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The last chart is really a sign of things to come. The us school system was already split and I think after a year an a half of covid it will be completely segr

by rdtwo 6y ago

The last chart is really a sign of things to come. The us school system was already split and I think after a year an a half of covid it will be completely segregated by economic class. What your are basically seeing as a complete failure of all government programs and safety nets. Everything from schools to libraries to homeless housing has failed. Anyone wealthy enough to not use those services extensively is ok, everyone that needs them is f-Ed. Moreover the folks using those services were an optional luxury in many cases and simply got cut.

xwdv 6y ago
Education has always been the true driver of inequality. Once you are highly educated, you can leverage that to obtain compounding levels of success indefinitely. But if you suffer from poor education, you fall behind and it gets increasingly harder to catch up, to the point you may never truly find the motivation to dig yourself out of the hole, and even if you do, it may be too late. Your life will be battered by bad, uneducated decisions that you spend most of your time trying to fix. Inequality in America will not be fixed until after the COVID generation. If at all.
- anovikov 6y ago
  People who are in a startup-centric forum shouldn't complain on inequality i believe. What is a startup? A scheme to milk future generations of Americans for cash that will let them be immune from the failure of this system in the future. We are all riding a horse we know won't be around for much longer. Most startups exploit the shiny object factor, gullibility, poor education and plain stupidity of people who shouldn't have had any money to buy stuff in the first place - and they soon will not have - but above all they exploit the pyramid of debt as trillions upon trillions of valuations and exits that the founders cash out are the printed money that doesn't really exist. When it will be time to pay it back, it's better to be as far as possible...
  - croissants 6y ago
    Eh, I for one hope rich people feel bad enough about inequality to start doing something about it. If "complain[ing] on inequality" gets them there, go for it!
  - jlokier 6y ago
    Not really. It's a mixture here. Some startups take cash and turn it into useful things that benefit future generations. Things like medical breakthroughs for example. Without that cash, those useful things will not be created, they will just live in someone's head as an unfulfilled dream. Some use it to make things that make people happy, like games. Don't discount the benefit to future generations of having things that make life happier. And don't discount the goodness of people being able to work on their dreams, either. It's not just rich people that get to play the startup work-on-my-dream game. Poorer people do as well, admittedly with less chances at it, but it happens often enough to count. Some even have benefitting others, the less well off, be an explicit goal of their startup. Heck, some even invest their time and money into non-profits for such benefit to others. (I did that.) And some startups are bootstrapped by people's own personal money that they earned doing a regular job. Imagine that.
    - anovikov 6y ago
      Any startup that looks for valuation/exit more than for profits, is of that sort because absurdly high valuations/ratios are funded by printed money which is basically, robbing of future generations.
  - violiner 6y ago
    Pretty much. When I hear someone call their project a "startup" instead of a "business" I assume they're trying to scam the world.
    - jlokier 6y ago
      There's a few reasons, among them to attract certain kinds of investors, and certain types of potential co-workers, and to mix with whichever crowd the "startup action" is happening in. If you want people to think of David to the incumbent Goliaths, something with a mission to introduce something new and breakthrough to the world, a conduit for the wild dreams of youth to come alive, call it a startup. If you want people to think stodgy, established, nice stable place to work and pay your mortgage off for 30 years, but no changing the world, call it a business. Like any branding, that will affect who approaches you and what opportunities you end up with.
      - violiner 6y ago
        That's fair, and I get the branding distinction. Maybe I just think it's played out and there needs some new way to communicate that. When I someone emails me about working at a startup I think "No, I don't want to humor your get rich quick scheme by working for lottery tickets. Nor do I want to work for organized crime like Uber, or commit fraud like Theranos, or destroy civilization itself like Facebook." To me the word communicates a kind of tech savvy used car salesman vibe. I understand that there are Enrons and cigarette companies, so "businesses" aren't immune to this either. Maybe I'm just skeptical of human endeavor.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        And most startups who claim to want to “take on Goliath” really want to get acquired by Goliath. Whether they want it or not though, that’s the expected exit of their investors. Just look at YC. Only two YC backed companies have ever gone public - DropBox and PagerDuty.
  - compiler-guy 6y ago
    "What is a startup? A scheme to milk future generations of Americans for cash that will let them be immune from the failure of this system in the future." I've worked for two startups. Both really did want to change the world in good ways. Yes, we wanted to get rich (in neither case were we exactly successful, although they weren't failures in that regard either), but "milking future generations for cash" didn't come into it at all. Making something people wanted did. There are plenty of scammers in the startup space, but that is hardly the definition.
    - anovikov 6y ago
      It doesn't matter. The yardstick is: if a business is about profits, it's usually OK. If it's about valuation and exits - and all startups are - it's a scam: because why is it looking for those? Because they are absurdly inflated. Where is that money coming from? It's printed! That money is debt. It will be paid by future generation of Americans - well ofc it won't, the payment will come simply in form of the system crashing down, voiding almost all values of everything, including stocks, real estate, retirement money, and debt too... When it happens it's best of all to be as far away as possible - because all American life is built around that inflated money and with it gone, bottom will fall out of the good old U.S.
      - compiler-guy 6y ago
        Sounds like your problem is with capitalism generally, along with a heaping dose of modern economics, not startups specifically.
        anovikov 6y ago
        Well, it's the monetary stimulus going off scale. The amount of money being printed by the Fed is ridiculous, and it causes all these bubbles - and a lot of people think that they sit on a lot of money and plan their retirements on spending it. Not going to happen because this money - like home and stock values - doesn't exist, it exists on paper only as long as not enough people are trying to spend it. System would be balanced if seeking profits and seeking exits was similarly valued and respected, if VCs would invest money looking for stream of dividends as much as exit/IPO of the company... But that would take average P/E about 5..8, not 25-30 it is. Till then, and as long as "revenue business" is a derogatory term, we can know that startups are little but a generational Ponzi scheme.
  - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
    I don't know whether you're being sarcastic, but if that's your genuine attitude towards your own vocation I wish you all the success you feel you deserve.
    - anovikov 6y ago
      I am just trying to stay mentally healthy by lying to myself as little as i can. Also, i know that the only alternative is the Communism, and i was born in the Soviet Union and old enough to remember a lot of it, and that's enough to prefer the current system.
- tryptophan 6y ago
  >Your life will be battered by bad, uneducated decisions that you spend most of your time trying to fix. I feel like this type of education is the one that you get at home rather than at school. No amount of continually lowering standards, affirmative action, and pushing people through "higher" education will ever fix this. Problem is, there is a prisoners' dilemma type situation with college. It would be best if nobody went, but nobody wants to be the one left out in case not everyone agrees to do so. So the result is that people waste more and more money on useless degrees, putting those in lower classes into more trouble by trying to better their lives(or just excluding those who won't take the risk).
  - NickM 6y ago
    >It would be best if nobody went That seems like a pretty radical thing to say. Sure, some people go into debt for degrees with questionable job prospects, but you really believe that the world would be better off if nobody went to college?
    - tryptophan 6y ago
      Absolutely, 100%. I think its becoming increasingly apparent that college is not the right/best model for educating(as in gaining useful knowledge) people.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        Do you want to eliminate white-collar jobs? Who will give you medical care, dentistry, engineer new products, design new buildings, etc? You can call it a "better model that's not called college", but I bet it's going to look a lot like college.
- xapata 6y ago
  It's not clear whether education inequality is the cause or consequence of wealth inequality.
  - MikeTheGreat 6y ago
    I'm not a statistician (so I can't definitively say how you establish cause vs. correlation) but since you can a child's parents' economic status has a significant impact on the child's academic performance [0], I'm going to say that education inequality is a consequence of wealth inequality ---------------- [0] https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1083795 https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1083795. AFAIT this is from "Journal of Education and Practice", which is a peer-reviewed journal
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      They're intertwined. Many things in life you can't learn from textbooks, which you can from having friends who have parents who are doctors and lawyers and business owners. When they cluster together, by living near each other in higher priced homes and towns, and send all their kids to similar schools, you end up with an unequal education for the kids because while the teachers and the books can be the same, the learning environment as well as access to adults with better resources can't be made the same.
    - xapata 6y ago
      Statistics lets us identify correlation. Science lets us infer cause.
  - Ancapistani 6y ago
    Why not both? My parents went from poverty to middle class during my childhood, and I was able to go to college with a reasonable familial safety net to support me as a result. I promptly discovered the joys of chronic depression compounded by undiagnosed ADHD, then failed out, but honestly I feel like it doesn't matter a bit in my day-to-day life. Meanwhile, my wife and I homeschool/unschool both of our children and are therefore deeply involved in their education. I expect that this will mean that they have man advantages over their peers - if I didn't expect this, I wouldn't have invested so much time and energy into it!
fnord77 6y ago
> What your are basically seeing as a complete failure of all government programs and safety nets. Not to get overly political, but I think this was the goal, at least for one of the US's political parties.
- bhupy 6y ago
  Nearly all of those programs listed are funded and administered at the state and local level, which are run by both major political parties.
  - suchire 6y ago
    There were many influential policy decisions at the Federal level that pushed for defunding public programs, such as cutting federal grants/loan forgiveness for teacher training
    - bhupy 6y ago
      Like what, specifically? To use one of the cited programs, the US school system, as an example: per-pupil inflation-adjusted spending on schools is the highest it's ever been, and has been continuously increasing: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.asp?current=yes https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.a... Also, Federal spending only covers about 8% of public school budgets: https://theconversation.com/federal-spending-covers-only-8-of-public-school-budgets-142348 https://theconversation.com/federal-spending-covers-only-8-o...
    - claydavisss 6y ago
      Can you honestly not take two seconds to Google-factcheck your own post?
    - jakearmitage 6y ago
      Can you cite any?
  - takeda 6y ago
    yep and without federal help the states are struggling the unemployment benefits come from state funds as well
okbake 6y ago
I wish there was a little bit more data on this last chart. How are they measuring 'math progress' here? It looks like the data comes from "online usage data from Zearn math", but how is progress being measured? Does a +53% increase mean that average classroom scores (tests and quizzes?) increased by 53% over where they were before covid? Does it mean the class as a whole covered 53% more of the topics than they would have otherwise? It's unclear to me. Whatever the measurement, I find it just as interesting that there was such a large increase over pre-covid for the high income zipcodes. My assumption would have been a decrease in the low-income zipcodes (due to access to technology resources for e-learning, more friction in adjusting to staying at home, economic woes effecting low income families more, etc), but the high-income zipcodes to stay roughly the same. It looks like (for math at least) that e-learning is working out great when you have access to the technology, much better than regular in-person school (assuming what they're measuring as 'progress' is actually meaningful to begin with).
- deeeeplearning 6y ago
  >My assumption would have been a decrease in the low-income zipcodes (due to access to technology resources for e-learning, more friction in adjusting to staying at home, economic woes effecting low income families more, etc), but the high-income zipcodes to stay roughly the same. It looks like (for math at least) that e-learning is working out great when you have access to the technology, much better than regular in-person school (assuming what they're measuring as 'progress' is actually meaningful to begin with). My anecdote working with a lot of engineers who are all currently remote is that they're spending much more time with their kids overall. All throughout the day and not just after work hours. It makes a lot of sense that high income households have math literate parents and those parents now have more time to help their kids become math literate.
- otoburb 6y ago
  Since we're focusing on that last chart, the week the national emergency was declared was also the same week where schools started shutting down en masse; NYC DOE shut down week of March 15[1], and during the enuring weeks and months had issues scrambling to issue tablets to low-income families. The participation rates for Zearn is, at best, a proxy. And when they say "student progress", I believe it means "students solving puzzles and progressing through the lessons" (whether that's with parental supervision or self-supervised). [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/15/nyregion/nyc-schools-closed.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/15/nyregion/nyc-schools-clos...
mgh2 6y ago
The US has always been a land for the rich to oppress the poor: the system encourages this. Those who care about the less fortunate are the minority. A day of reckoning is only wishful thinking. The Matthew effect is here to stay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect *I am always perplexed by how Americans feel so much pride over this
- nickff 6y ago
  You are displaying a total lack of understanding of the USA. The USA has a long history of charitable societies and social organizations; many of these were destroyed by (well-intentioned) government programs, but the USA still has one of the highest rates of private charitable giving in the world.
  - mgh2 6y ago
    Charities are irrelevant from the failures of the system itself.
  - antman 6y ago
    Instead of formal support systems people need to depend on occasional charities.
    - comeonseriously 6y ago
      What does "occasional" look like? There are millions who can't find work due to the pandemic. How often should they ask for help? More importantly, why aren't we collectively falling all over ourselves to help those people?
      - antman 6y ago
        They should not be asking for help it should be a given. It can be the state's work to establish procedures and checks based on real needs rather than private organizations for advertising purposes. This has proven to be inconsistent and not sustainable, I mean for the people. As for the companies they are producing pretty good posters, which also count as part of the charity budget.
cjohnson318 6y ago
> The us school system was already split and I think after a year an a half of covid it will be completely segregated by economic class. I agree, this "segregation by class" is also proxy for "segregation by color". I grew up going to public schools that were about 50% white. The AP classes were all at least 75% white, and 100% upper-middle class, or better. Part of the problem was that lower-class kids didn't have the resources at home to perform well in school. I think another part was that upper-class kids looked cleaner, and had parents that advocated for them to get into AP classes, whether they were more advanced or not. Full-disclosure, I wasn't in lower-class/non-AP group.
rayiner 6y ago
That's an interesting narrative, but is there any support for your notion that services "got cut?" 1) Excluding federal funding (which is directed to poor school districts) 20 states provide meaningfully more per-student funding (> 5% difference) to poor districts. In 6 states, poor school districts get 15% more funding than rich ones. Only 4 states provide meaningfully less per-student funding (> 5% difference) to poor school districts versus rich ones: https://www.usnews.com/dims4/USNEWS/39d5daf/2147483647/resize/970x/quality/85/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmedia.beam.usnews.com%2F39%2F62%2Fbfb5fe4a4471ba90eef2802ec2a9%2F180223-fundingfig1-graphic.JPG https://www.usnews.com/dims4/USNEWS/39d5daf/2147483647/resiz.... 2) More generally, per-student spending, adjusted for inflation, has more than tripled since 1960: https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/blog_per_pupil_spending_1960_2015.gif https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/blog_.... Aside from a very small dip in 2008-2010, spending has been monotonically increasing for the last 60 years. 3) In the United States, nearly everyone, about 95% of students, attends our well-funded public schools: http://www.oecd.org/education/EAG2014-Indicator%20C7%20(eng).pdf http://www.oecd.org/education/EAG2014-Indicator%20C7%20(eng).... The OECD average is closer to 80%. 4) Public social welfare spending, as a share of the economy, has consistently increased over the last 50 years, except for a brief dip after the 2008 recession: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long.... In 1990, we spent about 13% of the economy on social welfare. Today, it's over 19%. So please explain to me, what "got cut?" There is so much talk about "austerity" and America being "hollowed out" but it's not reflected anywhere in the numbers. If I were being cynical, I would say that people are gas-lighting the public to deflect attention away from the fact that the Great Society project didn't work. (Or at least insofar as it did work, some other aspect of society is crumbling faster than the government can increase spending to remedy the effects.)
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Districts are hugely internally diverse in income and funding spend. Budgets were ballooning but not being spent on hiring more teachers to teach. Class sizes are huge. Bottom half of households wage is stagnant over past 50 years.
  - 6y ago
loco5niner 6y ago
When I saw that chart, I immediately thought about parental involvement in child activities and it's association with general success in life (which would include income levels of the parents). A more involved parent is going to make sure the kid keeps working on his homework, whether live or online.

by rdtwo 6y ago

xwdv 6y ago

Education has always been the true driver of inequality. Once you are highly educated, you can leverage that to obtain compounding levels of success indefinitely. But if you suffer from poor education, you fall behind and it gets increasingly harder to catch up, to the point you may never truly find the motivation to dig yourself out of the hole, and even if you do, it may be too late. Your life will be battered by bad, uneducated decisions that you spend most of your time trying to fix. Inequality in America will not be fixed until after the COVID generation. If at all.

anovikov 6y ago
People who are in a startup-centric forum shouldn't complain on inequality i believe. What is a startup? A scheme to milk future generations of Americans for cash that will let them be immune from the failure of this system in the future. We are all riding a horse we know won't be around for much longer. Most startups exploit the shiny object factor, gullibility, poor education and plain stupidity of people who shouldn't have had any money to buy stuff in the first place - and they soon will not have - but above all they exploit the pyramid of debt as trillions upon trillions of valuations and exits that the founders cash out are the printed money that doesn't really exist. When it will be time to pay it back, it's better to be as far as possible...
- croissants 6y ago
  Eh, I for one hope rich people feel bad enough about inequality to start doing something about it. If "complain[ing] on inequality" gets them there, go for it!
- jlokier 6y ago
  Not really. It's a mixture here. Some startups take cash and turn it into useful things that benefit future generations. Things like medical breakthroughs for example. Without that cash, those useful things will not be created, they will just live in someone's head as an unfulfilled dream. Some use it to make things that make people happy, like games. Don't discount the benefit to future generations of having things that make life happier. And don't discount the goodness of people being able to work on their dreams, either. It's not just rich people that get to play the startup work-on-my-dream game. Poorer people do as well, admittedly with less chances at it, but it happens often enough to count. Some even have benefitting others, the less well off, be an explicit goal of their startup. Heck, some even invest their time and money into non-profits for such benefit to others. (I did that.) And some startups are bootstrapped by people's own personal money that they earned doing a regular job. Imagine that.
  - anovikov 6y ago
    Any startup that looks for valuation/exit more than for profits, is of that sort because absurdly high valuations/ratios are funded by printed money which is basically, robbing of future generations.
- violiner 6y ago
  Pretty much. When I hear someone call their project a "startup" instead of a "business" I assume they're trying to scam the world.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    There's a few reasons, among them to attract certain kinds of investors, and certain types of potential co-workers, and to mix with whichever crowd the "startup action" is happening in. If you want people to think of David to the incumbent Goliaths, something with a mission to introduce something new and breakthrough to the world, a conduit for the wild dreams of youth to come alive, call it a startup. If you want people to think stodgy, established, nice stable place to work and pay your mortgage off for 30 years, but no changing the world, call it a business. Like any branding, that will affect who approaches you and what opportunities you end up with.
    - violiner 6y ago
      That's fair, and I get the branding distinction. Maybe I just think it's played out and there needs some new way to communicate that. When I someone emails me about working at a startup I think "No, I don't want to humor your get rich quick scheme by working for lottery tickets. Nor do I want to work for organized crime like Uber, or commit fraud like Theranos, or destroy civilization itself like Facebook." To me the word communicates a kind of tech savvy used car salesman vibe. I understand that there are Enrons and cigarette companies, so "businesses" aren't immune to this either. Maybe I'm just skeptical of human endeavor.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      And most startups who claim to want to “take on Goliath” really want to get acquired by Goliath. Whether they want it or not though, that’s the expected exit of their investors. Just look at YC. Only two YC backed companies have ever gone public - DropBox and PagerDuty.
- compiler-guy 6y ago
  "What is a startup? A scheme to milk future generations of Americans for cash that will let them be immune from the failure of this system in the future." I've worked for two startups. Both really did want to change the world in good ways. Yes, we wanted to get rich (in neither case were we exactly successful, although they weren't failures in that regard either), but "milking future generations for cash" didn't come into it at all. Making something people wanted did. There are plenty of scammers in the startup space, but that is hardly the definition.
  - anovikov 6y ago
    It doesn't matter. The yardstick is: if a business is about profits, it's usually OK. If it's about valuation and exits - and all startups are - it's a scam: because why is it looking for those? Because they are absurdly inflated. Where is that money coming from? It's printed! That money is debt. It will be paid by future generation of Americans - well ofc it won't, the payment will come simply in form of the system crashing down, voiding almost all values of everything, including stocks, real estate, retirement money, and debt too... When it happens it's best of all to be as far away as possible - because all American life is built around that inflated money and with it gone, bottom will fall out of the good old U.S.
    - compiler-guy 6y ago
      Sounds like your problem is with capitalism generally, along with a heaping dose of modern economics, not startups specifically.
      - anovikov 6y ago
        Well, it's the monetary stimulus going off scale. The amount of money being printed by the Fed is ridiculous, and it causes all these bubbles - and a lot of people think that they sit on a lot of money and plan their retirements on spending it. Not going to happen because this money - like home and stock values - doesn't exist, it exists on paper only as long as not enough people are trying to spend it. System would be balanced if seeking profits and seeking exits was similarly valued and respected, if VCs would invest money looking for stream of dividends as much as exit/IPO of the company... But that would take average P/E about 5..8, not 25-30 it is. Till then, and as long as "revenue business" is a derogatory term, we can know that startups are little but a generational Ponzi scheme.
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  I don't know whether you're being sarcastic, but if that's your genuine attitude towards your own vocation I wish you all the success you feel you deserve.
  - anovikov 6y ago
    I am just trying to stay mentally healthy by lying to myself as little as i can. Also, i know that the only alternative is the Communism, and i was born in the Soviet Union and old enough to remember a lot of it, and that's enough to prefer the current system.
tryptophan 6y ago
>Your life will be battered by bad, uneducated decisions that you spend most of your time trying to fix. I feel like this type of education is the one that you get at home rather than at school. No amount of continually lowering standards, affirmative action, and pushing people through "higher" education will ever fix this. Problem is, there is a prisoners' dilemma type situation with college. It would be best if nobody went, but nobody wants to be the one left out in case not everyone agrees to do so. So the result is that people waste more and more money on useless degrees, putting those in lower classes into more trouble by trying to better their lives(or just excluding those who won't take the risk).
- NickM 6y ago
  >It would be best if nobody went That seems like a pretty radical thing to say. Sure, some people go into debt for degrees with questionable job prospects, but you really believe that the world would be better off if nobody went to college?
  - tryptophan 6y ago
    Absolutely, 100%. I think its becoming increasingly apparent that college is not the right/best model for educating(as in gaining useful knowledge) people.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Do you want to eliminate white-collar jobs? Who will give you medical care, dentistry, engineer new products, design new buildings, etc? You can call it a "better model that's not called college", but I bet it's going to look a lot like college.
xapata 6y ago
It's not clear whether education inequality is the cause or consequence of wealth inequality.
- MikeTheGreat 6y ago
  I'm not a statistician (so I can't definitively say how you establish cause vs. correlation) but since you can a child's parents' economic status has a significant impact on the child's academic performance [0], I'm going to say that education inequality is a consequence of wealth inequality ---------------- [0] https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1083795 https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1083795. AFAIT this is from "Journal of Education and Practice", which is a peer-reviewed journal
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    They're intertwined. Many things in life you can't learn from textbooks, which you can from having friends who have parents who are doctors and lawyers and business owners. When they cluster together, by living near each other in higher priced homes and towns, and send all their kids to similar schools, you end up with an unequal education for the kids because while the teachers and the books can be the same, the learning environment as well as access to adults with better resources can't be made the same.
  - xapata 6y ago
    Statistics lets us identify correlation. Science lets us infer cause.
- Ancapistani 6y ago
  Why not both? My parents went from poverty to middle class during my childhood, and I was able to go to college with a reasonable familial safety net to support me as a result. I promptly discovered the joys of chronic depression compounded by undiagnosed ADHD, then failed out, but honestly I feel like it doesn't matter a bit in my day-to-day life. Meanwhile, my wife and I homeschool/unschool both of our children and are therefore deeply involved in their education. I expect that this will mean that they have man advantages over their peers - if I didn't expect this, I wouldn't have invested so much time and energy into it!

fnord77 6y ago

> What your are basically seeing as a complete failure of all government programs and safety nets. Not to get overly political, but I think this was the goal, at least for one of the US's political parties.

bhupy 6y ago
Nearly all of those programs listed are funded and administered at the state and local level, which are run by both major political parties.
- suchire 6y ago
  There were many influential policy decisions at the Federal level that pushed for defunding public programs, such as cutting federal grants/loan forgiveness for teacher training
  - bhupy 6y ago
    Like what, specifically? To use one of the cited programs, the US school system, as an example: per-pupil inflation-adjusted spending on schools is the highest it's ever been, and has been continuously increasing: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.asp?current=yes https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.a... Also, Federal spending only covers about 8% of public school budgets: https://theconversation.com/federal-spending-covers-only-8-of-public-school-budgets-142348 https://theconversation.com/federal-spending-covers-only-8-o...
  - claydavisss 6y ago
    Can you honestly not take two seconds to Google-factcheck your own post?
  - jakearmitage 6y ago
    Can you cite any?
- takeda 6y ago
  yep and without federal help the states are struggling the unemployment benefits come from state funds as well

okbake 6y ago

I wish there was a little bit more data on this last chart. How are they measuring 'math progress' here? It looks like the data comes from "online usage data from Zearn math", but how is progress being measured? Does a +53% increase mean that average classroom scores (tests and quizzes?) increased by 53% over where they were before covid? Does it mean the class as a whole covered 53% more of the topics than they would have otherwise? It's unclear to me. Whatever the measurement, I find it just as interesting that there was such a large increase over pre-covid for the high income zipcodes. My assumption would have been a decrease in the low-income zipcodes (due to access to technology resources for e-learning, more friction in adjusting to staying at home, economic woes effecting low income families more, etc), but the high-income zipcodes to stay roughly the same. It looks like (for math at least) that e-learning is working out great when you have access to the technology, much better than regular in-person school (assuming what they're measuring as 'progress' is actually meaningful to begin with).

deeeeplearning 6y ago
>My assumption would have been a decrease in the low-income zipcodes (due to access to technology resources for e-learning, more friction in adjusting to staying at home, economic woes effecting low income families more, etc), but the high-income zipcodes to stay roughly the same. It looks like (for math at least) that e-learning is working out great when you have access to the technology, much better than regular in-person school (assuming what they're measuring as 'progress' is actually meaningful to begin with). My anecdote working with a lot of engineers who are all currently remote is that they're spending much more time with their kids overall. All throughout the day and not just after work hours. It makes a lot of sense that high income households have math literate parents and those parents now have more time to help their kids become math literate.
otoburb 6y ago
Since we're focusing on that last chart, the week the national emergency was declared was also the same week where schools started shutting down en masse; NYC DOE shut down week of March 15[1], and during the enuring weeks and months had issues scrambling to issue tablets to low-income families. The participation rates for Zearn is, at best, a proxy. And when they say "student progress", I believe it means "students solving puzzles and progressing through the lessons" (whether that's with parental supervision or self-supervised). [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/15/nyregion/nyc-schools-closed.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/15/nyregion/nyc-schools-clos...

mgh2 6y ago

The US has always been a land for the rich to oppress the poor: the system encourages this. Those who care about the less fortunate are the minority. A day of reckoning is only wishful thinking. The Matthew effect is here to stay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect *I am always perplexed by how Americans feel so much pride over this

nickff 6y ago
You are displaying a total lack of understanding of the USA. The USA has a long history of charitable societies and social organizations; many of these were destroyed by (well-intentioned) government programs, but the USA still has one of the highest rates of private charitable giving in the world.
- mgh2 6y ago
  Charities are irrelevant from the failures of the system itself.
- antman 6y ago
  Instead of formal support systems people need to depend on occasional charities.
  - comeonseriously 6y ago
    What does "occasional" look like? There are millions who can't find work due to the pandemic. How often should they ask for help? More importantly, why aren't we collectively falling all over ourselves to help those people?
    - antman 6y ago
      They should not be asking for help it should be a given. It can be the state's work to establish procedures and checks based on real needs rather than private organizations for advertising purposes. This has proven to be inconsistent and not sustainable, I mean for the people. As for the companies they are producing pretty good posters, which also count as part of the charity budget.

cjohnson318 6y ago

> The us school system was already split and I think after a year an a half of covid it will be completely segregated by economic class. I agree, this "segregation by class" is also proxy for "segregation by color". I grew up going to public schools that were about 50% white. The AP classes were all at least 75% white, and 100% upper-middle class, or better. Part of the problem was that lower-class kids didn't have the resources at home to perform well in school. I think another part was that upper-class kids looked cleaner, and had parents that advocated for them to get into AP classes, whether they were more advanced or not. Full-disclosure, I wasn't in lower-class/non-AP group.

rayiner 6y ago

That's an interesting narrative, but is there any support for your notion that services "got cut?" 1) Excluding federal funding (which is directed to poor school districts) 20 states provide meaningfully more per-student funding (> 5% difference) to poor districts. In 6 states, poor school districts get 15% more funding than rich ones. Only 4 states provide meaningfully less per-student funding (> 5% difference) to poor school districts versus rich ones: https://www.usnews.com/dims4/USNEWS/39d5daf/2147483647/resize/970x/quality/85/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmedia.beam.usnews.com%2F39%2F62%2Fbfb5fe4a4471ba90eef2802ec2a9%2F180223-fundingfig1-graphic.JPG https://www.usnews.com/dims4/USNEWS/39d5daf/2147483647/resiz.... 2) More generally, per-student spending, adjusted for inflation, has more than tripled since 1960: https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/blog_per_pupil_spending_1960_2015.gif https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/blog_.... Aside from a very small dip in 2008-2010, spending has been monotonically increasing for the last 60 years. 3) In the United States, nearly everyone, about 95% of students, attends our well-funded public schools: http://www.oecd.org/education/EAG2014-Indicator%20C7%20(eng).pdf http://www.oecd.org/education/EAG2014-Indicator%20C7%20(eng).... The OECD average is closer to 80%. 4) Public social welfare spending, as a share of the economy, has consistently increased over the last 50 years, except for a brief dip after the 2008 recession: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long.... In 1990, we spent about 13% of the economy on social welfare. Today, it's over 19%. So please explain to me, what "got cut?" There is so much talk about "austerity" and America being "hollowed out" but it's not reflected anywhere in the numbers. If I were being cynical, I would say that people are gas-lighting the public to deflect attention away from the fact that the Great Society project didn't work. (Or at least insofar as it did work, some other aspect of society is crumbling faster than the government can increase spending to remedy the effects.)

srtjstjsj 6y ago
Districts are hugely internally diverse in income and funding spend. Budgets were ballooning but not being spent on hiring more teachers to teach. Class sizes are huge. Bottom half of households wage is stagnant over past 50 years.
- 6y ago

loco5niner 6y ago

When I saw that chart, I immediately thought about parental involvement in child activities and it's association with general success in life (which would include income levels of the parents). A more involved parent is going to make sure the kid keeps working on his homework, whether live or online.