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> My personal answer, and seemingly not so popular, is education, at all stages. Former educator here, the problem with this idea is that educational outcomes

> My personal answer, and seemingly not so popular, is education, at all stages. Former educator here, the problem with this idea is that educational outcomes are dominated by three factors: 1. More individualized education (smaller classes or tutors) 2. Children having a safe, well resourced home life 3. Smarter, less stressed teachers To get an idea of how strong (1) is it is useful to know of a result called Bloom's Two Sigma which roughly says that a student at the 50th percentile for their class is tutored, they will perform like students in the 95th percentile (the most recent literature I read pegged the effect slightly weaker than this, but not that much). These results on inequality tell us several things: Increased inequality reduces the quality of home life for children by making parents stressed and unhappy. Increased inequality plus the fundamental economics of public education mean that smart and capable people are less likely to become teachers, and those who do will be more stressed Increased inequality means that richer people can afford to hire the services of tutors for their children, drastically improving outcomes. As someone who sold my educational services to rich people, and gave it away to poorer students when I could afford to, I can personally testify to the massive difference this kind of resourcing makes. I don't think there's any way to get away from that aside from actually reducing inequality.

dnautics 5y ago
Also it's not clear how to "do this correctly". The us spends more per Capita, inflation-adusted on education than it ever has in the past. Outcomes are not really getting dramatically better. The places that spend the most per pupil are often the worst school districts.
- Hermitian909 5y ago
  Spending numbers are not super informative, I'll ramble off a few things I find are non-obvious to people outside of education that relate to inequality. 1. Parents farther down the social totem pole are more unhappy and stressed as a cohort. The negative effects of a bad home life on kids is enormous and education is often impossible without dealing with some of these issues. You either spend your resources addressing those home issues are try to ignore them and throw good money after bad. (this also complicates cross-country comparisons because many of our social programs for kids are funded through the education budget where other countries put them in a health or social well-being budget). 2. When it was easier to achieve a higher quality of life on a single above average income you get higher quality teachers. A pattern you see amongst the best teachers who are now in their 50s or 60s is that their significant other had a good job and the teacher sacrificed a higher paying career for better hours for raising kids and the ability to easily move to almost any location with their spouse without their own career disruptions (since everyone needs teachers). This is no longer a good option unless your partner is earning a lot of money. 3. Funding numbers often fail to capture various types of donations in cash, materials, and/or labor. I grew up in a fairly rich neighborhood and my public school received thousands of hours of unpaid labor per year from parents, construction projects built cheap at high quality by parents who owned massive contracting businesses, an art program taught by rich moms who took minimum wage to just fill their day (to be clear, they were good teachers), and a whole host of other benefits. These benefits can be worth thousands of dollars per child per year.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    Completely agreed on all fronts: my point is that the "problem" is so complex that I think expecting a bureaucracy (which is guided by a political class that campaigns on basically one metric "how much did you spend on education") is unlikely to make much headway at all. If you want a reductionist soundbyte, as a political system we have goodhearted education spending and neglected truly important things which you have bulleted (and more important things in addition).
beerandt 5y ago
I don't follow how (1) is an indicator(?) of inequality. Aren't all the students capable of learning more with tutoring? Measuring by percentile seems like a problem if everybody improves. It's a good thing to try and make sure everyone performs to some minimum standard for their age, but are you suggesting equal outcome as a goal? If kids are learning at home, are you suggesting they should receive fewer school resources? I'm lost on what the goals are here and what you'd consider success to be?
- Hermitian909 5y ago
  (1) is not an indicator of inequality but it does imply that in a very unequal economic system (where the rich can afford lots of private tutoring) "more education" is not a very good solution to inequality because only the top few percent of poor kids will be able to compete with the median rich kid.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  A lot of poorer students don’t get any homework help at home. None. Their parents are working several jobs and don’t have time. Some of the parents might not have the ability. If you had two identically intelligent and capable students and one gets thirty minutes of one-on-one homework help from a parent every day after school and the other didn’t I can definitely imagine there would be a significant difference how much they’ve each learned by the time the school year ends.
  - beerandt 5y ago
    But difference shouldn't matter as long as both make sufficient progress and graduate. If that requires help outside of school to do, it's still a "more education" argument. Performance/success in high school might help get into college, but even with that advantage, it's not an indicator of relative success later in life. If attention and stability at home are the issue, then that problem needs to be fixed, but its not an economic one. Plenty of poor parents make the time for their kids, and plenty of wealthy parents ignore them. Parents spending time with kids is tied more to family makeup, with financial security just being a symptom. Having a two-parent home is still the success factor that is in a league of its own, and is an obvious solution to literally doubling parental supply. Presuming a significant number of these poorer students are from single parent/ broken homes, that's the direct solution to "needs parental help at home", not money.

dnautics 5y ago

Also it's not clear how to "do this correctly". The us spends more per Capita, inflation-adusted on education than it ever has in the past. Outcomes are not really getting dramatically better. The places that spend the most per pupil are often the worst school districts.

Hermitian909 5y ago
Spending numbers are not super informative, I'll ramble off a few things I find are non-obvious to people outside of education that relate to inequality. 1. Parents farther down the social totem pole are more unhappy and stressed as a cohort. The negative effects of a bad home life on kids is enormous and education is often impossible without dealing with some of these issues. You either spend your resources addressing those home issues are try to ignore them and throw good money after bad. (this also complicates cross-country comparisons because many of our social programs for kids are funded through the education budget where other countries put them in a health or social well-being budget). 2. When it was easier to achieve a higher quality of life on a single above average income you get higher quality teachers. A pattern you see amongst the best teachers who are now in their 50s or 60s is that their significant other had a good job and the teacher sacrificed a higher paying career for better hours for raising kids and the ability to easily move to almost any location with their spouse without their own career disruptions (since everyone needs teachers). This is no longer a good option unless your partner is earning a lot of money. 3. Funding numbers often fail to capture various types of donations in cash, materials, and/or labor. I grew up in a fairly rich neighborhood and my public school received thousands of hours of unpaid labor per year from parents, construction projects built cheap at high quality by parents who owned massive contracting businesses, an art program taught by rich moms who took minimum wage to just fill their day (to be clear, they were good teachers), and a whole host of other benefits. These benefits can be worth thousands of dollars per child per year.
- dnautics 5y ago
  Completely agreed on all fronts: my point is that the "problem" is so complex that I think expecting a bureaucracy (which is guided by a political class that campaigns on basically one metric "how much did you spend on education") is unlikely to make much headway at all. If you want a reductionist soundbyte, as a political system we have goodhearted education spending and neglected truly important things which you have bulleted (and more important things in addition).

beerandt 5y ago

I don't follow how (1) is an indicator(?) of inequality. Aren't all the students capable of learning more with tutoring? Measuring by percentile seems like a problem if everybody improves. It's a good thing to try and make sure everyone performs to some minimum standard for their age, but are you suggesting equal outcome as a goal? If kids are learning at home, are you suggesting they should receive fewer school resources? I'm lost on what the goals are here and what you'd consider success to be?

Hermitian909 5y ago
(1) is not an indicator of inequality but it does imply that in a very unequal economic system (where the rich can afford lots of private tutoring) "more education" is not a very good solution to inequality because only the top few percent of poor kids will be able to compete with the median rich kid.
elliekelly 5y ago
A lot of poorer students don’t get any homework help at home. None. Their parents are working several jobs and don’t have time. Some of the parents might not have the ability. If you had two identically intelligent and capable students and one gets thirty minutes of one-on-one homework help from a parent every day after school and the other didn’t I can definitely imagine there would be a significant difference how much they’ve each learned by the time the school year ends.
- beerandt 5y ago
  But difference shouldn't matter as long as both make sufficient progress and graduate. If that requires help outside of school to do, it's still a "more education" argument. Performance/success in high school might help get into college, but even with that advantage, it's not an indicator of relative success later in life. If attention and stability at home are the issue, then that problem needs to be fixed, but its not an economic one. Plenty of poor parents make the time for their kids, and plenty of wealthy parents ignore them. Parents spending time with kids is tied more to family makeup, with financial security just being a symptom. Having a two-parent home is still the success factor that is in a league of its own, and is an obvious solution to literally doubling parental supply. Presuming a significant number of these poorer students are from single parent/ broken homes, that's the direct solution to "needs parental help at home", not money.