What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity with an algorithm
apps.bostonglobe.com
apps.bostonglobe.com
There's a function which takes a schedule and generates a score. Leaving a spot unfilled or scheduling someone who isn't available subtracts lots of points. Scheduling someone much more or less often than the median subtracts points based on how much of a difference there is. Scheduling someone on a day they prefer adds points, and so forth.
Then it's a simple hill-climbing algorithm starting from an empty schedule. I get people's availability and preferences into the program, hit run, and out pops a schedule.
I learned early on that I must check the result before publishing it. The algorithm itself works fine. Hill climbing probably isn't finding the absolute optimal schedule, but it does a good job. The problem, of course, is the scoring function. Sometimes it turns out to be missing some important constraint. Much more often, I need to tinker with the weights assigned to various conditions.
People assign too much agency and intelligence to computers. They are, of course, just tools. A nail gun will put a nail into whatever you point it at, whether it's drywall or flooring or feet. Likewise, a computer optimization system will optimize whatever function you tell it to, and will probably do an excellent job, but it's up to you to make sure the function accurately describes what the humans want.
I wrote a simple Excel macro which randomly assigned security personnel to posts they held qualifications for. Since it didn't have any knowledge of personality conflicts or preferences of the troops getting assignments, the results generated by the Rosternator 3000 were generally hated by all involved.
In the end the tool was still useful - the mere threat of a randomized roster was enough to get everyone to quit grumbling.
The current approach is a 2-month rotating schedule. Since there are day/evening/overnight shifts, with overnight being the least desirable and evening the most desirable, it was deemed most equitable to simply rotate members through different 2-month schedules. This way, everyone across the year will be doing the same sets/timings of shifts in different months. This becomes very important for evening shifts, in particular, since transitioning to/from that schedule requires time to overcome the jet-lag induced.
This was a shift-specific tool, so it only had to account for certifications (e.g. a Response Force Member wouldn't be put into a Controller/Dispatch position). From what I recall, the post listing itself was on one sheet with personnel/qualifications on another. Posts were iterated by priority, so critical manning positions were always appropriately staffed from the source roster.
http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/need-sleep/success-stori...
If I had to do it today, I'd probably put the list of pair scores on one sheet (e.g. Snuffy/Smith at +5, Smith/Jones at -3) and perform iterative swapping as you suggested.
This is one of the reasons good retail managers ignore the advice of their time-keeping systems and give peoples' requests preference. The time-keeping system ignores all of the human aspects of the problem to focus on the least-important aspect of keeping a store running--making sure there are warm bodies in it.
So... you're saying soldiers are like girls in high school?
"I thought this high school bullshit was over!" is one of the most depressingly funny phrases I've ever heard eighteen-year-olds repeatedly utter.
Also, it's a very good practice to iterate through the neighbors in a random order (if you're doing next descent, for steepest descent obviously it doesn't matter).
One thing which has been done quite a lot (and that's not to say you don't already do this), is to measure the gradient of improvement of your fitness function, and if it's been flat for too long, to relax the conditions/weights by X percent (X becomes another thing to tinker here, but I start with 10%). The flatness here suggests that you may be in a local optimum in the candidate space.
This will allow worse solutions for many more iteration, (and a graph tracking the fitness will go the wrong direction), but in the end, you might find that you end up with a solution that is much 'fitter' than before the algorithm relaxed the conditions. (In the academic papers I read at the time, various words were used for this, sometimes it was called 'reheat')
It seems that even if you don't do this, you know about it intuitively anyway since you talked about tinkering with the weights, just thought I'd chime in to mention that the tinkering part is often automated now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Deluge_algorithm
EDIT: A sibling comment pointed out Simulated Annealing also, which provides a more analogous means to discuss the 'reheat' stage here.
So my focus was half on the theory behind these solution search algorithms and half on parallelism and the associated theory.
I've a gut feeling that a superior algorithm often gets you better ROI than parallelising an existing solution.
The TLDR of my findings was that for the algorithm in question, it wasn't greatly suited to parallelism. Performance didn't scale linearly with cores due to too much shared state, and the best you could hope for was seeding each parallel run of the algorithm with different randomisation seeds and it's own state and bank on certain runs not getting caught in local optimum.
So it got you better performance, but not so much that you'd jump right in to doing work to parallelise. Probably better to use algorithms that are built to be embarrassingly parallel from the ground up.
I don't think tinkering with the weights is quite the same thing. That happens when the algorithm is doing a good job of optimizing the scoring function, but the scoring function isn't doing a good job of representing what people want.
It does remind me of another thing I occasionally do when I don't quite get the results I want, which is to manually change one of the assignments and then have it climb the hill from there. Sometimes I'll just clear some assignments and re-run, which is pretty much a manual, ad-hoc version of what you describe.
Even though I did research on it, I found that the field is subject to a lot of colloquialisms (for lack of a better term) when it comes to different research cliques, and therefore the terminology I use isn't any more of less correct as a result.
It seems like you've got as good a handle on it as anyone.
My research was mainly involving investigating parallelism of the above algorithm (not very friendly to parallelism without work).
Nowadays, there's so many academic open source optimizers, as well as commerical, that I would usually tell people if you're solving for a business case, it's often more cost effective to frame your problem in a format digestible by the solvers and let them at it than writing the solvers yourself.
Of course, where's the fun in that? I'm jealous that you got to use this for a problem that you had, rather than in my approach which was for a problem I didn't need solved myself. I bet that was satisfying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing#Mathematical_des...
In that ER center, the scheduling of ER Doctors was done manually, by one of the ER doctors. Of course not the most senior doctor. But not the most junior doctor either, cause that doctor will be bullied into giving someone a preferred schedule. So the job was given to one of the junior doctors, like 3rd or 4th newest doctor out of about 15 ER doctors.
These are doctors with big egos and with family, and all have legitimate reasons not to work certain days/nights/shifts.
And this new, young ER doctor starting out his career confessed coming up with the weekly schedule to satisfy as many of the doctors as possible was the MOST stressful aspect of his job. And this is an ER doctor we are talking about. Granted he worked in a hospital in a suburb so not as many shootings/etc. I thought that was hilarious to hear.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9d0b/5eb5749a6699a4c43bf808...
It's entirely possible that your particular case has constraints you can't easily express as a linear program. But if you can, go ahead and use the nuclear option!
I think this project was useful because it started this debate and brought more information to the table. For example, I found that a lot of people did not know how much the start times affected the district costs (tens of millions of dollars every year), or how the schools times seemed to be unequitable.
And this Boston Globe article allows even more people to read about this issue and make their own opinion. Ultimately, a lot of people in the US want later start times for high schoolers. This work can provide some information about the ways to implement such a change, as well as the consequences.
Now I am sure we have done some communications mistakes. For example the algorithm does not "decide" the start times. You just give it a (long) list of preferences and objectives (e.g., less HS students starting early, more fairness across the population...), and then the algorithm generates thousands of solution that try to satisfy these objectives. Solutions are carefully reviewed, and the objective updated if we think we can do better.
So in the end, this research is just a tool, it does not solve all the problems, and in the end people still need to find a way to agree. Hopefully they have a little bit more information to do so!
So, was the real motivation here one of efficiency and cost-savings then?
That is a clear thorn they might have wanted to solve.
Is the added sleep beneficial to students, all other things equal? I'm sure it is, but was the real motivation a cost savings and the sleep deprivation a nice cover for the real motivation?
There has been a lot of research on high school students lack of sleep, and it seems that the school times do have a important impact on the students :
BPS is pretty forward-thinking, and lots of research has shown that high school students are better off with later start times. Don't dismiss this as the actual motivation.
Real-world problems are so much messier and more frustrating than the clean abstractions many of us choose to work with. But this is really meaningful work that should have concrete social benefit. We should all hope to do good as you have.
In the meantime, there is some available information that is listed on my website: https://sebmart.github.io/media.html
I would argue that although it could have been more transparent, it is way more transparent than the status quo, where each individual school can try to pressure the district to get the time that they want, without considering the "big picture" and the impact on other schools/neighborhood/budget.
All decisions were made after a lot of group conversations with parents/staff/principals... But I am sure some things could have been better, in the end we were just the grad students trying to help :)
http://mitsloan.mit.edu/actionlearning/labs/a-lab.php
My company had pitched the students of the A-Lab a couple years ago, but unfortunately we didn't get picked. BPS was one of the others pitching the students at the same event.
Do you think more user and stakeholder engagement would have helped the public accept your research? I have no idea if BPS has the bandwidth for supporting this type of engagement, but I imagine a lot more fears would be assuaged if parents could have some role in "co-creation" of the algorithm, rather than just accepting results.
A lot of research from the fields of citizen science, public understanding of technology, and user experience show that participatory design techniques can enhance acceptance. E.g., https://www.bmj.com/content/319/7212/774.short
I am sure more engagement is always a good thing! One of the tricky tasks of BPS is to make sure that this engagement is "balanced", i.e., everyone's voice is equally heard. And you can imagine how hard that may be in practice. For example, Boston Public Schools had this survey asking people for their preferences on the start times. But most of the answers from these survey came from schools with less economically disadvantaged families. One way to do it is to call the families directly or have a lot of local meetings. But it is still a complicated problem.
Also, it is an algorithmic challenge to find a "path" of good solutions that go step by step to the good final start times.
Yes. This is what separates the pros from the not-pros in major systems design and operation. The transition plan is the major key to plan, not the algorithm (which plays the role of Shiny Object in this case).
It is lots harder, lots, to get smoothly from A to B than to simply big-bang B. It takes enormous attention to detail and thinking through of every angle, and when done well is a thing of wonder.
I think in this case your team was not well served by how it was tasked.
Thanks again for responding, and for your team's efforts in the design.
Can you talk about how you made this tradeoff? There's research that suggests high schoolers do better with later start times. But is there any research that backs up doing it at the expense of younger students? ie, is it possible that all students benefit from a later start time?
> Research findings suggest that changes occur in the “biological clock” during adolescence. As a result, teenagers have a natural tendency to fall asleep later and to wake up later. This is referred to as sleep phase delay.
> A correlation was found between subjects' melatonin secretion and their stage of development. The results indicated that melatonin onset occurs later in adolescents, making it difficult for them to go to sleep earlier at night. At the same time, the hormone “turns off” later in the morning, making it harder for them to wake up early (Carskadon et al., 1998, 1999).
It's like things are happening to the body during puberty.
Another way to ask this question is: were there volunteer transit, ride share, or pre/post-school care incentives included in your algorithm, to balance the potential negative impacts to parents?
I guess volunteer transit is always a positive thing for the parents and the districts. The algorithm was just trying to fulfil the objectives given by the district (costs, later students, fairness...). The compensations are what should happen after the algorithm: what do you do with the saved money, how do you help the most impacted parents? These negative effects were expected to disappear with the years as new parents start to choose the schools after the start times have changed (and therefore choose schools that can accomodate their schedules).
That's a ~9 month notice?
Maybe some will remember this if money for student transportation comes up to ballot.
Presumably, you are already doing that, by limiting the start/end times from 7am-10am, or something similar. In this case, instead of a global time restraint, there would be a local time change restraint +-1 hour for each school.
[1] http://web.stanford.edu/~niederle/SFUSDBoardPresentationFeb....
In my mind, this alleviates a lot of the “would have to change jobs this year” concerns, because the people making changes would ALREADY be making bigger changes (starting to take their kids to school), and the most extreme schedule changes would be deferred until the children on the existing schedule had aged out of that grade’s current schedule.
(Done enough optimization modeling to know this isn’t an easy path... but seems like it has some potential.)
Similarly, (maybe this was just the article dumbing down reality a bit, but it sounded like the transit expenditure vs parent happiness units were somewhat fungible. Any possibility of offsetting a bit of upfront expenditure with future savings of the more efficient (say from year N/2 onward) future state?
[1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/03/02/how-mbta-makes-...
Coincidentally, Seattle, two years ago, also implemented later HS start times and earlier elementary start times. Our elementary child went from a 9:30am to 7:50am start time. It sucks and there was some outcry, but like so much in Seattle -- there was mostly just a collective shrug.
[0]http://schoolchoice.dpsk12.org/schoolchoice-round-1/
[1]
We also generally do not use busing, but New York City is so large and congested that you start asking a lot of kids. I went to a school that was 90 minutes away by public transit on a good day, so I'd wake up at 5am to make an 8am start time.
Oh man! A friend in HS had swim practice before school and woke up at ~4:30 for it 3 days a week. On each of those days, she was just a zombo. I can't even imagine doing that every year. Do you think it was worth it for you?
There was a school within walking distance, but the graduation rates weren't too hot. The nice thing about school choice, in theory, is that it doesn't cause neighborhoods to gentrify or disintegrate due to the quality of the local school. But if you scale it up to a million kids you basically make it so that only people with time and money can really game the system. I wouldn't consider myself particularly blessed, but I definitely was not the worst off person.
http://school-diversity.org/pdf/DiversityResearchBriefNo1.pd...
https://occrl.illinois.edu/files/Projects/ccr/Library/Newton...
http://www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?Contentid=15664
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/19/446085513/the-evi...
it is overall a good thing for pretty much all parties
These two statements conflict with each other. If it was overall a good thing for all parties, you would not have people fleeing to good school districts.
1) end recipient tells you what they want
2) you build that, perhaps exactly
3) they don't like it
Thinking in abstractions, and imagining what that would really look like once implemented, is more or less a job description for programmers. It isn't, for most other jobs, and thus most other people. If you don't do frequent reality checks during the process, you will be quite likely to get this result at the end. Of course, the students doing the programming in this case, were unlikely to have had multiple software projects' experience, to know this. But someone there should have, and should have insisted on putting sample results in front of parents to see what their theoretical response would be. I find that management, and probably also politicians, don't like doing that because they can't control how the conversation goes, and it could bring them bad news. But putting that off until the end, brings worse news.
ADDED: To be fair, they did try to take the results and try to run with them. It seems as if there would have been less of an issue had they taken the results and did more outreach to find if this was a change parents were actually OK with.
I mean, it sounds like "Silly users don't like my smart product that no one uses" without considering, maybe, just maybe, the product wasn't good?
The author did touched on it a little by mentioning the difficulty for working parents to move their work schedule, but it seemed glossed over. I'd think changes that interfere with the the household bread earners ability to earn would be a serious consideration and a deal breaker for any proposed change.
Not to say politics aren't incredibly inefficient and way more emotive than logic prone.
1) We hear about how hard the algorithm worked (vs the programmers tangential involvement):
> "Sorting through 1 novemtrigintillion options — that’s 1 followed by 120 zeroes — the algorithm landed on a plan"
2) We hear about the push-back:
> "But no one anticipated the crush of opposition that followed"
3) We are assured the algorithm was an upstanding citizen:
> "They couldn’t help but notice, though, that most of the critics hailed from wealthier sections of the city"
4) Finally, we say it wasn't the poor little algorithms fault:
> "IN THE END, the school start time quandary was more political than technical"
The man operates algorithm trading systems; it's the reason he is a billionaire.
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you that I read algorithm positive news stories in his newspaper. Shocked!
Children who live too far from the school to walk catch a bus, an ordinary scheduled bus on a standard route, or the train# or the metro. They get special bus passes (some get them free, I think most now).
What I'm saying I think is why on earth is the Boston school system in the public transport business to start with?
(#) Doing your homework on the train on the way to school is one ritual I was amused recently to see is still going strong. I did this and my dad did this (pre WW2).
I could alternatively have taken a (public transport) bus, but the fare would have come out of my pocket (i.e. out of the small monthly allowance I was given to spend on whatever I chose).
In the US, a separate public transit system specifically for schoolchildren exists, usually because there is no effective public transit system for everybody. A child cannot catch a city bus from their home to their school when no city bus ever comes within 3 miles of their home.
Europeans often don't understand, because American urban planning makes it seem like one would have to be a madman in order to do things that way. It's not madness. That's just the way the economic incentives aligned in the past, and no one has cared to re-break the bones in order to set them properly, so everyone is crippled from birth by the history of the infrastructure.
Someone above said ~25$/student/day: sure that's higher than the average commuter fare right now. Couldn't a unified system serve everyone better?
And encourage students to spend at least a bit of the day not locked into an institution designed around them.
Some school systems in the US are subject to judicial desegregation orders, so that the racially-divided neighborhoods do not result in segregated schools. These may require transit routes that are not necessarily coincident with the daily work commute. Some systems also have magnet or specialty schools. Some have even greater ability to choose (or win via lottery) a school other than the nearest to one's home. As a result, the commute for one child could be longer than that for their parents, and using the regular public transit could result in hours on trains and buses. In such cases, a school bus would essentially be an express, with no stops between school and the residential neighborhood.
And, of course, once you run one school bus, that means you now have a school bus infrastructure, which makes it easier to run more buses.
The public transit system is usually designed around moving people between workplaces, mainly in the city core, and homes, which are more evenly distributed. Schools are also more evenly distributed, as villages, towns, smaller cities, and unincorporated townships may have had one or more of their own before being annexed into the metropolitan city. As a result, the nearest transit station to both home and school may be the same station. Or they could be on lines that run nearly parallel before meeting in the downtown hub.
One possible solution to this would be to build a large, unified school near the city's central transit hub. And that would likely be selected by an algorithm as most efficient. But politically, people prefer their schools to be near their homes. And separated by grade levels. With athletic fields and playgrounds. And lots of separate and distinct administrative regions. Again, the technically sensible solution is untenable, because people just want what they like (and what makes them money).
Also in the US once you are outside a medium to large city public transportation may not be available at all. Or is limited to systems which run only during commuting hours and are designed to transport people from a few centralized locations into the closest city.
I'm pretty sure that when i was at school in the UK, there were specific school bus routes. They weren't operated by the schools or the local education authority, so i assume they were special services run by the local bus operators, using stock that would be used on other routes at other times.
I believe each route served multiple schools - kids from my school would share the bus with kids from other schools. Since we were the grammar school, full of nerds in garish purple blazers, and they were, well, not, this was sometimes a stressful experience.
It may be relevant that this was in Colchester, a town with numerous schools, some quite close to each other, whose catchment areas take in lots of small villages, where there isn't necessarily a good normal bus service.
Mind you, i got the (ordinary!) train, so i'm not sure of the detail.
It's a system with alot of history, impact and strong feelings on both the schools and the city itself.
Alas, my first selection was rejected by my supervisor because they were related to a co-worker. Ok, try again.
The next selection was rejected because she knew they weren't able to utilize the prize.
The next selection happened to be someone who had raised the least of anyone on the list. That wouldn't do.
I finally said "ok, you choose someone that's deserving and hasn't won recently".
Computers have a way of exposing you when you think you know what algorithm you want, but you don't.
If anything, it's just a case of political leaders failing to communicate and take action to garner support for doing something with abstract/non-existent benefits and concrete, likely, and easy to measure risk. They did use the arrogant and paternal approach of big tech company, though.
Based on the figures shared in the article, it smells like the district had an objective of saving some cash, while getting some attention for saving high schoolers from sleep deprivation. To meet the goal you have a few strawman arguments that would waste time or money, then settle on a solution that met the cost target, using difficult to argue with rationale like racial equity as an justification.
It would have made more sense to slowly introduce changes, and perhaps measure the stated outcome before disrupting everything. Given the really high cost of daycare in Boston, it seems unconscionable to force parents into situations where you need a much larger block of afterschool care.
When did it became a right for parents to put their kids on a bus? They wait on the sidewalk, the big yellow truck comes by, they get on it. It's not that hard. I managed to do it without parental intervention every day from 2nd grade on (legally required before that where I grew up), because my parents' work schedules conflicted with the bus schedule.
And I'm not some old-timer complaining about kids these days, I'm < 30 and I still remember being completely unable to fall asleep before 1am as a teenager and being expected to wake up at 6:30 and go work for 14 hours a day. On behalf of their kids, fuck all of these parents.
Shuffling schedules makes things very bad for parents with few opportunities (due to having insufficient negotiating power in the labor market).
And there are certain things to do with kids in the morning, other than putting them on the bus.
That said, I got only a wake up from Mom and Dad when I was in elementary school, and later only the alarm clock did that.
"Trying 10^120 options..."
We can stop padding our writing to make page length and column inches now. Digital media has a page area that is exactly as large as you need it to be.
If you're a journalist, even in long form stories, your working vocabulary is essentially the 3000 most-used words, and anything outside that should be easily understood from context alone. If you have to follow a word with its definition, you need to write something else. I don't know who edited this, but their iron palm of author-correction should have started the smack after "novem" and finished it before reading to the end of the "illion". A large number doesn't need a large word to describe it.
The essence of the problem is this. Balance the following factors:
(1) Supervise the children of working adults, without interfering with their work day.
(2) Transport those children between their homes and their schools, at minimum cost.
(3) Teach the kids how to be working adults after they graduate. (3a) Prepare a fraction of the kids for further education, to associates or bachelors.
In light of research into school start times as a factor of academic performance, they asked some MIT grad students to improve on goal (3) by giving high-school students later start times, with minimal impact to (2) from the new bus schedules. The algorithm devised to do so failed to sufficiently account for goal (1)--with all of its obfuscated hidden requirements--which made the whole plan fail.
They simply forgot, or never knew, that the primary purpose of public education in the US is to allow both parents to work outside the home, and to subsidize companies that have extended business hours with state-provided supervision for the children of their employees--a benefit usually paid for by the employees themselves via the property taxes on their homes.
The technical solution is easy. The political solution, which includes an admission that this is one of the goals baked into the public schools system, is nigh impossible.
> (1) Supervise the children of working adults, without interfering with their work day.
That is indeed an important objective. I want to underline that it is impossible to achieve it in practice. Each parent has a different life with their own constraint, but each school can only have one time. The complexity of school assignment and start time choice is to find a way to do as well as we can. Unfortunately to the best of my knowledge, there is no perfect solution.
Some school cafeterias even serve breakfast--mostly for kids with subsidized meals, who may not be able to eat regularly otherwise. That is state or federal money available to open earlier. Youth diversion program money can keep a school open later. It is entirely possible for a kid to be at school continuously for 12 hour intervals, every weekday, with no additional burden on the local taxes. Meanwhile, in the suburban schools, the clubs and extracurricular activities are powered by fees paid by the parents directly, and some kids get picked up and dropped off by private cars, as part of their parents' commutes, never even seeing the inside of a school bus.
With humans, we can have extremely complex goals, which leave room for our morality to shift around as the context changes in subtle ways (to make exceptions to rules, for instance.) Machines tend to have very simple goals by comparison. It makes it difficult to encode any potential exceptions to the rules.
[1] https://github.com/JuliaOpt/JuMP.jl
[2] http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/trip_record_data.shtm...
The hardest job in the world is getting a large group of people to all do something. The way you message something can be as important as what you say. If I was working on a major schedule change project like this, I wouldn't even tell people about the algorithm. That's just a tool to help you arrive at a schedule. People don't want to feel like their life is controlled by an unfeeling machine even if the result is better for them.
I'm not saying this particular situation was winnable. But I've seen this kind of thing happen over and over in the tech world.
But I'll be damned if I can work out how to apply it to childhood education. It's almost definitionally a system run by the old guard, on 'behalf' of people too young to change anything. A lot of my friends and I got to our late teens and twenties, swore up and down we were going to fix some of the obvious idiocies and cruelties and wastes of education, and just utterly failed. There's no population to offer a competing system to, and very little road into the existing for any member of the 'young smart generation' which lacks either children (to be a stakeholder) or multiple degrees and time in the trenches (to be a participant).
One of the main objective of this particular project was to make a complex problem more accessible to a general audience, so that such a debate could take place. For example, before this "algorithm", it was harder to understand the impact of your school time on the other schools and the budget of the district. And this budget is also what pays for teachers, nurses and buildings.
My hope is to convey that yes, algorithms can be scary when they decide for you, but sometimes they are just tools that bring information to the debate and help the minorities be heard. And ultimately, humans make the important decisions.
I hope you'll keep on doing great stuff like this even if sometimes the surrounding political situation outside of your control is messy and sometimes feels discouraging.
But in this case, I'm not sure there was anything to be done. (As you acknowledge - I'm not disagreeing, just looking at the point.) Two grad students whose background was overwhelmingly technical were brought in to provide a technical solution. They had enormous amounts of logistical information, but it's not clear they had social/political information about their task, and certainly they had no control over messaging and notification.
The outrage appears to have been less about the use of an algorithm than about massive disruptions to schedules. It's a predictable outcome - school start times are largely set around common parent work schedules - but it's also an irreducible one. The desired outcome was the source of the anger, however much the computer derivation added insult to injury. Doctors have been calling for these changes for years and been utterly ignored. The school district I grew up in tried something a lot like this a decade ago, with no fancy algorithm, and was slapped down with similar fury.
At a certain point I think the error was not the superintendent seeking a technical solution to changing start times, but seeking a solution at all on a topic where parents didn't want change.
(If I were to really get inflammatory, I might mention that school is a classic principal-agent problem, and the proposal failed because it tried to trade the agents' convenience for the principals' health. But that's another, uglier debate.)
Agreed. It's a super hard problem to solve. But this situation as a whole I think is still a good case study that developers should consider. You can do the best job possible and still get "blame" because of the political situation beyond your control. You can't fight politics and emotion with data alone.
Or, at least (to phrase it in a slightly less negative way) to trade relatively incremental, diffuse, and somewhat abstract benefits for the students with specific and sometimes disruptive change for parents.
Furthermore, just about any change to an accepted status quo--even if it's arguably a mild net positive--is going to have a lot of vocal critics. Those who like the change will mostly not feel very strongly. Those who don't like it or have just learned to live with the status quo will often hate it.
Doing small changes can help, but it is so politically complicated to change the school times that some districts prefer to do it all at once.
(Think of everything from changing heating and AC schedules to reworking start times for bus drivers to telling parents they need to drop their kids off at a different time each year. There's a reason most school administrators I know get an absolutely hunted look when you mention changing anything.)
Just go through with one fell swoop and swap every single starting time.
* Downtown Boston is tiny. But the actual official city is pretty big, and dips much further south than many people realize.
Also, it'd have a huge side effect: middle/high schools kids can go to school on their own. Many kids at elementary schools cannot. With this, you force parents to drop their kids off much earlier, which would fuck with their work schedules.
I*m not entirely sure why it is a big deal: Either way, it is only an hour at this point. To be fair, it was more difficult before indiana adopted Daylight Savings time.
My high school (in Maryland) started at 7:25. The middle school in my town in Massachussetts now starts at 7:40.
1) Elementary and middle schools are (more or less) neighbourhood based, it is an exception that a pupil comes from far away.
2) The "problem" comes starting from high school, in Italy we have two "generic" high school types, the "Classico" and the "Scientifico" (I think there is no need for a translation) of which there are many + a number of "focused" or "professional" schools like Geometri, Ragionieri, Linguistico, Artistico, Alberghiero (Surveying, Accounting, Linguistic, Artistic, Hotelier) and usually it is the kids going to these latter types that have the longer commuting time/earlier waking needs, particularly those coming from villages nearby the city.
In my times, I was lucky enough to be able to walk (accompanied or later alone) to elementary school as it was less that one block away, as well walk (some fifteen minutes walk away) to middle school and go by bike or moped or bus to high school (a fifteen to thirty minutes trip at the most).
But I had friends that went to that or the other "professional" institute that had 1 h - 1 h 30 trips every morning, so they usually set the alarm clock to 6-6:15 in the morning.
Now I will sound as an old grumpy bastard, but all in all none of us suffered from the scary consequences outlined in the article:
"Sleep-deprived teens are at increased risk for poor academic performance, binge drinking, and suicide."
Maybe, just maybe, it is that risk that is a tad bit exaggerated?
But it can be very hard for the parents that previously chose the school (partly) because of its start time, and adapted their own life & work schedule around this time.
I'm surprised that the school district did not foresee this resistance.
There was a section describing parents whose elementary school kids would have to start earlier, and they didn't like that because the kids would have to go to bed earlier and it would be tough to rearrange their work schedules to accommodate. But won't this also be true when their kids are in high-school? If they can't cope now, how will they cope then?
I always though it was obvious that elementary school and high school start times should just be swapped because in my experience elementary aged kids always wake up far earlier on their own.
- high school starting later in the morning (adolescents need more sleep)
- ensuring adequate child-care options are available for little kids. Early start means more PM care, late start means both AM and PM care, etc.
Then you get compounding factors... - high school athletics. Parents don't want high school to start too late, because then there is no daylight for football practice (yes, this is an actual argument I've heard... parents would prefer their kids play sports than maximize the kids education). - race and income issues - either correcting existing disparities or avoiding creating them.
No. The paragraph I quoted implies that the parents have some notion of "best" start times that has nothing to do with the district's perspectives. But the article makes no attempt to describe what that is! (Other than what I already mentioned and questioned.)
Child-care, and not having your kids practice football in the dark is the kind of thing that makes sense.
But what does school start time have to do with race and income?
Snarky answer... It's the US, everything has to do with race and income, even when it doesn't.
My best guess... people are generally change-averse and parents are generally selfish a-holes. Lacking irrefutable evidence that the new time is better FOR THEIR CHILD, parents will violently protect the status quo (even if it's obvious to outside observers that the district as a whole would be better off with the change).
Elementary school students (especially in the early grades; it's less of a problem for the 10-11 year olds) typically need someone to help them get out the door in the morning and someone to meet them when they come after school. This introduces a coupling between school start/stop times and parent work schedules.
Your typical high schooler can get themselves to and from school on their own and doesn't need to be watched over when they come home, so their school schedule doesn't really have to match up to the parents' work schedule.
This is obviously not an issue for people with flexible enough working hours.
Nothing is more infuriating than not being told why you're being punished, why someone got accepted into a school when you didn't, or why a judge won't consider your appeal.
We can even handle injust answers-- "his parents are alumni that donate a lot of money." That sucks, but it's the answer.
But we can't handle not knowing. Denying people the ability to reason is one of the cruelest things you can do to them. The Amish figured this out centuries ago.
"...the algorithm would eventually propose — shifting school start times at some elementary schools by as much as two hours. Even more.
Hundreds of families were facing a 9:30 to 7:15 a.m. shift. And for many, that was intolerable. They’d have to make major changes to work schedules or even quit their jobs. And because their kids would have to go to bed so early, they’d miss out on valuable family time in the evening."
If they hours didn't then it would be possible to have home-study for some time of the day and do all the bus transport mid 'school' day at various times for a massive reduction in resources.
This kind of massive change should have a year or two or even four of prep work. People can adjust their jobs and schedules much more easily over that kind of time than a single summer.
> District officials [...] released the new school schedule on a Thursday night in December, with plans to implement in the fall of 2018.
That's more than six months. That's not really 'no lead time'.
It's also the first line in the article. Like, it's right there, at the top.
The article never really goes into this any farther. Was this just an empty point from the selfish wealthy families, or were they correct?
Reality is, instead of a human misunderstanding you, it's a robot (like Rosie from Jetsons) misunderstanding you.
If you know a parent with small children in SF you've probably have heard some consternation about the school lottery. Although the majority of families get their first choice, there are copious horror stories. Top economists were brought in around 2010 to design a new school assignment system.[2] They designed an algorithm. It tried to solve for a few goals: diversity, proximity and choice. They tried to make it "strategically simple" to avoid gaming the system.
The algorithm works like this: You rank the schools you want. Assignments are handed out according to a series of preferences called tiebreakers: First to siblings, then residents of low test score areas (to promote diversity), then residents of the neighborhood, then by lottery draw. If you didn't get anything on your list it'd assign you to the nearest school with space.
Then it did a neat thing: If it saw a mutually advantageous trade between families, it'd do it. If Family A got B's top choice and B got A's top choice they'd both get upgraded. It's called the Transfer Mechanism, commonly known as "swapping". This was meant to cut out complex strategies to get the school you want so you could just honestly list the schools you wanted in order.
Welp... After many years of horror stories of families getting assigned clear across town, the verdict finally arrived that the system utterly failed to improve diversity too. Here's what's going wrong:
1. That low test score area preference (called CTIP) is disproportionately used by the few white and asian families in those neighborhoods to get out of their local school. It's a golden ticket to any school in the city. Perversely, what was meant to help diversify actually increased segregation while rewarding the most privileged families.
2. The neighborhood preference (called Attendance Area) is woefully inadequate to ensure assignment to a nearby school. Many schools don't have enough capacity for their area, and if you don't get into your neighborhood school the other nearby schools might also be filled up by their own locals. That means you could be assigned clear across town to the nearest school with capacity -- which means not a very popular school either. No consideration is given to "bumping" a set of people over one neighborhood, for example, or otherwise more gently distributing the pain. (EDIT: I just noticed the original proposal had an "Overfill" preference to address this very issue.[2] Didn't get implemented.)
3. Far from simplifying strategy, the Transfer Mechanism actually opens up a whole new kind of strategy. Clever families list schools with "swap value" in the hopes that they'll transfer their way into an otherwise inaccessible school. This is exacerbated by the existence of speciality schools that don't have an Attendance Area preference, i.e. language immersions and K-8 programs, creating a kind of niche swapping opportunity with AA-bearing families. This results in excessive "false" applications to these speciality schools, bumping more "true" applicants to their oversubscribed local school, bumping other locals, replacing them with swapped-in clever families, and creating a sense of injustice. Worst of all, this strategy is, you guessed it, disproportionately utilized by privileged families.
So last month SFUSD just decided to suspend the Transfer Mechanism.[4] This is big news and I'm not sure most families realize it yet. And there is a proposal in the works to rethink the whole system, taking inspiration from Berkeley.[1]
[1] http://www.sfexaminer.com/school-board-member-proposes-scrap...
[2] http://web.stanford.edu/~niederle/SFUSDBoardPresentationFeb....
[3] http://www.sfusd.edu/en/assets/sfusd-staff/enroll/files/2019...