flagged]

Um, you have noticed that the account you're complaining about got banned?

Andrew Anglin. Look him up. Nazis and white supremacists are not welcome here!

It doesn't make sense to me that all kids get the same education at the same pace even though they have different abilities. If someone learns slower, maybe they need more hours at school to learn the same material as someone who learns faster. And maybe they even need to skip some unimportant subjects to find that time. It would be great if every individual student somehow got a tailored program (impractical with conventional teaching, I know) so they could all reach a sufficient standard of education. Some geniuses might not even have to go to school if they can just flip through the book and ace the test on their own, while the labor saved teaching them could be spent on those who need more.

If you can flip through the book and learn to a particular level on your own then you don't need less schooling, you need schooling at a more appropriate level (in order to fulfill your intellectual drive/curiosity/etc.).

What does someone who has spent his academic career with a tailored education program that provides extra time to complete tasks and take tests do upon entering the workforce? Will employers go the extra mile to cater to his needs? Will the market do likewise for his business or product? If I could have taken as long as I wanted on the SAT, I probably would have been able to get a perfect score. But then I wouldn't have been taking the same test as everyone else, would I?

If the goal of school is to get kids to learn the content of the curriculum, then that's not relevant. If you want to use it to assess how fast they learn or how intelligent they are, then that would have to be explicitly included as a goal before you designed the system. Perhaps employers and universities use school grades as a proxy for intelligence because it's convenient, but it's a little indirect. It would give falsely high scores to students who have good teachers or who hire private tutors.

> That is quite a bit more than high-quality schooling.

I'm not familiar with any legal or otherwise definition that constrains what services a school can and cannot provide. There are in fact high-quality boarding schools in Europe that provide all these services and more. (In fact they provide free housing to some of their students!)

> And does the touted "closing" of the black-white achievement gap persist if white students receive the same treatment?

Why be a coward, Andrew Anglin? Why don't you just come out and say what you mean?

> I'm not familiar with any legal or otherwise definition that constrains what services a school can and cannot provide.

It is important to note in a study where the abstract suggests a community focused approach is not necessary.

They should put in the abstract: Community approach not necessary if you get the school to provide the most critical community offerings.

You do realize that addressing the achievement gap is the point of both the school and the article, correct? It then makes sense to question if the gap might re-emerge if similar methods were applied to all students, does it not? I have no problem saying precisely what I mean to say.

> It then makes sense to question if the gap might re-emerge if similar methods were applied to all students, does it not?

No, it doesn't make any sense. What do you think actually causes the gap? Is it some magical force inherent in white children?

They've shown they can eliminate the gap by addressing environmental issues like nutrition and providing more school time. That would indicate to a logical person that the gap is caused or at least correlated with precisely these deficiencies that were corrected. If other kids don't experience these deficiencies what would make you think more nutrition or more school time could increase their performance?

>No, it doesn't make any sense. What do you think actually causes the gap? Is it some magical force inherent in white children?

You mean genetics?

How is spending twice as long at school correcting a deficiency? Are you sure you understand what a deficiency is? If spending twice as long at school can improve the results of the poor black students in this study, why shouldn't it do the same for white students? If it does, what happens to the achievement gap? How is this not a reasonable question? And do you really think being provided free medical care, dental care, mental health care, etc. is not qualitatively different than receiving the same from the fruit of the parents' labor?

i don’t think taxpayer provided medical etc care is any different than getting it from parents’ employer-provided (tax-code-subsidized) insurance or from inherited wealth from generations ago. in all cases it’s manna from heaven as far as young kids know. is there some problem with european or canadian children who get these things from a single-payer government scheme?

> What do you think actually causes the gap? Is it some magical force inherent in white children?

Why do you go straight to the absurd?

Can you not think of any other factors?

As an example what if poor early childhood nutrition maxes you out at a lower peak?

It is a fair question.

(2010)

Kudos for de-clickbaiting the title.

Good schooling is vital for building up confidence and belief in one self. Without it chances to succeed in our society are fewer.

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