23 ms·

What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity with an algorithm

191 points by sopooneo 8y ago

MrTonyD 8y ago
Exactly. I was working on some machine learning code when I realized that there were implicit moral choices in all machine learning results. Every dataset has implicitly made choices about data to include or not include. Every "weighing" algorithm, even if emergent, is choosing "values" to weigh or not weigh. Now I see data in a whole new way - and find that I can easily dismiss most conclusions, since they represent value systems which are very distant from mine. (Most often, they represent a value system based on profit - effectively keeping others down rather than lifting others up. How many people even noticed that costs were a major consideration of the article? We are so accustomed to our value system of profit over people that we fail to look at the system as a whole - and consider the incredible wealth of our society and wider impacts of actions.)
- bitL 8y ago
  Most people don't get it as they don't understand reason behind their "reasoning" - usually driven by feelings, instincts (biology) and default modes they learned from their parents, friends or at school. So implicit choices made for them already ("common sense") cover the reasons about what really drives them and these are completely out of their radar, but we have to cope with them when we want to get anywhere near automated intelligence and morality.
- minitel 8y ago
  > Most often, they represent a value system based on profit - effectively keeping others down rather than lifting others up. I don't see how that follows at all. Profit motives have increased standards of living substantially across the board. In systems where wealth isn't generated at a rate fast enough to keep up with population growth zero sum games are a good approximation, but that hasn't been the case with capitalism so far.... (On a side note, I think vague and slightly negative headlines like this act like a canvas for us to paint our own ideological biases and anxieties on.)
- Retra 8y ago
  This is very easy to see when you consider morality to be (perhaps by definition) any process which compares competing possibilities and labels some superior to others. There is an implied morality acting under any goal, because one always considers the states that achieve the goal superior to ones that do not. With humans, we can have extremely complex goals, which leave room for our morality to shift around as the context changes in subtle ways (to make exceptions to rules, for instance.) Machines tend to have very simple goals by comparison. It makes it difficult to encode any potential exceptions to the rules.
- closeparen 8y ago
  Resources are not infinite. Better to have a careful allocation through serious consideration of cost than to let the chips fall where they may.
Copereno 8y ago
What are the downsides of having middle and high schools start at 9am with elementary schools starting at 7:30am? Basically a reversal of what is in place today. Just go through with one fell swoop and swap every single starting time.
- frockington 8y ago
  Allegedly the problem was that parents had to quit their jobs to adjust to the schedule. To me this seems easily solved by having little Jimmy walk or take the bus to school. No need for parental involvement in those cases as 12 year olds are capable of getting off and on a bus without supervision
  - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
    It is more because older children can watch the younger ones after school. A 15-year old can watch the 8 year old for an hour or so after school. the 12 year old might be able to, but can definitely stay home alone. An 8 year old needs care. The later start minimises this with a "traditional" work schedule.
    - hammock 8y ago
      How many households have a 15 year old and an 8 year old?
      - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
        Im sure google has precise answers and it has changed since it became a standard arguement 30+ years ago, but I do imagine plenty. 3 years between kids and having 3 kids gets you pretty close (the 8 year old would have a 14 year old sibling). I personally have siblings 6 and 11 years younger than me. The bigger issue with me answering is that not only am I 40, but I'm childless and living in a different country than I grew up in. I*m not sure what the standard family actually is right not in different parts of the country.
  - sopooneo 8y ago
stephengillie 8y ago
Request was for a system that perfectly understands you. Reality is, instead of a human misunderstanding you, it's a robot (like Rosie from Jetsons) misunderstanding you.
- lodrein 8y ago
  It makes sense that it can be easier to be misunderstood by a human than by a robot. And what about the case when any decision will always be bad for some people? I would argue that using (at least partly) an algorithm can add some fairness to the process, as without an algorithm systems can favor people who know the system the most.
apenney 8y ago
I'm not surprised it failed, with such drastic changes. Why couldn't they add a constraint of no more than 15 minutes change and reapply every year for 5-10 years until they reach a point they are happy with?
- billsmithaustin 8y ago
  Of course they could, but as the article mentioned toward the end, the school district no longer has the political capital to pursue rearranging school schedules. The superintendent lost his job over this. I imagine votes were angry with the school board.
- lodrein 8y ago
  It is typically very hard for the parents when we change a school start time, sometimes even when the change is small. Doing small changes can help, but it is so politically complicated to change the school times that some districts prefer to do it all at once.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  Repeated change has its own substantial costs for a system as large as a school district - even without the outrage over the drastic change, reworking schedules every year would be enormously unpopular. (Think of everything from changing heating and AC schedules to reworking start times for bus drivers to telling parents they need to drop their kids off at a different time each year. There's a reason most school administrators I know get an absolutely hunted look when you mention changing anything.)
- Izkata 8y ago
  Because done that way (in addition to what sibling comments suggest), halfway through, there'll be a point when everyone has to get to school at the same time and the bus fleet will have to triple, at huge cost. Or you just end up doing a large disruptive jump anyway to avoid that timing issue.
mikeash 8y ago
I have a miniature version of this, as I'm in charge of the duty schedule at my flying club and I wrote a program to generate the schedules for me. There's a function which takes a schedule and generates a score. Leaving a spot unfilled or scheduling someone who isn't available subtracts lots of points. Scheduling someone much more or less often than the median subtracts points based on how much of a difference there is. Scheduling someone on a day they prefer adds points, and so forth. Then it's a simple hill-climbing algorithm starting from an empty schedule. I get people's availability and preferences into the program, hit run, and out pops a schedule. I learned early on that I must check the result before publishing it. The algorithm itself works fine. Hill climbing probably isn't finding the absolute optimal schedule, but it does a good job. The problem, of course, is the scoring function. Sometimes it turns out to be missing some important constraint. Much more often, I need to tinker with the weights assigned to various conditions. People assign too much agency and intelligence to computers. They are, of course, just tools. A nail gun will put a nail into whatever you point it at, whether it's drywall or flooring or feet. Likewise, a computer optimization system will optimize whatever function you tell it to, and will probably do an excellent job, but it's up to you to make sure the function accurately describes what the humans want.
- snerbles 8y ago
  Back when I was enlisted, my sergeant had a bit of a conundrum. Troops were grumbling about being repeatedly assigned to the same posts, and we didn't have enough time during the shift to scramble the roster while ensuring adequate manning. I wrote a simple Excel macro which randomly assigned security personnel to posts they held qualifications for. Since it didn't have any knowledge of personality conflicts or preferences of the troops getting assignments, the results generated by the Rosternator 3000 were generally hated by all involved. In the end the tool was still useful - the mere threat of a randomized roster was enough to get everyone to quit grumbling.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    Nice one. The key to effective use of computers is knowing exactly what problem you want to solve.
lodrein 8y ago
I am one of the two PhD students that conducted this research with Boston Public Schools. I'll be glad to answer any question you may have.
- keithpeter 8y ago
  Did you think the project was useful in the sense of getting the parents to think about possible changes and rejecting them? So they as citizens are clear that the current system is sub-optimal but they are OK with that
  - lodrein 8y ago
    That's a great question, that I asked myself a lot. I think this project was useful because it started this debate and brought more information to the table. For example, I found that a lot of people did not know how much the start times affected the district costs (tens of millions of dollars every year), or how the schools times seemed to be unequitable. And this Boston Globe article allows even more people to read about this issue and make their own opinion. Ultimately, a lot of people in the US want later start times for high schoolers. This work can provide some information about the ways to implement such a change, as well as the consequences.
- opwieurposiu 8y ago
  Did the algorithm assume all persons time was equally valuable? From an economics standpoint this is clearly not the case, the range of salaries of public school parents could vary by a factor of 10x or more. To me it seems obvious that the rich parents should be able to pay the poor parents to take the "worse" time slots. This should be beneficial for both parties, but human pride may preclude this as a solution.
  - lodrein 8y ago
    Yes it did. What you are suggesting would be politically very complicated to implement. Also, one need to take into account the characteristics of the district: https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/cms/lib/MA01906464/Centricity/Domain/187/BPS%20at%20a%20Glance%202017-2018.pdf https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/cms/lib/MA01906464/Centr... 66% of the students are economically disadvantaged. Additionally, a lot of schools have both "rich" and "poor" parents, but still need to have a unique time.
ageitgey 8y ago
One thing many programmers fail to realize is that almost all problems in the world are ultimately political, not technical. Data analysis is almost always a tool, not an answer. The hardest job in the world is getting a large group of people to all do something. The way you message something can be as important as what you say. If I was working on a major schedule change project like this, I wouldn't even tell people about the algorithm. That's just a tool to help you arrive at a schedule. People don't want to feel like their life is controlled by an unfeeling machine even if the result is better for them. I'm not saying this particular situation was winnable. But I've seen this kind of thing happen over and over in the tech world.
- bitL 8y ago
  That's why the smartest people should shut up, create a great technology that solves issues people can't agree on for centuries, then entice young smart generation to adopt it and then overrun the issue in the real world by being the only solution. Once politics and interests get involved, it's over.
  - Bartweiss 8y ago
    I'm pretty sympathetic to this tactic - it's amazing how many 'intractable' political and social debates have been solved by rendering the whole problem moot for a group that's not already entrenched. Science rather famously "advances one funereal at a time", and most debates over resources don't get settled so much as growth and technology render them uninteresting. (Recall that brightly colored fabrics were once a source of enormous wealth and even legislation.) But I'll be damned if I can work out how to apply it to childhood education. It's almost definitionally a system run by the old guard, on 'behalf' of people too young to change anything. A lot of my friends and I got to our late teens and twenties, swore up and down we were going to fix some of the obvious idiocies and cruelties and wastes of education, and just utterly failed. There's no population to offer a competing system to, and very little road into the existing for any member of the 'young smart generation' which lacks either children (to be a stakeholder) or multiple degrees and time in the trenches (to be a participant).
- 8y ago
keithpeter 8y ago
UK: most schools start at around 9am to 9:15am Children who live too far from the school to walk catch a bus, an ordinary scheduled bus on a standard route, or the train# or the metro. They get special bus passes (some get them free, I think most now). What I'm saying I think is why on earth is the Boston school system in the public transport business to start with? (#) Doing your homework on the train on the way to school is one ritual I was amused recently to see is still going strong. I did this and my dad did this (pre WW2).
- Khol 8y ago
  I came here to say almost the exact same thing. From age ~10 onwards, I would walk to school with my younger sibling in order to get to school for 0850. When I moved schools in year 7, I left slightly earlier to accommodate the change in distance as the school started at the same time, and my sibling walked alone (they were then ~10). My parents went to work whenever they needed to. I could alternatively have taken a (public transport) bus, but the fare would have come out of my pocket (i.e. out of the small monthly allowance I was given to spend on whatever I chose).
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  In order for a public transit system to be adequate to transport children to school, it has to be adequate, full stop. In the US, a separate public transit system specifically for schoolchildren exists, usually because there is no effective public transit system for everybody. A child cannot catch a city bus from their home to their school when no city bus ever comes within 3 miles of their home. Europeans often don't understand, because American urban planning makes it seem like one would have to be a madman in order to do things that way. It's not madness. That's just the way the economic incentives aligned in the past, and no one has cared to re-break the bones in order to set them properly, so everyone is crippled from birth by the history of the infrastructure.
  - ocb 8y ago
    Your point is valid but the person you replied to was specifically asking about Boston. I admittedly don’t know a lot about the public transit infrastructure in Boston but I have a hard time believing it’s less extensive than e.g. Seattle, where public high school students use the standard bus system, with the school district paying for special limited routes where the normal bus routes lack coverage.
logfromblammo 8y ago
> Sorting through 1 novemtrigintillion options — that’s 1 followed by 120 zeroes — "Trying 10^120 options..." We can stop padding our writing to make page length and column inches now. Digital media has a page area that is exactly as large as you need it to be. If you're a journalist, even in long form stories, your working vocabulary is essentially the 3000 most-used words, and anything outside that should be easily understood from context alone. If you have to follow a word with its definition, you need to write something else. I don't know who edited this, but their iron palm of author-correction should have started the smack after "novem" and finished it before reading to the end of the "illion". A large number doesn't need a large word to describe it. The essence of the problem is this. Balance the following factors: (1) Supervise the children of working adults, without interfering with their work day. (2) Transport those children between their homes and their schools, at minimum cost. (3) Teach the kids how to be working adults after they graduate. (3a) Prepare a fraction of the kids for further education, to associates or bachelors. In light of research into school start times as a factor of academic performance, they asked some MIT grad students to improve on goal (3) by giving high-school students later start times, with minimal impact to (2) from the new bus schedules. The algorithm devised to do so failed to sufficiently account for goal (1)--with all of its obfuscated hidden requirements--which made the whole plan fail. They simply forgot, or never knew, that the primary purpose of public education in the US is to allow both parents to work outside the home, and to subsidize companies that have extended business hours with state-provided supervision for the children of their employees--a benefit usually paid for by the employees themselves via the property taxes on their homes. The technical solution is easy. The political solution, which includes an admission that this is one of the goals baked into the public schools system, is nigh impossible.
- lodrein 8y ago
  I think "novemtrigintillion" was just a harmless joke about this very large number of possibilities, nothing too serious about it, I also had to Google the word I doubt anyone knew it. > (1) Supervise the children of working adults, without interfering with their work day. That is indeed an important objective. I want to underline that it is impossible to achieve it in practice. Each parent has a different life with their own constraint, but each school can only have one time. The complexity of school assignment and start time choice is to find a way to do as well as we can. Unfortunately to the best of my knowledge, there is no perfect solution.
ashelmire 8y ago
I've experienced this pushback against the algorithm firsthand. I work in NLP, and I was asked to write a script to select data for annotation based on a number of criteria, including some automated balancing of a few factors. It turns out, this was very unsatisfying to some. It led to questions like "why is this document being selected, but not this one?" without an answer that was really satisfying. I ended up changing it to give total control to the person running the script, and removed the self-balancing feature. Since then, I pushback against any sort of black-box auto-selection sort of ideas, because I know that, while they might result in faster and ultimately equivalent results, people want control.
- jstarfish 8y ago
  People don't want control so much as those answers you yourself didn't get. Nothing is more infuriating than not being told why you're being punished, why someone got accepted into a school when you didn't, or why a judge won't consider your appeal. We can even handle injust answers-- "his parents are alumni that donate a lot of money." That sucks, but it's the answer. But we can't handle not knowing. Denying people the ability to reason is one of the cruelest things you can do to them. The Amish figured this out centuries ago.
lackbeard 8y ago
I think something important is being glossed over by this article: "...distributing the best school start times more evenly..." Can someone explain to me what makes a start time "best"? There was a section describing parents whose elementary school kids would have to start earlier, and they didn't like that because the kids would have to go to bed earlier and it would be tough to rearrange their work schedules to accommodate. But won't this also be true when their kids are in high-school? If they can't cope now, how will they cope then? I always though it was obvious that elementary school and high school start times should just be swapped because in my experience elementary aged kids always wake up far earlier on their own.
- alistairSH 8y ago
  "Best" is a combination of... - minimizing cost to the district (number of buses, etc) - high school starting later in the morning (adolescents need more sleep) - ensuring adequate child-care options are available for little kids. Early start means more PM care, late start means both AM and PM care, etc. Then you get compounding factors... - high school athletics. Parents don't want high school to start too late, because then there is no daylight for football practice (yes, this is an actual argument I've heard... parents would prefer their kids play sports than maximize the kids education). - race and income issues - either correcting existing disparities or avoiding creating them.
  - lackbeard 8y ago
    > "Best" is a combination of... - minimizing cost to the district (number of buses, etc) No. The paragraph I quoted implies that the parents have some notion of "best" start times that has nothing to do with the district's perspectives. But the article makes no attempt to describe what that is! (Other than what I already mentioned and questioned.) Child-care, and not having your kids practice football in the dark is the kind of thing that makes sense. But what does school start time have to do with race and income?
    - alistairSH 8y ago
      But what does school start time have to do with race and income? Snarky answer... It's the US, everything has to do with race and income, even when it doesn't.
lacker 8y ago
This article doesn't mention it, but the biggest problem with Boston Public Schools transportation is that students don't actually attend the school in their neighborhood. The school district assigns you a school that may not be located particularly near you, in order to increase school diversity. So a lot of this transportation time and expense is taken up to shuffle students around to far-away schools.
- lodrein 8y ago
  Yes, Boston Public Schools has the second highest transportation budget per student in the country as a result. If I remember correctly it is ~25$/student/day. But one could argue this is the price to pay for increased diversity.
  - dopamean 8y ago
    Is that $25 per student overall or per student who uses school provided transportation services? If it's the former that is about a quarter billion in transportation costs annually.
    - lodrein 8y ago
      per transported students. The transportation cost are more than 100 million per year.
      - iguy 8y ago
        Do you know off-hand how this compares to the rest of the system? I mean non-student public transport... maybe just busses? Per-rider and overall, ideally.
        ghaff 8y ago
        These are the figures from 2015 [1] Subway/bus fares are $2.75 each way (obviously lower with a monthly pass) which covers about 30% of the total so the cost per rider is ~$8 per trip. The overall figures include commuter rail but I'm just assuming that doesn't change the percentage covered by fares all that much. The MBTA carries about 1 million riders per weekday. [1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/03/02/how-mbta-makes-and-spends-its-money/PL3Z70XaEFfnI42awRcKMO/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/03/02/how-mbta-makes-...
rossdavidh 8y ago
This, essentially, looked like a grander scale version of almost every web design project ever. What is different is that, over time, web teams have learned to use "mockups" or "wireframes", to put in front of the end recipient some simulation or approximation of what the final result will look like. Why? Because otherwise you get this sequence: 1) end recipient tells you what they want 2) you build that, perhaps exactly 3) they don't like it Thinking in abstractions, and imagining what that would really look like once implemented, is more or less a job description for programmers. It isn't, for most other jobs, and thus most other people. If you don't do frequent reality checks during the process, you will be quite likely to get this result at the end. Of course, the students doing the programming in this case, were unlikely to have had multiple software projects' experience, to know this. But someone there should have, and should have insisted on putting sample results in front of parents to see what their theoretical response would be. I find that management, and probably also politicians, don't like doing that because they can't control how the conversation goes, and it could bring them bad news. But putting that off until the end, brings worse news.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Isn't that more or less what they did? Having a couple of grad students compute exactly what shifting high school later without costing a lot of extra money sounds sort of like the definition of exploring what the change would look like. ADDED: To be fair, they did try to take the results and try to run with them. It seems as if there would have been less of an issue had they taken the results and did more outreach to find if this was a change parents were actually OK with.
  - towelr34dy 8y ago
    Yeap, the article has a very heavy handed one side to it. I mean, it sounds like "Silly users don't like my smart product that no one uses" without considering, maybe, just maybe, the product wasn't good? The author did touched on it a little by mentioning the difficulty for working parents to move their work schedule, but it seemed glossed over. I'd think changes that interfere with the the household bread earners ability to earn would be a serious consideration and a deal breaker for any proposed change. Not to say politics aren't incredibly inefficient and way more emotive than logic prone.
johnkpaul 8y ago
I'm unclear as to why this change was made between one school year and another. Unless I'm mistaken, there was no lead time. This seems like a big bang software rewrite. This kind of massive change should have a year or two or even four of prep work. People can adjust their jobs and schedules much more easily over that kind of time than a single summer.
- lodrein 8y ago
  It's true that it was fast, maybe too fast, although the district was planning this conversation for more than 10-20 years. But even if it has not been implemented, the debate itself may have been worth the trouble. The complex problem of start time choice is an incredibly deep and interesting question, and so is the interface between algorithms and public policy.
- arbitrage 8y ago
  FTFA: > District officials [...] released the new school schedule on a Thursday night in December, with plans to implement in the fall of 2018. That's more than six months. That's not really 'no lead time'. It's also the first line in the article. Like, it's right there, at the top.
  - johnkpaul 8y ago
    Sure, but 6 months is nothing. I'm talking about years. If parents knew that in 5 years the times would change, they could adjust their work schedules over that timeperiod. Especially if everyone in the whole district knew, even the childless.
    - oh_sigh 8y ago
      There is still a single point where you have to go from, say, starting work at 9am vs starting work at 7am. And a lot of jobs do not provide this flexibility at all.
quirkot 8y ago
This genre of article, which I call "poor little algorithm," is very interesting. 1) We hear about how hard the algorithm worked (vs the programmers tangential involvement): > "Sorting through 1 novemtrigintillion options — that’s 1 followed by 120 zeroes — the algorithm landed on a plan" 2) We hear about the push-back: > "But no one anticipated the crush of opposition that followed" 3) We are assured the algorithm was an upstanding citizen: > "They couldn’t help but notice, though, that most of the critics hailed from wealthier sections of the city" 4) Finally, we say it wasn't the poor little algorithms fault: > "IN THE END, the school start time quandary was more political than technical"
- towelr34dy 8y ago
  The Boston Globe is owned by John W Henry. The man operates algorithm trading systems; it's the reason he is a billionaire. I'm shocked, shocked I tell you that I read algorithm positive news stories in his newspaper. Shocked!
40acres 8y ago
Parents are a really tough constituency, especially the wealthier, former yuppie, homeowner cross-section. If you look at any major initiative to transform urban living, from housing to transportation to schooling you will find this demographic resisting with force. I'm surprised that the school district did not foresee this resistance.
dwighttk 8y ago
>Even if the algorithm promised to reduce inequities, the upheaval involved — with nearly 85 percent of the district getting new start times — would hit black and brown families especially hard, the groups argued. The article never really goes into this any farther. Was this just an empty point from the selfish wealthy families, or were they correct?
Spooky23 8y ago
This is nothing to do with the algorithm, and all about the downsides of centralized administration. If anything, it's just a case of political leaders failing to communicate and take action to garner support for doing something with abstract/non-existent benefits and concrete, likely, and easy to measure risk. They did use the arrogant and paternal approach of big tech company, though. Based on the figures shared in the article, it smells like the district had an objective of saving some cash, while getting some attention for saving high schoolers from sleep deprivation. To meet the goal you have a few strawman arguments that would waste time or money, then settle on a solution that met the cost target, using difficult to argue with rationale like racial equity as an justification. It would have made more sense to slowly introduce changes, and perhaps measure the stated outcome before disrupting everything. Given the really high cost of daycare in Boston, it seems unconscionable to force parents into situations where you need a much larger block of afterschool care.
Floegipoky 8y ago
How little the health of students counts compared to the whims of their parents. When did it became a right for parents to put their kids on a bus? They wait on the sidewalk, the big yellow truck comes by, they get on it. It's not that hard. I managed to do it without parental intervention every day from 2nd grade on (legally required before that where I grew up), because my parents' work schedules conflicted with the bus schedule. And I'm not some old-timer complaining about kids these days, I'm < 30 and I still remember being completely unable to fall asleep before 1am as a teenager and being expected to wake up at 6:30 and go work for 14 hours a day. On behalf of their kids, fuck all of these parents.
- pas 8y ago
  Student health is very directly dependant on parents having a job. Shuffling schedules makes things very bad for parents with few opportunities (due to having insufficient negotiating power in the labor market). And there are certain things to do with kids in the morning, other than putting them on the bus. That said, I got only a wake up from Mom and Dad when I was in elementary school, and later only the alarm clock did that.
perl4ever 8y ago
I was asked to choose someone to receive a small prize/incentive, out of a list of fundraisers. I'd never done anything like that before, so I thought "I'm going to do this right!". So I went to random.org to get a real random number to select from the list. Alas, my first selection was rejected by my supervisor because they were related to a co-worker. Ok, try again. The next selection was rejected because she knew they weren't able to utilize the prize. The next selection happened to be someone who had raised the least of anyone on the list. That wouldn't do. I finally said "ok, you choose someone that's deserving and hasn't won recently". Computers have a way of exposing you when you think you know what algorithm you want, but you don't.
mjevans 8y ago
A major portion of the problem is that schools aren't just about educating children; they're also about warehousing them as public daycare for workers. The hours matter for that. If they hours didn't then it would be possible to have home-study for some time of the day and do all the bus transport mid 'school' day at various times for a massive reduction in resources.
StefanKarpinski 8y ago
It's not mentioned in the article, but Julia was used to solve the huge optimization problem for this project—specifically, the JuMP optimization package [1]. This SIAM article has more technical detail: https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/a-school-bus-trip-to-the-crossroads-of-policy-and-optimization https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/a-school-bus-trip-to-th.... This seems to be a preprint of the paper that may describe the algorithm used in Boston, although it seems to talk more about the well-known New York taxi data set: http://web.mit.edu/~jaillet/www/general/travel-time-18.pdf http://web.mit.edu/~jaillet/www/general/travel-time-18.pdf. [1] https://github.com/JuliaOpt/JuMP.jl https://github.com/JuliaOpt/JuMP.jl [2] http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/trip_record_data.shtml http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/trip_record_data.shtm...
slaymaker1907 8y ago
Can we please stop with writing out “... 50 bazillion zeros...” and just write using scientific notation? It’s part of a basic high school education and is much easier to read and understand.
deleted 8y ago
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Ice_cream_suit 8y ago
The constraints of the problem seem to have been poorly specified: "...the algorithm would eventually propose — shifting school start times at some elementary schools by as much as two hours. Even more. Hundreds of families were facing a 9:30 to 7:15 a.m. shift. And for many, that was intolerable. They’d have to make major changes to work schedules or even quit their jobs. And because their kids would have to go to bed so early, they’d miss out on valuable family time in the evening."
abalone 8y ago
Something like this just happened in the San Francisco school district. As of last month they decided to undo a key piece of an Ivy League authored school assignment algorithm and there's talk of scrapping the whole thing.[1] If you know a parent with small children in SF you've probably have heard some consternation about the school lottery. Although the majority of families get their first choice, there are copious horror stories. Top economists were brought in around 2010 to design a new school assignment system.[2] They designed an algorithm. It tried to solve for a few goals: diversity, proximity and choice. They tried to make it "strategically simple" to avoid gaming the system. The algorithm works like this: You rank the schools you want. Assignments are handed out according to a series of preferences called tiebreakers: First to siblings, then residents of low test score areas (to promote diversity), then residents of the neighborhood, then by lottery draw. If you didn't get anything on your list it'd assign you to the nearest school with space. Then it did a neat thing: If it saw a mutually advantageous trade between families, it'd do it. If Family A got B's top choice and B got A's top choice they'd both get upgraded. It's called the Transfer Mechanism, commonly known as "swapping". This was meant to cut out complex strategies to get the school you want so you could just honestly list the schools you wanted in order. Welp... After many years of horror stories of families getting assigned clear across town, the verdict finally arrived that the system utterly failed to improve diversity too. Here's what's going wrong: 1. That low test score area preference (called CTIP) is disproportionately used by the few white and asian families in those neighborhoods to get out of their local school. It's a golden ticket to any school in the city. Perversely, what was meant to help diversify actually increased segregation while rewarding the most privileged families. 2. The neighborhood preference (called Attendance Area) is woefully inadequate to ensure assignment to a nearby school. Many schools don't have enough capacity for their area, and if you don't get into your neighborhood school the other nearby schools might also be filled up by their own locals. That means you could be assigned clear across town to the nearest school with capacity -- which means not a very popular school either. No consideration is given to "bumping" a set of people over one neighborhood, for example, or otherwise more gently distributing the pain. (EDIT: I just noticed the original proposal had an "Overfill" preference to address this very issue.[2] Didn't get implemented.) 3. Far from simplifying strategy, the Transfer Mechanism actually opens up a whole new kind of strategy. Clever families list schools with "swap value" in the hopes that they'll transfer their way into an otherwise inaccessible school. This is exacerbated by the existence of speciality schools that don't have an Attendance Area preference, i.e. language immersions and K-8 programs, creating a kind of niche swapping opportunity with AA-bearing families. This results in excessive "false" applications to these speciality schools, bumping more "true" applicants to their oversubscribed local school, bumping other locals, replacing them with swapped-in clever families, and creating a sense of injustice. Worst of all, this strategy is, you guessed it, disproportionately utilized by privileged families. So last month SFUSD just decided to suspend the Transfer Mechanism.[4] This is big news and I'm not sure most families realize it yet. And there is a proposal in the works to rethink the whole system, taking inspiration from Berkeley.[1] [1] http://www.sfexaminer.com/school-board-member-proposes-scrapping-student-assignment-system-focus-community-schools/ http://www.sfexaminer.com/school-board-member-proposes-scrap... [2] http://web.stanford.edu/~niederle/SFUSDBoardPresentationFeb.17.2010.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/~niederle/SFUSDBoardPresentationFeb.... [3] http://www.sfusd.edu/en/assets/sfusd-staff/enroll/files/2019-20/Transfer_Mechanism.pdf http://www.sfusd.edu/en/assets/sfusd-staff/enroll/files/2019...

191 points by sopooneo 8y ago

Exactly. I was working on some machine learning code when I realized that there were implicit moral choices in all machine learning results. Every dataset has implicitly made choices about data to include or not include. Every "weighing" algorithm, even if emergent, is choosing "values" to weigh or not weigh. Now I see data in a whole new way - and find that I can easily dismiss most conclusions, since they represent value systems which are very distant from mine. (Most often, they represent a value system based on profit - effectively keeping others down rather than lifting others up. How many people even noticed that costs were a major consideration of the article? We are so accustomed to our value system of profit over people that we fail to look at the system as a whole - and consider the incredible wealth of our society and wider impacts of actions.)

bitL 8y ago
Most people don't get it as they don't understand reason behind their "reasoning" - usually driven by feelings, instincts (biology) and default modes they learned from their parents, friends or at school. So implicit choices made for them already ("common sense") cover the reasons about what really drives them and these are completely out of their radar, but we have to cope with them when we want to get anywhere near automated intelligence and morality.
minitel 8y ago
> Most often, they represent a value system based on profit - effectively keeping others down rather than lifting others up. I don't see how that follows at all. Profit motives have increased standards of living substantially across the board. In systems where wealth isn't generated at a rate fast enough to keep up with population growth zero sum games are a good approximation, but that hasn't been the case with capitalism so far.... (On a side note, I think vague and slightly negative headlines like this act like a canvas for us to paint our own ideological biases and anxieties on.)
Retra 8y ago
This is very easy to see when you consider morality to be (perhaps by definition) any process which compares competing possibilities and labels some superior to others. There is an implied morality acting under any goal, because one always considers the states that achieve the goal superior to ones that do not. With humans, we can have extremely complex goals, which leave room for our morality to shift around as the context changes in subtle ways (to make exceptions to rules, for instance.) Machines tend to have very simple goals by comparison. It makes it difficult to encode any potential exceptions to the rules.
closeparen 8y ago
Resources are not infinite. Better to have a careful allocation through serious consideration of cost than to let the chips fall where they may.

Copereno 8y ago

What are the downsides of having middle and high schools start at 9am with elementary schools starting at 7:30am? Basically a reversal of what is in place today. Just go through with one fell swoop and swap every single starting time.

frockington 8y ago
Allegedly the problem was that parents had to quit their jobs to adjust to the schedule. To me this seems easily solved by having little Jimmy walk or take the bus to school. No need for parental involvement in those cases as 12 year olds are capable of getting off and on a bus without supervision
- Broken_Hippo 8y ago
  It is more because older children can watch the younger ones after school. A 15-year old can watch the 8 year old for an hour or so after school. the 12 year old might be able to, but can definitely stay home alone. An 8 year old needs care. The later start minimises this with a "traditional" work schedule.
  - hammock 8y ago
    How many households have a 15 year old and an 8 year old?
    - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
      Im sure google has precise answers and it has changed since it became a standard arguement 30+ years ago, but I do imagine plenty. 3 years between kids and having 3 kids gets you pretty close (the 8 year old would have a 14 year old sibling). I personally have siblings 6 and 11 years younger than me. The bigger issue with me answering is that not only am I 40, but I'm childless and living in a different country than I grew up in. I*m not sure what the standard family actually is right not in different parts of the country.
- sopooneo 8y ago

stephengillie 8y ago

Request was for a system that perfectly understands you. Reality is, instead of a human misunderstanding you, it's a robot (like Rosie from Jetsons) misunderstanding you.

lodrein 8y ago
It makes sense that it can be easier to be misunderstood by a human than by a robot. And what about the case when any decision will always be bad for some people? I would argue that using (at least partly) an algorithm can add some fairness to the process, as without an algorithm systems can favor people who know the system the most.

apenney 8y ago

I'm not surprised it failed, with such drastic changes. Why couldn't they add a constraint of no more than 15 minutes change and reapply every year for 5-10 years until they reach a point they are happy with?

billsmithaustin 8y ago
Of course they could, but as the article mentioned toward the end, the school district no longer has the political capital to pursue rearranging school schedules. The superintendent lost his job over this. I imagine votes were angry with the school board.
lodrein 8y ago
It is typically very hard for the parents when we change a school start time, sometimes even when the change is small. Doing small changes can help, but it is so politically complicated to change the school times that some districts prefer to do it all at once.
Bartweiss 8y ago
Repeated change has its own substantial costs for a system as large as a school district - even without the outrage over the drastic change, reworking schedules every year would be enormously unpopular. (Think of everything from changing heating and AC schedules to reworking start times for bus drivers to telling parents they need to drop their kids off at a different time each year. There's a reason most school administrators I know get an absolutely hunted look when you mention changing anything.)
Izkata 8y ago
Because done that way (in addition to what sibling comments suggest), halfway through, there'll be a point when everyone has to get to school at the same time and the bus fleet will have to triple, at huge cost. Or you just end up doing a large disruptive jump anyway to avoid that timing issue.

mikeash 8y ago

I have a miniature version of this, as I'm in charge of the duty schedule at my flying club and I wrote a program to generate the schedules for me. There's a function which takes a schedule and generates a score. Leaving a spot unfilled or scheduling someone who isn't available subtracts lots of points. Scheduling someone much more or less often than the median subtracts points based on how much of a difference there is. Scheduling someone on a day they prefer adds points, and so forth. Then it's a simple hill-climbing algorithm starting from an empty schedule. I get people's availability and preferences into the program, hit run, and out pops a schedule. I learned early on that I must check the result before publishing it. The algorithm itself works fine. Hill climbing probably isn't finding the absolute optimal schedule, but it does a good job. The problem, of course, is the scoring function. Sometimes it turns out to be missing some important constraint. Much more often, I need to tinker with the weights assigned to various conditions. People assign too much agency and intelligence to computers. They are, of course, just tools. A nail gun will put a nail into whatever you point it at, whether it's drywall or flooring or feet. Likewise, a computer optimization system will optimize whatever function you tell it to, and will probably do an excellent job, but it's up to you to make sure the function accurately describes what the humans want.

snerbles 8y ago
Back when I was enlisted, my sergeant had a bit of a conundrum. Troops were grumbling about being repeatedly assigned to the same posts, and we didn't have enough time during the shift to scramble the roster while ensuring adequate manning. I wrote a simple Excel macro which randomly assigned security personnel to posts they held qualifications for. Since it didn't have any knowledge of personality conflicts or preferences of the troops getting assignments, the results generated by the Rosternator 3000 were generally hated by all involved. In the end the tool was still useful - the mere threat of a randomized roster was enough to get everyone to quit grumbling.
- mikeash 8y ago
  Nice one. The key to effective use of computers is knowing exactly what problem you want to solve.

lodrein 8y ago

I am one of the two PhD students that conducted this research with Boston Public Schools. I'll be glad to answer any question you may have.

keithpeter 8y ago
Did you think the project was useful in the sense of getting the parents to think about possible changes and rejecting them? So they as citizens are clear that the current system is sub-optimal but they are OK with that
- lodrein 8y ago
  That's a great question, that I asked myself a lot. I think this project was useful because it started this debate and brought more information to the table. For example, I found that a lot of people did not know how much the start times affected the district costs (tens of millions of dollars every year), or how the schools times seemed to be unequitable. And this Boston Globe article allows even more people to read about this issue and make their own opinion. Ultimately, a lot of people in the US want later start times for high schoolers. This work can provide some information about the ways to implement such a change, as well as the consequences.
opwieurposiu 8y ago
Did the algorithm assume all persons time was equally valuable? From an economics standpoint this is clearly not the case, the range of salaries of public school parents could vary by a factor of 10x or more. To me it seems obvious that the rich parents should be able to pay the poor parents to take the "worse" time slots. This should be beneficial for both parties, but human pride may preclude this as a solution.
- lodrein 8y ago
  Yes it did. What you are suggesting would be politically very complicated to implement. Also, one need to take into account the characteristics of the district: https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/cms/lib/MA01906464/Centricity/Domain/187/BPS%20at%20a%20Glance%202017-2018.pdf https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/cms/lib/MA01906464/Centr... 66% of the students are economically disadvantaged. Additionally, a lot of schools have both "rich" and "poor" parents, but still need to have a unique time.

ageitgey 8y ago

One thing many programmers fail to realize is that almost all problems in the world are ultimately political, not technical. Data analysis is almost always a tool, not an answer. The hardest job in the world is getting a large group of people to all do something. The way you message something can be as important as what you say. If I was working on a major schedule change project like this, I wouldn't even tell people about the algorithm. That's just a tool to help you arrive at a schedule. People don't want to feel like their life is controlled by an unfeeling machine even if the result is better for them. I'm not saying this particular situation was winnable. But I've seen this kind of thing happen over and over in the tech world.

bitL 8y ago
That's why the smartest people should shut up, create a great technology that solves issues people can't agree on for centuries, then entice young smart generation to adopt it and then overrun the issue in the real world by being the only solution. Once politics and interests get involved, it's over.
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  I'm pretty sympathetic to this tactic - it's amazing how many 'intractable' political and social debates have been solved by rendering the whole problem moot for a group that's not already entrenched. Science rather famously "advances one funereal at a time", and most debates over resources don't get settled so much as growth and technology render them uninteresting. (Recall that brightly colored fabrics were once a source of enormous wealth and even legislation.) But I'll be damned if I can work out how to apply it to childhood education. It's almost definitionally a system run by the old guard, on 'behalf' of people too young to change anything. A lot of my friends and I got to our late teens and twenties, swore up and down we were going to fix some of the obvious idiocies and cruelties and wastes of education, and just utterly failed. There's no population to offer a competing system to, and very little road into the existing for any member of the 'young smart generation' which lacks either children (to be a stakeholder) or multiple degrees and time in the trenches (to be a participant).
8y ago

keithpeter 8y ago

UK: most schools start at around 9am to 9:15am Children who live too far from the school to walk catch a bus, an ordinary scheduled bus on a standard route, or the train# or the metro. They get special bus passes (some get them free, I think most now). What I'm saying I think is why on earth is the Boston school system in the public transport business to start with? (#) Doing your homework on the train on the way to school is one ritual I was amused recently to see is still going strong. I did this and my dad did this (pre WW2).

Khol 8y ago
I came here to say almost the exact same thing. From age ~10 onwards, I would walk to school with my younger sibling in order to get to school for 0850. When I moved schools in year 7, I left slightly earlier to accommodate the change in distance as the school started at the same time, and my sibling walked alone (they were then ~10). My parents went to work whenever they needed to. I could alternatively have taken a (public transport) bus, but the fare would have come out of my pocket (i.e. out of the small monthly allowance I was given to spend on whatever I chose).
logfromblammo 8y ago
In order for a public transit system to be adequate to transport children to school, it has to be adequate, full stop. In the US, a separate public transit system specifically for schoolchildren exists, usually because there is no effective public transit system for everybody. A child cannot catch a city bus from their home to their school when no city bus ever comes within 3 miles of their home. Europeans often don't understand, because American urban planning makes it seem like one would have to be a madman in order to do things that way. It's not madness. That's just the way the economic incentives aligned in the past, and no one has cared to re-break the bones in order to set them properly, so everyone is crippled from birth by the history of the infrastructure.
- ocb 8y ago
  Your point is valid but the person you replied to was specifically asking about Boston. I admittedly don’t know a lot about the public transit infrastructure in Boston but I have a hard time believing it’s less extensive than e.g. Seattle, where public high school students use the standard bus system, with the school district paying for special limited routes where the normal bus routes lack coverage.

logfromblammo 8y ago

> Sorting through 1 novemtrigintillion options — that’s 1 followed by 120 zeroes — "Trying 10^120 options..." We can stop padding our writing to make page length and column inches now. Digital media has a page area that is exactly as large as you need it to be. If you're a journalist, even in long form stories, your working vocabulary is essentially the 3000 most-used words, and anything outside that should be easily understood from context alone. If you have to follow a word with its definition, you need to write something else. I don't know who edited this, but their iron palm of author-correction should have started the smack after "novem" and finished it before reading to the end of the "illion". A large number doesn't need a large word to describe it. The essence of the problem is this. Balance the following factors: (1) Supervise the children of working adults, without interfering with their work day. (2) Transport those children between their homes and their schools, at minimum cost. (3) Teach the kids how to be working adults after they graduate. (3a) Prepare a fraction of the kids for further education, to associates or bachelors. In light of research into school start times as a factor of academic performance, they asked some MIT grad students to improve on goal (3) by giving high-school students later start times, with minimal impact to (2) from the new bus schedules. The algorithm devised to do so failed to sufficiently account for goal (1)--with all of its obfuscated hidden requirements--which made the whole plan fail. They simply forgot, or never knew, that the primary purpose of public education in the US is to allow both parents to work outside the home, and to subsidize companies that have extended business hours with state-provided supervision for the children of their employees--a benefit usually paid for by the employees themselves via the property taxes on their homes. The technical solution is easy. The political solution, which includes an admission that this is one of the goals baked into the public schools system, is nigh impossible.

lodrein 8y ago
I think "novemtrigintillion" was just a harmless joke about this very large number of possibilities, nothing too serious about it, I also had to Google the word I doubt anyone knew it. > (1) Supervise the children of working adults, without interfering with their work day. That is indeed an important objective. I want to underline that it is impossible to achieve it in practice. Each parent has a different life with their own constraint, but each school can only have one time. The complexity of school assignment and start time choice is to find a way to do as well as we can. Unfortunately to the best of my knowledge, there is no perfect solution.

ashelmire 8y ago

I've experienced this pushback against the algorithm firsthand. I work in NLP, and I was asked to write a script to select data for annotation based on a number of criteria, including some automated balancing of a few factors. It turns out, this was very unsatisfying to some. It led to questions like "why is this document being selected, but not this one?" without an answer that was really satisfying. I ended up changing it to give total control to the person running the script, and removed the self-balancing feature. Since then, I pushback against any sort of black-box auto-selection sort of ideas, because I know that, while they might result in faster and ultimately equivalent results, people want control.

jstarfish 8y ago
People don't want control so much as those answers you yourself didn't get. Nothing is more infuriating than not being told why you're being punished, why someone got accepted into a school when you didn't, or why a judge won't consider your appeal. We can even handle injust answers-- "his parents are alumni that donate a lot of money." That sucks, but it's the answer. But we can't handle not knowing. Denying people the ability to reason is one of the cruelest things you can do to them. The Amish figured this out centuries ago.

lackbeard 8y ago

I think something important is being glossed over by this article: "...distributing the best school start times more evenly..." Can someone explain to me what makes a start time "best"? There was a section describing parents whose elementary school kids would have to start earlier, and they didn't like that because the kids would have to go to bed earlier and it would be tough to rearrange their work schedules to accommodate. But won't this also be true when their kids are in high-school? If they can't cope now, how will they cope then? I always though it was obvious that elementary school and high school start times should just be swapped because in my experience elementary aged kids always wake up far earlier on their own.

alistairSH 8y ago
"Best" is a combination of... - minimizing cost to the district (number of buses, etc) - high school starting later in the morning (adolescents need more sleep) - ensuring adequate child-care options are available for little kids. Early start means more PM care, late start means both AM and PM care, etc. Then you get compounding factors... - high school athletics. Parents don't want high school to start too late, because then there is no daylight for football practice (yes, this is an actual argument I've heard... parents would prefer their kids play sports than maximize the kids education). - race and income issues - either correcting existing disparities or avoiding creating them.
- lackbeard 8y ago
  > "Best" is a combination of... - minimizing cost to the district (number of buses, etc) No. The paragraph I quoted implies that the parents have some notion of "best" start times that has nothing to do with the district's perspectives. But the article makes no attempt to describe what that is! (Other than what I already mentioned and questioned.) Child-care, and not having your kids practice football in the dark is the kind of thing that makes sense. But what does school start time have to do with race and income?
  - alistairSH 8y ago
    But what does school start time have to do with race and income? Snarky answer... It's the US, everything has to do with race and income, even when it doesn't.

lacker 8y ago

This article doesn't mention it, but the biggest problem with Boston Public Schools transportation is that students don't actually attend the school in their neighborhood. The school district assigns you a school that may not be located particularly near you, in order to increase school diversity. So a lot of this transportation time and expense is taken up to shuffle students around to far-away schools.

lodrein 8y ago
Yes, Boston Public Schools has the second highest transportation budget per student in the country as a result. If I remember correctly it is ~25$/student/day. But one could argue this is the price to pay for increased diversity.
- dopamean 8y ago
  Is that $25 per student overall or per student who uses school provided transportation services? If it's the former that is about a quarter billion in transportation costs annually.
  - lodrein 8y ago
    per transported students. The transportation cost are more than 100 million per year.
    - iguy 8y ago
      Do you know off-hand how this compares to the rest of the system? I mean non-student public transport... maybe just busses? Per-rider and overall, ideally.
      - ghaff 8y ago
        These are the figures from 2015 [1] Subway/bus fares are $2.75 each way (obviously lower with a monthly pass) which covers about 30% of the total so the cost per rider is ~$8 per trip. The overall figures include commuter rail but I'm just assuming that doesn't change the percentage covered by fares all that much. The MBTA carries about 1 million riders per weekday. [1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/03/02/how-mbta-makes-and-spends-its-money/PL3Z70XaEFfnI42awRcKMO/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/03/02/how-mbta-makes-...

rossdavidh 8y ago

This, essentially, looked like a grander scale version of almost every web design project ever. What is different is that, over time, web teams have learned to use "mockups" or "wireframes", to put in front of the end recipient some simulation or approximation of what the final result will look like. Why? Because otherwise you get this sequence: 1) end recipient tells you what they want 2) you build that, perhaps exactly 3) they don't like it Thinking in abstractions, and imagining what that would really look like once implemented, is more or less a job description for programmers. It isn't, for most other jobs, and thus most other people. If you don't do frequent reality checks during the process, you will be quite likely to get this result at the end. Of course, the students doing the programming in this case, were unlikely to have had multiple software projects' experience, to know this. But someone there should have, and should have insisted on putting sample results in front of parents to see what their theoretical response would be. I find that management, and probably also politicians, don't like doing that because they can't control how the conversation goes, and it could bring them bad news. But putting that off until the end, brings worse news.

ghaff 8y ago
Isn't that more or less what they did? Having a couple of grad students compute exactly what shifting high school later without costing a lot of extra money sounds sort of like the definition of exploring what the change would look like. ADDED: To be fair, they did try to take the results and try to run with them. It seems as if there would have been less of an issue had they taken the results and did more outreach to find if this was a change parents were actually OK with.
- towelr34dy 8y ago
  Yeap, the article has a very heavy handed one side to it. I mean, it sounds like "Silly users don't like my smart product that no one uses" without considering, maybe, just maybe, the product wasn't good? The author did touched on it a little by mentioning the difficulty for working parents to move their work schedule, but it seemed glossed over. I'd think changes that interfere with the the household bread earners ability to earn would be a serious consideration and a deal breaker for any proposed change. Not to say politics aren't incredibly inefficient and way more emotive than logic prone.

johnkpaul 8y ago

I'm unclear as to why this change was made between one school year and another. Unless I'm mistaken, there was no lead time. This seems like a big bang software rewrite. This kind of massive change should have a year or two or even four of prep work. People can adjust their jobs and schedules much more easily over that kind of time than a single summer.

lodrein 8y ago
It's true that it was fast, maybe too fast, although the district was planning this conversation for more than 10-20 years. But even if it has not been implemented, the debate itself may have been worth the trouble. The complex problem of start time choice is an incredibly deep and interesting question, and so is the interface between algorithms and public policy.
arbitrage 8y ago
FTFA: > District officials [...] released the new school schedule on a Thursday night in December, with plans to implement in the fall of 2018. That's more than six months. That's not really 'no lead time'. It's also the first line in the article. Like, it's right there, at the top.
- johnkpaul 8y ago
  Sure, but 6 months is nothing. I'm talking about years. If parents knew that in 5 years the times would change, they could adjust their work schedules over that timeperiod. Especially if everyone in the whole district knew, even the childless.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    There is still a single point where you have to go from, say, starting work at 9am vs starting work at 7am. And a lot of jobs do not provide this flexibility at all.

quirkot 8y ago

This genre of article, which I call "poor little algorithm," is very interesting. 1) We hear about how hard the algorithm worked (vs the programmers tangential involvement): > "Sorting through 1 novemtrigintillion options — that’s 1 followed by 120 zeroes — the algorithm landed on a plan" 2) We hear about the push-back: > "But no one anticipated the crush of opposition that followed" 3) We are assured the algorithm was an upstanding citizen: > "They couldn’t help but notice, though, that most of the critics hailed from wealthier sections of the city" 4) Finally, we say it wasn't the poor little algorithms fault: > "IN THE END, the school start time quandary was more political than technical"

towelr34dy 8y ago
The Boston Globe is owned by John W Henry. The man operates algorithm trading systems; it's the reason he is a billionaire. I'm shocked, shocked I tell you that I read algorithm positive news stories in his newspaper. Shocked!

40acres 8y ago

Parents are a really tough constituency, especially the wealthier, former yuppie, homeowner cross-section. If you look at any major initiative to transform urban living, from housing to transportation to schooling you will find this demographic resisting with force. I'm surprised that the school district did not foresee this resistance.

dwighttk 8y ago

>Even if the algorithm promised to reduce inequities, the upheaval involved — with nearly 85 percent of the district getting new start times — would hit black and brown families especially hard, the groups argued. The article never really goes into this any farther. Was this just an empty point from the selfish wealthy families, or were they correct?

Spooky23 8y ago

This is nothing to do with the algorithm, and all about the downsides of centralized administration. If anything, it's just a case of political leaders failing to communicate and take action to garner support for doing something with abstract/non-existent benefits and concrete, likely, and easy to measure risk. They did use the arrogant and paternal approach of big tech company, though. Based on the figures shared in the article, it smells like the district had an objective of saving some cash, while getting some attention for saving high schoolers from sleep deprivation. To meet the goal you have a few strawman arguments that would waste time or money, then settle on a solution that met the cost target, using difficult to argue with rationale like racial equity as an justification. It would have made more sense to slowly introduce changes, and perhaps measure the stated outcome before disrupting everything. Given the really high cost of daycare in Boston, it seems unconscionable to force parents into situations where you need a much larger block of afterschool care.

Floegipoky 8y ago

How little the health of students counts compared to the whims of their parents. When did it became a right for parents to put their kids on a bus? They wait on the sidewalk, the big yellow truck comes by, they get on it. It's not that hard. I managed to do it without parental intervention every day from 2nd grade on (legally required before that where I grew up), because my parents' work schedules conflicted with the bus schedule. And I'm not some old-timer complaining about kids these days, I'm < 30 and I still remember being completely unable to fall asleep before 1am as a teenager and being expected to wake up at 6:30 and go work for 14 hours a day. On behalf of their kids, fuck all of these parents.

pas 8y ago
Student health is very directly dependant on parents having a job. Shuffling schedules makes things very bad for parents with few opportunities (due to having insufficient negotiating power in the labor market). And there are certain things to do with kids in the morning, other than putting them on the bus. That said, I got only a wake up from Mom and Dad when I was in elementary school, and later only the alarm clock did that.

perl4ever 8y ago

I was asked to choose someone to receive a small prize/incentive, out of a list of fundraisers. I'd never done anything like that before, so I thought "I'm going to do this right!". So I went to random.org to get a real random number to select from the list. Alas, my first selection was rejected by my supervisor because they were related to a co-worker. Ok, try again. The next selection was rejected because she knew they weren't able to utilize the prize. The next selection happened to be someone who had raised the least of anyone on the list. That wouldn't do. I finally said "ok, you choose someone that's deserving and hasn't won recently". Computers have a way of exposing you when you think you know what algorithm you want, but you don't.

mjevans 8y ago

A major portion of the problem is that schools aren't just about educating children; they're also about warehousing them as public daycare for workers. The hours matter for that. If they hours didn't then it would be possible to have home-study for some time of the day and do all the bus transport mid 'school' day at various times for a massive reduction in resources.

StefanKarpinski 8y ago

It's not mentioned in the article, but Julia was used to solve the huge optimization problem for this project—specifically, the JuMP optimization package [1]. This SIAM article has more technical detail: https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/a-school-bus-trip-to-the-crossroads-of-policy-and-optimization https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/a-school-bus-trip-to-th.... This seems to be a preprint of the paper that may describe the algorithm used in Boston, although it seems to talk more about the well-known New York taxi data set: http://web.mit.edu/~jaillet/www/general/travel-time-18.pdf http://web.mit.edu/~jaillet/www/general/travel-time-18.pdf. [1] https://github.com/JuliaOpt/JuMP.jl https://github.com/JuliaOpt/JuMP.jl [2] http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/trip_record_data.shtml http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/trip_record_data.shtm...

slaymaker1907 8y ago

Can we please stop with writing out “... 50 bazillion zeros...” and just write using scientific notation? It’s part of a basic high school education and is much easier to read and understand.

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Ice_cream_suit 8y ago

The constraints of the problem seem to have been poorly specified: "...the algorithm would eventually propose — shifting school start times at some elementary schools by as much as two hours. Even more. Hundreds of families were facing a 9:30 to 7:15 a.m. shift. And for many, that was intolerable. They’d have to make major changes to work schedules or even quit their jobs. And because their kids would have to go to bed so early, they’d miss out on valuable family time in the evening."

abalone 8y ago

Something like this just happened in the San Francisco school district. As of last month they decided to undo a key piece of an Ivy League authored school assignment algorithm and there's talk of scrapping the whole thing.[1] If you know a parent with small children in SF you've probably have heard some consternation about the school lottery. Although the majority of families get their first choice, there are copious horror stories. Top economists were brought in around 2010 to design a new school assignment system.[2] They designed an algorithm. It tried to solve for a few goals: diversity, proximity and choice. They tried to make it "strategically simple" to avoid gaming the system. The algorithm works like this: You rank the schools you want. Assignments are handed out according to a series of preferences called tiebreakers: First to siblings, then residents of low test score areas (to promote diversity), then residents of the neighborhood, then by lottery draw. If you didn't get anything on your list it'd assign you to the nearest school with space. Then it did a neat thing: If it saw a mutually advantageous trade between families, it'd do it. If Family A got B's top choice and B got A's top choice they'd both get upgraded. It's called the Transfer Mechanism, commonly known as "swapping". This was meant to cut out complex strategies to get the school you want so you could just honestly list the schools you wanted in order. Welp... After many years of horror stories of families getting assigned clear across town, the verdict finally arrived that the system utterly failed to improve diversity too. Here's what's going wrong: 1. That low test score area preference (called CTIP) is disproportionately used by the few white and asian families in those neighborhoods to get out of their local school. It's a golden ticket to any school in the city. Perversely, what was meant to help diversify actually increased segregation while rewarding the most privileged families. 2. The neighborhood preference (called Attendance Area) is woefully inadequate to ensure assignment to a nearby school. Many schools don't have enough capacity for their area, and if you don't get into your neighborhood school the other nearby schools might also be filled up by their own locals. That means you could be assigned clear across town to the nearest school with capacity -- which means not a very popular school either. No consideration is given to "bumping" a set of people over one neighborhood, for example, or otherwise more gently distributing the pain. (EDIT: I just noticed the original proposal had an "Overfill" preference to address this very issue.[2] Didn't get implemented.) 3. Far from simplifying strategy, the Transfer Mechanism actually opens up a whole new kind of strategy. Clever families list schools with "swap value" in the hopes that they'll transfer their way into an otherwise inaccessible school. This is exacerbated by the existence of speciality schools that don't have an Attendance Area preference, i.e. language immersions and K-8 programs, creating a kind of niche swapping opportunity with AA-bearing families. This results in excessive "false" applications to these speciality schools, bumping more "true" applicants to their oversubscribed local school, bumping other locals, replacing them with swapped-in clever families, and creating a sense of injustice. Worst of all, this strategy is, you guessed it, disproportionately utilized by privileged families. So last month SFUSD just decided to suspend the Transfer Mechanism.[4] This is big news and I'm not sure most families realize it yet. And there is a proposal in the works to rethink the whole system, taking inspiration from Berkeley.[1] [1] http://www.sfexaminer.com/school-board-member-proposes-scrapping-student-assignment-system-focus-community-schools/ http://www.sfexaminer.com/school-board-member-proposes-scrap... [2] http://web.stanford.edu/~niederle/SFUSDBoardPresentationFeb.17.2010.pdf http://web.stanford.edu/~niederle/SFUSDBoardPresentationFeb.... [3] http://www.sfusd.edu/en/assets/sfusd-staff/enroll/files/2019-20/Transfer_Mechanism.pdf http://www.sfusd.edu/en/assets/sfusd-staff/enroll/files/2019...