A Test for School Reform in Newark
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Sure, I get the argument that it's more efficient to pool some resources, such as buses, food service, etc., but I really believe that education is really just about having a good principal who can choose his/her teachers and hold them accountable. Most people aren't aware that many union contracts prohibit the principal from choosing the teachers in the school because of seniority rules, and getting rid of bad teachers is essentially hopeless. And of course all teachers are paid the same, based on years of tenure, rather than actual outcomes or instructional needs.
I've seen schools which most would consider being in the worst part of the ghetto doing very well because of a highly motivated principal. The more we centralize, the harder it becomes to do anything of value to help schools perform better. And the trend continues to be more and more in the direction of centralization.
Although it's far far from perfect, the NYC education department has managed to increase principal autonomy somewhat without throwing out all the advantages to scale.
This is the big problem with education. I don't like how unions have co-opted the narrative to "Just pay us more and we'll finally do our jobs right" which somehow has become crowd friendly. Instead better performance testing and easier firing is what we need, especially in my hometown of Chicago. Public sector unions have interests that go against those of taxpayers by default. Until we fix unions we won't fix education.
They're probably even less happy about the right-wing has co-opted the narrative that the problems in education are caused by the teachers.
Teaching is a challenging job which requires an advanced degree, very long hours with no flexibility, low pay even before you adjust for true hours worked, and you are given very little professional discretion. Do you really think you're going to get better results by putting even more pressure on things which teachers have only marginal control over[1] rather than simply encouraging more teachers to leave?
To put some facts into the discussion: this assessment by the American Statistical Association found that teachers are responsible for 1 to 14% of student's test score variance:
http://www.amstat.org/policy/pdfs/ASA_VAM_Statement.pdf
Follow Amdahl's law: even if you could load the school up with the best teachers on the planet, lavish pay, fully merit-based, etc. you're not going to see the kind of improvements you're claiming.
The problems start outside of the classroom and need to be fixed there.
So you'd agree that more money for schools is not the answer?
This would cost more, although I'd hope we could compensate by having fewer administrators making hard-to-discern contributions at [generally] much higher pay.
This would certainly require more money to be put into the school systems.
You can't fix US education by pouring more money into it, but you're also not going to fix it by dismantling it. The source of the primary problem isn't the education system, it's poverty.
Moreover, the two ideas are not mutually exclusive: the outside-the-home situation could need improvement AND schools could benefit from more money.
One thing article clearly illustrates is that only throwing money at a problem does not work and difficult discussions must be had to improve the schools in this area. This benefits the economy in the long run.
"Chicago school teachers make a median salary of $71,017. That's a whole lot more than the city's median household income (which can include multiple salaries for households with more than one earner) of $46,877, and greater still than its median per capita income of $27,148"
According to the actual Chicago Public Schools site that average is now $74,839. "Low pay" seems like quite a reach for me, especially for an employee who works only 9 months out of the year.
I agree with your last line very much, but I don't think it hurts to aim some focus towards getting students that extra 14%.
9 months of the year is a popular claim but it's very misleading: most teachers are working 60+ hours during week (and weekends) during the school year and the summer vacation has been steadily shrinking as schools add various administrative days and many teachers are required to engage in ongoing professional development which means that they're using some of that time to take classes.
This isn't to say that teaching is abject misery but we aren't exactly going out of our way to make the job appealing. If you look at the total time commitment or stress levels, there are plenty of jobs where you'll get a better deal.
If we are going to compare inputs in that way, we can look at the test scores of college students going for education degrees, and see that they have worse English scores than the math majors and also have worse math scores than the English majors.[1] For most education majors, their alternative isn't to become a lawyer or scientist or Python developer.
The education degree is useful for people who are doing research into education, not actually teaching themselves.
[1] First google hit among many for SAT scores of education majors: http://www.joshuakennon.com/sat-scores-ranked-by-intended-co...
My sample is skewed by knowing mostly science teachers but basically 100% of the ones I know could easily learn to program as well as a fair percentage of the developers I've worked with. They might not be doing original CS research or doing kernel driver development but there's an awful lot of work, much of it quite well paying, which depends more on skills other than core programming ability.
If you keep on bringing up the Master's degree as some kind of proof of the other jobs they could get, I'll have to keep on posting things like[1] It's almost like the Master's of Education has been watered down to a credential to people who are willing to put in a bunch of busy work.
I'm not surprised that science teachers are pretty smart. Almost all my science teachers were pretty on it (I can name two exceptions). We probably need to do something to attract more quality science teachers. But, of course, saying that is an insult to current teachers.[2]
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/heres-the-nations-easiest-colleg...
You can argue about the merits of the requirement, whether schools of education should change their practices, etc. but until that changes, honesty compels you to compare the median incomes of people with roughly equivalent time invested in their professional skills.
> We probably need to do something to attract more quality science teachers. But, of course, saying that is an insult to current teachers.[2]
You appear determined to misunderstand that comment: it's a question of balance. The next time you hear a politician talk about education, see how many times they say anything positive about teachers versus the negatives – and note the dubious aspect to, say, “hard working” when you know that means “nights and weekends at no extra pay”.
How would you feel if your CEO kept talking about your company is releasing buggy code and we need to hire better programmers and make shipping bug-free code a key part of your pay? And, of course, no department is getting more staff, pay isn't going up in absolute terms, and none of the major obstacles people have been trying to get fixed for years are getting addressed first.
Now consider if it was paired with, say, major investment in a world-class QA operation, internal support resources and developers gaining some influence over deadlines and features. The core program might be the same but how it would be perceived is completely different if it's backed by signs of commitment and doesn't feel like you're being scapegoated.
If you want to bring it up again, this time I'll throw Teach For America onto the list of organizations that say it has no impact.[1]
that it's a professional barrier to entry which requires extra time or money to get
This is exactly credentialism. EXACTLY. "I don't know if it provides any benefit, but it takes time and money to get" is the perfect description for a useless credentialism structure.
when you know that means “nights and weekends at no extra pay”
I really don't know this. NPR seems to be part of the conspiracy keeping me ignorant [2]. Teachers work about 30 or so minutes less per day than other professionals, and that includes weekend work.
How would you feel if your CEO kept talking about your company is releasing buggy code and we need to hire better programmers and make shipping bug-free code a key part of your pay?
Like any professional, I would leave and get a different job. Fortunately my profession has not worked hard to arrange that there is only one employer in town. Since my wages are roughly what I would get on the market, as opposed to being set by some third party despite my market value, it means I haven't priced myself out of other jobs. My current employer pays me (roughly) enough to keep me around which is (roughly) what I would get elsewhere.
If I was being paid way above market for some reason, though, I'd raise a stink to high heaven and keep a hold of that prior job no matter what.
Modulo the need to keep things staffed for a whole semester, switching jobs into or out of teaching should not be as insanely difficult as it is. The beneficiaries of this system are the high-seniority people currently in the field who have no plans to leave. If someone wants to switch into teaching from another career, they need to go through the silly Masters-In-Ed hoops via night school. If someone wants to switch out after a few years, they are walking away with nothing from their pension-vesting system, and they have a "Masters In Education" degree which no one values besides school boards that have negotiated contracts.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-mak...
[2] http://stateimpact.npr.org/ohio/2011/10/05/teachers-work-few...
If you subtract the number of teacher/administrative work days they get about 20 days off per year - during the school year.
My wife has been a private school teacher for almost a decade now and worked briefly in public schools. She saw firsthand the insane rigidity of the teachers union and how incompetent teachers were kept on because they were fast to involve the union and were more senior.
I'll disagree that it's any benefit to job performance. Any evidence that it is indicative of other job qualifications is very limited. It's telling that the first page of google results for "benefits of a masters degree in education" are mostly about how it can improve the teacher's salary, not how it makes one a better teacher.
Master's degrees for other liberal arts degrees don't bring any salary boost.
70k is significantly above the US median salary.
FWIW: My mom was (until a couple years ago) a CPS teacher with a Masters and a focus on BD/LD teaching; she has strong feelings about this stuff, but I think I might disagree with a lot of them.
Relative to investment bankers, teachers are not highly paid. But relative to the economy and, in particular, to supply/demand, they have what seems to be a pretty solid deal.
A lawyer is also required to shoulder an average of 85k of postgraduate education to enter the field; a high school teacher can start with a bachelors.
Unemployment rates for teachers are projected to fall. The unemployment picture for lawyers is bleak, due to the slow-motion collapse of biglaw.
I should not have implied that you said it indicated job performance; that was the wrong place for me to challenge your statement (as I read it). Instead, I will say that it's not proper to treat a masters in education as giving the same signal as a masters in other fields.
For no reason whatsoever besides credentialism.
very long hours with no flexibility
My dad worked hard as a teacher. But he didn't work 60 hours a week or anything like that. He'd grade papers while the kids were doing homework.
low pay even before you adjust for true hours worked
Two months vacation.
and you are given very little professional discretion.
I agree with you here. The constraints put on teachers and schools by all sorts of outsiders are very limiting.
Most of them are because the people paying the bill want some sort of feedback and control mechanism. Instead, I think teachers should be given great leeway, but also be very easy to hire and fire. If a parent isn't happy with their teacher/school, they shouldn't need to appeal to the schoolboard to place rules on the teachers. Instead they should be able to vote with their feet. Exit beats voice.
To put some facts into the discussion: this assessment by the American Statistical Association found that teachers are responsible for 1 to 14% of student's test score variance
If the theory is that teachers aren't that important, we shouldn't worry so much about who they are, or if we are paying enough to attract quality teachers. NB I am not saying I agree with the antecedent.
I was just trying to point out that we're talking about a small part of the problem. I think teachers are incredibly important but they only have a limited area within which to work and the results are hard to reduce to a single number. Merit pay systems aren't a bad idea in theory but basing them so heavily on standardized tests doesn't seem like it'll set good incentives since it discourages all but a very small part of what you'd hope someone learns in school.
By analogy, imagine how it'd sound if we looked at America's obesity problem and said that the problem was caused by bad doctors and we should fix it by linking pay to their patients' blood pressure, measured annually.
Nobody would spend a minute taking that person seriously but the equivalent is basically the mainstream consensus for how to talk about education - even the Democrats who generally considered friends of the teachers unions always talk about how we need to attract better teachers, which is basically an insult to anyone who currently has the job.
I'm going to just leave this as is.
Sure there are some teachers that don't need to work all those hours. Some because they are in a good district, some because they are fine doing the minimum, but you just can't make the blanket statement that teachers don't need to work long hours and "it's ok" because of the summers break. It just is not correct.
shortening every year with professional development requirements (not saying those are bad
I'll say they are no good. They are, again, credentialism: put up some hurdles for people to jump over, and then say that they should get paid more because they jumped over some hurdles.
The real problem seems to be that the arbitration proceedings in NYC take years - partly because NYC isn't paying the arbitrators (in contrast to the union, which is paying its half of the arbitrator wages). How is that the union's fault?
This is the way just about every other profession in the US works.
My manager doesn't need to prove anything to anyone to dismiss me.
The kind of relationship you describe has created a general environment in which wages are depressed and working conditions continue to deteriorate. Every time unions lose power, workers' working conditions--including compensation and intangibles--deteriorate.
Unless teachers should be treated and protected like factory workers. Usually teachers object to that characterization, but if you want to argue for it, okay.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professions
[2] I'm assuming you are using Reagan's election as the start date of the professional malaise. Call it a lucky guess.
Yes. Why shouldn't the head of a school have the authority to fire the school's employees? If he misuses his authority, fire him.
(That goes for any profession - I don't see why anyone would work under "at-will employment" laws, particularly in the US where you can choose to work in a state that doesn't have those laws)
There are two types of people in the world: those who see themselves as perpetual victims, passively experiencing the actions of others; and those who see themselves as protagonists. The former want things like work councils, unions, arbitration boards and so forth, because they believe in conspiracies and cabals &c.; the latter prefer freedom, because they have faith in their ability to succeed in a free environment.
The last of those is considered the most broad exception, and is the least common. You want to work in a state with none of these exceptions? You're looking at Georgia and Florida. The longest period of time I spent in Florida was in a union shop.
The largest exception to at-will employment in the U.S. is civil service workers, the second largest is non-unionized private sector workers with contractual exceptions.
Whether working in a union or without a union, I've found that there are always people that work, and people that work the system.
I received better wages and better job security as a non-union worker, but that may not be the case for others. I receive better benefits as a union worker (eventually the job security would come, but I have yet to see a union in which anything other than seniority improves job security).
The only place I've ever seen freedom come into it is in how the law limits your ability to defend your professional reputation if you encounter a malicious or incompetent manager. Thankfully, I've never needed to test that.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/nyregion/16rubber.html
Sure, if by started to be dismantled you mean "was completely unchanged other than they stopped assigning the thumb-twiddling teachers to big rooms/facilities (too visible a target to critics) in favor of assigning them to smaller spaces - spare cubes, broom closets, locker rooms, conference rooms - more widely distributed around the city and hence harder to count."
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/city-schools-r...
I don't wish to make the argument that this makes the spending or this practice ideal, but rather than in scale of the NYC DOE it does not appear to be as large of a leakage as the press might like to make it seem.
[1] http://schools.nyc.gov/Aboutus/Funding/overview/default.htm
Nonetheless if we are to believe the official figures, they claim the number of rubber-roomers has declined from ~700 to ~200. Which isn't "dismantled" but is certainly "reduced"; it does seem like some progress is being made.
The alternative widely prescribed is to move towards quasi-private charter schools. These schools attract enrollment mostly because of their 7-5 school day, which eliminates daycare expense and hassle for many parents.
Educational outcomes vary.
The thing that doesn't vary is that the bondholders who fund the school buildings, etc tend to be protected. So if the charter school flops, you're stuck with it.
It's just like you can't make any ten programmers all 10x programmers, no matter what.
In a place like Newark, a child's teachers may be the only people in their lives with stable employment. That doesn't matter when implementing free market Wahhabism. Teachers must fear for their jobs.
Tenure is an imperfect proxy for employee ownership. As the article shows, it may be a better model than venture capital rocket fuelled disruption. The tragedy, in human terms, is not the failure. The tragedy in human terms is that unjust means were rationalized for ideological ends and the result was still a failure...in human terms.
Free market Wahhabism just writes up all those charter schools and consultants and studies and threatened livelihoods to a failed "ability to think outside the box." The solution to the solution failing is always the solution.
[Disclaimer: my sister is a public school teacher. Tattooed and pierced, she does the Dirty Harry. She had the kid the who was afraid that the pictures wouldn't be there later if they closed the book - think video tape. She had the kid who was kept in a closet at home for four years before third grade. The kid whose mom called the school to say he wouldn't be in because the boy friend had just killed the baby brother - and that's how the police found out when the principal called them - that's one of kids whose improvement on the FCAT determined her bonus. These are the kids who stand out from the usual parents in jail or dead of AIDS or homeless or just coming to school hungry or sick because they don't have affordable health care. Why is she in the union? Well so that some born again Southern Baptist principal can't fire her tattooed Wiccan ass.]
The system was actively anti-meritocratic and the waste was simply incredible. They ran an entire data center at around 1% utilization. The electricity wasted alone must have been tens of thousands worth a month at least.
Contractors were the worst. People often complain about too many and overpaid government employees, and there certainly was that, but the contracting waste was where the real hemorrhaging was going on. I routinely saw outside firms hired to do things at many multiples of what it would have cost to have federal employees do it, or even to recruit new federal employees. These contractors would proceed to waste the money much more flagrantly than anyone inside the government did, would deliver barely-working solutions, and would then get contracted again to fix them. It was a routine thing. I started to really suspect that someone was getting kick-backs, but gross incompetence in the handling of outside contracting could explain it too.
Contractors optimized for money-over-work.
I had a similar situation where I politely mocked a competitor's product for breaking down in 3 months when mine would die after 2 years, and the other guy answered that they make a lot of money on service contracts (it's nautical equipment, so warranties work a little differently).
Most of the explanation is probably the obvious answer: fixing the broken system requires calling higher-status people on the carpet. Attacking a few teachers, clerks, etc. is much safer politically than asking exactly why the superintendent or CEO doesn't seem to care about efficiency absent a crisis.
Still: the waste I saw was incredible. There is definitely a systemic incentive problem in government, not to mention a problem with private contracting and oversight.
That's why reforming a school is a shit show. Its the place where everyone is feeding at the teat.
Here is one possible solution for a billionaire to try. It won't work for anything but a tiny minority of students at the moment, but it will shine a light on how our education problems are a problem of the education bureaucracy, and not of the students.
Set up a magnate boarding school, outside of the city (perhaps even outside the state). Run it EXACTLY the way you want to run it. Let anyone apply. Give admission based on a lottery ... not on the basis of an examination ... so no one can accuse you of taking only the best kids.
Offer free room/board/education.
Start only with first graders. Then add a grade, every year, as your first class ages. In 12 years you will graduate your first class of students.
Hire the best teachers. Spend a lot on infrastructure. Teach programming/science/technology. Make partnerships with the best universities. Get internships for your students in start ups and companies, using your connections. Maybe your own company can hire some of them.
Show the world what kids from an inner city failed neighborhood can do, without the interference of these teachers and their unions.
When your kids succeed, however spectacularly, or modestly, that will be a beacon.
Encourage your graduates to give back to the school. You will still hemorrhage cash every year, it may never be sustainable without your continued involvement ... but it would be the kind of experiment that would leave an impact for decades ... and if you succeeded in making it sustainable, maybe for centuries.
Do you see how people cling to those fucking administrative jobs, while screwing over kids, like those jobs are the last life preserver on a sinking ship.
Every school district has teacher's unions that are a pain in the ass ... but only in Newark do you see an utterly corrupt organization defended tooth and nail by entire neighborhoods, without regard for how the children are effected.
Its ridiculous. People treat the firing of clerks like its a genocide of a colonized people.
I have to admit I am channeling some childhood angst about a different school system altogether ... not Newark.
My kids' time in a public school without these unions have had mixed results. The teachers seem good, but the administration seems utterly incompetent. Which is kind of the failure mode I would expect. Bad teachers cannot continue to hide, but what can I do about an administration that takes 3 years to conduct an IEP?
(The answer to that last question is one of "fight to fix the system" or "use legal recourse." Option 1 is incredibly irrational: these insiders know the game better than me and have a lot more invested in it than me. Option 2 is what my spouse and I are doing now, but it doesn't feel at all like it's improving the situation for anyone but our immediate child for the immediate time frame.)
Give admission based on a lottery ... not on the basis
of an examination ... so no one can accuse you of taking
only the best kids.
It's not, but you can randomly choose an equally-sized comparison group from the population who apply and are not selected.
> And also charter schools are notorious for rejecting students for various reasons that public schools are not allowed to use, including rejecting special ed students, all in the name of making their test scores look better: http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2013/05/tcr-dirty-dozen
Now you are changing the stated starting conditions. The plan is based on admission by lottery. Period. What other, selective private and charter schools do in admissions is irrelevant.
Kids would be sent home for holidays, and weekends even (if the parents want to pick them up).
I think some parents would leap at the chance to have the week free, so they can work. Childcare is a big problem in the inner city.
People I know would be taken care of by grandparents, old neighbors, trusted older kids, etc., while their mothers would work (in the case when father was absent).
Might as well trust an institution.
In my limited experience with kids from elite boarding schools (which tend to draw from already wealthy communities), graduates of these programs seem to tend more towards the culture of the school than that of their hometown. I think this effect would be even more pronounced in your proposed system.
To which the answer is "Of course."
Obviously its not "of course" enough to change policy in this country.
Why are they "actual constraints"?
Are you sure they're "actual constraints", or are they ways of looking at things that need to be updated for progress to happen?
1.) Land costs. If you are building inside a major city land costs are huge, and you need acres of land. Outside of cities can be less expensive, but it's still a steep cost.
2.) Permitting/regulations/etc. I have no idea what it would cost to get the land you just built zoned to allow you to build a school, but I'm sure it isn't cheap or easy.
3.) Infrastructure costs. You have to build each of these new schools. The private boarding school that I went to[1] just built two new dorms after receiving a gift of $10m to house 98 students. They are probably really nice dorms, but it's not cheap to build. And that's just the dorms. You also need an academic center, library, gym, and possibly support buildings (like faculty housing, student centers, etc.). You also need to build roads, sewers, electricity, etc.
4.) You need to find and hire administrators and teachers. If you go with the chicago stats cited above then you'll need to pay each teacher ~$70k. One of the best things about private schools is the high teacher to student ratio. My biggest class was 14 students and most were in the 6-8 range. It's complicated to figure out the exact number of faculty off the top of my head, but you'll need at least 10 teachers. My high school had around 380 students and they have more than 60 faculty. So, for 100ish students you'd need 15ish faculty. That's $1m a year in funding. Chicago spends roughly $12k per student, which would cover faculty costs, but...
5.) You also have to pay administrators, janitors, lawn care, and a ton of other providers for service. Chicago administrators make roughly $120k a year. That difference has to come from somewhere.
6.) Oh, and you have to get accredited somehow so your students would be able to get into college.
There's probably plenty more constraints that we could come up with. But the biggest one is cost. Who is paying for this? A billionaire could do it, for sure. But it doesn't seem like people are upset enough about the current situation to pay more taxes to support the schools we do have. I'm not sure how you could convince people to pay to create a private school from scratch...especially if their kids aren't going to be the ones eligible to go.
[1] Westminster School, Simsbury Connecticut - Amazing experience! [2] http://chicagoist.com/2013/06/19/crains_chicago_business_and...
Look at your list. Can you think of alternative approaches that reduce or eliminate each item on the list?
You won't have created any kind of scalable / repeatable model that would work at the regional or national level; nobody is going to raise taxes enough to fund that and most people aren't going to sign up to send their kids off to boarding school for K-12.
If we spend that money on institutions that actually WORK, we could do a lot. If we need to build those institutions outside the city, to get them away from the clutches of the political machines in those cities ... then we do THAT.
For example: Summit Public Schools in California, FirstLine Schools in New Orleans, Excel Academy in Boston - just to name a few I've seen first hand.
And no, it's not an orphanage. These kids are a burden for their poor parents who try to provide for them, and fail, and have their heart torn apart failing that. And the kids see their parents' misery, and have their heart torn apart, too.
It's a convolution of sadness with itself.
I had this exact same plan, starting at the youngest possible age, so they grow with you. The school teaches them everything, so they become normal human beings and not ghetto people. I don't think there's a single parent who'd like his child to grow up in misery, and if there's a way to shield that child from this shit-hole, I think any parent would be willing to do almost anything.
Who decides what 'normal' is? What makes your upbringing better than 'ghetto people'? You're walking a very, very fine line between what is best for children, and what is just cultural indoctrination. Do you see how easy it is to slip between the two?
What you're operating under is called cultural relativism. Melville Herskovits said it best, "Judgements are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation." In other words, while you may believe that a 'ghetto' upbringing is worse than what you had, you came to that conclusion under a biased observation. Yes, there is a higher crime rate in 'ghetto' areas, but that has less to do with culture, and more to do with opportunity. When you have 0 opportunity, you tend to become hopeless. So, we'll educate the kids, make sure they conform to our standards, then release them back into hopeless areas. What outcome is that looking for?
And yes, there are parents who would prefer that their children not simply be 'white washed' into cultural conformity based on someone else's standards.
>Who decides what 'normal' is?
Common sense. Saying "I don't know nobody" isn't normal. Imagine you lived in a ghetto with your kid, and there's a billionaire who proposes to offer him a good education, wouldn't you want your kid to get out of that place ASAP.
The most probable outcome for a child who grew up in a ghetto isn't that bright, and refusing to acknowledge the benefit of the above plans just for the sake of political correctness and free choice isn't
>What makes your upbringing better than 'ghetto people'?
Everything. Growing up in a ghetto, you start in life with a handicap:
- They are stereotyped (for good reasons, because they probably fit that stereotype). - They have to deal with things children don't have to deal with. - They are, most probably, less educated than children who grew up in normal neighborhoods. Again, let's leave political correctness aside for a minute, this is a fact.
{ You're walking a very, very fine line between what is best for children, and what is just cultural indoctrination. Do you see how easy it is to slip between the two? }
The line is so thick, it's not even funny. It's not cultural indoctrination, these are facts. There's a reason why ghettos suck, and why no one in his right mind would make a conscious choice of living there. Let alone with a kid.
{ What you're operating under is called cultural relativism. Melville Herskovits said it best, "Judgements are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation." }
Oh really, where did he live? And where did his children grow up and study? I bet he didn't send them to a slum just to be philosophical.
Try telling this to people living in those places. Anyone who says he lives there and is "proud" is full of shit. The minute they make it, they get out there. Only mobsters choose to keep living there because they'd be a nobody if they ever left.
Ghettos suck. This sentence would get an "Amen" from China to South Africa, and it doesn't even need to be translated.
>In other words, while you may believe that a 'ghetto' upbringing is worse than what you had, you came to that conclusion under a >biased observation.
Biased by numbers, yes. Criminality, illiteracy rate, rate of single moms, murder, poverty, health. Ghettos suck. If they didn't, we'd have no problems actively making a choice of moving there with our families. But we don't. Nobody who can afford to live elsewhere makes an active decision to live in a ghetto.
>Yes, there is a higher crime rate in 'ghetto' areas, but that has less to do with culture, and more to do with opportunity.
Isn't opportunity closely tied with culture?
How many startups have been started by a guy named Maleeek (with 3 'e' s) who grew up in a ghetto? If not none, then very few. Why? Because they didn't have the opportunity to drop out of MIT, Harvard, or Stanford or to get there in the first place for that matter.
Yeah, there are few people who "hustle". A very few. And these apples don't fall really far from the Hip-Hop tree. There are of course outliers, but they're that: Outliers. We need something consistent. Something we can see on a graph and say "Holy shit, the correlation!".
>And yes, there are parents who would prefer that their children not simply be 'white washed' into cultural conformity based on someone >else's standards.
Maybe. But I also think that most parents would prefer that to the most likely outcome of their kid. Any parent can choose to ignore the realities of the world just to make a point, or make the best out of the situation he's in.
That view was extremely popular in the 40's and 50's, and is also extremely ineffective. It's a true story.
What is effective, instead of indoctrinating 'ghetto people' to your "better" way of life, is providing them with opportunity. Look at areas, schools or neighborhoods than have been effective and successful, regardless of being in a 'ghetto'. There is one common theme; internal hope and prosperity. It doesn't take white culture to fix 'ghetto people'. It takes hope, opportunity, community investment and old fashioned work from those people living there. Without it, all you'll do is drain the youth from these communities, and allow real estate brokers access to swaths of uninhabited city centers.
Your argument is fundamentally wrong, and is incredibly ignorant of education and community development in failing areas. You are arguing that 'those ghetto people' are broken, their culture is broken, and only removing them from their surroundings and supplanting their culture can fix their problems. You're wrong, you're just wrong is all there is to it. That's been proven by history and research - I'm not at home and don't have access to a database, but you're wrong.
I'm not saying that ghettos need to remain for the sake of themselves, that the individuals living there love it, or that the people living in there start even close to the same footing as the rest of the world. I'm saying that the way to fix the issues associated with these areas isn't a white knight swooping in to save the poor colored kids; that.does.not.work. It's for these areas to be empowered through community investment to fix it for themselves.
Do you know the best way to empower a community? Education focused INSIDE of it.
And for Melville: I'm not certain that his upbringing is really all that important. Your argument here is really, really weak (and is an outstanding example of Ad Hominem; what does it matter where he's from?). You're arguing that, unless you are from a ghetto, you're not allowed to have an opinion on them. Where did you grow up?
But look at what you said "It doesn't take white culture to fix 'ghetto people'"..
This means your presupposition is that ghettos are predominantly non white, which means that you subconsciously think white folks don't have that problem, which in turns contradicts what you said about not needing white culture to fix ghetto people.. Which is not what I said.
It says a lot: If you can do feature exctraction on a social problem that easily, it means something is really screwd.
I also think there's an impedance mismatch here between what you say and what I understand, and vice versa. I agree on the fact that people living in ghettos must be empowered, and a way to do that in my mind was to get their children a better education, easing the financial burden on the parents, and shielding the children from their toxic environment.
If I went overboard, it's because it's too important to let ourselves dwell on rhetorics. My reasoning was: We may not be able to help the parents (they had their lives), but the children still have a chance. The parents played their turn, now it's the children's turn at life.
But I agree on your point about draining the youth from these communities. I haven't seen it that way.
{ I'm saying that the way to fix the issues associated with these areas isn't a white knight swooping in to save the poor colored kids; that.does.not.work. It's for these areas to be empowered through community investment to fix it for themselves. }
Which would be easier if they had a better education, education which would be easier to obtain if they didn't have to hustle to eat, or have to choose which child to send to school, or chose if the child is going to eat or get an education.
>Do you know the best way to empower a community? Education >focused INSIDE of it.
I'd say education no matter where. As I said, my rationale is that children are too precious to waste on a social experiment of community stuff. They need education and be able to be children. { And for Melville: I'm not certain that his upbringing is really all that important. Your argument here is really, really weak (and is an outstanding example of Ad Hominem; what does it matter where he's from?). You're arguing that, unless you are from a ghetto, you're not allowed to have an opinion on them. Where did you grow up? }
I didn't attack him, Loughla. I even agree with him. And I didn't even say you're not allowed to have an opinion unless you live there (I didn't say that). But the issue at hand has nothing to do with opinion. Living in a ghetto just sucks and nobody needs research or a PhD to know that. It's just reality, man. Not "perception" and not "endoctrination".
It's a toxic environment that would influence the most immune systems. And I didn't say it needs a "white knight", I didn't even mention a white dude saving the day (you did). You assumed that when I said "billionaire", the guy would be white.. Which again, says a frigging lot about the reality you are trying to polish. In other words: you are contradicting yourself because, deep down, in your guts, you don't feel that way about the issue.
Mentalist out (I'm not half as good looking as he is. Oh, well..).
Given that there is evidence of very successful schools run by governments outside the USA (Finland is often used as an example, but it is certainly not alone), despite the fact that they have bureaucracy and unions, why do you believe this?
Let anyone run them.
A billionaire is necessary only because the current political system brooks no competition. The teachers will not allow it. Their cushy incompetence would be put in sharp relief if something like this were to succeed.
If you're idea is done in the context of replacing foster homes for kids who are removed from their parents by social services, I suppose it can work.
There are many successful societies where boarding schools are the norm for the most wealthy and successful people. I don't just mean China and India, where it is extremely common. I mean also England, where it had been more common, and has now become less common; Wealthy WASPS in the North East of America have a few institutions where they send their kids; there is at least one public boarding magnate school that is highly regarded in the American South ... I don't remember its name, but a quick Google will provide I'm sure. There are many other examples.
The idea that a child is best served at the bosom of his parents might be right in the best of circumstances. It is certainly NOT right in an American inner city neighborhood.
Now if your goal is to say, I refuse the best solution, because I hold out for the dream of solving all inner city problems at once, and turning these neighborhoods into pleasant neighborhoods ... then I say, cheers.
You are precisely the reason why we need a billionaire for this venture ... public money will never come to support something so radically different.
That doesn't fully counter the "creaming effect" argument unless you assume the applicant pool is a representative sample of the population.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_...
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_...
How are they supposed to operate their organizations without funds?
Or do people seriously think government funding of papers is the way to go?
I happen to think that state funded news papers would be worse than papers funded by advertisers. At least with advertisers you have many different sources of funding. With the state you have just one boss, and you can't print stories that would piss him off.
For one thing, it drives the value of the ads you do show way down to commodity prices. Think about it: no advertiser is going to spend big bucks on ads that are literally only shown to the cheapest and least engaged members of your audience.
It also misaligns the incentives. Now the ads function like the "nag screen" on old shareware apps. The site's revenue is tied to the ads being annoying enough that you'll want to get rid of them.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_...
Some people actually do prefer pagination on long articles, by the way. I've seen A/B data.
Unfortunately, the best way to raise someone out of poverty is through education. So you've got a chicken-egg problem.
Have we tried doing both? Create new jobs for poor parents while simultaneously improving schools for their children?
The solution is to realize that the causes are many and big. Rather than trying to take these on in a gargantuan effort, which is pretty much doomed, my suggestion would be to ... just ignore the causes! Forget about what causes the problem, just fix the problem for now. When somebody heavily bleeding you don't stop to find out what caused the wound.
This would be a transitory approach, of course. But, as you stated, once you make headway into education, you'll be much better equipped to tackle the root causes.
Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-ame...
Actually, I'd be the second to say that. My Finnish colleagues would be first.
The R-value here is 0.
I suspect in both cases, it's an entirely different cause than the format of the school system that is responsible for the high results.
The problem is it's not just a few it's probably a lot of really crappy teachers, principals, and administrators. Teacher unions like to use the phrase "just a few bad apples" but when you have a system that bad your're right a few doesn't explain it it's probably the whole bunch or close to it that is rotten.
"In situations where accusations of widespread corruption, misconduct, unethical action, etc are made, a phrase that is often trotted out in defense of the accused is "just a few bad apples". It's not WhereEver Police Department that has an issue with racial bias and violent escalation, it's just a few bad apples. Our school district does not have a bullying problem, it's just a few bad apples. Etc.
What is interesting about this cliched defense is that it is actually a malformed statement of the original cliche, "A few bad apples spoil the barrel."
The original cliche refers to a phenomenon where overripe or rotten apples release ethylene gas, which is a ripening agent. This ethylene gas will accelerate the ripening/rot of nearby apples. If you are not vigilant in weeding out the bad apples, the rot will rapidly spread and soon there will be no good apples left to rescue.
Human "bad apples" don't release ethylene gas, but they corrupt their peers nevertheless. When a good cop backs the cover story of his corrupt cop partner, he becomes a bad cop as well. When prosecutors take up arms in defense of their corrupt prosecutor peers, they become no better than the initially targeted. If school administrators allow a bully to have his way for too long, then everybody else sees that they can get away with it too and before long you have daily fistfights behind the school at the end of the day.
Institutions that have had widespread unchallenged corruption for decades rarely need keyhole surgery, they need amputations."
That's a large assumption. I am sure many things can be done to improve peoples' ability, means and motivation to be good parents.
Education is clearly one factor, but there are many others. The most effective way to ameliorate poverty is to improve all factors simultaneously. E.g. employment/income, housing, healthcare, incarceration, transportation, education--just to name a few of many factors.
Tulsa OK is trying that. Preschool combined with a jobs program.
http://www.npr.org/2014/04/22/304563233/what-exactly-is-high...
Imagine two school systems that otherwise have the same general qualities.
In one you have children who have wealthy, educated parents. Parents who read. Parents who take an active interest in their children's education. Parents who encourage their children to learn independent of school. Those children are going to acquire an education more or less independent of the quality of their teachers. They will be able to get as much out of the text books as they would from the teachers, because they are more likely to read on their own, more likely to spend the effort doing the work, and more likely to care (or have their parents care) about learning. If those children have bad teachers it's a momentary setback, and something they can often overcome with the help of their parents, fellow students, and self-study.
In the other you have children who have poor, uneducated parents. Those children are almost completely and utterly dependent on their teachers. They're not going to read at home, they're parents may not have a strong interest in their education (assuming that the school is handling it), and so on. If those students encounter a bad teacher it translates to a huge setback. They have no support network to deal with bad teacher, it could easily cause them to fall behind or, worse, to lose interest in school and education.
Can you explain that in more detail? Detroit is the counterexample where the firms did not offshore the jobs, but the city still got decimated. I'm not sure how "free market globalization" is the root cause. Maybe you could say as "other countries industrializing has simply left places like Newark to die" but I don't think our economic policies could slow or reverse that trend.
Now, I'm not saying that on the whole the world isn't better off as a result of free-market globalization. On the net, the gain to consumers in Phoenix from cheaper foreign goods might well outweigh the loss to workers in Newark. But I don't think it's controversial to say that alternative policies could have left Newark better off than it is now, even if they are globally less efficient, or that economic conservatives tend not to highlight the downsides of pro-globalization policies. Nobody comes out and says: "more competition means more efficiency, but it also means there will be winners and losers, and lower-skilled workers in America are likely to be the losers."
But I still don't think there was any policy the US could have taken to prevent the rise of industrial Korea and Japan, and the downfall of Newark and Detroit.
Given this, one would expect this exact outcome. Santayana and all that.
If you want to use money to improve education, I suspect the best use would be to provide parental education as soon as the child is born. It would be nice if someone provided a small amount of money to try that out.
Would you mind listing some studies showing point (2). I'd really appreciate anything you've got handy.
"We"—schools, society, etc.—can't really control parenting. But we can control schools, and per the articles I list here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-... , it is probably possible to get substantially better outcomes than the ones we're getting now, chiefly through better teachers. At the moment, most public school teachers are paid in lockstep based on seniority—CS teachers and PE teachers get the same pay—and can't be fired after their second or third year of teaching, and that creates a lot of perverse incentives.
Sounds like you need a citation of your own. I'm sure you could come up with hundreds of ways to apply money towards the solution of improving parenting.
Programs exist for this with some positive results. Here's one from a quick Google search: http://evidencebasedprograms.org/1366-2/nurse-family-partner...
Programs like "Nurse-Family Partnership – Top Tier" already operate. I know because I've written numerous Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Healthy Start Initiative (HSI) proposals (see more about the program here: http://blog.seliger.com/2013/12/15/hrsas-healthy-start-initi...) that attempt to do just this. I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies, so I see citations like yours all the time. Next time I write an HSI or similar program, I'll cite "Nurse-Family Partnership – Top Tier." Doing so isn't going to make the program any better, because HSI has been operating for a couple decades, under different names, and hasn't accomplished much on a large scale, in part because of the scale-up problems described in the first paragraph.
Ideas like "Nurse-Family Partnership – Top Tier" sound good, but the gap between the real world and the proposal world is quite wide (http://blog.seliger.com/2010/04/11/the-real-world-and-the-pr...). Zuckerberg has evidently learned this.
Apologies for the length of this post, but the issue is a complex one that is hard to explain and harder to understand—hence all the links!
I understand that scaling is very difficult. But what makes you think scaling these types of programs is harder than scaling those that directly target education? In fact, the first link you provide talks about the difficulty of scaling an educational program.
I'd love for there to be strong evidence backing a scalable program that addresses generational poverty, be it an educational approach or not, but I don't know of any. Until we find that, I really don't think it's helpful to limit public discourse to only one potential solution to such a complex problem.
I agree with this statement as it is. But I think it's one of the problems.
There have been complaints elsewhere in this thread about the strict work rules under which teachers operate. And I agree with them.
You know the story of the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight instead of in the bushes where he lost them, saying "the light's better here"?
If we keep on expecting schools to be the magical institution that fixes society's problems, we are going to keep on being disappointed, all the while greatly bothering all the people working at the school in the meantime.
You have to work hard to correct for all these effects. For example, is there a difference between : single mom because mom never married; single mom because parents divorced; single mom because dad died on a business trip?
Seriously, compare the life outcomes of single-parent households by breaking out the reasons for single-parenthood. http://www.clasp.org/resources-and-publications/states/0086.... There is a lot more going on than "no dad -> sucky results."
Zuck needs to figure out what the real causes are before pouring another $100,000,000 down the drain.
That said, by far the strongest correlation is with dual parents. I don't know if anyone has studied the details you ask for, but it does stand to reason that a single parent -- of either sex and regardless of cause -- has a much tougher life and therefore less time to spend one on one with their child.
Another instance of the principle that money is, in many ways, like violence: you'd like to think that if it hasn't solved your problem already, if you just keep throwing more and more at it it, you'll solve it eventually -- but all to often, it just makes the problem worse.
And inasmuch as Zuck would like to believe that being young means you're smarter... whatever your baseline, oftentimes, having too much money -- in Zuck's case, literally more money than he knows what to do with -- just makes us stupider.
Between 2010 and 2012, The New Yorker reports that "more than twenty million dollars of Zuckerberg’s gift and matching donations went to consulting firms with various specialties: public relations, human resources, communications, data analysis, [and] teacher evaluation." Many of the consultants were being paid upwards of $1,000 a day.
“Everybody’s getting paid but Raheem still can’t read," Vivian Cox Fraser, president of the Urban League of Essex County, was quoted saying.
Perhaps in Zuckerberg's case, it was PHP rather than XML.
In any case, the headline gets a gigantic "well, DUH" from me. Two reasons:
1. It strikes me as unlikely that a lack of funding is Newark's fundamental problem here.
2. Even if lack of money is the fundamental problem, the annual budget for the system is a billion dollars. Why would anyone expect 10% of their annual budget, spent over a period of years, to do anything interesting?
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_...
Submitters: please do your due diligence. HN wants original sources, not ripoffs. If the article you're posting is ripped off of something else, post the something else.
In this case it looks like it didn't make a difference -> failed gift.
http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/13/10/22/explainer-mark-z...
"The Booker-Christie-Zuckerberg strategy was doomed, he said, since it included no systemic assault on poverty."
Poverty truly is this issue.
Giving meal tickets to a bunch of proclaimed "reformers" is not the solution, as this case proves.
Until every child has a warm place to sleep, food to eat, and at least one devoted adult to discipline and encourage them, children will be "left behind," to use the phrase of yesterday.
I say this as someone who statistically excelled at teaching reading in the West and South sides of Chicago for nine years.
I also say this as a member of the human race.
They should have watched the documentary "Waiting For Superman" which talks about schools that defy the odds and produce good outcomes for the their students in places where the schools in general are a total failure. It used to be on Netflix streaming but looks like it is only available via DVD now.
I wonder how many of these consultant firms had ties to Booker and his cronies.
BTW, this is an excellent way of fairly determining if a job is overpaid or underpaid: how hard is it to find applicants? Do people camp out for 3 days beforehand for a chance to apply? In case of performance issues, do people cling to their jobs like a drowning man to a life-preserver?
LATE EDIT
I agree with the discretionary budgets. Each teacher should have an expense account on a credit card for when things come up and s/he needs to buy something.
No doubt. And I pulled the number 200K out of my ass; it could be a lot of numbers. But on the question of how hard it is to find applicants, it depends what you hold constant: the qualifications or the compensation. Here we're holding the compensation constant and raising the qualification bar however high we can. I'm sure hoards of people would apply to become CEO of Microsoft if that was a thing you could do, but that doesn't mean the position is overpaid. The experiment here is to see if you could get much better teachers by widening the pool of potential applicants to people who who wouldn't normally want to do that, by a) making the pay competitive with other high-skill industries and b) cutting out a lot of the bullshit involved in applying that skill to teaching children. That pool would surely include plenty of people who are already rockstar teachers, but additionally lots of people who think of themselves as bound for, say, business consulting or finance or software engineering. How would you choose among your applicants? I don't know, but I'm sure there are plenty of answers to "if I could turn anyone into a teacher, who would it be? And I how could I maximize their abilities?" Maybe this is actually lots of different experiments with different selection criteria and different degrees of freedom in applying themselves to the task (e.g., in defining curriculum).
Some people in this thread have mentioned some primary boarding schools for high-risk students. I'd want to internalize the results of those interventions, too.
His program sponsors local competitions, such as building robots, and other technology-oriented activities.
While the issues raised in the article are valid ones, we need to look at the whole picture.
It seems that perhaps what is needed is a YC of education that provides small grants and helps with follow-on investment once those small bets pay dividends.
Education is fundamentally pretty simple, you need a room, a teacher, and a few dollars worth of paper. Seems like the ideal thing for a startup. Fundamentally once you teach a person basic literacy and basic numeracy they can spend the rest of their life teaching themselves.
Another factor, not very politically correct to say but real nonetheless, is genetics, although genes likely play a larger role when the subject matter is more complicated, at the high school level and beyond, and when the learning environment is worse. If the teaching system is suitable and children have the motivation to learn, most students can master elementary school materials quite well.
At the high school level though, not everyone can master abstract concepts, like equations involving complex numbers and trigonometric functions, with reasonable effort, especially if their basics from elementary education are lacking. (They may be able to get fairly good at them with Herculean efforts, but few would want to dedicate their whole teenage life to academics.)
Given the hypothesis from real-world experience above, I suspect that reform successes at the high school level is significantly harder to come by than at the elementary one. If anyone has empirical data to support or refute this hypothesis, it would be helpful.
In any case, involving parents and caretakers to support children education is essential for any school reform efforts in poorer neighborhood. This is likely to be more effective at the elementary level when parents have stronger influence over their kids, and other confounding factors (like drugs and love life) are less important than when they become teens.
Parental push is definitely behind the academic success of Confucius regions in Asia: Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and Shanghai-China. All of them perform excellently in international academic assessments in reading, math, and science.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/03/pisa-re...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema...
This is why we should raise taxes on Billionaires. A lot of them are willing to give away a lot of their money but, no matter how well intentioned they are, they are not as good at spending money for the public good as the government is.
Put into a trust, you could pull out interest every year, say $2 million, and have your project funded forever.
What would the project be? Well, if you set the funding up that way, that's the beauty: you could try different things with that $2 million every year and see what worked the best. That way, instead of trying to "fix" a problem, you could create a system that would continue to help find optimizations.
Hell, one year you could give away cash prizes. Another year hire in-home tutors for at-risk kids. Another year you could try some kind of vouchers. You could on and on like this, continuing to experiment and evolve. Or you could just write a check to somebody.
Maybe Zuck has learned that you don't write checks to fix systemic problems.
Maybe.
There are a lot of myths out there about (U.S. K12) education, such as all these "bad teachers" that we can't ever fire because of tenure, and how awful U.S. education is compared to other countries or compared to the U.S. in the 50s and 60s, and how charter schools or vouchers will solve all education's problems.
There is actual data and research out there on all this, buried under all this opinion. Did you know for example that tenured teachers are twice as likely to lose their job as non-tenured teachers? http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/teachers/the-m...
There is also a history behind all this. Before teacher tenure, teachers were regularly fired on the whim of principals or because of getting pregnant. See for example "Why Teacher Unions Are Good for Teachers—and the Public" http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/winter0607/ravitc...
And see the book "50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools" http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/...
As the authors state: "The mythical failure of public education has been created and perpetuated in large part by political and economic interests that stand to gain from the destruction of the traditional system."
Once you get past the myths, I'd recommend doing a little reading on how people actually learn (it's not just dumping information on empty brains). See for example the book How People Learn (free, pdf): http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368
Or for the more impatient, watch this beginning of this video Minds of Our Own: http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html
Or this even shorter video on the counter-intuitive nature of how people learn from videos (criticizing the Khan Academy videos): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVtCO84MDj8
Teaching is an incredibly difficult job, because learning is incredibly complex. A single phrase or gesture can have an enormous positive or negative influence on learning. If you tried spending even one hour in a typical K12 classroom, most likely you'd be eaten alive. It may not seem like many K12 teachers are getting fired, partly because most teachers quit within 5 years.
Throwing money at a problem and forgetting about it almost never works. It just breeds corruption. Case in point.
Well, in a way the money wasn't wasted. Mark really needed the positive PR back then what with The Social Network movie and all the privacy vulnerabilities and abuses of Facebook. He got his PR. Facebook surviving was worth $100 million to him, so good job. Facebook survived. So he stopped donating.
Is that really true? I thought Zuckerberg gave more in 2013 to charity then any other person in the United States.
Link: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/10/zuckerb...
What Zuckerberg should have done is to put out $10M-$20M of that money as prizes for small non/for-profit startups to come up with ingenious solutions. Then, after this survival of the fittest mode ends, push money into the promising ones.
They were not aiming at the root of the problem: massive poverty and massive inequality.
In fact I'd go further, $100 million is nothing. What is probably needed is billions of dollars worth of investment in public services.
How ironic. You write off an entire group of people because of their background as not being able to understand a problem and then throw out the privilege (AKA: "You are being preemptively blacklisted from this argument) card. In a thread about education.
Seriously?
If a group of people haven't got the background to understand a problem, they aren't likely to produce a solution that is viable. I don't see how that's a controversial statement. We "exclude" on this basis all the time in our every day lives (e.g. by selecting doctors for solutions to medical problems, as opposed to, say, firemen or physicists), because it's entirely rational and the empirically correct thing to do.
People go to to med school to become doctors, you don't automatically blacklist everyone of a particular socioeconomic/racial background (NB: there's a word for this..) as being incapable of having the background necessary to be a doctor.
Yet, there I am helping them, raising money for equipment, buying them rPi's, trying to teach them Python, implementing software for their FRC robot and trying to act as an all around mentor.
My cost to the CPS is negative (I bring in all the money, $1k-$2k here, from my company). This is the solution I'm talking about. Of course, my impact is minimal. But money from donors such as Zuckerberg could be used to create bigger grassroots efforts and amplify the impact greatly.
Ask yourself: What is the solution that YOU suggest? Reading the thread I was only one concrete suggestions, using the $100M to open a calling center in the area. Is that the best we can do?
While this is completely true, you also have to factor in politics. Take a look what's happening in NYC right now. You have charter schools that are doing incredible work in low income areas and De Blasio wants to shut them down:
"Bill de Blasio, who repeatedly singled her out on the campaign trail as the embodiment of what he saw was wrong in schooling, and who last week followed his word with deed, canceling plans for three of her schools in New York City while leaving virtually all other charter proposals untouched."
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/05/nyregion/de-blasio-and-bui...
What kind of solution would a startup come up with for a kid who doesn't sleep under the same roof three nights running or who doesn't have a single role model who succeeded at school and is doing well professionally because they live in an area which has been systematically screwed over (race, class, etc.) for so long that everyone they know has given up?
There are a few areas where the tech-world style approach could help — building better software for class management, lesson planning, etc. if for no reason other than reducing the amount going to huge, under-delivering enterprise software vendors – but most of the problems are areas where we've chosen not to invest as a society: jobs, housing, medical care — critically long-term disability care — etc. Ask a teacher how it feels when a bright student starts missing school because their family was evicted or is being pressured not to go to college because their family wants them to watch a younger/disabled sibling while the parents are at work.
The best use for that $100M probably would have been opening some sort of high-headcount employer in the area to help break the cycle — even a call center job is a big step up if it provides a consistent, livable income.
That assumes these people are employable or want to work.
We agree the biggest problem for these kids is family life, I just don't think that will stop with employment or even just handing their parents money.
Do you have any reason to believe that we have a huge population of parents who aren't willing to work to provide for their families? Skills can be a challenge but it almost always comes down to other factors like whether jobs are available in their area, transportation and child care availability, and whether things like public assistance benefits were set up in a way which penalizes anyone who gets a job.
>things like public assistance benefits were set up in a way which penalizes anyone who gets a job.
So true. However, in many cultures pride is more important than the monetary benefit of free loading.
I'd say that seems more reasonable than assuming the opposite, but not at all surprising that you would feel otherwise [1][2].
I love people who think they're not racist then make assumptions like yours.
Our current setup is severely broken and full of perverse incentives that trap people in poverty. In an effort to prevent abuse we've stripped eligibility for assistance programs to only the near-destitute but then set the payouts at a higher level than many of those people are likely to earn on re-entering the workforce.
Dozens of programs, at both a state and federal level, would need to be overhauled so that the incentives led people out of poverty instead of creating a chasm between government dependence and entry-level labor.