Imagine if a lemon law penalized schools for rotten educations | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if a lemon law penalized schools for rotten educations

washingtonpost.com

62 pointsmudro_zboris97 comments

This approach is extremely dangerous. It's baffling to me that it could be seriously considered after No Child Left Behind.

One key variable that needs to be addressed in evaluating school performance is variation in the quality of the students. Some kids are more capable and more driven than others for reasons part cultural and part genetic, and the perceived quality of a school will reflect that of its students. The effects of teachers and administration are not that substantial as long as basic requirements (food/shelter/safety) are met.

Though this notion is distasteful to some, it must be addressed because otherwise, schools and teachers are going to be put on the hook for conditions that are simply outside their control.

I agree with your point about not blaming teachers for factors beyond their control, but let's not forget that when students spend most of their lives at school, teachers can play a big role in fostering a positive learning culture.

A child raised by American parents who attends a school in Japan (where students are expected to, for example, clean their own classrooms) will have a dramatically different experience than if they attend an American school.

True. The problem is that when ratios are 1:30 (teacher:student) or sometimes even higher, it is hard for teachers to influence individual kids rather than spending all their time playing fire-fighter to a handful of problem students (often with pre-existing issues from home).

Can you please point me to an under-performing school with that ratio? In my experience, the under-performing schools receive between 50% and 100% percent more funding than high performing schools and have very low teacher student ratios. Thanks.

Mississippi is one of the worst performing states in the US (by multiple metrics[0]), to quote state policy (Mississippi Code Ann. Section 37-151-77):

> 28.3 Student teacher ratios do not exceed 30 to 1 in self-contained classes serving grades 5-8. {MS Code 37-151-77} A one-year waiver may be requested for classes that do not exceed more than two (2) students beyond the allowable student teacher ratio.

And:

> 28.4 Student teacher ratios do not exceed 33 to 1 in departmentalized academic core classes serving grades 5-12. {MS Code 37-151-77} A one-year waiver may be requested for classes that do not exceed more than two (2) students beyond the allowable student teacher ratio.

[0] https://www.gulflive.com/news/2019/07/mississippis-school-sy...

[1] Jackson Public School District documentation which is a succinct list of State limits: https://www.jackson.k12.ms.us/cms/lib/MS01910533/Centricity/...

Mississippi is a poor state, but within Mississippi, do the better performing schools receive more funding?

White 8th graders in Mississippi average the same in mathematics testing as white 8th graders in Vermont or New Hampshire. (In reading they're 1 point behind.)

Mississippi's average is only low because they have a large black population, and they do better than black kids in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama, but worse than Tennessee and Georgia.

You can see here:

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/mathematics/states/groups/...

Positive impact is hard, but there are certainly terrible teachers who have a strong negative impact but are sheltered by teachers' unions. The best case is places like New York that have the notorious "rubber rooms" where they are exiled so at least they can do no further harm to students, while remaining a drain on public finances.

The problem is you can't use data science to find them. Any metric can and will be gamed. It requires a qualitative assessment, and also giving parents more power in the system, since they are the ones most aligned with the interests of students.

Parents more power in the system is a bit of a double edged sword.

For every story about a teacher doing poorly teachers often have them of parents refusing to believe that their child could ever do anything wrong, like cheating or bullying behavior.

But that Japanese experience is not just created by the teachers, the other students and their parents are a very big part of it. I think kids around that age care most about their peers. If they didn't do as everybody else there they would really stand out negatively.

Otherwise, the problem could be solved by importing Japanese teachers to American schools, in person or just their training. I would be surprised if just exchanging for other teachers had a huge impact. That would mean it has always been the teachers fault, which I highly doubt.

I'm not saying that parents don't matter, just that teachers _do_ matter. Both play an important role in setting expectations. Someone with bad parents and bad teachers is likely to have a rough start in life. Having good teachers can give children with bad parents a fighting chance.

Of course, in the US many people strongly in parental control, to the point that you need permission slips to discuss simple facts about the human body or climate change. Sometimes these cultural challenges make it difficult to be a good teacher.

> But that Japanese experience is not just created by the teachers, the other students and their parents are a very big part of it.

As an example of the different overall culture, in Japan kids clean the schools (to varying degrees):

* https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/04/04/396621542/without...

Also, in Japan, teachers move from classroom to classroom, which is different from the US where the kids move between teachers' rooms. And Japanese children help serve (and clean up after) a very nutritious school lunch [0], as opposed to the US which is pinching pennies on feeding children to the point where the tomato paste in pizza is given four times the credit it should be to count as a vegetable.

And education is not without its pitfalls in Japan, like the bullying problem and the high rate of suicide in such a high-pressure environment.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fze5s1SlqB8

>teachers can play a big role in fostering a positive learning culture.

My spouse is a teacher... I understand it's difficult to maintain a positive attitude and outlook, and therefore a positive learning environment, when more and more paper pushing, busywork, and administrative responsibilities are being pushed onto them. (No, we don't need more [expensive] administrators. [Teacher/Admin] Assistants, perhaps.)

>because otherwise, schools and teachers are going to be put on the hook for conditions that are simply outside their control.

Or worse, we will see standards continue to erode in an unrealistic, sociologically suicidal pursuit of equity rather than accept that ability is rather unevenly distributed.

Exactly this. What we learnt from No Child Left Behind was:

a) Just like in software companies, unless a metric is very well thought through, people will game the metrics. That’s what happened with NCLB with schools teaching the test.

b) A significant amount (maybe the overwhelming majority) of schooling success is predicated on support outside of the school. So penalizing schools for poor outcomes only serves to further penalize kids who don’t have support outside their schools and need the school support the most.

Penalizing the worst failures in education (and rewarding the best successes) is a lot easier than trying to set up comprehensive scoring systems that would apply to every kid's outcomes. The faults of NCLB are well-known, but real improvement in how schools are managed seems quite possible.

This was already tried with No Child Left Behind, with schools above proficiency obtaining additional funding and those falling below would be penalized. In many states, it created a testing frenzy, caused a huge push for curriculum standardization that rankled both teachers and parents. It funneled tons of money into test prep providers that probably would be better spent recruiting and retaining skilled teachers.

I wish education reform enthusiasts would try a different tactic.

It also resulted in teaching to the tests and not for understanding or usefulness.

So, more power to the bean counters led to less flexibility for the teachers, misallocating money, measuring the wrong things and providing much worse education.

Sounds like another tale about a Chinese Communist Party top-down initiative executed to perfection with disastrous results.

Weird how China gets dragged into everything. The Chinese educational system is similar to all East Asian systems. SK famously stops flights to avoid disturbing test takers. Find another scapegoat

> Sounds like another tale about a Chinese Communist Party top-down initiative executed to perfection with disastrous results.

They might have been referring to the sparrows:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign

The 20th century’s history is filled with unintended consequences. DDT spraying caused a mass extinction event. CFCs destroyed the ozone layer. Outsourcing cheap labor led to human rights abuses and destroying the middle class. Etc.

Yes, this is what I was referring to.

> It also resulted in teaching to the tests

Or outright fraud, much more reliable than cramming.

Even worse: the No Child Left Behind Act tested and funded schools based on improvements in student test scores.

A school in an impoverished community that managed to excel, to overcome adversity, may well be penalized for doing so; when you're at 90% of the national test score range, even small improvements become difficult.

Basing the funding on score improvements is easy to explain to the taxpayers as maximizing return on investment. And sure, a school that fails to get their kids through the system might be in desperate need for more funding.

But you also end up increasing investment into school districts and methods that are not effective.

Source: Personal experience, served two years on the board of a tiny charter school in a rural village, that managed to provide good education on a minimal budget. This was pre- Betsy DeVos charter school "reform".

Welcome to why metrics in ill-conditioned systems are the most toxic policy instruments on Earth.

I think the model in Finland is better because it rewards talented teachers. Those teachers, if you have a favorite one, would excel at devising ways to simplify complicated things, I think.

Finland is a homogenous society. The US is very heterogenous in class and race.

This is something americans tell themselves as a coping method.

Finland doesn't have the obscenity that is homeless kids coming to school tired because they couldn't sleep, hungry, scared because of violence and instability in their life circumstances, and otherwise with so many strikes against them it would take a miracle for them just to graduate, let alone thrive.

The main problem IMO with lemon laws and other "starve the beast" tactics is that in a lot of cases you basically condemn the offender into a negative spiral. This is fine for private enterprise where it's easy enough for new market entrants to take the place of old ones but it's a lot harder and more time-consuming to set up a well functioning school, and in the meantime you'll be doing a lot of collateral damage to children who are stuck there.

At least where I grew up and they tried shutting down failing schools, part of the issue was that the new schools that were set up would take less of a percentage of Special Ed or ELL students that are harder to accommodate for and teach, and so they would be left to drag down the schools marked as failing.

why can't the metric eliminate outlier students? This is what they do in competitive sports that require judges like ice-skating or diving; you remove the top and bottom score, and average the rest.

A school should not be judged on the best students they have, nor the worst. They ought to be judged on the most prominent outcomes for students - the middle.

A school could get a higher score, even if they take in bad students or ESL students, or disabled students. The metric for measurement should remove those students' contributions (as they are likely the ones dragging down the metric), unless those students reach some middling score (in which case, they don't affect the over all metric much). Ditto with the super-genius students.

Student performance doesn't entirely depend on individual circumstances, it depends on the environment and the other students around them. The special ed students require more resources. E.g. they usually have more staff, sometimes 1:1 aides, dedicated rooms, special classes. Beyond the resources explicitly allocated for them, they also take up common resources. E.g. if they are mixed into a normal class, the teacher usually has to spend disproportionately more time on them, either 1:1 in the classroom or in prep for customized learning plans.

Informally bad students are worse in some ways since they don't necessarily get additional resource allocation (like an ESL or special ed student would), but will distract the rest of the classroom.

It would only make sense if they completely segregated those students, which (AFAIK) is very bad for those students.

Some schools are dominated by outlier students. What do you when you have a school of 500 students in a blighted community and the average GPA is less than 0.15?

>https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/baltimore-school-rep...

Then they aren't "outliers" are they?

For the school, no. For the general population, yes.

They should have a mentor system where high performing schools become mentors of underperforming schools. The high performing school will get more funding if it is successful in improving educational quality. 10% of its budget must be spent on mentoring.

You can't fix a resource problem with a positive feedback punishment loop.

Also known as a negative feedback loop?

A negative feedback loop self-regulates. A feedback loop that exacerbates itself is a positive feedback loop, regardless of the perceived character of the feedback.

Gotcha, thanks for the clarification. Positive in the sense of accumulation not in the sense of a positive outcome.

"The beatings will continue until morale improves!"

If successful schools are responsible for less successful schools it might work out.

> Imagine if a lemon law penalized schools for rotten educations

California has that, originally as part of the high-stakes testing with consequences regime incentivized by NCLB. It means poor districts with the kinds of populations that do poorly, especially if they also are in communities that experience particularly adverse local economic conditions resulting in a negative socioeconomic shift, fail, get punished, and ultimately get deprive of local control.

Doesn't improve education, but it does mean that disadvantaged communities in crisis also get treated as second class citizens that can't be trusted with their own government.

Education “accountability” policy in the US, both actual and the suggestions made by policy entrepreneurs, shows a distinct lack of appreciation for the concept of establishing what outcomes are legitimately in control of those being held “accountable” before holding them accountable.

> Through one of the educational reforms for which I advocated as governor, Indiana prohibits the so-called social promotion of children from third to fourth grade until they pass a reading test...The reform worked, in a uniquely rapid and emphatic fashion. In the first post-reform cycle of national assessments, Indiana fourth-graders jumped from 27th to 14th. Two years later, the state ranked ninth... So a little accountability can go a long way.

I'm not saying this is a bad idea, or that you should advance the grade level of kids who didn't learn how to read. But, those improvements to the tests scores are probably better explained by the fact that they just stopped testing the kids who were dragging down the average. The third graders who didn't learn to read were left in third grade, and they only tested the kids who went on to fourth.

> by fining them a fraction of their graduates’ student debt defaults, charging them an insurance premium against such failures to repay, or some similar mechanism, the concept of schools sharing the risk of inadequate performance

Wouldn’t colleges just charge more to account for the potential fines?

Or maybe they would allow fewer students to graduate, at which point students have student loans and no diploma. Sounds like a lose/lose.

I’m also wondering if the data on loan defaults after attending a certain college would be consistent enough to attribute the default primarily to the education rather than to luck, major life events, lifestyle choices, etc.

And if a student graduates with the lowest GPA possible, do they not bear some responsibility for low aspirations or low ability as well?

I’m a little perplexed that this is a serious proposal.

They would close or shrink departments that lead to careers with poor incomes. I'd argue that wouldn't be such a bad thing. Many departments like English are notorious for conning gullible students into grad school with marginal at best career prospects, just to preserve their turf in internecine inter-departmental turf wars.

Teachers would refuse to work at schools in areas with children who have low levels of home support.

This is already the case to a certain extent. In my state, experienced teachers are constantly applying for jobs in preferred districts. There is a notable migration pattern from poor districts to affluent ones.

Also, poor districts are penalized with a lower property tax base.

Yep, it's a win win for those teachers and school districts. Teachers get an enjoyable teaching experience with students that actually care about success AND they get (much, much) higher pay. Students get great teachers.

Unfortunately you can't really fix students not caring about their education. America doesn't have the type of shaming culture Asian countries have where class rankings are publicly posted and low scorers are socially stigmatized.

I think a student in America is more likely to be stigmatized for doing well academically rather than for doing poorly.

That really depends on where you went to school. The "in" crowd at my school were some of the smartest kids. My best friend from college was scolded by his peers for "acting white" when he tried hard growing up.

Pop culture stereotypes kids who try hard as "nerds", but I don't really think it is a terribly accurate reflection of reality; post-secondary education attainment is as high as ever, so unless you are determined to do unskilled labor or run in a gang, you are more likely to try than not.

> Unfortunately you can't really fix students not caring about their education

You absolutly can, it should be the easiest thing in the world.

From birth give them caregivers with the time and ability to start learning early. Give them someone who will read to them daily, who will show them numbers and letters and counting.

Send them to a good pre-school with motivated teachers who are able to teach them math and language and cause and effect without them realizing they are being taught.

Send them to schools where they can do their assignments during the day, either in class or in an afterschool program. Give them tutors to help them in subjects they struggle with.

In other works, give them what every middle and upper class kid gets. It would do wonders.

It all comes down to being willing, as a society, to devote adequate resources to everyone, and in particular to every child, regardless of circumstance.

It also come down to providing better options to folks who don’t want to be or shouldn’t be parents. Lots of kids being born into homes that will fail them, even if you shoveled fiat into the household.

(from experience as a volunteer guardian ad litem)

Yes, unfortunately it's quite easy to have them and not so easy to raise them.

In the words of a famous poet:

Tout le monde sait comment on fait des bébés, mais personne sait comment on fait des papas.

Make it easy to get contraception.

Make it easy for young men to get and then reverse vasectomies.

Invest much more in the education system and children in general.

Make it easy to get an abortion.

That is one thing, and it is important, but what I said encompasses a lot more people and needs, so I think it doesn't quite "come down to" merely helping this one specific set of "problematic" adults you personally have some experience with. Maybe some problems are directly caused by what you said.

"Shoveling fiat into the household." We had the biggest drop in child poverty during the pandemic (too bad it's temporary), because we gave people money. If you want to limit the supply of dollars raise taxes on the top, that's where all the "fiat" (lol) ends up after just a couple steps.

What I said is much more general: our society must devote sufficient resources that all children have the opportunity to flourish.

Sorry I read "all" but you wrote "also", which is more in accord. Sorry!

Nevertheless I think what you said is a special case of what I said.

Society needs less kids overall imho, based on the quantity of capable family units fit to parent. Parenting and children should be a privilege, not a right.

More money doesn’t fix terrible parents/households, and they’re numerous to say the least.

People have fewer children as economic opportunities increase.

All over the world birth rates are falling—even India is approaching below-replacement.

So you can probably move on from your concern, and focus on getting the benefits of economic development to everyone, problem solved!

If that were the case then Asians wouldn't comprise 50% of school populations where affirmative action is banned even though there are far more middle and upper class whites in those states (California, Washington).

I don't think you've experienced what "caring about education" truly means. I mean that you are held to a high standard from a very early age. No B's allowed or you get an ass-whooping. You are expected to rank highly in any competitions or standardized testing. You're expected to take the most challenging classes possible and do well in them. Your parents constantly compare you to those better than you and motivate you to become better than them.

Those are much higher standards than what you're proposing, which is to just give them tutoring. They're things that you don't get by funding more resources, but by a certain form of family cultural norms. You can't buy culture with money.

> No B's allowed or you get an ass-whooping. You are expected to rank highly in any competitions or standardized testing. You're expected to take the most challenging classes possible and do well in them. Your parents constantly compare you to those better than you and motivate you to become better than them.

I'm not sure that the world in which we give 90% of children depression is really the ideal we're striving for here.

This is not "caring about education" in a way that I think really helps anyone. I cared about education and didn't have these things. I honestly don't see how anyone can look at e.g. the SK system and cram schools and the like and think "Yeah! _They_ really know how to do it!"

Also, it's not clear that this actually leads to better outcomes for South Koreans either if you look at any sort of economic data.

Three quarters of South Koreans are college graduates but only 30% of jobs require a college education.

How would this work in practice? Who would pay and who would provide the service? Wouldn't it make sense for the parents to provide this service, or would there be forced conscription either in the form of forced labor (directly i.e. slavery) or forced labor (indirectly via taxation)?

Imagine if the funding went with the student rather than the district - all manner of schools would pop up, market themselves to parents, and pay equivalent salaries. It would decouple school quality from region.

there's a couple problems with this, though;

* our national zoning issues with housing also extend to schools. it is really hard to find appropriate sites for new schools and even harder to set one up with the approval of the neighbors. Schools do generate traffic and such, although usually at different times than work commutes, but this doesn't really matter to your retired NIMBY arguing about neighborhood character.

* given school siting issues, transportation costs are a huge stumbling block for lower income children to be going to different schools. School busing is not cheap and sometimes not paid from general funding, but required to be paid by parents. If school busing is not available, not all parents have the time to drive their kids to school before work, not all schools are safe or reasonably close enough to walk or bike to, and cabs are out of the question due to expense.

* it incentivizes good schools from taking in children that would tank their KPIs. one controversy with new charter schools when I was growing up is that they would generally take less Special Ed or ELL (English Language Learner) students than the population at large to try and goose their statistics.

"There is nothing worse than black children ruining the character of the neighborhood." - american strawman

I hope nobody thinks like this in reality.

Here's an article discussing opposition to a shelter for homeless children and women: https://www.bakersfield.com/opinion/community-voices-nimbyis...

And opposition to a 2018 plan by the San Jose school district to build affordable housing for their own employees: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-17/a-fierce-.... Never mind that the housing is "low-income" because they chose the teachers' salaries.

Better yet, put education on the blockchain. Each student gets a supply of school crypto which can be traded for schooling, or exchanged with other students. Some kids may not stay in school as long, but this way everyone gets equal value. Plus schools earn much more as the price of Educoin increases, which improves quality of education across the board.

It would be a disaster, as in, something that might be conceivably even worse than what we've got now.

1. There's no way that parents could choose quality schools, especially if there was enough churn in the market.

2. Maximizing profits would be at odds with providing sufficient capacity, meaning that there would be shortages of "seats" and possibly even regions with effectively no schools.

3. There would be continual bail-outs of "too big to fail" school operators, and schools that go bankrupt after exhausting their start-up capital.

4. It would be a logistical nightmare if parents can't find nearby schools for their kids. Imagine each family logging a couple of hours per day on the road transporting kids to schools.

The state would still have to function as the back-up for school failures and capacity shortage, basically providing the inefficiency needed to guarantee access to everybody.

NIMBY.

In my school district teachers have stopped giving out homework apparently because they are negotiating their contract. I had to purchase Brain Quest books to keep kids busy after school.

This is already how it works. Crappy schools are pretty much exclusively staffed by early career teachers who can't do better and under-performing experienced teachers who can't do better.

How many motivated students who regularly attend class out there actually get a poor education?

Sure, lots of students fail, but how many are specifically for poor instruction?

Poor instruction comes in many forms. To give you an example, my brother was hated by a 3rd grade teacher. She would be just a bit harsher with him. Objectively she wasn't teaching him that 1+1 = 5 or something like that, but she was definitely destroying his motivation for school.

I saw that exact sort of thing happen numerous times. Teachers who habitually pick nemesis students year after year, to single out for uniquely harsh punishment and public derision. From what I've seen myself and heard from others, it's a serious and widespread problem, and has been for generations.

How can this be solved though? I earnestly don't know. 'More funding' is the usual silver bullet solution for anything wrong with education, but would more funding actually fix this specific problem? Teachers who habitually do this to kids have something wrong in their head, paying them more money won't improve their behavior. You have to get rid of those teachers. But how do you do that? Getting rid of public school teachers for anything less than criminal misbehavior is very difficult; teachers unions can drag it out for years, and that's even assuming the administration is motivated to do something. Often, that's not the case. This sort of abusive behavior doesn't necessarily leave behind a paper trail to investigate, resulting in a he-said-she-said mess of allegations that are very difficult to untangle and much easier to ignore. Even if everything was recorded, it's still easier for the administration to ignore the problem than to address it; that's their path of least resistance. If you took the teachers union out of the picture, that wouldn't solve the problem because the administrations could still choose to ignore the problem. And of course, cutting funding to the schools doesn't fix this problem either. That only makes conditions shittier for everybody, it doesn't get rid of problem teachers.

> Teachers who habitually pick nemesis students year after year, to single out for uniquely harsh punishment and public derision. From what I've seen myself and heard from others, it's a serious and widespread problem, and has been for generations.

It's a case of basic animal social order: someone has to be the low bird in the pecking order. If it's not a kid it'll be the teacher.

> How can this be solved though?

Keep the ratio of kids to adults low, 6:1 is probably the outer limit. Also the adults should be sane and emotionally mature.

My friend was bullied by a 3rd grade teacher - harsh lectures and detention. He a shy kid, never made trouble.

I had my own experience with a hostile grad student teaching a required course. He would get exasperated trying to find faults with my homework.

This was my middle school experience. Teachers gossiped like crazy, and if one took a dislike to you, you became branded. I had my own issues at the time, but man I hated that school.

Fast forward to high school, and life totally turned around. Motivation, attainment and having a teacher believe in you are all closely tied together.

Surely in your own life you've had teachers that really stood out? Ones that made learning especially fun or effortless? Who are good at showing you how the knowledge can be useful in the real world?

A lot of people seem to have this idea that there's no such thing as a bad teacher (especially when that teacher has a PhD), but to accept that you must also accept that there's no such thing as a good teacher either. All that matters is showing up to class, no matter how the teacher chooses to present the material?

I sincerely hope people are not stupid enough to think this is remotely a good idea.

Folks need to pay very careful attention to the Republican playbook; like many public services, they're absolutely deliberately running public education into the ground, because privatization is very profitable. I wish more understood this very obvious play.

"Imagine if we punished under-funded schools" with fines and reduced funding.

...

Oh wait that was the "No child left behind" which provided a mechanism to allow states to defund low income schools that they didn't want to support in the first place.

I think it is a wrong place to start. If we somehow manage to get politicians to bear personal financial responsibility for improving living standards of the majority the rest should more or less fall into place eventually. Of course making politicians responsible in such way will never happen in reality. They are mostly bought by big corporations and act accordingly.

Cannot read the entire article, but from the title, teaser and comments I think I get the idea. Sure, penalize the mayor and the school (district?) board officials, not the actual school or teachers. Make the leaders responsible, not the workers, for the high level results.

Seriously the state government is the entity diving up money, and determining the curriculum, so that is the entity to target. For states that have demonstrated a general hatred for free public education simply reducing funding aids their goals.

The correct course of action should be that they get decreasing control over their state education system, the state education system is increasingly run by the federal government, and the state pays back the federal government for the service.

If a state actually can run its education system more "efficiently" then it will come out ahead. But if not the students aren't made to suffer - it forces the state itself to budget correctly.

I did not propose reducing funding, but penalizing the people that run (lead/manage) the system. It is like a performance driven salary for them, bad results lead to low or no pay.

And let's let parents off scot-free because clearly everyone else is to blame for their children's lack of success. /s

If the kid's time were a limitless, free resource, and they also weren't subject to any stigma from repeating a grade, or any negative effect from being taken away from their age cohort a.k.a. "friends," then sure why not?

Here's a better idea: how about we allow colleges to repeal diplomas for folks who graduate but clearly didn't learn anything. Let's start with the author of this column.

Learning is just one of the many value props of a college, and possibly the less important one. They're social networks + outsources conscientiousness/IQ tests for the labor market + personal brand building institutions.

Will they control for IQ?

IQ is only a valid metric for intelligence when someone "low IQ" is up for the death penalty. In all other circumstances, its a fake stat that doesn't really measure anything and can't predict anything.

Unbiased citation needed. IQ is politically incorrect, but there seems to be evidence to support its validity.

Imagine holding parents accountable for the development of their offspring?

I'm imagining vouchers.

I'm imagining the same for parents who don't control their kids. Someone has to vouch for them.

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