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I doubt the funding for black and white students really differs that much. You can find many articles claiming this but a lot of this seems to depend how you co

I doubt the funding for black and white students really differs that much. You can find many articles claiming this but a lot of this seems to depend how you count and who is counting. The washington post or NYT will run an article claiming huge gaps, while the heritage foundation says it is broadly equal (https://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-myth-racial-disparities-public-school-funding https://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-myth-racial-di...). Some of the best funded schools in the whole country are black schools. America is littered with failed projects to better minority performance by increasing school expenditures (here is one: https://www.cato.org/commentary/americas-most-costly-educational-failure https://www.cato.org/commentary/americas-most-costly-educati...). The tendency of blacks to go to prison doesn't really seem to have to do with the things you mentioned, at least not solely. For example, young blacks whose parents are in the top 1% of earners, who certainly do not grow up in bad neighbourhoods with terrible schools or targeting by police, seem to commit crime at rates similar to whites from families earning <40,000$/year (raj chetty). And none of this explains how policies that help Nigerians get into Harvard make sense as a means of helping poor American blacks.

btilly 4y ago
In California they certainly do. Schools are mostly funded locally. As a result, there are very large funding gaps. And it isn't just liberal media saying it, https://reason.org/commentary/californias-schools-are-failing-black-students/ https://reason.org/commentary/californias-schools-are-failin... says the same. I can't speak to other states. That said, there are a lot of ways to throw money at a problem and produce very little in the way of results. The education establishment is very, very good at it.(That would be a rant for another day - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 for a flavor.) And about crime, the issue of targeting by police is not necessarily the neighborhood, but the person. When police see someone "who doesn't look like they belong", that person gets targeted. As a result black people in affluent neighborhoods get stopped a lot more than white people in the same neighborhoods. So even if black and white kids are doing bad things in similar amounts, the blacks are going to get arrested for it at a far higher rate. This is not just a random conspiracy theory. See https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/study-racially-disparate-outcomes-los-angeles-police-department https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/study-ra... for an example of research on racial disparities of how policing is done in Los Angeles. Many other cities have similar problems. That the problem is not just limited to one bad police department is shown by a simple statistics. In surveys, blacks and whites do illegal drugs at similar rates. But blacks are arrested and charged for that at several times the rate that whites are. And so the arrest and jail statistics make it look like blacks are doing far more drugs than whites. But our best evidence is arrest records are a very severely racially biased sample of what is actually happening. That said, I'm mostly in agreement with you on affirmative action. But there is one data point that shows a flaw in your argument. It is easy to argue that policies that helped a half-Kenyan kid get into Columbia for undergraduate and Harvard for law school won't help American blacks very much. But Barack Obama went on to become the first black US President. And the symbolism of that seems to be very important for inspiring US blacks in general. So even though it doesn't seem to me like it should matter, in practice it seems to have.
- runsWphotons 4y ago
  Re throwing money at a problem and getting no results because of bad administration of funds---this is definitely what we have been doing in education and we should stop. Arguments to give more money to the same people to do the same things are going to go poorly with increasingly large amounts of the broader populace--this may not stop the government from doing it though. I am not going to pretend to know the details of California school funding. But broadly speaking schools which get less local funding usually get more funding from state and federal sources. And the national average per pupil differences between the poorest and richest school districts are really not that large, but these numbers are very tricky (much more spent in nyc than idaho, etc.). Some anecdotes: recently there was a viral video of a school in Indiana, I think Carmel. Everyone was very impressed by the school facilities and it seemed to confirm the prior that rich kids get more funds. But then it turned out the average spending per pupil at that school is less than half the per pupil spending of DC public schools. Now there may be good reasons DC would spend more (COL etc.), but even adjusting for that the spending wouldn't be that different. Carmel just spends the money better. Anecdote 2: I have taught school in rural areas at schools which are absolutely poor in terms of facilities and everything else. I don't think tripling the spending per student would have done anything at all to change outcomes there...the students could usually not make it through a 40 min lesson without attacking each other or totally disrupting things. No reasonable amount of money would have changed this. It is not that expensive to educate a kid, you just need to feed them and teach them things that have been known for hundreds or thousands of years from old books. What is going wrong, I think, does not have to do with differences in school funding. I think Obama's legacy is yet to be understood. Something like "the inspirational power of the symbol of a black president" is difficult to measure. The worsening race relations and their societal impacts (and their causes) since he took office is also hard to measure. Im curious what your evidence is to say "it seems very important for inspiring US blacks in general". Inspiring them to do what? And how is this quantified? (I guess by asking people "who is your hero" or something).
  - btilly 4y ago
    We agree on problems in how education was done. Sitting at my son's IEP meetings with a roomful of expensive professionals who documented all of the ineffective things that they were doing was eye-opening. I pulled him from public school and put him in a private school that specialized in children with lack of executive function (primarily ADHD and autistic). For a cost of about half the per student average in the school he was in (where he had cost far more than average) he got real help. He went from there to a college prep school that is far more academically rigorous than public schools, at similar per capita cost. He is doing far better than public schools could have done, in a much more cost effective way. On minority schools, a big part of the problem isn't funding. For many good reasons, schools in bad districts see very high turnover. As a result their teachers tend to be inexperienced. Plus there is the whole disrupted classroom issue, which is much worse in a tough neighborhood. And about Obama, statistics do not support his having made lives better for blacks in general. But he's still cited as an inspiration a whole lot. And his success seems to have inspired other blacks to try to perform at the top level. Including our current vice president. So he seems to have become a useful symbol.

btilly 4y ago

In California they certainly do. Schools are mostly funded locally. As a result, there are very large funding gaps. And it isn't just liberal media saying it, https://reason.org/commentary/californias-schools-are-failing-black-students/ https://reason.org/commentary/californias-schools-are-failin... says the same. I can't speak to other states. That said, there are a lot of ways to throw money at a problem and produce very little in the way of results. The education establishment is very, very good at it.(That would be a rant for another day - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34634210 for a flavor.) And about crime, the issue of targeting by police is not necessarily the neighborhood, but the person. When police see someone "who doesn't look like they belong", that person gets targeted. As a result black people in affluent neighborhoods get stopped a lot more than white people in the same neighborhoods. So even if black and white kids are doing bad things in similar amounts, the blacks are going to get arrested for it at a far higher rate. This is not just a random conspiracy theory. See https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/study-racially-disparate-outcomes-los-angeles-police-department https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/study-ra... for an example of research on racial disparities of how policing is done in Los Angeles. Many other cities have similar problems. That the problem is not just limited to one bad police department is shown by a simple statistics. In surveys, blacks and whites do illegal drugs at similar rates. But blacks are arrested and charged for that at several times the rate that whites are. And so the arrest and jail statistics make it look like blacks are doing far more drugs than whites. But our best evidence is arrest records are a very severely racially biased sample of what is actually happening. That said, I'm mostly in agreement with you on affirmative action. But there is one data point that shows a flaw in your argument. It is easy to argue that policies that helped a half-Kenyan kid get into Columbia for undergraduate and Harvard for law school won't help American blacks very much. But Barack Obama went on to become the first black US President. And the symbolism of that seems to be very important for inspiring US blacks in general. So even though it doesn't seem to me like it should matter, in practice it seems to have.

runsWphotons 4y ago
Re throwing money at a problem and getting no results because of bad administration of funds---this is definitely what we have been doing in education and we should stop. Arguments to give more money to the same people to do the same things are going to go poorly with increasingly large amounts of the broader populace--this may not stop the government from doing it though. I am not going to pretend to know the details of California school funding. But broadly speaking schools which get less local funding usually get more funding from state and federal sources. And the national average per pupil differences between the poorest and richest school districts are really not that large, but these numbers are very tricky (much more spent in nyc than idaho, etc.). Some anecdotes: recently there was a viral video of a school in Indiana, I think Carmel. Everyone was very impressed by the school facilities and it seemed to confirm the prior that rich kids get more funds. But then it turned out the average spending per pupil at that school is less than half the per pupil spending of DC public schools. Now there may be good reasons DC would spend more (COL etc.), but even adjusting for that the spending wouldn't be that different. Carmel just spends the money better. Anecdote 2: I have taught school in rural areas at schools which are absolutely poor in terms of facilities and everything else. I don't think tripling the spending per student would have done anything at all to change outcomes there...the students could usually not make it through a 40 min lesson without attacking each other or totally disrupting things. No reasonable amount of money would have changed this. It is not that expensive to educate a kid, you just need to feed them and teach them things that have been known for hundreds or thousands of years from old books. What is going wrong, I think, does not have to do with differences in school funding. I think Obama's legacy is yet to be understood. Something like "the inspirational power of the symbol of a black president" is difficult to measure. The worsening race relations and their societal impacts (and their causes) since he took office is also hard to measure. Im curious what your evidence is to say "it seems very important for inspiring US blacks in general". Inspiring them to do what? And how is this quantified? (I guess by asking people "who is your hero" or something).
- btilly 4y ago
  We agree on problems in how education was done. Sitting at my son's IEP meetings with a roomful of expensive professionals who documented all of the ineffective things that they were doing was eye-opening. I pulled him from public school and put him in a private school that specialized in children with lack of executive function (primarily ADHD and autistic). For a cost of about half the per student average in the school he was in (where he had cost far more than average) he got real help. He went from there to a college prep school that is far more academically rigorous than public schools, at similar per capita cost. He is doing far better than public schools could have done, in a much more cost effective way. On minority schools, a big part of the problem isn't funding. For many good reasons, schools in bad districts see very high turnover. As a result their teachers tend to be inexperienced. Plus there is the whole disrupted classroom issue, which is much worse in a tough neighborhood. And about Obama, statistics do not support his having made lives better for blacks in general. But he's still cited as an inspiration a whole lot. And his success seems to have inspired other blacks to try to perform at the top level. Including our current vice president. So he seems to have become a useful symbol.