Comment by camgunz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by camgunz | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Yeah I don't know or really care about Rationalism or whatever. But I took Aaronson's advice and read Zvi Mowshowitz' Childhood and Education #9: School is Hell [0], and while I share many of the criticisms (and cards on the table I also had pretty bad school experiences), I would have a hard time jumping onto this bus.

One point is that when Mowshowitz is dispelling the argument that abuse rates are much higher for homeschooled kids, he (and the counterargument in general) references a study [1] showing that abuse rates for non-homeschooled kids are similarly high: both around 37%. That paper's no good though! Their conclusion is "We estimate that 37.4% of all children experience a child protective services investigation by age 18 years." 37.4%? That's 27m kids! How can CPS run so many investigations? That's 4k investigations a day over 18 years, no holidays or weekends. Nah. Here are some good numbers (that I got to from the bad study, FWIW) [2], they're around 4.2%.

But, more broadly, the worst failing of the US educational system isn't how it treats smart kids, it's how it treats kids for whom it fails. If you're not the 80% of kids who can somehow make it in the school system, you're doomed. Mowshowitz' article is nearly entirely dedicated to how hard it is to liberate your suffering, gifted student from the prison of public education. This is a real problem! I agree it would be good to solve it!

But, it's just not the problem. Again I'm sympathetic to and agree with a lot of the points in the article, but you can really boil it down to "let smart, wealthy parents homeschool their kids without social media scorn". Fine, I guess. No one's stopping you from deleting your account and moving to California. But it's not an efficient use of resources--and it's certainly a terrible political strategy--to focus on such a small fraction of the population, and to be clear this is the absolute nicest way I can characterize these kinds of policy positions. This thing is going nowhere as long as it stays so self-obsessed.

[0]: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/childhood-and-education-9-scho...

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5227926/

[2]: https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cb/cm2023.pdf

Cherry-picking friendly studies is one of the go-to moves of the rationalist community.

You can convince a lot of people that you've done your homework when the medium is "an extremely blog post with a bunch of studies attached" even if the studies themselves aren't representative of reality.

Is there any reason you are singling out the rationalist community? Is that not a common failure mode of all groups and all people?

BTW, this isn't a defensive posture on my part: I am not plugged in enough to even have an opinion on any rationalist community, much less identify as one.

Oh. It’s literally the main stereotype about rationalists. It’s a very blog-heavy subculture.

My wife is LMSW (not CPS!) and sees ~5 people a day. 153,922 population in the metro area. Mind you, this is adults, but they're all mandated to show up.

there's only ~3300 counties in the USA.

i'll let you extrapolate how CPS can handle "4000/day". Like, 800 people with my wife's qualifications and caseload is equivalent to 4000/day. there's ~5000 caseworkers in the US per statistia:

> In 2022, there were about 5,036 intake and screening workers in child protective services in the United States. In total, there were about 30,750 people working in child protective services in that year.

37% of children obviously do not experience a CPS investigation before age 18.

not what i am speaking to. I don't know the number, and neither do you. you'd have to call those 5000 CPS caseworkers and ask them what their caseload is (it's 69 per caseworker on average across the US. that's a third of a million cases, in aggregate across all caseworkers)

my wife's caseload (adults) "floats around fifty."

> not what i am speaking to

My misunderstanding then - what are you speaking to? Even reading this comment, I still don't understand.

>> 37.4%? That's 27m kids! How can CPS run so many investigations? That's 4k investigations a day over 18 years,

> 800 people with my wife's qualifications and caseload is equivalent to 4000/day. there's ~5000 caseworkers in the US

I don't know what the number of children in the system is. as i said in the comment you replied to, here. but the average US CPS worker caseload is 69 cases. which is over 300,000 children per year, because there are ~5000 CPS caseworkers in the US.

I was only speaking to "how do they 'run' that many investigations?" as if it's impossible. I pointed out it's possible with ~1000 caseworkers.

Yeah OK I can see that. Mostly you inspired me to do a little napkin math based on the report I linked, which says ~3.1m kids got CPS investigations (etc) in 2023, which is ~8,500 a day. But, the main author in a subsequent paper shows that only ~13% of kids have confirmed maltreatment [0]. That's still far lower than the 38% for homeschooled kids.

[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5087599/

I wonder if the CPS on homeschooled children rate is from people who had their children in school and then "pulled them out" vs people who never had their children in school at all. As some comedian said "you're on the grid [...], they have your footprint"; i know it used to be "known" that school districts go after the former because it literally loses them money to lose a student, whereas with the latter, the kid isn't on the books.

also i wasn't considering "confirmed maltreatment" - just the fact that 4k/day isn't "impossible"

> i know it used to be "known" that school districts go after the former

Maybe, but this sounds like some ideologically opposed groups slandering each other to get the moral high ground to me. The papers linked show a pretty typical racialized pattern of CPS calls (Blacks high, Asians low, Whites and Latinos somewhere between) that maybe contraindicates this, for example.

> also i wasn't considering "confirmed maltreatment" - just the fact that 4k/day isn't "impossible"

Yup I think you're right here. I think there's something fuzzy happening with conflating "CPS investigation" with "abuse", but I'm not sure where the homeschool abuse rate comes from.

> racialized pattern of CPS calls (Blacks high, Asians low, Whites and Latinos somewhere between)

Predominantly "black" schools receive less funding in general (per student over $2000 less), and as such, need all the student-age people in class. So a "black" family removing their child(ren) from school becomes a fiscal issue, coupled to racial issues, coupled to history; like >60% of "black" children live in a 'single parent household' due to "no man about the house" policies dating back to the 1960s, just as a single example.

I am quoting "black" because i am sensitive to this, and if i had started out with ADOS or NBA/FBA (native black american, foundational black american) i just assume it'd brook argument.

To wrap this all up - "more testing equals more cases."

I think for this argument to have any weight you have to have evidence that schools are calling CPS on families who are pulling their kids out to homeschool them. I don't see any so far.

It's not just Moshowitz a lot of them have the same syndome.

> but you can really boil it down to "let smart, wealthy parents homeschool their kids without social media scorn"

The whole reason smart people are engaging in this debate in the first place is that professional educators keep trying to train their sights on smart wealthy parents homeschooling their kids.

By the way, this small fraction of the population is responsible for the driving the bulk of R&D.

I mean, I'm fine addressing Tabarrok's argument head on: I think there's far more to gain helping the millions of kids/adults who are functionally illiterate than helping the small number of gifted kids the educational system is underserving. His argument is essentially "these kids will raise the tide and lift all boats", but it's clear that although the tide has been rising for generations (advances in the last 60-70 years are truly breathtaking) more kids are being left behind, not fewer. There's no reason to expect this dynamic to change unless we tackle it directly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com