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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

What does being "behind" even mean? The dirty truth of the US educational "system" is that there is no system. Different school districts offer vastly different levels of education, depending mainly on wealth (i.e., the property tax base, because schools are locally funded). When I was a kid, my family moved from one city to another within the same state, and suddenly I was way behind in my new school, especially in math, simply because my new school moved at a significantly faster pace and had higher expectations of students. But I eventually caught up, and it was fine. So I suspect that this problem is vastly overstated.

It's not like the US educational system was doing a great job before the pandemic. I used to teach in college, and a lot of student were not properly prepared. We rely a lot on "social promotion", where mere age and time spent in seats is taken as the standard for educational level.

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> But I eventually caught up, and it was fine. So I suspect that this problem is vastly overstated.

Alternative explanation: you are acting like there is no problem based on anecdotal evidence that is irrelevant to the current situation - At the same time there might be a very serious one as quite a few kids basically have missed proper school for about 2 years. Let's not even try to pretend that lockdowns have no negative effects at all.

> At the same time there might be a very serious one as quite a few kids basically have missed proper school for about 2 years. Let's not even try to pretend that lockdowns have no negative effects at all.

I'm not saying there are no negative effects. What I would say is this: even before the pandemic, many students were not sufficiently "challenged". They were already moving more slowly than they could have moved. It's possible for them to catch up. They could have caught up with other kids before the pandemic too, if put in the right situation.

Time spent sitting in seats is not education, by itself. How that time is used is just as important, and we often squander that time, even when there's not a public health crisis.

Unless you think that every single child was previously slacking off and is capable of effectively working double time without getting overwhelmed, then it's still a problem to be concerned about.

> Unless you think that every single child was previously slacking off and is capable of effectively working double time without getting overwhelmed

I actually do think this.

"John Stuart was educated by his father, with the advice and assistance of Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place. He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Biography

I realize that this is not financially realistic for application to every child. But the gap between how far we could push children and how far we do push children is often massive. We've always been "ok" with leaving many children behind.

This sounds suspiciously like JEDD Mason in Terra Ignota.

Human intelligence is distributed, like everything else, on a normal distribution. Students at either end will have vastly different experiences. The low-end students, sadly, will never catch up. The high-end students will catch up easily, and may even enjoy the challenge. The really bad outcome is if the average student (e.g. +/- one sigma) can't catch up such that when this generation reaches employment age, there will be a noticable dip in education, roughly equivalent to skipping half of high-school.

Why didn't schools keep going during the pandemic, but outside or in very well ventilated buildings? This is what New York did during he Spanish flu pandemic, and it seemed to work. (It did look cold, though).

>> Why didn't schools keep going during the pandemic, but outside or in very well ventilated buildings?

Possibly because the leadership of the associated organizations were raised in an educational system that doesn't promote critical thinking, creativity, or analytical reasoning.

It's worse than that. I remember bars, restaurants and even sporting events were open prior to schools. Children were an afterthought.

Teachers unions were against it in our area, even after vaccination became available to everyone over 11.

>Different school districts offer vastly different levels of education, depending mainly on wealth

The data show that causation mostly flows in the opposite direction. The main determinant of whether a school is "good" is the average academic ability of the students who attend the school. And that, statistically speaking, is largely a function of race and income.

Policy interventions based on the idea that school quality determines student performance have consistently failed to show significant results. These interventions include local and regional busing. Putting lower-achieving students in close physical proximity to higher-achieving students doesn't make much of a long-term difference.

> These interventions include local and regional busing.

Busing raises a host of problems that are independent of school quality.

I can only offer my anecdotal experience here, but I was able to thrive in my new school, after I caught up. My inherent ability didn't change simply by moving, but more was given to me and more expected of me after I moved. But I wasn't bused in, I lived in the same neighborhoods as my friends and peers.

The article you're commenting on mentions several interventions with significant benefit:

"High-dosage tutoring—which educators define as involving a trained tutor working with one to four students at a time, three times a week for a whole year—is one of the few interventions with a demonstrated benefit that comes close, producing an average gain equivalent to 19 weeks of instruction."

"One option is voluntary summer school, which, according to prior research, has yielded about five weeks of instructional gain per student. Another option is an extra period each day of instruction in core subjects. A double dose of math over the course of an entire school year has been shown to produce gains equivalent to about 10 weeks of in-person instruction, although the evidence on reading is weaker."

https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/5-lessons-e... lists a few more studies that consistently show the opposite of what you claimed. School quality matters, and more schooling matters.

Summer school, being about 5 weeks, adding 5 weeks of gain is ... kind of expected.

Which begs the question… why don’t we do it? Summer break is fun and all, but far to long for most students.

I am a fan of switching to school years with 10 weeks on, 3 week off quarters. I think a couple of the summer breaks staggered across the nation would be even better so that not all kids are on vacation at the same time.

While you are correct that good schools are caused by good students, it's not strictly accurate to say that "statistically speaking, is largely a function of race and income". Being a good student is largely a function of intelligence and conscientiousness, which is largely a function of parental intelligence and conscientiousness. Income doesn't cause intelligence or conscientiousness, although it may be partially caused by them.

Agreed, this is a more precise way of stating it, albeit using traits that are more difficult to measure at scale.

Income can have a huge effect on observed "conscientiousness". If a student is having to spend effort on looking after their siblings, or their parents, or worrying about how they're going to eat then it's going to be much harder for them to focus on school.

I've always believed, though i'm unsure of specific studies that back this claim up, that income is dominant in defining these traits not because wealth translates to intelligence but that poverty inhibits it.

Stressors make everything difficult, of which poverty is a massive one.

> Being a good student is largely a function of intelligence and conscientiousness, which is largely a function of parental intelligence and conscientiousness

Only partially - only ~40-50% of a person's IQ are a result of parental genetics [3]. The rest is a result of the environment in which the child is raised - and there are very important factors at play that directly correlate with income of the parents:

- Does each child have their own, adequately sized, room with a study desk to work in and concentrate? During the pandemic it turned out to be a real problem that children who had to share rooms had issues following streamed lectures.

- Are the living conditions actually healthy? Poor people are often forced by their poverty to live in decrepit conditions: noise from highways or rails, toxic emissions from nearby factories, general issues with toxicity (paint, lead water pipes, mould). All of this has direct outcome on performance of students.

- Do the children, particularly those of working age (14 and above, but especially 16 and above) have to work actual jobs to make pocket money or contribute to household income?

- Are the parents largely absent from their children's lives because both parents have to work full-time or worse jobs just to make ends meet?

- Can the parents invest time and money into furthering their children's education? Can they sit together with them in the afternoon/evening and work through homework problems? Can they afford side education, playing instruments or similar activities that have been shown to have a positive effect on education?

- Do the parents have enough money to feed the children? Hundreds of thousands of students alone in New York depend on schools handing out free lunches, which turned out to be a massive problem during the pandemic [1].

- Poverty causes stress - not just from being cooped together in too small living spaces, but also in food insecurity, increased fights between parents over the stress, or in the worst cases from literally being homeless [2].

[1] https://www.foodandwine.com/news/new-york-city-school-childr...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/nyregion/nyc-homeless-chi...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Molecular_g...

If these family-level environmental inputs had substantial effects on adult IQ, we'd see it in the behavioral genetics research. But we don't. The adult IQs of adopted children have very little correlation with those of the adoptive parents who raised them or those of their adopted, non-biological siblings.

> If these family-level environmental inputs had substantial effects on adult IQ, we'd see it in the behavioral genetics research. But we don't.

Actually there is a direct correlation between adult IQ and stress [1], it isn't genetic though.

> The adult IQs of adopted children have very little correlation with those of the adoptive parents who raised them or those of their adopted, non-biological siblings.

To quote [2]: "Studies of mixed-race children and black children adopted by white parents suggest, however, that racial differences in test performance are largely if not entirely environmental in origin."

In any case the question is open if "IQ testing" is actually a decent measure of intelligence, especially with children that suffer from a variety of stuff somewhere on the ADHD/autism spectrum (e.g. selective mutism, anxiety issues), or if it can be used as a metric at all due to disparities in testing incidence between population segments - often enough, it's teachers who recommend IQ and ADHD tests, and there have been a number of suggestions that racial and other discrimination can negatively affect children there.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/analysis-h...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-black-white-test-scor...

>Does each child have their own, adequately sized, room with a study desk to work in and concentrate? During the pandemic it turned out to be a real problem that children who had to share rooms had issues following streamed lectures.

I had a small that I shared with two brothers. My desk was minuscule. I had top grades.

>Do the children, particularly those of working age (14 and above, but especially 16 and above) have to work actual jobs to make pocket money or contribute to household income?

My family was so poor at a time we didn't have the money to pay the mortgage and the bank wanted to take our house. I had top grades.

>Are the parents largely absent from their children's lives because both parents have to work full-time or worse jobs just to make ends meet?

My parents were and are apathetic to my existence. I had top grades.

>Can the parents invest time and money into furthering their children's education? Can they sit together with them in the afternoon/evening and work through homework problems? Can they afford side education, playing instruments or similar activities that have been shown to have a positive effect on education?

None of that existed in my house. Nobody helped me doing homework and nobody sit with me exploring my life path. I rented instruments and asked as few money as possible. I had top grades.

>Do the parents have enough money to feed the children? Hundreds of thousands of students alone in New York depend on schools handing out free lunches, which turned out to be a massive problem during the pandemic.

Admittedly, even in poverty we never were hungry.

>Poverty causes stress - not just from being cooped together in too small living spaces, but also in food insecurity, increased fights between parents over the stress, or in the worst cases from literally being homeless.

This I wholeheartedly agree, that's why the "money doesn't make you happy" is such a lie.

I know my tone was rather flippant but the relationship between money, stress and academics is so important to me. And by the way, even after all these top grades, and a Physics degree and speaking English, French, Italian and German and whatever I haven't escaped poverty. I'm back living to my parents at 27. It seems like the best way to make money in Italy is to inherit it.

Have you considered that your experience is entirely anecdotal and statistically someone in your place is less likely to succeed in general, not guaranteed to fail?

Did anyone get their exams paper's back and check the answer's against text books? If you didnt, how did you know your grade is accurate?

I was living in a four man tent during my exams, fortunately I had it to myself.

Not the best situation to be in but its made me hyper aware of how corrupt the criminals running the world are.

"I did it so there is no excuse for anyone else"

Your response appears utterly useless in this discussion except to highlight that even those who grew up in poverty cannot be expected to have any empathy for those who share a similar background.

It is an example that nature absolutely can overcome nurture. Kids in similar situations usually fails, yes, but if they were talented enough they would have succeeded just like that guy. You can still have empathy for them and see that they struggle, no kids should have to go through that in an ideal world, but you can't say that those kids fails only because of that situation as we can show plenty of examples where talented kids makes it through.

We should help all kids from poverty, but we shouldn't ignore the huge factor talents plays in how well they will perform in school. Saying things like "rich kids only do well because they get good support" is ignorant. That support helps, but parts of it is genes as well, both are important factors, and understanding how those factors interacts is important to give each kid the best help they can get.

I'm going to repost a comment of mine from two years ago. This is not an unknown thing to school boards.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23012403

The wife of one of my good friends was on the county school board for 12 years. According to her, it was an unspoken secret was that parental involvement was the biggest predictor of / contributor to student success. The reason it was taboo was because you absolutely cannot expect anything from the parents. It was political suicide.

I would put dollars on the table that such is already happening for every parent that is willing and able to do it, because they were already doing it before too.

The #1 factor in determining if a kid will have a desired outcome is if they have a mom and a dad present. It's really that simple. And that means parental involvement.

It's sad one is labeled a racist or anti-feminist or w/e when you point this obvious fact out. ~70% of black kids are born to single mom's. That's a broken culture. White kids are at ~30% and rising and we see the same failure rates. That's a broken culture. Asian's have 2-parent families and have success. Even the lower class ones, suggesting income/class shouldn't be a factor in having kids with 2 parents.

So of course the next step is to demonize the nuclear family. The trends keep getting worse.

What do you mean by "broken culture?"

That's it's considered acceptable for kids to be born into situations like this. This is "broken" because it reliably leads to failure and undesirable outcomes.

You’re making a lot of strong assumptions when you say that it’s considered acceptable. I strongly doubt that it is normal for anyone to want to be a single parent (there are of course anecdotal exceptions to this, but not on a cultural level).

I think he means a culture that produces bad outcomes.

The most charitable interpretation of "broken culture" would be America, across all slices of society, has trended towards selfish shallow values, less intellectual interests and value on hard work, more aggression and an empathy defecit.

I think this has frayed the fabric of society by damaging the reciprocity that binds families and communities, and encourages divisive and antisocial, short-term behaviors over long-term, collective decision-making.

This varies across our rich tapestry of subcultures, but I see it everywhere. Especially among government and business leaders.

An analogy I heard is that there is no single American culture. Or even an "American Culture" at all, and that there probably shouldn't be one. And that various powers/forces/etc have tried to homogenize America into a shared American Culture which can't possibly exist. So, the analogy is America is like a soda machine that has many different flavors of soda and each of them is different and unique and loved by different people. Some flavors disgust some people too and they don't want it. However, we've decided to mix them all together anyways and no one actually likes that. So instead we'd be better off leaving each other alone, allowing different communities with different values to do things the way they want to and to rely less and less on Federal government oversight into social issues. Give more power to the states and in turn the states give more power to localities.

Wholeheartedly agree with your analogy. Americans share a federal political system, but not much of a collective culture, at least not too far beyond that shared by liberal societies around the world. It's one of the best thing about the states. You're 100% right that the Federal govt should step back to allow local government to handle issues differently. Local people care about local people and understand their needs/concerns.

but what to do about it?

we can't just expect parents to get involved. nor does it help to just blame their kids performance on them.

the focus really needs to be on a broader level. what changes to our society are needed so that families can thrive so that they can actually focus on the care of their kids?

things like higher minimum wage, parental leave, easy access to insurance, etc. all the general needs everyone has.

i believe what largely has gone wrong is the idea that in order for people to have a better life they need to start with better academic performance so they can get better jobs which ends in a better life.

but it appears that academic performance is not the start of a better life, it is the outcome.

That's a broken culture

what part of the culture is broken? and who's culture?

how about the broken american culture that doesn't provide adequate support and protection for parents? i don't think being a single parent is a problem in itself. it only raises the difficulty level. it would be less of an issue if parents had more rights against their employers that would allow them to care for their kids, or get enough financial support that they don't need to hold a fulltime job with hours that conflict with their kids schedule. or affordable childcare. there are so many things that could be done, but people just like to point at problems and not think about solutions.

So you're saying it's everything else that's wrong. Not that we accept single motherhood as normal and OK?

That's what's wrong here. Rights without responsibility. Stop incentivizing single motherhood, for starters. Encourage men to stick around and for both parents to rely on each other. It feels like you're helping but you're not. You're encouraging futile behavior.

that's not what i meant to say.

what's wrong is that we keep trying to find out who or what is at fault instead of trying to find out how to actually make things better.

the question is: how do you encourage men to stick around? what makes them leave? who or what is incentivizing single motherhood? if it is economical factors, then those factors need to change. those are what i gave as examples.

what i hear is: being a single mother is bad. you shouldn't leave your family. don't do that. but that doesn't help. we need to get a better understanding of what causes families to break apart. we need to provide an environment that supports families.

being a single parent is not a cause, it is an outcome. we need to fix the causes for that outcome, if we want to change that.

encourage parents to rely on each other

what is that supposed to mean? a cynical reading suggests that this means that if only parents would rely on each other they would not have any problems. how about the ability to rely on society? because that is what is lacking. parents are on their own. i don't know, but is that what incentivizes single mothers? because they can get more help that way? if that is the case, yes, that should change, but not by providing less help to single parents, but rather by providing more help to couples, so they can stay together.

Of course there are external factors, but if you aren't even going to entertain the idea that the people who decide to live these lifestyles bear some of the responsibility for the outcomes, you are not helping anyone.

It seems that as a society we have given up on the idea of personal responsibility/accountability.

No, we as a society have deemed it irresponsible to leave it completely up to people who have never properly learned how to succeed in society what they want to do and instead set up programs to make it easier for them to get on the path to success.

There still remains a vocal part of society that have given up their civic responsibility to improve society (whether by ensuring the other participants in the democracy are educated or by reducing pollution, etc.) and that believes that these groups should continue to remain impoverished for generations, radiating harms on the rest of society.

i think it is irrelevant who is responsible, what matters is what we can do about it.

i can not force you to change your lifestyle, but i can make the desired lifestyle more economically and socially viable.

but that requires actually helping people instead of lecturing them.

It's a hard question and we have to look at how we got here. Before 1955 or so, we weren't having this problem, for example. We had other problems, yes, but not this disaster. Not so many people were clients of the state.

But for starters at a high level:

- Dismantle any form of welfare; money, food stamps, housing, etc. for anyone of able mind and body and of working age. Children will never be an input for how much welfare you receive so there is no incentive to have kids. Possibly even penalize welfare based on number of kids.

- As a consequence of this, fire most of the welfare administration nationwide

- Build a new Citizen Development Force that takes on children from mothers that can't raise them without benefits. Any mother can drop their kid(s) off here but the mother then loses any rights to the child. These are large camps around the country that offer among the best salaries to qualified care takers, teachers, mentors, etc. Each function has aggressive KPIs (to go with the high salaries) and audits to ensure successful outcomes. There are checks and controls to prevent any type of abuse.

- Citizen Development Force has a mission to nurture, raise, teach, and grow these kids into self sufficient, responsible adults. The top 30% are sent to universities or put into military leadership positions (officers). The rest are taught trades/technical/enlisted after 15 years of age based on their interests and aptitudes. Those with learning disabilities become clients of the state for life.

Ideally, after about 20-30 years this program can begin to be shut down and the funds can be redistributed to finance new social problems. The idea is to break the cycle.

please tell me you are joking. you want to punish people for having kids?

do you think parents are going to give up their children willingly?

what you are suggesting sounds like brave new world. that's a horrible vision.

children growing up without their own parents is only going to make things worse. i do not believe that any form of institution is going to be more capable to raise children than natural parents.

your ideas work under the assumption that these parents are not capable of raising their kids. but that is not true, and that is not the problem.

the problem is that they have to raise their kids and make a living in an environment that is not supportive. pretty much any other country in the world is more supportive than the USA.

the big factor that you are missing is that we don't know if those children will be capable to have families of their own. my prediction is that they won't be because they didn't grow up in a family themselves. so this system will have to continue in perpetuity because the children of these people will also have to be raised in these institutions, and more parents are going to send kids to these institutions than parents from there who will be able to raise kids on their own. it's going to create a cycle that will end in a dystopia.

i was still with you when you said to disincentivize single parenting, but i thought you wanted to support families. you said it yourself: The #1 factor in determining if a kid will have a desired outcome is if they have a mom and a dad present. what you are suggesting here is quite the opposite. children in institutions is not children with parents.

it smacks of hubris and arrogance. the assumption that normal people should be able to take good care of their kids without help and anyone who isn't is simply incapable and should not have had kids in the first place. that you know better than they do, and they should just submit to your authority.

brave new world indeed.

(UPDATED)

> do you think parents are going to give up their children willingly?

No, they won't want to lose their kids. But if they have no means to support them then they will. So because they aren't receiving any financial assistance for shelter, food, and clothing then they will rely on having a partner. We have now incentivized that type of behavior. Failing that, if they can't provide a safe environment for their kids then we will take the kids out of the home. We do this today. We could altar the civil rights act to include children in these situations.

> children growing up without their own parents is only going to make things worse.

Adopted kids do great. It's about structure and predictability.

> your ideas work under the assumption that these parents are not capable of raising their kids.

Correct. All the evidence says they are not capable.

> the problem is that they have to raise their kids and make a living in an environment that is not supportive.

Correct - as stated above we incentivize them to create a supportive environment or we will create one for their kids.

> the big factor that you are missing is that we don't know if those children will be capable to have families of their own.

We will teach them how. They will be so removed from their environment of shattering poverty, drugs, abuse, etc. They won't even recognize that world and will be disgusted by it. They will learn how to be productive people that can not only take care of themselves but can care for others. These are learned behaviors. One of the reasons we have generational poverty is because bad habits are passed down. The cycle never gets broken.

> children in institutions is not children with parents.

Institutions are a surrogate.

> it smacks of hubris and arrogance. the assumption that people should be able to take good care of their kids without help and anyone who isn't is simply incapable and should not have had kids in the first place. that you know better than they do, and they should just submit to your authority.

Or we can continue to double down on the same bad ideas we've been trying for the last 60 or 70 years. Talk about hubris and arrogance!

The main difference is I'm actually trying to help the kids. Not create government dependent parents that will vote for me because I get scraps sent their way.

This is the same kind of thinking that lead to the abduction of Native kids, forced sterilizations, etc.: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2019/10/14/20913408/us-stol...

Not really. What happened there was an attempt to destroy Native cultures and even reproduction. It's based on a racial trait.

My ideas are to help kids from mothers that can't or won't provide an acceptable environment to grow up in have a chance to grow up in a caring, non-abusive environment that gives them the best chance to have a life. And hopefully reproduce and pass those values on to their own kids! :)

I'm not saying it would be the best implementation, but the idea is to help kids. Not create a client of the state that will vote for a certain political party because they are helpless and dependent. I want to help people. Not hurt them and lie to myself and others and pretend I'm helping when I'm only serving my own agenda.

Why do you think the people who stole Native kids didn't want the best for those kids? It's just that in their case, they assumed that Native upbringing == bad parenting. (And I'm sure that the poverty/crime rate/etc. of those communities were also part of that rationalization.)

> Not create a client of the state that will vote for a certain political party because they are helpless and dependent.

I'm pretty sure there's no evidence bearing out that this happens to any significant degree. Moreover, people generally don't enjoy staying on welfare.

I mean, we already pull a ton of kids out of abusive homes today. The difference is there has to be a case that the child is in an unsafe environment. In the case of Native kids it was simply their race.

The problem today is the kids stay in or close to the negative environment. There’s no one to teach them. My idea is to simply close the loop and give them essentially boarding school.

People may not enjoy being on welfare but the data shows that generational welfare is a thing.

But if they have no means to support them then they will.

and as a result you traumatize everyone in that family for life.

So because they aren't receiving any financial assistance for shelter, food, and clothing then they will rely on having a partner. We have now incentivized that type of behavior.

no, you haven't.

how do you think this works? all you are doing is forcing people to stay in relationships that are not healthy. do you think people separate because they got bored? they separate because they can't support each other. but you are forcing them to stay together, which creates environments ripe for abuse.

Adopted kids do great.

you were talking about an institution. and where are you going to find all these adoptive parents? already now there are not enough of those.

we incentivize them to create a supportive environment

that's not what i meant by a supportive environment.

a supportive environment is a community that helps families who can't make it on their own.

We will teach them how. They will be so removed from their environment of shattering poverty, drugs, abuse, etc.

they will also be removed from the love of their parents, which is the most important thing that they need.

Or we can continue to double down on the same bad ideas we've been trying for the last 60 or 70 years

we could also look at how other countries do it, and listen to people and learn what they actually need to make this work for them.

The main difference is I'm actually trying to help the kids.

and i am trying to help the parents. so that they can actually take care of their kids themselves.

I think all your ideas are great and I’d be all for them if they weren’t just completely unrealistic and ineffective.

I grew up around those environments and was immersed in them. My experience as well as analyzing what we have done to “fix it” have led me to believe that a radical breaking of the wheel is necessary. And not only necessary but moral.

It’s time to put kids first.

It’s time to put kids first.

this is where i have a problem. taking away kids from their parents is not putting kids first. unless the parents are outright abusive, in which case there are already mechanisms in place. what you are suggesting is not helpful.

we do not need better individual academic performance but we need better relationships, so that people care more for each other and we can build stronger communities that can work together to improve everyones lives.

taking away children from their parents hurts the ability of those children (and of the parents too) to make friends and form trusting relationships. which in the long term hurts the very fabric of society. already individualism is very strong, and it's becoming a problem.

only as a united community can we solve our problems and build a better future.

One thing to do is to stop penalizing family structure through taxes and transfers.

> The U.S. tax code, for example, contains a marriage penalty for high-earner, two-income couples. And the earned income tax credit penalizes lower-wage married couples. Moreover, welfare rules have frequently made it harder for married households than for single-parent households to get benefits. Although few couples sit down and calculate the possible economic effects of getting married, there is a sense, especially within low-income communities, that getting married means you lose “stuff.” Couples may not be able to calculate exactly how much “stuff” they stand to lose, but they know marriage, at least financially, is a bad deal.

> And they are right. According to calculations by Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute, a single mother working full-time at a minimum-wage job who marries a man working full-time at $8 an hour stands to lose $8,060 in cash and noncash welfare benefits. Under such circumstances, the wonder is not that few low-income couples marry, but that any do.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/wedding-bell-blues-marria...

Yes and no. The tax code doesn't punish marriage per se. It punishes financially successful and ambitious couples (and for that matter, financially successful and ambitious individuals). The traditional breadwinner-homemaker relationship is subsidized in all but name by the current tax code.

If there is a causal relationship between number of parents and children's erudition, then I think you've made a good argument for the nuclear family and a great argument for polygamy. :)

We do have a sort of polygamy but the fathers don't stick around! But it's not hard to see why so many cultures had (and still have) this type of arrangement where wealthy men that can support all these women and kids have many wives, average guys have 1, and the bottom of society has none as they can't support them anyways.

Poor men can have multiple girlfriends and one night stands as well. The vast majority of men thrown in jail for failure to pay child support have low paying jobs.

> It's sad one is labeled a racist or anti-feminist or w/e when you point this obvious fact out. ~70% of black kids are born to single mom's

Where it ventures into racist territory is to present these statistics on their own absent the context of mass incarceration, over policing and manufactured black criminality that play such a large role in the disparity that you’re pointing out. To blame it on culture more so than a correlation with poverty and a cycle of incarceration feels awfully close to blaming black people for the systemic racism to which they’re subjected.

It’s not just a black issue. There’s a ton of white people this applies to. White people are at the same rate blacks were in the 60’s when the Moynihan Report came out. So the trajectory is the same.

Society is far less racist than it was in the 1950’s. However the amount of fatherlessness has exploded. Same with for whites but it started at a different place.

What data?

"i.e., the property tax base, because schools are locally funded"

Not exactly. Most states and the federal government adjust funding to send it to the schools that need it most.

https://www.commonwealthfoundation.org/research/school-fundi...

"Most states" qualifier supports the claim that funding varies widely from state to state and town to town. State and Federal funding grants alone are not going to sustain a school district.

Also, your link is basically a charter school industry propo campaign. Hardly unbiased when talking about public schools.

It's possible there could be bias. Do you have a source that states otherwise? Do you have any resaon/explaination to suspect the numbers in the pertianate table to be biased?

'"Most states" qualifier supports the claim that funding varies widely from state to state and town to town.'

Of course funding will vary to some degree - as does cost of living. This is especially true depending on the state, but it is not based on local wealth (as the original claim states). The point is that the troupe that districts collecting less property tax are providing poor education because of it are mostly false. The funding levels are mostly adjusted to be similar to other districts based on the needs-based funding of higher levels of government. Are there some states that underfunded the entire system? Probably. The example of Pennsylvania shows that it is one of the highest funded states, with some of the highest paid teachers, has relatively evenly distributed funds, and it still has districts that underperformed. This isn't a funding issue, and continuing to look at it like one is doing a disservice to those students.

There are other factors that drive success more than property tax funding. Things like two parent households, and societal/parental expectations.

As someone who went to a very poor school district - I can tell you that what the state and federal government has sent in the past is not sufficient. My school district was only 4-days a week. It has not changed since I left to the best of my knowledge.

Four days. We couldn’t even afford five days a week. There were other effects to this besides four day weeks but I’m giving a good sound byte here.

Here’s a different source contradicting that: https://www.pubintlaw.org/cases-and-projects/our-expert-repo...

Where's the part that contradicts that? That lawsuit is saying that the state isn't calculating the required funds and is apparently underfunding almost every district. That doesn't contradict the claim that the state is allocating more funds to poor districts than it does to more affluent districts, thus resulting in similar per student funding overall.

The schooling system is designed to fail the expectations of those who think its purpose is to educate people, and succeed in full-filling other purposes. If you're curious about what those other purposes might be, I recommend reading the books of John Taylor Gatto [1].

Also, the School Sucks Project [2] is a great source of knowledge about the history of schooling, as well as education solutions and alternatives to schooling. They have just launched a re-broadcast of the essential 50 episodes (of their over a decade of 800 episodes) that covers the full spectrum of the relevant topics.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/John-Taylor-Gatto/e/B001K7S0AE%3Fref=... [2] https://schoolsucksproject.com

> What does being "behind" even mean?

In my case as a guitar teacher, I see two patterns:

- Students with less support at home or natural feeling for guitar are about a year behind where they would normally be after four years of studying.

- My most motivated, talented and best supported students are on schedule or slightly ahead.

Thanks for mentioning music. It baffles me that anyone would be blind to the idea that children could be "behind" when so much of childhood development involves muscle strength and dexterity that must be practiced. This goes for many musical instruments as well as the voice, all athletics, penmanship, verbal articulation, and so much more.

Is this actually a problem for music though? Who are the future professional musicians? "My most motivated, talented and best supported students are on schedule or slightly ahead." So it's not clear that we're losing any potential virtuosos here. If a generation of amateur musicians end up being a little less proficient in music, that's unfortunate, but hardly worth panicking, I think.

I personally started playing guitar, and tennis, too late in life to become a professional. This had nothing to do with the pandemic. But I can still enjoy them as an amateur.

I'm not really thinking of the health of the professional music class here, I'm thinking of the mental and social well-being of a generation of people who may never be even moderately proficient at music.

The guitar teacher said some students are "about a year behind where they would normally be after four years of studying". That seems a lot less extreme than "never be even moderately proficient at music".

This sort of extrapolation has been very common re: children and school and the pandemic.

"Who will think of the children??" come to life

>> I personally started playing guitar, and tennis, too late in life to become a professional.

I would argue that literally no one needs professional guitar and tennis players, those are at most the "nice to have". As humans we like to have nice things, even pretend that we have to have them otherwise our life is meaningless. Don't get me wrong I love music, but deep in my mind some intuition lingers, that its vanity to claim that it is necessary, when there are people in china working 996 culture to produce our unnecessary mostly plastic stuff.

> I would argue that literally no one needs professional guitar and tennis players

I would argue that I need professional guitar players, and my life would be drabber without Steve Vai in it.

I would argue with Nietzsche that, "life without music is a mistake".

"Who are the future professional musicians?"

By the looks of things, it's the ones that take off the most clothes and do the most scandalous things. But maybe I'm just turning into a grumpy old man.

> What does being "behind" even mean?

Or matter?

Is extending parental dependency the problem? If someone starts college at 20 instead of 18 they are likely at home longer. But a lot of people aren't leaving home for college anyway, or they return home after college whether they graduate or not.

If a bunch of kids start high school at 16 instead of 14 is it going to cause serious problems? It seems to me the only issues would be those that we create by our own expectations.

There would be huge capacity problems associated with combining entire years of students. Many teachers, classrooms, and entire schools are already on the edge of overcapacity.

Absolutely. If everyone is behind, are you?

If everyone is behind then society is behind. It isn't a problem for society if one kid is behind, but it starts to be a problem when millions of kids are behind.

I would like to bring up the question again of “compared to what?”

Are the metrics:

1. Based on university entrance (in which case you need to recourse and ask the same questions of that) or

2. Based on some pragmatic list of things that will help the child become a good part of society or

3. Completely arbitrary.

You don't imagine being two years older than the majority of your classmates at that time is going to have immediate effects on their social life at that time or that employers in the future will note that they graduated later in life and thus pass them over for a different candidate?

> or that employers in the future will note that they graduated later in life and thus pass them over for a different candidate?

How would a potential employer know they were graduating college at 24 vs 22, and without knowing the reason for the difference why would they care. "I'm afraid we can't hire you at FAANG, it seems you had to repeat the first grade 15 years ago."

I was thinking more about graduating high school. At least in my country that is something you'd put on your resume.

A FAANG probably wouldn't care either way, but a Fortune 500 might, and numerous other places of employment might also pick the person that graduated "on time" if most other things are equal between two candidates.

_If_ they knew the reason it might matter less, but not all employers will take the time to figure out what the reason was, and not all reasons are necessarily something you'd want to share and offer up freely because it might be very personal. They'd have to trust the reason given as well. A person that graduated on time presents no such hassle, or unknowns.

I'm not saying it is correct to do this, it's just what I _imagine_ is likely to happen given how people tend to sometimes judge people on other inconsequential stuff.

For college graduates in the US, high school is typically not something included on your resume. The only time it'd makes sense to include is if it's a flex, like if you went to Philips Academy or somewhere "special".

Home schooling is quantifiably far superior to public schooling, pretty much independent of socioeconomic status[1].

  As one would expect, the education level of parents did affect the results. For example, home-school students of parents without college degrees scored, on average, at the 83rd percentile for the core subjects. When one parent had a college degree, those students scored at the 86th percentile, and when both parents had a college degree, those students scored at the 90th percentile. There was virtually no difference, however, between the scores of students whose parents were certified teachers and those who were not.

It amuses me that apparently certified teachers are no better at teaching than any other concerned parent. In fact, a concerned parent will wildly outperform a school teacher. This ought to be unsurprising to anyone who is aware of the mind-boggling two standard deviation improvement tutoring provides. A home-school is essentially a tutoring arrangement.

[1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/30/home-school...

> In fact, a concerned parent will wildly outperform a school teacher.

A parent teaches maybe 2 students per day. A school teacher teaches maybe 200 students per day. It's an unfair comparison.

I'm struggling to find the purpose of this reply.

Do you believe that saying "no fair!" invalidates the superior outcomes for home-schooled children?

If billions of dollars of state funding and the teachers' aggregate decades of university education can't overcome this obstacle (which did not seem to be a problem when children in one-room schoolhouses routinely used to learn Latin), I'm wondering what other advantages anti-home-schooler central planners need, in order to force their sub-par solution on parents?

I know I'm being ... obtuse. But, seriously -- if it takes 1 or 2 hours a day to "keep up" with the standard curriculum in grade school, and "schooled" students are sent home with 1 or 2 hours of homework, after they attend "school" all day -- what is the purpose of sending kids to these institutions?

> I'm struggling to find the purpose of this reply.

Not the OP, but I think the pushback is against the implication that instructor training means nothing in the context of a large classroom. It's unclear if this was an assertion you were making.

> I'm wondering what other advantages anti-home-schooler central planners need, in order to force their sub-par solution on parents?

I'm not anti home schooling. Is home schooling illegal in some places? If it is, I wasn't aware of that. Otherwise, I don't see how there's any forcing of parents.

I'm not trying to invalidate the outcomes of home schooling. I'm merely suggesting that teacher training is useful and probably necessary if you have to teach a larger number of students and not just your own few kids.

Daycare

> if it takes 1 or 2 hours a day to "keep up" with the standard curriculum in grade school, and "schooled" students are sent home with 1 or 2 hours of homework, after they attend "school" all day -- what is the purpose of sending kids to these institutions?

OMG OMG OMG this!

It’s amazing how little time it takes to keep up with school. It’s so completely clear once you clear the fog that school is mostly just day care so both parents can have a job outside of the house and increase the output of the economy.

I'd image those same parents would score similarly to the public school teachers if they had to comply with all the policies the schools set. Many teachers have quit because the schools don't let them teach effectively.

> So I suspect that this problem is vastly overstated.

> It's not like the US educational system was doing a great job before the pandemic. I used to teach in college, and a lot of student were not properly prepared.

Huh? So you think the problem of being behind is overstated, but observed many students not being properly prepared yourself when you taught?

> Huh?

There's a typo: it should have said "a lot of students". Not sure whether that was the confusion here.

You're saying that you taught and felt people were not properly prepared, but also believe people are not behind?

What I'm saying is that there's no uniformity. Incoming college freshman are mostly the same age, but their preparation for college varies dramatically, depending largely on where they came from. At any given age, many US students are "behind" their peers, because they're not all receiving the same education.

That doesn't mean they're not behind, though? If anything it just means most students are behind. It's strange you say that the problem is overstated but also say that you encountered many kids yourself who were not prepared.

> That doesn't mean they're not behind, though?

As I asked originally, what does "behind" even mean? It seems to depend crucially on a schedule and expectations. This is why I mentioned social promotion, where students move up in grade simply because a year has passed.

The pandemic has certainly messed up the standard academic schedule, without a doubt. But so what? Are kids irreparably harmed because the standard academic schedule was messed up? I don't think so. Kids were already moving at different educational paces before the pandemic.

I'm not saying it's good that educational quality differs by school district. But this is a socioeconomic problem. There's no "natural human" educational system that the pandemic messed up. When you compare US kids with, say, the great English philosopher John Stuart Mill, we're all way behind. As a kid, J.S. Mill was the beneficiary of an educational experiment almost without equal in history. He was taught Greek at the age of three! Who gets that?

The article showed standardized test performance went down, which is what it means by behind. You seem to be ranting about something irrelevant.

The authors never claimed kids were irreparably damaged. Your take is just so bizarre.

> The article showed standardized test performance went down, which is what it means by behind.

The schedule of standardized tests is not written in stone for eternity. If the academic schedule is messed up, then give the tests later.

Let's say you take a year off between high school and college. Are you "behind"? In one sense, yes. But that doesn't mean your overall college experience will be any worse than someone who started college immediately after high school. Why is the standard schedule so important?

Arguably everyone should take some time off between high school and college to get all the drinking/drugs/partying out of your system before you get serious. I certainly squandered my first couple years. ;-) But then I worked like crazy and "made it up" as a junior and senior.

If you read the article, it specifically points to remote learning as the thing that put students behind. I think the commenter believes that the negative effect of remote learning is overstated relative to other factors.

the commenter didn't even mention remote at all tho

I think it's fair to assume, in the discussion of an article, that all the discussion is related to said article.

Grice's maxim of relation: Be relevant.

https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Gricean_maxims#Maxim_of_R...

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