16 ms·

High-quality schools can increase academic achievement among the poor (2010)

173 points by MaysonL 8y ago

adamnemecek 8y ago
Are the my using black and poor interchangeably?
- bpchaps 8y ago
  How did you get that impression? If it's because of "black-white achievement gap": https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/studies/pdf/school_composition_and_the_bw_achievement_gap_2015.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/studies/pdf/sc...
  - mantas 8y ago
    Is "black-white achievement gap" still there once you control for parents' education and incomes?
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
      Yes, that's why it's not the "rich-poor achievement gap", which is also quite large, but significantly smaller than the black-white one.
      - mantas 8y ago
        Got any data? I googled a bit, but couldn't find by both socioeconomic class and color. It's either one or the other. I wonder where's the disparity. Are well-off black kids doing worse? Is it poor whites doing better than their peers? Are white poor- communities doing better than black ghettos? How is it correlating to street crime and violence?
        MagnumOpus 8y ago
        This guy has collected all the data on it, and answers a lot of your questions: https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/understanding-the-academic-achievement-gaps/ https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/unde...
        swebs 8y ago
        Wow, every post on that blog seems to be a wealth of data. This should be its own post.
blockchain-help 8y ago
As with other industries, traditional gaming payment systems are usually slow, cumbersome, and expensive. They can also cause a maldistributed ecosystem of wealth as the middlemen and large vendors benefit the most from those inefficiencies. With cryptocurrency payments, in-app purchases become frictionless as micropayments can transfer directly from players to the game developer. There’s no more need for a middleman in this transaction. The security and immutability of blockchain technology are enough to facilitate this type of trustless exchange. The blockchain also brings value to game distribution. Instead of publishing to a centralized marketplace like the Apple App Store, game developers can reach consumers directly through a decentralized marketplace. for more information please visit our site:- http://www.blockchainhelp.pro http://www.blockchainhelp.pro
imjustsaying 8y ago
(2010)
ShabbosGoy 8y ago
Not sure how that conclusion isn’t obvious or self-evident. Obviously, if you have a high quality school with motivated students, chances are their achievement will be an order of magnitude higher than students at a poor quality school. The more important question is, how difficult is upward social mobility in 2018?
- lazyasciiart 8y ago
  Plenty of people have argued that the problem is not the quality of the school but the quality of the students attending it - a.k.a the "culture of poverty" https://thesocietypages.org/roundtables/culture-of-poverty/ https://thesocietypages.org/roundtables/culture-of-poverty/ In fact, some of them are referred to in the study itself as an example of the debate they are addressing - "Advocates of the community-focused approach argue that teachers and school administrators are dealing with issues that originate outside the classroom, citing research that shows racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps are present before children enter school (Fryer and Levitt 2004; 2006) and that one-third to one-half of the gap can be explained by family-environment indicators (Meredith Phillips, James Crouse, and John Ralph 1998; Fryer and Levitt 2004). In this scenario, combating poverty and having more constructive out-of-school time may lead to better and more-focused instruction in school. Indeed, James Coleman et al. (1966), in their famous report on equality of educational opportunity, argue that schools alone cannot treat the problem of chronic underachievement in urban schools. "
  - emodendroket 8y ago
    Considering the free medical and dental care, one might argue that that position isn't really in conflict with the success of this school
- dagw 8y ago
  if you have a high quality school with motivated students Sure, but how do you motivate the students? Does that come automatically with a high quality school or is there more to it? How big a part of a achievement is the motivation and how big part is the school? If you take a failing kid from a poor school and 'force' him to go to a good school is that enough to get the desired improvements? Could you achieve similar effect by just focusing more on the motivation side? While I do have lots of hunches and guesses, I don't see any obvioulsy self-evident answers to any of the questions.
tempodox 8y ago
Education is only going to get more important with progress. It's such a shame that in the US, you have to be rich first before you even get a chance to prove yourself.
- babesh 8y ago
  Its designed that way. How else are the rich going to preserve their wealth?
  - ralusek 8y ago
    You live in a cartoon. There isn't some collective of rich white men ensuring that we keep people uneducated so that they can preserve their wealth. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Companies like Google and Apple don't benefit and get to keep their wealth by having an uneducated population.
    - Ma8ee 8y ago
      A functioning wellfare state requires that you tax the rich. If everyone should get the same opportunities as the rich kid, their parents need to help paying also for the poor kids' opportunities.
    - lern_too_spel 8y ago
      Rich parents have the time and money to push for better schools. Companies have little to do with it. Even in Google's hometown, the elementary school with the most low income kids has lead in its drinking water. https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2018/02/09/elevated-lead-levels-found-in-theuerkauf-water https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2018/02/09/elevated-lead-level...
    - babesh 8y ago
      You are wrong. Betsy DeVos Donald Trump Koch brothers They promote for profit schools but the vouchers they propose wouldn't cover the cost of better private schools. Google Koch pro school choice voucher Arizona. 90% voucher of previous cost.
    - 8y ago
imagetic 8y ago
I wish American politics would focus on education 5000x more than anything else.
- clan 8y ago
  Goes everywhere actually. Today it should be common knowledge that education is the foundation of a strong and prosperous society. Yet we keeper our focus elsewhere.
  - KozmoNau7 8y ago
    To make it sound maybe a bit more enticing to the money holders, investing in education is literally investing in the future.
    - dagw 8y ago
      The "money holders" already have access to great schools turning out great students. They literally don't see the problem.
      - KozmoNau7 8y ago
        Yeah, they're covered for their offspring. But we have to make them see that investing in everyone's future is a net gain. Then we obviously just have the small problem that you can only be obscenely wealthy if you have a lot more wealth than the average person. Elevate a large number of people, and the über-wealthy people's relative wealth go down. Regrettably, they would apparently rather have a violent uprising and be forced to help other people, than do it voluntarily.
- Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
  I wish the opposite. Education should be entirely apolitical and atomized to give those with the most skin in the game the most control. Traditionally, this has been the American way and I do not find a more politicized approach has gained us anything other than divisiveness and contention. The more local the matter, the less the Rs and Ds matter and the more the actual names and people they represent do.
Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
The kids were in school twice as long, received free dental, medical, and mental health services as well as free meals and transportation for their parents. That is quite a bit more than high-quality schooling. And does the touted "closing" of the black-white achievement gap persist if white students receive the same treatment?
- gnarbarian 8y ago
  Also, it would be good to know if the children were randomly selected for this program from all the children in Harlem or if ambitious parents who cared more about their children's education could jockey for position and placement.
  - dagw 8y ago
    Enrollment to the program is apparently done by lottery among everybody that applies and the study compared kids that applied and got selected to kids that applied but didn't get in. So that should at least go some way to account for the parent factor.
    - burfog 8y ago
      It fails. In the special school, 100% of the kids/parents actively took an interest in education. In the alternatives, less than 100% did. School quality is largely determined by the students in the school. This doesn't just mean that the performance of student X is determined by student X caring about school. The performance of student X is also determined by the fact that student Y cares or doesn't care about school. So in all the non-special schools, there exist the sort of uncaring disruptive students who will drag down everybody. It isn't that the special school is itself somehow wonderful, but that the bad influences are excluded. Simply put, one can not scale this solution. Providing the supposed quality school to everybody is not possible because the quality of a school is largely determined by the students.
      - dnomad 8y ago
acjohnson55 8y ago
The hundred billion dollar question is how do you scale it? High functioning schools are magnets for the best teachers, savviest families, and external support. It's just meritocracy applied to the bottom quintile. Show me a school model that's succeeding with the most at risk subdemographic within disadvantaged communities and then I'll be impressed. I think the simple truth is that there's no free lunch. If we actually believe every child deserves an excellent education, we have to acknowledge it's going to take radical investment at the deepest levels of poverty, working upward from there. It's not impossible. Cuba sent teachers to every remote corner of their island to eradicate illiteracy, and largely succeeded. It's one of the few successes of the revolution. We spend astronomical amounts of money incarcerating the more people per capita than anyone else in the world. Imagine if we applied that level of thoroughness to education.
- Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
  Literacy is a low threshold. This study is talking about eliminating achievement gaps between populations. Their method is intense intervention in every facet of the students' lives. So who receives these services? Is it "fair" to only provide them to certain populations, those deemed most in need? If these methods are successful, why should any student be deprived of them? And if all students receive them, what then becomes of the achievement gap? Does it re-establish itself?
  - cm2187 8y ago
    And if you push this logic to its extreme we would have to take children away from under achieving families to break the reproduction of under achievement cycle. Will probably work but not exactly desirable.
    - Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
      Perhaps, if humans are mostly fungible commodities that respond uniformly to inputs. And RIP if you dare suggest the inverse: subsidizing the reproduction of high achievers.
forkerenok 8y ago
Kudos for de-clickbaiting the title. Good schooling is vital for building up confidence and belief in one self. Without it chances to succeed in our society are fewer.
home_boi 8y ago
The most important methodology of the school: > Like many charter schools in New York City, the Promise Academy has an extended school day and year, with coordinated after-school tutoring and additional classes on Saturdays for children who need remediation in mathematics and English Language Arts skills. Our rough estimate is that Promise Academy students that are behind grade level are in school for twice as many hours as a traditional public school student in New York City. Students who are at or above grade level still attend the equivalent of about fifty percent more school in a calendar year. The students are working twice as hard as others and attend remediation classes. Other inputs: > The schools provide free medical, dental and mental-health services (students are screened upon entry and receive regular check-ups through a partnership with the Children’s Health Fund), student incentives for achievement, nutritious cafeteria meals, support for parents in the form of food baskets, meals, bus fare, and so forth, and less tangible benefits such as the support of a committed staff. The schools also make a concerted effort to change the culture of achievement, emphasizing the importance of hard work in achieving success. These inputs are claimed as characteristics of a "high quality school" in the abstract: > We conclude with evidence that suggests high-quality schools are enough to significantly increase academic achievement among the poor. "High quality schools" (high quality meaning high test scores) generally do not fund many of these services for their students. What the study demonstrates are characteristics of schools that can help underprivileged children with less than adequate familial support. This is an argument in favor of segregation. These services can only scale and be cost effective if a large portion of the students will use the services. This would not be cost effective if the majority of the school was not underprivileged.
skookumchuck 8y ago
Now and then we read about a public school that achieves spectacular results, often based on the work of a charismatic and driven teacher or principal. Nobody has ever been able to scale these. "Stand and Deliver" is an example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_and_Deliver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_and_Deliver
- Iv 8y ago
  When reading about alternative school systems, many publications show really improved performances by students, but many of these studies suffer of the same bias: teachers who volunteer to teach differently, and parents who volunteer their kids to try a new approaches, are usually the main cause of good metrics. Indeed, the challenge is to get even mediocre teachers to be able to teach better. We lack even mediocre teachers, so making a better system only for good teachers is not a solution.
  - acjohnson55 8y ago
    As a former mediocre teacher, I strongly don't believe that mediocre teachers are our problem. It shouldn't take superheroes to teach. But that's what's required given the way our educational system is set up. That strategy has no hope of scaling.
  - panzagl 8y ago
    We lack even mediocre parents- when you talk low SES you mean kids living in cars, parents in jail, kicked outside all night because mom wants to party with her new boyfriend. Not all of them, of course, but enough in those types of situations that no amount of classroom management or enthusiasm is going to overcome it.
silvestrov 8y ago
The kids were a self-selected group because attending the school required that the parents had to do something active to get their kids into this school. They try to control for this by comparing those kids to kids who lost in the lottery. But this only tells us about kids who have engaged parents. You cannot generalise to kids who have non-engaged parents. Having engaged parents is the single most important condition for getting a good education. Secondly, not having disruptive kids in class. And only thirdly are quality of teachers. If "free dental, medical, and mental health services" were all it took, then no school in Scandinavia should have any problem with poor kids. But we do have problems because some parents don't care at all about their kids education.
- croon 8y ago
  > They try to control for this by comparing those kids to kids who lost in the lottery. But this only tells us about kids who have engaged parents. You cannot generalise to kids who have non-engaged parents. > Having engaged parents is the single most important condition for getting a good education. If that was true then there would be no significant difference between the students in the study, since all of them had engaged parents.
  - jstanley 8y ago
    Just because something is the most important condition doesn't make it the only important condition.
    - croon 8y ago
      But it makes it the most significant condition. It was in the stated initial premise. And if they're all important (according to GPs list) then maybe more expensive teachers, better properties/real estate, supplies, etc is important enough anyways.
      - jstanley 8y ago
        > > Having engaged parents is the single most important condition for getting a good education. > If that was true then there would be no significant difference between the students in the study, since all of them had engaged parents. This does not follow. Just because something is the most significant condition doesn't mean that two things meeting that condition will have no significant differences. EDIT: For example, let's say breathing is the single most important thing to do in order to stay alive. That doesn't mean eating isn't important to do as well. If two people breathe, but only one of them eats, they will have significant differences in outcome even though they both met the single most important condition.
js8 8y ago
The results of this paper and its refutation of racism do not surprise me in the slightest. I recently opened book Economic Indeterminacy by Yanis Varoufakis and apparently, he was conducting some experiments in the past that support his theory about economic origins of discrimination and dominance hierarchy. Basically, what he seems to claim is that while discrimination might be completely unfounded in reality, it will set in as a mechanism to determine and stabilize equilibrium in some economic games. And once the equilibrium is determined, discrimination will actually start to make sense for the game players, ex post facto. The book is unfortunately quite technical, but I have to say I was impressed, Varoufakis certainly is a smart guy. I wish somebody would write a more approachable popular summary of this and other conclusions in the book. Perhaps Varoufakis did himself in his other books, I didn't read any, but I think I will have to at some point.
qop 8y ago
This seems exceptionally obvious. "Better nutrition can increase athletic performance among the poor" Well no shit! Education lawmakers are typically the scummiest, grimiest, awful people. Lots of school districts are sabotaged by privilege politics bordering on rye educational equivalent of separate but equal. That's a strong claim, but I work with a few young men that grew up in rough neighborhoods in Chicago and Boston, and their situations have a lot of similarity when it comes to how school was. I know the language in this comment is strong, but America is really fucked when it comes to public education. Shit like common core is the tip of the incestuous, corrupt iceberg. Bad schools lock down neighborhoods within a generation, and are a huge burden on the socioeconomic development of the people there. It's as important in communities as affordable groceries.

173 points by MaysonL 8y ago

adamnemecek 8y ago

Are the my using black and poor interchangeably?

bpchaps 8y ago
How did you get that impression? If it's because of "black-white achievement gap": https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/studies/pdf/school_composition_and_the_bw_achievement_gap_2015.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/studies/pdf/sc...
- mantas 8y ago
  Is "black-white achievement gap" still there once you control for parents' education and incomes?
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    Yes, that's why it's not the "rich-poor achievement gap", which is also quite large, but significantly smaller than the black-white one.
    - mantas 8y ago
      Got any data? I googled a bit, but couldn't find by both socioeconomic class and color. It's either one or the other. I wonder where's the disparity. Are well-off black kids doing worse? Is it poor whites doing better than their peers? Are white poor- communities doing better than black ghettos? How is it correlating to street crime and violence?
      - MagnumOpus 8y ago
        This guy has collected all the data on it, and answers a lot of your questions: https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/understanding-the-academic-achievement-gaps/ https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/unde...
        swebs 8y ago
        Wow, every post on that blog seems to be a wealth of data. This should be its own post.

blockchain-help 8y ago

As with other industries, traditional gaming payment systems are usually slow, cumbersome, and expensive. They can also cause a maldistributed ecosystem of wealth as the middlemen and large vendors benefit the most from those inefficiencies. With cryptocurrency payments, in-app purchases become frictionless as micropayments can transfer directly from players to the game developer. There’s no more need for a middleman in this transaction. The security and immutability of blockchain technology are enough to facilitate this type of trustless exchange. The blockchain also brings value to game distribution. Instead of publishing to a centralized marketplace like the Apple App Store, game developers can reach consumers directly through a decentralized marketplace. for more information please visit our site:- http://www.blockchainhelp.pro http://www.blockchainhelp.pro

imjustsaying 8y ago

(2010)

ShabbosGoy 8y ago

Not sure how that conclusion isn’t obvious or self-evident. Obviously, if you have a high quality school with motivated students, chances are their achievement will be an order of magnitude higher than students at a poor quality school. The more important question is, how difficult is upward social mobility in 2018?

lazyasciiart 8y ago
Plenty of people have argued that the problem is not the quality of the school but the quality of the students attending it - a.k.a the "culture of poverty" https://thesocietypages.org/roundtables/culture-of-poverty/ https://thesocietypages.org/roundtables/culture-of-poverty/ In fact, some of them are referred to in the study itself as an example of the debate they are addressing - "Advocates of the community-focused approach argue that teachers and school administrators are dealing with issues that originate outside the classroom, citing research that shows racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps are present before children enter school (Fryer and Levitt 2004; 2006) and that one-third to one-half of the gap can be explained by family-environment indicators (Meredith Phillips, James Crouse, and John Ralph 1998; Fryer and Levitt 2004). In this scenario, combating poverty and having more constructive out-of-school time may lead to better and more-focused instruction in school. Indeed, James Coleman et al. (1966), in their famous report on equality of educational opportunity, argue that schools alone cannot treat the problem of chronic underachievement in urban schools. "
- emodendroket 8y ago
  Considering the free medical and dental care, one might argue that that position isn't really in conflict with the success of this school
dagw 8y ago
if you have a high quality school with motivated students Sure, but how do you motivate the students? Does that come automatically with a high quality school or is there more to it? How big a part of a achievement is the motivation and how big part is the school? If you take a failing kid from a poor school and 'force' him to go to a good school is that enough to get the desired improvements? Could you achieve similar effect by just focusing more on the motivation side? While I do have lots of hunches and guesses, I don't see any obvioulsy self-evident answers to any of the questions.

tempodox 8y ago

Education is only going to get more important with progress. It's such a shame that in the US, you have to be rich first before you even get a chance to prove yourself.

babesh 8y ago
Its designed that way. How else are the rich going to preserve their wealth?
- ralusek 8y ago
  You live in a cartoon. There isn't some collective of rich white men ensuring that we keep people uneducated so that they can preserve their wealth. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Companies like Google and Apple don't benefit and get to keep their wealth by having an uneducated population.
  - Ma8ee 8y ago
    A functioning wellfare state requires that you tax the rich. If everyone should get the same opportunities as the rich kid, their parents need to help paying also for the poor kids' opportunities.
  - lern_too_spel 8y ago
    Rich parents have the time and money to push for better schools. Companies have little to do with it. Even in Google's hometown, the elementary school with the most low income kids has lead in its drinking water. https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2018/02/09/elevated-lead-levels-found-in-theuerkauf-water https://www.mv-voice.com/news/2018/02/09/elevated-lead-level...
  - babesh 8y ago
    You are wrong. Betsy DeVos Donald Trump Koch brothers They promote for profit schools but the vouchers they propose wouldn't cover the cost of better private schools. Google Koch pro school choice voucher Arizona. 90% voucher of previous cost.
  - 8y ago

imagetic 8y ago

I wish American politics would focus on education 5000x more than anything else.

clan 8y ago
Goes everywhere actually. Today it should be common knowledge that education is the foundation of a strong and prosperous society. Yet we keeper our focus elsewhere.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  To make it sound maybe a bit more enticing to the money holders, investing in education is literally investing in the future.
  - dagw 8y ago
    The "money holders" already have access to great schools turning out great students. They literally don't see the problem.
    - KozmoNau7 8y ago
      Yeah, they're covered for their offspring. But we have to make them see that investing in everyone's future is a net gain. Then we obviously just have the small problem that you can only be obscenely wealthy if you have a lot more wealth than the average person. Elevate a large number of people, and the über-wealthy people's relative wealth go down. Regrettably, they would apparently rather have a violent uprising and be forced to help other people, than do it voluntarily.
Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
I wish the opposite. Education should be entirely apolitical and atomized to give those with the most skin in the game the most control. Traditionally, this has been the American way and I do not find a more politicized approach has gained us anything other than divisiveness and contention. The more local the matter, the less the Rs and Ds matter and the more the actual names and people they represent do.

Andre_Wanglin 8y ago

The kids were in school twice as long, received free dental, medical, and mental health services as well as free meals and transportation for their parents. That is quite a bit more than high-quality schooling. And does the touted "closing" of the black-white achievement gap persist if white students receive the same treatment?

gnarbarian 8y ago
Also, it would be good to know if the children were randomly selected for this program from all the children in Harlem or if ambitious parents who cared more about their children's education could jockey for position and placement.
- dagw 8y ago
  Enrollment to the program is apparently done by lottery among everybody that applies and the study compared kids that applied and got selected to kids that applied but didn't get in. So that should at least go some way to account for the parent factor.
  - burfog 8y ago
    It fails. In the special school, 100% of the kids/parents actively took an interest in education. In the alternatives, less than 100% did. School quality is largely determined by the students in the school. This doesn't just mean that the performance of student X is determined by student X caring about school. The performance of student X is also determined by the fact that student Y cares or doesn't care about school. So in all the non-special schools, there exist the sort of uncaring disruptive students who will drag down everybody. It isn't that the special school is itself somehow wonderful, but that the bad influences are excluded. Simply put, one can not scale this solution. Providing the supposed quality school to everybody is not possible because the quality of a school is largely determined by the students.
    - dnomad 8y ago

acjohnson55 8y ago

The hundred billion dollar question is how do you scale it? High functioning schools are magnets for the best teachers, savviest families, and external support. It's just meritocracy applied to the bottom quintile. Show me a school model that's succeeding with the most at risk subdemographic within disadvantaged communities and then I'll be impressed. I think the simple truth is that there's no free lunch. If we actually believe every child deserves an excellent education, we have to acknowledge it's going to take radical investment at the deepest levels of poverty, working upward from there. It's not impossible. Cuba sent teachers to every remote corner of their island to eradicate illiteracy, and largely succeeded. It's one of the few successes of the revolution. We spend astronomical amounts of money incarcerating the more people per capita than anyone else in the world. Imagine if we applied that level of thoroughness to education.

Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
Literacy is a low threshold. This study is talking about eliminating achievement gaps between populations. Their method is intense intervention in every facet of the students' lives. So who receives these services? Is it "fair" to only provide them to certain populations, those deemed most in need? If these methods are successful, why should any student be deprived of them? And if all students receive them, what then becomes of the achievement gap? Does it re-establish itself?
- cm2187 8y ago
  And if you push this logic to its extreme we would have to take children away from under achieving families to break the reproduction of under achievement cycle. Will probably work but not exactly desirable.
  - Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
    Perhaps, if humans are mostly fungible commodities that respond uniformly to inputs. And RIP if you dare suggest the inverse: subsidizing the reproduction of high achievers.

forkerenok 8y ago

Kudos for de-clickbaiting the title. Good schooling is vital for building up confidence and belief in one self. Without it chances to succeed in our society are fewer.

home_boi 8y ago

The most important methodology of the school: > Like many charter schools in New York City, the Promise Academy has an extended school day and year, with coordinated after-school tutoring and additional classes on Saturdays for children who need remediation in mathematics and English Language Arts skills. Our rough estimate is that Promise Academy students that are behind grade level are in school for twice as many hours as a traditional public school student in New York City. Students who are at or above grade level still attend the equivalent of about fifty percent more school in a calendar year. The students are working twice as hard as others and attend remediation classes. Other inputs: > The schools provide free medical, dental and mental-health services (students are screened upon entry and receive regular check-ups through a partnership with the Children’s Health Fund), student incentives for achievement, nutritious cafeteria meals, support for parents in the form of food baskets, meals, bus fare, and so forth, and less tangible benefits such as the support of a committed staff. The schools also make a concerted effort to change the culture of achievement, emphasizing the importance of hard work in achieving success. These inputs are claimed as characteristics of a "high quality school" in the abstract: > We conclude with evidence that suggests high-quality schools are enough to significantly increase academic achievement among the poor. "High quality schools" (high quality meaning high test scores) generally do not fund many of these services for their students. What the study demonstrates are characteristics of schools that can help underprivileged children with less than adequate familial support. This is an argument in favor of segregation. These services can only scale and be cost effective if a large portion of the students will use the services. This would not be cost effective if the majority of the school was not underprivileged.

skookumchuck 8y ago

Now and then we read about a public school that achieves spectacular results, often based on the work of a charismatic and driven teacher or principal. Nobody has ever been able to scale these. "Stand and Deliver" is an example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_and_Deliver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_and_Deliver

Iv 8y ago
When reading about alternative school systems, many publications show really improved performances by students, but many of these studies suffer of the same bias: teachers who volunteer to teach differently, and parents who volunteer their kids to try a new approaches, are usually the main cause of good metrics. Indeed, the challenge is to get even mediocre teachers to be able to teach better. We lack even mediocre teachers, so making a better system only for good teachers is not a solution.
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  As a former mediocre teacher, I strongly don't believe that mediocre teachers are our problem. It shouldn't take superheroes to teach. But that's what's required given the way our educational system is set up. That strategy has no hope of scaling.
- panzagl 8y ago
  We lack even mediocre parents- when you talk low SES you mean kids living in cars, parents in jail, kicked outside all night because mom wants to party with her new boyfriend. Not all of them, of course, but enough in those types of situations that no amount of classroom management or enthusiasm is going to overcome it.

silvestrov 8y ago

The kids were a self-selected group because attending the school required that the parents had to do something active to get their kids into this school. They try to control for this by comparing those kids to kids who lost in the lottery. But this only tells us about kids who have engaged parents. You cannot generalise to kids who have non-engaged parents. Having engaged parents is the single most important condition for getting a good education. Secondly, not having disruptive kids in class. And only thirdly are quality of teachers. If "free dental, medical, and mental health services" were all it took, then no school in Scandinavia should have any problem with poor kids. But we do have problems because some parents don't care at all about their kids education.

croon 8y ago
> They try to control for this by comparing those kids to kids who lost in the lottery. But this only tells us about kids who have engaged parents. You cannot generalise to kids who have non-engaged parents. > Having engaged parents is the single most important condition for getting a good education. If that was true then there would be no significant difference between the students in the study, since all of them had engaged parents.
- jstanley 8y ago
  Just because something is the most important condition doesn't make it the only important condition.
  - croon 8y ago
    But it makes it the most significant condition. It was in the stated initial premise. And if they're all important (according to GPs list) then maybe more expensive teachers, better properties/real estate, supplies, etc is important enough anyways.
    - jstanley 8y ago
      > > Having engaged parents is the single most important condition for getting a good education. > If that was true then there would be no significant difference between the students in the study, since all of them had engaged parents. This does not follow. Just because something is the most significant condition doesn't mean that two things meeting that condition will have no significant differences. EDIT: For example, let's say breathing is the single most important thing to do in order to stay alive. That doesn't mean eating isn't important to do as well. If two people breathe, but only one of them eats, they will have significant differences in outcome even though they both met the single most important condition.

js8 8y ago

The results of this paper and its refutation of racism do not surprise me in the slightest. I recently opened book Economic Indeterminacy by Yanis Varoufakis and apparently, he was conducting some experiments in the past that support his theory about economic origins of discrimination and dominance hierarchy. Basically, what he seems to claim is that while discrimination might be completely unfounded in reality, it will set in as a mechanism to determine and stabilize equilibrium in some economic games. And once the equilibrium is determined, discrimination will actually start to make sense for the game players, ex post facto. The book is unfortunately quite technical, but I have to say I was impressed, Varoufakis certainly is a smart guy. I wish somebody would write a more approachable popular summary of this and other conclusions in the book. Perhaps Varoufakis did himself in his other books, I didn't read any, but I think I will have to at some point.

qop 8y ago

This seems exceptionally obvious. "Better nutrition can increase athletic performance among the poor" Well no shit! Education lawmakers are typically the scummiest, grimiest, awful people. Lots of school districts are sabotaged by privilege politics bordering on rye educational equivalent of separate but equal. That's a strong claim, but I work with a few young men that grew up in rough neighborhoods in Chicago and Boston, and their situations have a lot of similarity when it comes to how school was. I know the language in this comment is strong, but America is really fucked when it comes to public education. Shit like common core is the tip of the incestuous, corrupt iceberg. Bad schools lock down neighborhoods within a generation, and are a huge burden on the socioeconomic development of the people there. It's as important in communities as affordable groceries.