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Comment by Andre_Wanglin | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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.

[flagged]

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.

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