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Education is getting its own spin on “You can see the computer revolution everywhere except the productivity numbers”. There was so much research saying all th

Education is getting its own spin on “You can see the computer revolution everywhere except the productivity numbers”. There was so much research saying all the millions we were about to spend on tech in classrooms wasn’t going to work. Reduce childhood poverty and you’ll improve results. Focus on a knowledge based curriculum and you’ll improve results[1]. 1. Why Knowledge Matters - ED Hirsch Jr

lotsofpulp 7y ago
> Reduce childhood poverty and you’ll improve results. Everyone knows this, but wealth redistribution is opposed by those who can prevent it from happening, i.e. those with wealth. So we continue wasting taxpayer’s money and instead funnel that into some VC/PE/index fund owner’s pocket.
- tsumnia 7y ago
  This is more about using AI in the classroom. Often times family income is a major feature in determining low-performance. Simply not including this in predictive models isn't enough because you may find a proxy feature that is also highly correlated to family wealth. Current research in edtech is now looking at the transferability of AI models. For example, if I target a specifically low-income / low-performing school and use some type of process to improve their scores, will that model transfer to another school (with hetero- or homogeneous students). So the statement "Reduce childhood poverty and you’ll improve results." isn't directly referring to how wealth improves intelligence, but rather from a logistical regression perspective each "unit of wealth" is correlated to a higher performance.
- ch4s3 7y ago
  We could do a lot to reduce poverty without an extra dollar or redistribution. We could end the drug war, expunge non-violent criminal records, remove lots of occupational licensing requirements, and make it easier to claim benefits.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    The goal would be to allow parents to spend more time with their children, and have more resources (money and knowledge) to share with their children. I don’t see how this can be accomplished without some sort of wealth redistribution, by which I don’t strictly mean transferring dollars from one account to another, but rather forcing all businesses to provide more time off, thereby increasing labor costs and hence reducing income for capital owners.
pessimizer 7y ago
There weren't a lot of vendors employing anti-salesmen to convince people not to buy stuff, or promoting research about how their products didn't work. The sellers of snake-oil will always win over the denouncers of snake-oil, because very few denouncers of snake-oil are also willing to dedicate their lives to snake-oil.

lotsofpulp 7y ago

> Reduce childhood poverty and you’ll improve results. Everyone knows this, but wealth redistribution is opposed by those who can prevent it from happening, i.e. those with wealth. So we continue wasting taxpayer’s money and instead funnel that into some VC/PE/index fund owner’s pocket.

tsumnia 7y ago
This is more about using AI in the classroom. Often times family income is a major feature in determining low-performance. Simply not including this in predictive models isn't enough because you may find a proxy feature that is also highly correlated to family wealth. Current research in edtech is now looking at the transferability of AI models. For example, if I target a specifically low-income / low-performing school and use some type of process to improve their scores, will that model transfer to another school (with hetero- or homogeneous students). So the statement "Reduce childhood poverty and you’ll improve results." isn't directly referring to how wealth improves intelligence, but rather from a logistical regression perspective each "unit of wealth" is correlated to a higher performance.
ch4s3 7y ago
We could do a lot to reduce poverty without an extra dollar or redistribution. We could end the drug war, expunge non-violent criminal records, remove lots of occupational licensing requirements, and make it easier to claim benefits.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  The goal would be to allow parents to spend more time with their children, and have more resources (money and knowledge) to share with their children. I don’t see how this can be accomplished without some sort of wealth redistribution, by which I don’t strictly mean transferring dollars from one account to another, but rather forcing all businesses to provide more time off, thereby increasing labor costs and hence reducing income for capital owners.

pessimizer 7y ago

There weren't a lot of vendors employing anti-salesmen to convince people not to buy stuff, or promoting research about how their products didn't work. The sellers of snake-oil will always win over the denouncers of snake-oil, because very few denouncers of snake-oil are also willing to dedicate their lives to snake-oil.