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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

It's not totally beyond the realm of plausibility for teachers to have long-term effects on height, given the effect of childhood nutrition on height. Properly feeding children can have such a positive effect on their academic achievement that some teachers end up doing it out of their own pocket. Certainly the best way to raise the worst-performing children is "fixing" whatever disaster family situation they are dealing with at home.

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Or healthier(mother does not smoke etc) and thus taller children go with schools where teachers are "better".

Further, good teachers stimulate children into mental engagement, while bad teachers bore & depress. Children typically take at least one meal in school, and take home assignments often completed around dinner- or bed-time

So is it really that far-fetched to think teachers could have an influence on eating & sleeping habits that could definitely affect height?

The study supposedly checks for one aspect of this – seeing if there's a cross-correlation between achievement-boost and height-boost, and thus some single general "positive influence" – and finds no correlation. But I haven't looked closely, and it's quite possible they're over-controlling to find that no correlation – which seems quite common in educational studies on ideologically-fraught topics.

I could also imagine teachers independently affecting academic achievement & height. Imagine a 2x2 model: teachers can be either 'fun/popular' or 'severe/unpopular', but also 'instructionally-effective' or 'instructionally-inept'. Fun/popular teachers might keep students in attendance, cheery, eating well at school lunches, not stressed/overworked with homework – and thus more likely to grow in height. But, only some of these 'fun' teachers (who promote mood/physical vitality) are also moving academic measures higher. Meanwhile, some of the academically-effective teachers do so via a harshness & heavy-workload that impairs height.

Teachers are not feeding kids in statistically significant volumes. Schools are, and there might be correlations.

>Teachers are not feeding kids in statistically significant volumes.

Likely untrue, given a few moments search. For example, "On average, teachers spend $37 a month and principals spend $59 a month for food for their students." [1].

There's lots more data on teachers feeding kids in perhaps causal amounts.

[1] http://neatoday.org/2013/09/10/report-teachers-spend-37-ever...

How many students do teachers have on average? $37 per month definitely does not seem significant enough to explain the effect found.

Avg public school teacher:student ratio is 16:1, avg school meal costs $2.48. This may be a non-negligible effect.

Given the strong correlation between some breakfast vs none, and school performance, it would not take much to affect the outcomes by feeding hungry kids little snacks.

The linked article cites a survey that it doesn’t currently link to, if it ever did, and implies it’s because kids are hungry; but without the survey we don’t know how it is phrased and they could be spending that money just to get the entire class cupcakes for birthdays or some kind of treats for holidays, rather than for feeding the hungry kids.

Is it possible that good teachers hang out in the lunchroom and encourage their students to eat? I don’t think it’s fair to so readily dismiss the hypothesis without a good look at the relevant data.

If children aren't eating, the cause is most likely not being able to afford food, or not being provided with food by their parents. If teachers were to have any effect, it would be by giving the children money or food, not "hanging out" and "encouraging" them.

Good teachers manage to prevent their school enacting bad policy like this: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/19/us/school-lunch-debt-dona...

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