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Comment by acjohnson55 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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

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.

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?

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.

>subsidizing the reproduction of high achievers.

[Western] Capitalism does this by concentrating wealth with higher "achievers".

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.

Fuck off Nazi

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.

> 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.

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