Hacker News Reader

Comment by rusabd | Hacker News Reader

> How is the system actually going to force compliance without being attacked as racist?

Focus on actual outcomes would be a good start. I would replace the whole school administration with someone more capable.

View on HN

The big problem is that no one more capable wants to work there.

We have a mild teacher shortage across the board (which may become major with reports of as many as 40% of teachers seriously considering leaving the profession this year). And then in turn, inner city schools are worse workplaces... which attract worse peers... You need a hell of a martyr complex to take this on, and even if you have it you won't last.

And throwing money at comp won't fix this, either: that's not a great motivator to get the people with the passion to fix this.

Someone quoted 15k USD spent in Baltimore for each student. That is a lot of money to attract top talent.

Yup, but money isn't great at motivating people to work hard; a lot of evidence implies it even does the opposite. And a huge chunk of that money is vacuumed up by administration.

Inner city school systems are great at grinding up passionate personnel, making them quit or just surrender to do things that look good on paper but don't improve anything.

Looks you are actually found who needs to be replaced

Is it? How do you know? Have you reviewed the budgets? Do you work in education in Baltimore, and thus, have a sense of what an appropriate number would be?

I don't know the answers, but I do know this -- it's a hell of a lot less than what gets spent in the NY metro area.

Here is the data.

According to the US Census[1], out of the largest 100 US Public School systems Baltimore ranked near the very top in spending per child (5th out of 100). Baltimore spent $15,793 per child. Only New York and Boston spent considerably more.

[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/school-s...

Thanks, that's much more informative.

Fines and jail time are the "actual outcomes" of truancy charges, and are much more immediate than proficiency tests and graduation rates. You simply can't force people to go to school without also punishing some of the parents and students, who are disproportionately in disadvantaged groups.

In this specific case I didn't any failure of enforcement at all because there weren't any. The school administration just dropped the ball without any explanation and no corrective action against _itself_. I guess tree-jobs-mum doesn't have much time going to school and make sure administration does its job.

We've had years of Obama administration policies specifically designed to prevent enforcement actions against minority students on the grounds of such enforcement being racist. The system is in perfect alignment with the incentives given to it. The problem is that those incentives sometimes lead to outcomes like the case we are discussing.

A new administator or new system with the same incentives is likely going to give the same results.

I can hardly believe that the system designed by intelligent people produces unintended outcomes after all these years.

That would be true if said intelligent people were optimizing exclusively for the metric you're looking at right now. In reality they usually are not, as they are themselves stuck in a system where their incentives are to optimize for things other than their supposed mission statement.

The world is full of tangled messes where everybody is acting with respect to their own local incentives and everyone is worse off as a result

Even the most intelligent person in the world will consistently make false deductions if she starts with false premises.

Ideally there is a process of incorporating real-world results and revising one's beliefs, but that process seems to have pretty much shut down in favor of strict political orthodoxy.

Intelligent people correct their actions when they see the results. It is fair to say that there is enough information about "unintended" results by now.

It's not like the systems we're talking about were performing well under Reagan/Bush, under Clinton, under G.W., or under Trump, either..

Truancy enforcement didn't work too well. Whether laxer truancy approaches end up with better outcomes overall is open to debate, but it's not like there's a clear answer.

That's a good point. If this school is as terrible as it sounds, the students probably wouldn't be learning much even if they were in school every day. We need serious reform on multiple axes; reforming one in isolation probably won't help much.

Truancy does make teaching effectively much harder. You're forced to either go over the beginning material over and over for the people who missed it, or you just abandon them and teach the handful of people who have attended consistently. No matter what you teach, you're teaching the wrong thing for half or more of the class. Then people get bored, and they skip school...

Yup-- Frequently these classrooms have packets of worksheets thrown at the students. There's a little direct instruction to a crowd that has never learned to accept information that way. If you or I were put in that situation we'd seek to avoid school, too.

And imagine being the one new excited, passionate teacher trying to rock the boat and get some effort. You're upsetting parents who wonder why you're all up in their business and don't understand the value. Your gradebook creates issues for your administrators. Other teachers who have given up react defensively and seek to undermine you. And the students are not thankful, and can be extremely disruptive.

I don't know how you fix it. Project-based learning has some evidence that it can work in situations like this, because it can draw out participation and interest by gamifying more of education. But it's not like a little more PBL is going to make the system suddenly work.

I worked as a tutor in prison, helping out in class. The teacher I worked with longest said that she felt safer working in prison than she did in public school, because there were guards right down the hall. Discipline is apparently a lot easier to enforce in prison than it is in public schools.

I felt like I was pretty successful providing individual instruction. For instance, I found a way to teach basic algebra that worked for guys with 3rd and 4th-grade level test scores. It didn't teach them the principles they would need for greater math education, but none of these guys were ever going to study college-level Calculus. They just needed enough math to pass the GED. Unfortunately, teaching that way involved a lot of moving around the classroom, and I didn't really want predators staring at my ass behind my back. So I didn't stick with it.

It says a hell of a lot that teachers find that kind of environment safer than public school. That suggests to me that discipline & safety have to be comprehensively addressed before any other changes will have a chance to work.

Yup. On the other hand, the prisoners who are working on schooling may be more motivated students than many kids in lower SES schools (greater maturity, more incentive, less competing distractions, etc).

That class was for guys with 3rd-5th grade level test scores. Most were forced to attend school and didn't really try to progress. I don't know the exact progression rates, but they were quite pitiful. You'd see a guy who last tested at 4.0 grade level take the next EA test and score 3.4. I suspect that quite a few had some degree of brain damage whether from drugs or violence, and covered up an inability to learn with a front of not caring. I helped one older guy for months, and he would constantly forget things that he previously had down no problem. It seemed like he would forget as much as he had learned. The higher-level classes had more students who were actually trying to graduate.

I later took college classes, and that was a different story. One teacher said that his prison students were much better than his free-world students, as they generally weren't partying all weekend etc. and were motivated to be in school.

What kind of a fucked up system throws kids in jail because they skipped school?

It is usually the parents that are penalized, but that's still pretty devastating to the kids. As for what kind of fucked up system does that, I was surprised to learn that it's something that some progressives have been pushing for[0][1], so I gather that it's a bipartisan thing. But it's fortunately fairly rare for someone to actually be jailed. In my personal experience, it was the threat of jail time that dramatically escalated the stress of the situation.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/10/17/924766186... [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kamala-harris-truancy-arrests...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com