7 ms·

The root of the problem (or at least the fixable part of the problem) is probably schools. Rich people arrange for their kids to go to good schools, and poor k

by pg 15y ago

The root of the problem (or at least the fixable part of the problem) is probably schools. Rich people arrange for their kids to go to good schools, and poor kids end up stuck in bad schools. So maybe the best way to narrow the gap is to make the worst schools better. That would be a good thing to do regardless. Startups may be able to help: http://imaginek12.com http://imaginek12.com

klbarry 15y ago
The KIPP program seems to work very well. I believe it's because it creates a cult-like environment, and I mean this in the best and most impressed way. It keeps poor opportunity kids (chosen by lottery) in school from very early to very late as many days as it can, loads them with homework, promotes group cohesiveness, and generally drills in the schools messages. Since the home neighborhood environment is often toxic, a complete environmental change seems to do the trick.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  "Since the home neighborhood environment is often toxic, a complete environmental change seems to do the trick." ...As measured by standardized testing, on a good day, and when you analyze the data the right way. And who knows what sorts of longterm problems KIPP could be causing in these kids and within their communities. The fact that the 'best' idea in educational reform is basically just taking kids away from their parents for virtually all of their waking hours shows that America is on its last legs. We no longer have the cognitive infrastructure necessary to transmit learning from parents to children, so I think KIPP is really just a hail mary attempt to try to buy some time before the whole system collapses.
  - klbarry 15y ago
    Thank you for this reply. I am very interested in seeing data against the KIPP model - what sources would you recommend? EDIT: just read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Is_Power_Program#Criticism_and_commentary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Is_Power_Program#Crit..., which is certainly interesting.
    - Alex3917 15y ago
      "I am very interested in seeing data against the KIPP model - what sources would you recommend?" There's very little data, which is the main problem. In terms of books about KIPP, the one I've read is Whatever It Takes, which is about Geoffrey Canada, who founded the Harlem Children's Zone. I'm not sure if this school is technically affiliated with KIPP proper, but it used the KIPP model. It's very difficult to explain the problems with KIPP. Basically you need to take a really good look at how the kids are actually spending their days, and then compare it with what we know about child development, educational research, best practices in various fields, research data on student achievement, etc. I don't think there is any way to understand it without having a solid background in education theory, education research, cognitive development, psychology, early childhood education, history, and even things like organization behavior and management theory, etc. The problem of what makes a good school and a good classroom is insanely complicated, which is why we've been using basically the same model since WWI.
      - yummyfajitas 15y ago
        Is there any non-theoretical reason to believe KIPP doesn't work? I.e., do KIPP students underperform in some way? Forget the theory. The theory might tell me why some measurable effect occurs and generate a complicated model of how it occurs. But without delving into theory, you can certainly tell me what the measurable effect will be. E.g., "KIPP students will have 10% lower math scores in year 2-4 of college," or something like that.
        Alex3917 15y ago
        "Is there any non-theoretical reason to believe KIPP doesn't work? I.e., do KIPP students underperform in some way?" There isn't enough data to say. "But without delving into theory, you can certainly tell me what the measurable effect will be." Cognitively, I'd be most concerned about whether the program would be harming their executive function and their intrinsic motivation. I don't see any value of trying to predict specific metrics though, beyond identifying specific metrics to look at once more data exists.
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    The fact that the 'best' idea in educational reform is basically just taking kids away from their parents for virtually all of their waking hours shows that America is on its last legs. We no longer have the cognitive infrastructure necessary to transmit learning from parents to children... This is an exaggeration. At most, programs like KIPP show that our lowest performing households no longer have the cognitive infrastructure necessary to transmit learning from parents to children.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
- ajross 15y ago
  Doesn't exactly sound like a "lottery" to me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Is_Power_Program#Criticism_and_commentary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Is_Power_Program#Crit... Basically: they have prerequisites for parental involvement (i.e. your parents have to be willing to work at your schooling too), and a high attrition rate (i.e. they throw out the underperformers). That's not a random sample, it's self-selected for people who do well in it. This doesn't mean that it's a bad idea, or that it doesn't work. But it means you have to be very careful about pronouncing it "working well."
Alex3917 15y ago
Most of the achievement gap actually comes from parenting, not schools. And of the portion of the gap that comes from schools, most of it comes from the differences within individual schools, rather than the differences between schools. (In other words, a kid taking high-level classes in a low-income school is probably getting a better education than a kid on the bottom track of a high-SES school.) While I'd like to believe that startups could help, I find it fairly unlikely. Most entrepreneurs I see in the education space don't seem to be experts in education theory/research, so most of the time their products seem to be only making things worse. And if the general public were well-educated enough to tell the difference, there wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem to begin with.
- ajross 15y ago
  It may be that parenting is more important (though I'd want to see some data there -- there's was a recent study showing that for poor children attending preschool was a very good predictor of life success; this would seem to argue counter to your assertion), but I don't see how that refutes the point. "Parenting" is not something subject to public policy, in the general case. School is. We can pass laws to make schools better. If it works (even partially), then we should. No?
  - EvanKelly 15y ago
    A lot of this is based on assumptions, but unless the study was somehow able to seperate "parenting" from pre-school attendence as an intervening variable, I don't necessarily think it's counter to his assertion. I would argue that pre-school attendance could be a very strong indicator of parenting quality, if we can even try to quantify such a thing. On the other hand, lack of pre-school could indicate a parent taking the pre-schooling responsibility upon themselves and providing a rather spectacular "home pre-school" environment.
  - ahlatimer 15y ago
    Poor children attending preschool doesn't necessarily mean that schooling is the answer. It could be that the parents who would send their kids to preschool (regardless of socioeconomic background) are the kind of parents who give their kids the skills needed to succeed later in life. There are tons of confounding variables when it comes to stuff like this, so the jump from "preschool is a good predictor of life success" to "we should invest more in preschools" isn't necessarily a logical one. Correlation does not imply causation, and all that.
gahahaha 15y ago
David Brooks wrote once "the rich don’t exploit the poor, they just out-compete them" And if out-competing people means tying their ankles together and loading them down with extra weight while hiring yourself the most expensive coaches and the best practice facilities, he’s right. The entire U.S. school system, from pre-K up, is structured from the very start to enable the rich to out-compete the poor, which is to say, the race is fixed. And the kinds of solutions that might actually make a difference: financing every school district equally, abolishing private schools, making high-quality child care available to every family are treated as if they were positively un-American.
- tokenadult 15y ago
  And the kinds of solutions that might actually make a difference: financing every school district equally My state has had a state law that finances districts equally by enrollment since the 1970s. http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf Actually, the districts with the highest concentration of low-income families have long received extra funding per pupil compared to the majority of school districts in the state. For more than twenty years now, all public schools anywhere in the state offer open enrollment to all students anywhere in the state, up to the limits of the capacity of each school district to receive students. http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/Academic_Excellence/School_Choice/Public_School_Choice/Open_Enrollment/index.html http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/Academic_Excellence/School_... So if students don't like what is on offer in their local school district, they can shop around, and take their state funding with them, by trying out another school district's offerings of courses and teachers (and classmates). More students enrolled means more state funding, so school districts make efforts to provide attractive programs that will bring students across district lines. This competition among school districts has promoted innovation in programs and resulted in a fair amount of interchange among students who live in different neighborhoods. School districts compete with one another by offeringprograms for fine-arts-inclined students, or students who desire language immersion programs (Spanish immersion and Chinese immersion programs are both hot programs in Minnesota), and students with many other characteristics. Some school districts gain almost half of their enrollment from open enrollment, and correspondingly some of the historically worst school districts in Minnesota have lost large percentages of enrollment to families crossing district boundaries to look for better schools. (Minnesota also has a huge number of charter schools, which is a distinct form of competition for publicly subsidized students, but they cannot offer some of the programs that public school districts can.) This competition keeps all districts accountable for providing a good learning environment, and helps change the psychology of teachers and principals dealing with families from one of treating learners as a burden to one of treating learners as an opportunity to be grateful for. Any other state in the United States could do the same, and a few already have. http://educateiowa.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=649&Itemid=636 http://educateiowa.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task... http://www.ecs.org/html/offsite.asp?document=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eecs%2Eorg%2FOpenEnrollmentDatabase http://www.ecs.org/html/offsite.asp?document=http%3A%2F%2Fww... abolishing private schools Abolishing private schools is a distinctly bad idea (as shown by the example of the Netherlands, where multiple kinds of schools receive public funding on a per-capita basis) and anyway is unconstitutional in the United States. The last major effort to abolish private schools in a whole state was sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan (which didn't like Catholic schools) and was overturned by the United States Supreme Court. http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6094501649208458004&q=Pierce+v.+Society+of+Sisters&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6094501649208458...
mattmanser 15y ago
It's far more than that though, your democracy is becoming beholden to it, the rich can lobby while the middle and lower classes can't. Or at least can't as effectively. The rich can run for office much easier than the middle and lower classes. The rich can monopolize new markets by simply undercutting new entrants. I'm sure there's many more examples than this of how by concentrating vast wealth to a few people you cut out opportunities for everyone else.
- tokenadult 15y ago
  It's far more than that though, your democracy is becoming beholden to it, the rich can lobby while the middle and lower classes can't. Indeed, much of this is predicted by public choice theory, http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html http://perspicuity.net/sd/pub-choice.html http://perspicuity.net/sd/pub-choice.html http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm which predicts that interest groups who have money to gain from a particular policy will fight harder to get their way on that policy than will voters in general who might gain more from a different policy. In education policy, there is HUGE access to the legislative process (especially at the state level, where most education policy is made) for the schoolteacher labor unions. The general public doesn't get the same kind of place at the table, by far. But politicians are not embarrassed by that. They call special access for special interest groups "taking care to consider the point of view of stakeholders," and don't think about policy in terms of what's right in the abstract, but rather in terms of what's expedient for staying out of political trouble. A quiet majority of inadequately educated Americans struggling to find time for political participation while making ends meet has less voice in the process than a vocal minority of wealthy people whining about "class warfare," and also less voice than a minority of people employed by publicly funded schools who are not held accountable for results.
femto 15y ago
There are also outliers, about which it interesting to ask "why?" This [1] example of poor kids in a good school was recently reported in Australian media. The Albert Street School [2] in Johannesburg is run by Zimbabwean refugees for Zimbabwean refugees. Recently, it's been achieving results comparable to the best African private schools. [1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-06/disadvantaged-students-excel-in-africa/3638362 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-06/disadvantaged-students... [2] http://www.eliasfund.org/partners/albert-street-school http://www.eliasfund.org/partners/albert-street-school
ronnier 15y ago
What if it is the students who make the schools a "worst school". Nobody seems to ever put any blame on the students. From 6th to 12th grade, I attended one of these very bad schools and largely the students were the problem.
bodegajed 15y ago
Yeah opportunity comes to the educated and the rich. While this is the advantage of the first world this is the deep problem with third world.
Hyena 15y ago
Don't discount the value of family connections, whether to family-run businesses or through friends. I turned down three jobs (two family firms and one using friends in the oil industry) because I did not feel I wanted a life beholden to that system. Most of our productivity comes from what we learn at our jobs, especially when our jobs (as you say) include a good portion of "school". Helping your children land good jobs is a very good way of passing on skills.
brlewis 15y ago
Alternatively, make better schools cheaper.

by pg 15y ago

klbarry 15y ago

The KIPP program seems to work very well. I believe it's because it creates a cult-like environment, and I mean this in the best and most impressed way. It keeps poor opportunity kids (chosen by lottery) in school from very early to very late as many days as it can, loads them with homework, promotes group cohesiveness, and generally drills in the schools messages. Since the home neighborhood environment is often toxic, a complete environmental change seems to do the trick.

Alex3917 15y ago
"Since the home neighborhood environment is often toxic, a complete environmental change seems to do the trick." ...As measured by standardized testing, on a good day, and when you analyze the data the right way. And who knows what sorts of longterm problems KIPP could be causing in these kids and within their communities. The fact that the 'best' idea in educational reform is basically just taking kids away from their parents for virtually all of their waking hours shows that America is on its last legs. We no longer have the cognitive infrastructure necessary to transmit learning from parents to children, so I think KIPP is really just a hail mary attempt to try to buy some time before the whole system collapses.
- klbarry 15y ago
  Thank you for this reply. I am very interested in seeing data against the KIPP model - what sources would you recommend? EDIT: just read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Is_Power_Program#Criticism_and_commentary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Is_Power_Program#Crit..., which is certainly interesting.
  - Alex3917 15y ago
    "I am very interested in seeing data against the KIPP model - what sources would you recommend?" There's very little data, which is the main problem. In terms of books about KIPP, the one I've read is Whatever It Takes, which is about Geoffrey Canada, who founded the Harlem Children's Zone. I'm not sure if this school is technically affiliated with KIPP proper, but it used the KIPP model. It's very difficult to explain the problems with KIPP. Basically you need to take a really good look at how the kids are actually spending their days, and then compare it with what we know about child development, educational research, best practices in various fields, research data on student achievement, etc. I don't think there is any way to understand it without having a solid background in education theory, education research, cognitive development, psychology, early childhood education, history, and even things like organization behavior and management theory, etc. The problem of what makes a good school and a good classroom is insanely complicated, which is why we've been using basically the same model since WWI.
    - yummyfajitas 15y ago
      Is there any non-theoretical reason to believe KIPP doesn't work? I.e., do KIPP students underperform in some way? Forget the theory. The theory might tell me why some measurable effect occurs and generate a complicated model of how it occurs. But without delving into theory, you can certainly tell me what the measurable effect will be. E.g., "KIPP students will have 10% lower math scores in year 2-4 of college," or something like that.
      - Alex3917 15y ago
        "Is there any non-theoretical reason to believe KIPP doesn't work? I.e., do KIPP students underperform in some way?" There isn't enough data to say. "But without delving into theory, you can certainly tell me what the measurable effect will be." Cognitively, I'd be most concerned about whether the program would be harming their executive function and their intrinsic motivation. I don't see any value of trying to predict specific metrics though, beyond identifying specific metrics to look at once more data exists.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  The fact that the 'best' idea in educational reform is basically just taking kids away from their parents for virtually all of their waking hours shows that America is on its last legs. We no longer have the cognitive infrastructure necessary to transmit learning from parents to children... This is an exaggeration. At most, programs like KIPP show that our lowest performing households no longer have the cognitive infrastructure necessary to transmit learning from parents to children.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
ajross 15y ago
Doesn't exactly sound like a "lottery" to me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Is_Power_Program#Criticism_and_commentary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Is_Power_Program#Crit... Basically: they have prerequisites for parental involvement (i.e. your parents have to be willing to work at your schooling too), and a high attrition rate (i.e. they throw out the underperformers). That's not a random sample, it's self-selected for people who do well in it. This doesn't mean that it's a bad idea, or that it doesn't work. But it means you have to be very careful about pronouncing it "working well."

Alex3917 15y ago

Most of the achievement gap actually comes from parenting, not schools. And of the portion of the gap that comes from schools, most of it comes from the differences within individual schools, rather than the differences between schools. (In other words, a kid taking high-level classes in a low-income school is probably getting a better education than a kid on the bottom track of a high-SES school.) While I'd like to believe that startups could help, I find it fairly unlikely. Most entrepreneurs I see in the education space don't seem to be experts in education theory/research, so most of the time their products seem to be only making things worse. And if the general public were well-educated enough to tell the difference, there wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem to begin with.

ajross 15y ago
It may be that parenting is more important (though I'd want to see some data there -- there's was a recent study showing that for poor children attending preschool was a very good predictor of life success; this would seem to argue counter to your assertion), but I don't see how that refutes the point. "Parenting" is not something subject to public policy, in the general case. School is. We can pass laws to make schools better. If it works (even partially), then we should. No?
- EvanKelly 15y ago
  A lot of this is based on assumptions, but unless the study was somehow able to seperate "parenting" from pre-school attendence as an intervening variable, I don't necessarily think it's counter to his assertion. I would argue that pre-school attendance could be a very strong indicator of parenting quality, if we can even try to quantify such a thing. On the other hand, lack of pre-school could indicate a parent taking the pre-schooling responsibility upon themselves and providing a rather spectacular "home pre-school" environment.
- ahlatimer 15y ago
  Poor children attending preschool doesn't necessarily mean that schooling is the answer. It could be that the parents who would send their kids to preschool (regardless of socioeconomic background) are the kind of parents who give their kids the skills needed to succeed later in life. There are tons of confounding variables when it comes to stuff like this, so the jump from "preschool is a good predictor of life success" to "we should invest more in preschools" isn't necessarily a logical one. Correlation does not imply causation, and all that.

gahahaha 15y ago

David Brooks wrote once "the rich don’t exploit the poor, they just out-compete them" And if out-competing people means tying their ankles together and loading them down with extra weight while hiring yourself the most expensive coaches and the best practice facilities, he’s right. The entire U.S. school system, from pre-K up, is structured from the very start to enable the rich to out-compete the poor, which is to say, the race is fixed. And the kinds of solutions that might actually make a difference: financing every school district equally, abolishing private schools, making high-quality child care available to every family are treated as if they were positively un-American.

tokenadult 15y ago
And the kinds of solutions that might actually make a difference: financing every school district equally My state has had a state law that finances districts equally by enrollment since the 1970s. http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf Actually, the districts with the highest concentration of low-income families have long received extra funding per pupil compared to the majority of school districts in the state. For more than twenty years now, all public schools anywhere in the state offer open enrollment to all students anywhere in the state, up to the limits of the capacity of each school district to receive students. http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/Academic_Excellence/School_Choice/Public_School_Choice/Open_Enrollment/index.html http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/Academic_Excellence/School_... So if students don't like what is on offer in their local school district, they can shop around, and take their state funding with them, by trying out another school district's offerings of courses and teachers (and classmates). More students enrolled means more state funding, so school districts make efforts to provide attractive programs that will bring students across district lines. This competition among school districts has promoted innovation in programs and resulted in a fair amount of interchange among students who live in different neighborhoods. School districts compete with one another by offeringprograms for fine-arts-inclined students, or students who desire language immersion programs (Spanish immersion and Chinese immersion programs are both hot programs in Minnesota), and students with many other characteristics. Some school districts gain almost half of their enrollment from open enrollment, and correspondingly some of the historically worst school districts in Minnesota have lost large percentages of enrollment to families crossing district boundaries to look for better schools. (Minnesota also has a huge number of charter schools, which is a distinct form of competition for publicly subsidized students, but they cannot offer some of the programs that public school districts can.) This competition keeps all districts accountable for providing a good learning environment, and helps change the psychology of teachers and principals dealing with families from one of treating learners as a burden to one of treating learners as an opportunity to be grateful for. Any other state in the United States could do the same, and a few already have. http://educateiowa.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=649&Itemid=636 http://educateiowa.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task... http://www.ecs.org/html/offsite.asp?document=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eecs%2Eorg%2FOpenEnrollmentDatabase http://www.ecs.org/html/offsite.asp?document=http%3A%2F%2Fww... abolishing private schools Abolishing private schools is a distinctly bad idea (as shown by the example of the Netherlands, where multiple kinds of schools receive public funding on a per-capita basis) and anyway is unconstitutional in the United States. The last major effort to abolish private schools in a whole state was sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan (which didn't like Catholic schools) and was overturned by the United States Supreme Court. http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6094501649208458004&q=Pierce+v.+Society+of+Sisters&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6094501649208458...

mattmanser 15y ago

It's far more than that though, your democracy is becoming beholden to it, the rich can lobby while the middle and lower classes can't. Or at least can't as effectively. The rich can run for office much easier than the middle and lower classes. The rich can monopolize new markets by simply undercutting new entrants. I'm sure there's many more examples than this of how by concentrating vast wealth to a few people you cut out opportunities for everyone else.

tokenadult 15y ago
It's far more than that though, your democracy is becoming beholden to it, the rich can lobby while the middle and lower classes can't. Indeed, much of this is predicted by public choice theory, http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html http://perspicuity.net/sd/pub-choice.html http://perspicuity.net/sd/pub-choice.html http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm which predicts that interest groups who have money to gain from a particular policy will fight harder to get their way on that policy than will voters in general who might gain more from a different policy. In education policy, there is HUGE access to the legislative process (especially at the state level, where most education policy is made) for the schoolteacher labor unions. The general public doesn't get the same kind of place at the table, by far. But politicians are not embarrassed by that. They call special access for special interest groups "taking care to consider the point of view of stakeholders," and don't think about policy in terms of what's right in the abstract, but rather in terms of what's expedient for staying out of political trouble. A quiet majority of inadequately educated Americans struggling to find time for political participation while making ends meet has less voice in the process than a vocal minority of wealthy people whining about "class warfare," and also less voice than a minority of people employed by publicly funded schools who are not held accountable for results.

femto 15y ago

There are also outliers, about which it interesting to ask "why?" This [1] example of poor kids in a good school was recently reported in Australian media. The Albert Street School [2] in Johannesburg is run by Zimbabwean refugees for Zimbabwean refugees. Recently, it's been achieving results comparable to the best African private schools. [1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-06/disadvantaged-students-excel-in-africa/3638362 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-06/disadvantaged-students... [2] http://www.eliasfund.org/partners/albert-street-school http://www.eliasfund.org/partners/albert-street-school

ronnier 15y ago

What if it is the students who make the schools a "worst school". Nobody seems to ever put any blame on the students. From 6th to 12th grade, I attended one of these very bad schools and largely the students were the problem.

bodegajed 15y ago

Yeah opportunity comes to the educated and the rich. While this is the advantage of the first world this is the deep problem with third world.

Hyena 15y ago

Don't discount the value of family connections, whether to family-run businesses or through friends. I turned down three jobs (two family firms and one using friends in the oil industry) because I did not feel I wanted a life beholden to that system. Most of our productivity comes from what we learn at our jobs, especially when our jobs (as you say) include a good portion of "school". Helping your children land good jobs is a very good way of passing on skills.

brlewis 15y ago

Alternatively, make better schools cheaper.