8 ms·

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. Tha

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
      You're asserting without any evidence that every student Y who "doesn't care about school" would not respond to the protocols described in this paper? This is an extraordinary claim and probably wrong. It needs to verified with data. The paper does provide the basis for a logical next step: imposing these protocols on all students in a region and measuring the impact.
      - sheepmullet 8y ago
        > You're asserting without any evidence that every student Y who "doesn't care about school" would not respond to the protocols described in this paper? No. They are simply stating the truth that there is no evidence it will work. It is basic selection bias.
        burfog 8y ago
        I don't know a proper name for the problem, but I don't think "selection bias" is really it. The problem is that the control is getting damaged by the experiment. The control is intended to be similarly-selected students (the lottery losers) in non-special schools, but there are also other students (never applied to the lottery) in those non-special schools who interfere with the experiment. The control students don't get to have those non-special schools to themselves.
        dagw 8y ago
        I don't know a proper name for the problem I think "confounding variable" would the describe the problem. Basically there are two variables that seem to affect the outcome, but since they only controlled for one of them, they can't tell if the second variable is affecting the experiment or not.
JepZ 8y ago
Well, it might be more than just 'high-quality' schools, but maybe that is necessary. That way you release the kids from their uneducated parents in some respect. The problem with uneducated parents is that they are still very valuable for the children in terms of emotional development. The problem however is, that they tend to make critical mistakes which sometimes affect the children's development. And to bridge those two aspects, this 'high-quality' school model might be a very good answer. Just to be clear: Not all uneducated parents are the same and some of them might be very good parents, its just that the probability of finding problematic behavior is much higher for uneducated parents.
- Iv 8y ago
  This is a think I wish more people understood: There is no equality of chances. Unless you give every kid the same standardized education and childhood experience, which implies a society no one wants. The only alternative is to recognize the people who start at a disadvantage and offer them compensation for that.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - didibus 8y ago
    > Unless you give every kid the same standardized education and childhood experience, which implies a society no one wants. I've always personally been open to this idea. I find families to be tribal and often problematic. I think it be nice to start seeing all children as your own, the children belong to society, and maybe we should all pay for them.
    - mamon 8y ago
      >> the children belong to society That's the dangerous way of thinking that we should avoid. Children belong to their parents, until they come out of age when they start "belonging" only to themselves. Seeing children as belonging to society is typical for totalitarian regimes (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Youth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Youth)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
malcolmgreaves 8y ago
White kids already receive this kind of treatment signficantly more often than children of color. This underlies the aforementioned achievement gap. Curious -- is this something that you're not aware of? I find it odd that you end your post with "of white students receive the same treatment?"
- Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
  No, I was not aware that poor white students receive twice as much schooling, free meals, free medical care, free dental care, free mental health care, and vouchers for food and transportation for their parents. I am very much interested in more information on this topic and will gladly receive any substantiation you can provide for your assertion.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - barrkel 8y ago
    There's a noxious odour of grievance emanating from your post.
  - croon 8y ago
    Either you are misunderstanding, or you are being intentionally obtuse. On aggregate, the students receiving those perks are generally wealthy, and generally white. Of course there are wealthy black students, and poor white students, but the achievement gap isn't based in particulars, but in aggregates and statistics. Side note: I do realize that your alias is a play on Andrew Anglin, creator of neo-nazi website Daily Stormer. Very clever. You could do with being more subtle in your framing of these posts though.
    - Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
      I am to understand that white students, in aggregate, receive twice as much schooling as black students? And thus the black-white achievement gap?
dnomad 8y ago
> That is quite a bit more than high-quality schooling. I'm not familiar with any legal or otherwise definition that constrains what services a school can and cannot provide. There are in fact high-quality boarding schools in Europe that provide all these services and more. (In fact they provide free housing to some of their students!) > And does the touted "closing" of the black-white achievement gap persist if white students receive the same treatment? Why be a coward, Andrew Anglin? Why don't you just come out and say what you mean?
- Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
  You do realize that addressing the achievement gap is the point of both the school and the article, correct? It then makes sense to question if the gap might re-emerge if similar methods were applied to all students, does it not? I have no problem saying precisely what I mean to say.
  - dnomad 8y ago
    > It then makes sense to question if the gap might re-emerge if similar methods were applied to all students, does it not? No, it doesn't make any sense. What do you think actually causes the gap? Is it some magical force inherent in white children? They've shown they can eliminate the gap by addressing environmental issues like nutrition and providing more school time. That would indicate to a logical person that the gap is caused or at least correlated with precisely these deficiencies that were corrected. If other kids don't experience these deficiencies what would make you think more nutrition or more school time could increase their performance?
    - sheepmullet 8y ago
      > What do you think actually causes the gap? Is it some magical force inherent in white children? Why do you go straight to the absurd? Can you not think of any other factors? As an example what if poor early childhood nutrition maxes you out at a lower peak? It is a fair question.
    - Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
Iv 8y ago
"That is quite a bit more than high-quality schooling." Yeah, it sounds almost like European-level. Seriously, nothing mentioned there should strike as exceptional in a rich country. "And does the touted "closing" of the black-white achievement gap persist if white students receive the same treatment?" That would be surprising, seeing how many other biased factors there are to handicap these kids. Even pre-natal conditions are a factor there! (Uneducated and poor women are more likely to smoke while pregnant)
- stuaxo 8y ago
  OT: I'm really annoyed, in the UK things like free school meals to the neediest are being taken away, along with cuts to transport, we're heading towards the US. Now I have a child it's tempting to leave the country.
  - kingkongjaffa 8y ago
    The barrier to a decent quality of life in the UK is getting higher and higher. Anecdotally - growing up a single parent on <£20k a year was enough for me to have a good childhood. Today my household will have a combined earning of nearly 3x that and the quality of life isn't 3x better. Probably only 1.5x-2x (I can now go on 2-3 holidays a year instead of 0 in my first 20 years)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
WillPostForFood 8y ago
There is more to it than that, they try to isolate the effect of the school from social programs. There are two pieces of evidence that, taken together, suggest that high quality schools are enough to significantly increase the achievement of poor minority students (see also Atila Abdulkadiroglu et al. (2009) and Angrist et al. (2010)). First, students who live outside the Zone garner the same benefit from attending the Promise Academy as the students inside the Zone, suggesting that proximity to the community programs is not important. Second, siblings of Promise Academy students who have access to the same community programs but were ineligible for the Promise Academy because of their age show no detectable gains in achievement.
lopmotr 8y ago
It doesn't make sense to me that all kids get the same education at the same pace even though they have different abilities. If someone learns slower, maybe they need more hours at school to learn the same material as someone who learns faster. And maybe they even need to skip some unimportant subjects to find that time. It would be great if every individual student somehow got a tailored program (impractical with conventional teaching, I know) so they could all reach a sufficient standard of education. Some geniuses might not even have to go to school if they can just flip through the book and ace the test on their own, while the labor saved teaching them could be spent on those who need more.
- Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
  What does someone who has spent his academic career with a tailored education program that provides extra time to complete tasks and take tests do upon entering the workforce? Will employers go the extra mile to cater to his needs? Will the market do likewise for his business or product? If I could have taken as long as I wanted on the SAT, I probably would have been able to get a perfect score. But then I wouldn't have been taking the same test as everyone else, would I?
  - lopmotr 8y ago
    If the goal of school is to get kids to learn the content of the curriculum, then that's not relevant. If you want to use it to assess how fast they learn or how intelligent they are, then that would have to be explicitly included as a goal before you designed the system. Perhaps employers and universities use school grades as a proxy for intelligence because it's convenient, but it's a little indirect. It would give falsely high scores to students who have good teachers or who hire private tutors.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  If you can flip through the book and learn to a particular level on your own then you don't need less schooling, you need schooling at a more appropriate level (in order to fulfill your intellectual drive/curiosity/etc.).
your-nanny 8y ago
Nazis and white supremacists are not welcome here.
- your-nanny 8y ago
  Andrew Anglin. Look him up. Nazis and white supremacists are not welcome here!
  - your-nanny 8y ago
    Getting down votes from all the supremacists I guess. Their standing with Andrew Anglin and stormfront. I said it and I'll say it again: Nazis and white supremacists are not welcome here.
- your-nanny 8y ago
  I was wrong. HN is totally open to posts by neoNazis and white supremacists
  - your-nanny 8y ago
    As long as they're civil, HN makes it very clear that they welcome participation by people who historically have advocated mass genocide if Jews and the enslavement of bkacks
    - detaro 8y ago
      Um, you have noticed that the account you're complaining about got banned?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]

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
    You're asserting without any evidence that every student Y who "doesn't care about school" would not respond to the protocols described in this paper? This is an extraordinary claim and probably wrong. It needs to verified with data. The paper does provide the basis for a logical next step: imposing these protocols on all students in a region and measuring the impact.
    - sheepmullet 8y ago
      > You're asserting without any evidence that every student Y who "doesn't care about school" would not respond to the protocols described in this paper? No. They are simply stating the truth that there is no evidence it will work. It is basic selection bias.
      - burfog 8y ago
        I don't know a proper name for the problem, but I don't think "selection bias" is really it. The problem is that the control is getting damaged by the experiment. The control is intended to be similarly-selected students (the lottery losers) in non-special schools, but there are also other students (never applied to the lottery) in those non-special schools who interfere with the experiment. The control students don't get to have those non-special schools to themselves.
        dagw 8y ago
        I don't know a proper name for the problem I think "confounding variable" would the describe the problem. Basically there are two variables that seem to affect the outcome, but since they only controlled for one of them, they can't tell if the second variable is affecting the experiment or not.

JepZ 8y ago

Well, it might be more than just 'high-quality' schools, but maybe that is necessary. That way you release the kids from their uneducated parents in some respect. The problem with uneducated parents is that they are still very valuable for the children in terms of emotional development. The problem however is, that they tend to make critical mistakes which sometimes affect the children's development. And to bridge those two aspects, this 'high-quality' school model might be a very good answer. Just to be clear: Not all uneducated parents are the same and some of them might be very good parents, its just that the probability of finding problematic behavior is much higher for uneducated parents.

Iv 8y ago
This is a think I wish more people understood: There is no equality of chances. Unless you give every kid the same standardized education and childhood experience, which implies a society no one wants. The only alternative is to recognize the people who start at a disadvantage and offer them compensation for that.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- didibus 8y ago
  > Unless you give every kid the same standardized education and childhood experience, which implies a society no one wants. I've always personally been open to this idea. I find families to be tribal and often problematic. I think it be nice to start seeing all children as your own, the children belong to society, and maybe we should all pay for them.
  - mamon 8y ago
    >> the children belong to society That's the dangerous way of thinking that we should avoid. Children belong to their parents, until they come out of age when they start "belonging" only to themselves. Seeing children as belonging to society is typical for totalitarian regimes (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Youth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Youth)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

malcolmgreaves 8y ago

White kids already receive this kind of treatment signficantly more often than children of color. This underlies the aforementioned achievement gap. Curious -- is this something that you're not aware of? I find it odd that you end your post with "of white students receive the same treatment?"

Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
No, I was not aware that poor white students receive twice as much schooling, free meals, free medical care, free dental care, free mental health care, and vouchers for food and transportation for their parents. I am very much interested in more information on this topic and will gladly receive any substantiation you can provide for your assertion.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- barrkel 8y ago
  There's a noxious odour of grievance emanating from your post.
- croon 8y ago
  Either you are misunderstanding, or you are being intentionally obtuse. On aggregate, the students receiving those perks are generally wealthy, and generally white. Of course there are wealthy black students, and poor white students, but the achievement gap isn't based in particulars, but in aggregates and statistics. Side note: I do realize that your alias is a play on Andrew Anglin, creator of neo-nazi website Daily Stormer. Very clever. You could do with being more subtle in your framing of these posts though.
  - Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
    I am to understand that white students, in aggregate, receive twice as much schooling as black students? And thus the black-white achievement gap?

dnomad 8y ago

> That is quite a bit more than high-quality schooling. I'm not familiar with any legal or otherwise definition that constrains what services a school can and cannot provide. There are in fact high-quality boarding schools in Europe that provide all these services and more. (In fact they provide free housing to some of their students!) > And does the touted "closing" of the black-white achievement gap persist if white students receive the same treatment? Why be a coward, Andrew Anglin? Why don't you just come out and say what you mean?

Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
You do realize that addressing the achievement gap is the point of both the school and the article, correct? It then makes sense to question if the gap might re-emerge if similar methods were applied to all students, does it not? I have no problem saying precisely what I mean to say.
- dnomad 8y ago
  > It then makes sense to question if the gap might re-emerge if similar methods were applied to all students, does it not? No, it doesn't make any sense. What do you think actually causes the gap? Is it some magical force inherent in white children? They've shown they can eliminate the gap by addressing environmental issues like nutrition and providing more school time. That would indicate to a logical person that the gap is caused or at least correlated with precisely these deficiencies that were corrected. If other kids don't experience these deficiencies what would make you think more nutrition or more school time could increase their performance?
  - sheepmullet 8y ago
    > What do you think actually causes the gap? Is it some magical force inherent in white children? Why do you go straight to the absurd? Can you not think of any other factors? As an example what if poor early childhood nutrition maxes you out at a lower peak? It is a fair question.
  - Andre_Wanglin 8y ago

Iv 8y ago

"That is quite a bit more than high-quality schooling." Yeah, it sounds almost like European-level. Seriously, nothing mentioned there should strike as exceptional in a rich country. "And does the touted "closing" of the black-white achievement gap persist if white students receive the same treatment?" That would be surprising, seeing how many other biased factors there are to handicap these kids. Even pre-natal conditions are a factor there! (Uneducated and poor women are more likely to smoke while pregnant)

stuaxo 8y ago
OT: I'm really annoyed, in the UK things like free school meals to the neediest are being taken away, along with cuts to transport, we're heading towards the US. Now I have a child it's tempting to leave the country.
- kingkongjaffa 8y ago
  The barrier to a decent quality of life in the UK is getting higher and higher. Anecdotally - growing up a single parent on <£20k a year was enough for me to have a good childhood. Today my household will have a combined earning of nearly 3x that and the quality of life isn't 3x better. Probably only 1.5x-2x (I can now go on 2-3 holidays a year instead of 0 in my first 20 years)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

WillPostForFood 8y ago

There is more to it than that, they try to isolate the effect of the school from social programs. There are two pieces of evidence that, taken together, suggest that high quality schools are enough to significantly increase the achievement of poor minority students (see also Atila Abdulkadiroglu et al. (2009) and Angrist et al. (2010)). First, students who live outside the Zone garner the same benefit from attending the Promise Academy as the students inside the Zone, suggesting that proximity to the community programs is not important. Second, siblings of Promise Academy students who have access to the same community programs but were ineligible for the Promise Academy because of their age show no detectable gains in achievement.

lopmotr 8y ago

It doesn't make sense to me that all kids get the same education at the same pace even though they have different abilities. If someone learns slower, maybe they need more hours at school to learn the same material as someone who learns faster. And maybe they even need to skip some unimportant subjects to find that time. It would be great if every individual student somehow got a tailored program (impractical with conventional teaching, I know) so they could all reach a sufficient standard of education. Some geniuses might not even have to go to school if they can just flip through the book and ace the test on their own, while the labor saved teaching them could be spent on those who need more.

Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
What does someone who has spent his academic career with a tailored education program that provides extra time to complete tasks and take tests do upon entering the workforce? Will employers go the extra mile to cater to his needs? Will the market do likewise for his business or product? If I could have taken as long as I wanted on the SAT, I probably would have been able to get a perfect score. But then I wouldn't have been taking the same test as everyone else, would I?
- lopmotr 8y ago
  If the goal of school is to get kids to learn the content of the curriculum, then that's not relevant. If you want to use it to assess how fast they learn or how intelligent they are, then that would have to be explicitly included as a goal before you designed the system. Perhaps employers and universities use school grades as a proxy for intelligence because it's convenient, but it's a little indirect. It would give falsely high scores to students who have good teachers or who hire private tutors.
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
If you can flip through the book and learn to a particular level on your own then you don't need less schooling, you need schooling at a more appropriate level (in order to fulfill your intellectual drive/curiosity/etc.).

your-nanny 8y ago

Nazis and white supremacists are not welcome here.

your-nanny 8y ago
Andrew Anglin. Look him up. Nazis and white supremacists are not welcome here!
- your-nanny 8y ago
  Getting down votes from all the supremacists I guess. Their standing with Andrew Anglin and stormfront. I said it and I'll say it again: Nazis and white supremacists are not welcome here.
your-nanny 8y ago
I was wrong. HN is totally open to posts by neoNazis and white supremacists
- your-nanny 8y ago
  As long as they're civil, HN makes it very clear that they welcome participation by people who historically have advocated mass genocide if Jews and the enslavement of bkacks
  - detaro 8y ago
    Um, you have noticed that the account you're complaining about got banned?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]