I am going to assume you do not live in the USA based on this comment. Most supermodels, which I'm using as a proxy for aesthetic preference, have BMIs under 20.
I knew that you were going to get attacked because someone would take your statement as hateful. Unfortunately, it takes longer to collect data than it does to write a dumb comment. They took your factual statement of Simpson's paradox being able to drive one global summary (lower overall scores - a bad thing) counter to the local summaries (increased scores by all groups - a good thing) explained by shifting population proportions as you "blaming immigrants" for the bad outcome when the logical extension of your statement is "hold on, we may have a good thing going on". Ignore @mmooss.
Have to admit the immigration comment also triggered my "blaming immigrants" radar. After a careful reading it was an honest attempt for more information or clarification on how the details might be better interpreted. Something people should do more of when statistics are used as evidence. Actually a very good question.
Thank you for the high quality comment. I'll try to add some insight here for race. Using the reports [1] and [2], the difference for Grade 4 students are:
American Indian / Alaska Native - 2.5% in 2019 - 1.6% in 2023 - 515 in 2019 - 504 in 2023
Asian - 5.3% in 2019 - 4.3% in 2023 - 586 in 2019 - 571 in 2023
Black - 13.2% in 2019 - 15.5% in 2023 - 494 in 2019 - 468 in 2023
Hispanic - 25.8% in 2019 - 26.3% in 2023 - 508 in 2019 - 491 in 2023
Native Hawaiian / Other Pacific Islander - 1.7% in 2019 - 0.9% in 2023 - 500 in 2019 - 457 in 2023
Two or more races - 5.6% in 2019 - 8.1% in 2023 - 554 in 2019 - 542 in 2023
White - 45.9% in 2019 - 43.2% in 2023 - 559 in 2019 - 543 in 2023
It looks like all groups suffered at least 10 points in loss but these effects are definitely exaggerated by the reweighing of population proportions.
Thank you for looking it up! My personal hunch is that COVID related disruption in schooling is responsible for most of the within-group drop, and the rest is mostly a result of changes in educational policy, where many places deemphasize objective measures and standards, causing students to care less for these on the margin.
Personally, I suspect there's likely a generational non-COVID caused reduction in child welfare at play, the leading edge of which happened to get hidden by COVID.
The combo of more and more parents who work all the time and/or have delegated parenting to YouTube and mobile devices, plus charter schools (1) moving a chunk of non-IEP kids into more non-secular schools with lower standards and (2) concentrating behavior issue and IEP kids in public schools are basically rotting things from the inside out.
Would you care to share more about what this means?
"moving a chunk of non-IEP kids into more non-secular schools with lower standards"
When we applied to public schools for my child, the one we were most excited about was a charter school, not one run by the local school district.
As far as I can tell, charter schools have some selection pressure that is absent from government-run schools: if a charter school does poorly, parents don't choose it, and it closes. If a district-run school does poorly, the district will allocate kids there anyway.
In my area charter schools game the system to not deal with special needs kids and make them leave the charters. Many basically avoid doing evaluations and IEPs entirely so they can force them to go back to public schools.
The highest achieving charters have also been able to get mediocre non IEP kids to transfer back by setting them up to have trouble keeping up and not supporting them when they struggle.
Edit: And on the lower-performing side, you have schools focused on religion and/or patriotism, which tend to be less concerned about getting low performers out, but which aren't based as much around effective academics so much as ideology, and which do not meet the civic bar for education. Though I've also seen some that are just there to basically act like the charter equivalent of for-profit colleges: give parents in low SES areas a message of hope and then just minimize costs in the classroom.
> on the lower-performing side, you have schools focused on religion
That is an interesting contrast with the British equivalent. Religious schools are generally academically much better, so much so that people lie about their religion (and start turning up to church etc.) to get in (IIRC it is a condition of state funding that a minimum proportion of students are followers of the religion).
My experience in the US has been similar - most religious schools had higher performance than most public schools. Even the grading systems reflected the higher standards by using a 7 point scale rather than a 10 point scale. None of the religious schools I heard of had the "no zero" policies like some of the public schools where you get an automatic minimum 50% score just for writing your name on the test.
I'm sure there are outliers in either school type, but categorizing religious schools as lower performing doesn't to fit my experiences at all.
Yes. Catholic schools, for example, have long been known for far surpassing public school performance, so much so that non-Catholics send their children to Catholic schools. Apart from the better quality of the curricula, Catholic schools have never experienced school shootings, student relations are more genial and civilized, and you can be more confident that your child will be spared the unhinged ideologies du jour.
On top of that, they are quite generous and inexpensive as non-state schools. Listed tuition does vary considerably, as some elite Catholic schools are truly very expensive. However, they're not representative of typical tuition costs, and in either case, they usually offer financial assistance. They even lower tuition for each subsequent child you send to their school. Some schools (like Regis in NYC) are completely free, if you get in.
On top of that, Catholic laity have been founding schools independently in the last ~20 years or so (that is, these are private schools that are not under the direct authority of the bishop of the local diocese). These tend to emphasize a return to classical curricula (like the trivium and quadrivium), updated and supplemented accordingly.
(Those with a prejudice against religious schools as a whole also fail to understand that a guiding worldview is always present in any school. This cannot be avoided. In fact, it is nonsensical. It is the backdrop that determines the organization and structure of curricula in the first place. State schools in the modern liberal state naturally insinuate and teach a liberal worldview, one that bona fide Catholics merely tolerate as a matter of practicality, but utterly reject as a matter of principle, as the liberal worldview along with its liberal anthropology is at odds with the Catholic worldview. Education is ultimately a matter of intellectual formation which is something that entails some measure of moral formation as well. The liberal arts are first and foremost about freeing a person to be able to reason and reason proficiently, not about producing economic actors first and foremost, though you could naturally expect someone with this formation to be well-prepared for the world of work as well as a consequence of having been formed intellectually and morally.)
It depends on whether the focus is on spreading knowledge or preserving doctrine. Most religious schools I know are solidly in the former category, but I suspect there are exceptions.
This seems like a false dichotomy to me. They can do both. We could look at SAT scores, which show religious schools having significantly higher scores than public schools. So clearly they are learning the material.
In what now feels like a past life I knew a guy who had a perfect SAT score, I met him while visiting a family member who was his roommate at Patrick Henry College in VA.
He believed radio carbon dating was a lie and the earth was literally ~5k years old.
There are confounding factors that SAT scores don't surface.
That's why I'm saying one of the post above seems like a false dichotomy as the schools could do both. If the measures of school quality are test results, higher education, etc, then the religious schools would still exceed the public schools in those scores, which are the only measures we have.
An interesting question is, would that person in your example answer a question about radio carbon dating correctly on a test? It's possible they know the correct answer to mark but have separate philosophical beliefs. This would further support the idea that the religious schools have high academic achievement even if the beliefs differ.
My example was an anecdote, I would assume any one person with a perfect SAT score is an outlier across educational methodologies.
Self directed learning, reading comprehension, maths skills, critical thinking skills, ability to identify and reject sophistry, these abilities have some overlap perhaps but can each be skilled up separately and impact how a person can later function in roles that depend on the ability to identify true/false propositions.
Do you view the utility and practice of having overlapping confirmations and methodologies for radiometric dating (radiocarbon, potassium–argon, uranium–lead, etc.) to be a philosophic belief?
Do you think that it is wise to spend time and money formally training "high potential" people to have such deeply systemic errors in reasoning to the point that they flat reject peer reviewed, high confidence data and methods as a positive?
We aren't talking about being a Theist, Deist, ETC. We aren't talking about religious beliefs as most christians support radiometric dating, we are talking about educational materials for the young that reject following the data in pragmatic, well documented, well confirmed, high utility fields and rejects them out of pocket with untestable unobservable and sometimes demonstrably false alternatives. I don't want my curriculum to be the blind (or the sophists) leading the blind and to pretend these are equivalent because this self selected group trends towards higher SAT scores seems to miss the point.
I am pro-homeschooling and private schools generally and have multi generational exposure and participation in these things. Let a family believe whatever it wants to believe intellectually, I generally believe these variations to be positive in ensuring the human race is more diverse in exploring the "search space".
That being said, one of the smartest people I know, with all the raw materials in the world became a PHD scientist in molecular biology and bioinformatics and got nerd sniped by his YEC background, the years he's spent spinning his wheels due to an inability to follow the conclusions of his cognitive dissonance means he might as well not have become a scientist at all. It's enough that his family did that to him and it's fine or whatever, but we shouldn't have tax paid educators and curriculums participate in the cognitive crippling of children if our goal is to have a functional and productive society.
There are many people who hold beliefs that run contrary to the evidence on a variety of subjects from all educational backgrounds.
"...because this self selected group trends towards higher SAT scores seems to miss the point."
If it does, it's a point that hasn't been made yet. This entire post is about test scores, which is the way education is measured. If you're contending that public schools produce better reasoning than religious schools, then please provide that data.
"but we shouldn't have tax paid educators and curriculums participate in the cognitive crippling of children if our goal is to have a functional and productive society."
This part left me unclear, as this is also the same sort of complaint many parents are having about some of the ideologies being taught (or how they're being taught) in public schools, which are publicly funded. Most states do not publicly fund religious/private schools.
"Do you think that it is wise to spend time and money formally training "high potential" people to have such deeply systemic errors in reasoning to the point that they flat reject peer reviewed, high confidence data and methods as a positive?"
So how did your example achieve a PhD if he contradicted the peer reviewed evidence? I assume the review board and degree was from a secular school and you have implied the secular school process doesn't permit these sorts of reasoning flaws. Perhaps their reasoning on most subjects is solids and they have a few blind spots. This is generally true of most people, including those from public schools. Also, let it be known that many successful scientists have challenged existing positions successfully to discover new things. Science encourages challenging existing positions as part of the process to make new discoveries. This is one of the reasons there are so few "laws" in science and so many "theories".
"We aren't talking about religious beliefs as most christians support radiometric dating, we are talking about educational materials for the young that reject following the data in pragmatic, well documented, well confirmed, high utility fields and rejects them out of pocket with untestable unobservable and sometimes demonstrably false alternatives."
Ok... so what is your point? The vast majority of religious schools support radio cabon dating just as you admit that most religions do. I'm pretty confident that my comment chain has been using qualifiers to indicate that there may be outliers, but that in general religious schools do not have lower academic standards as indicated by the test score data. There may be outliers in any of the various school types, but the data is pretty clear that the current measures of academic success are test scores and post-secondary education, for which religious school score at least as well on. This refutes the original comment that religious schools have academically lower standards. Unless someone has actual data and not just anecdotal that says otherwise.
Outliers, bias due to self selection, bad/factually false curriculums we can observe to be in use (not simply worries pertaining to observed outcomes in an individual), institutional methods to force out special needs children to improve averages. These are all confounding factors to a simple and frankly wrong narrative. Perhaps the real issue is our universally appalling teaching in statistics.
Unless you have well designed co-hort studies most of the data just isn't really useful. The SAT, like any other measure that becomes the standard, is going to be gamed. I'm trying to highlight why a shallow and cursory glance at any data can be misleading and adding specific observations as food for thought.
Take it as you will. Test scores surely are directional and with universal declines that is worrying, but that isn't the sole topic of discussion in the thread is it?
The intial ellipses is pretty indicative, it seems clear that radiometric dating is a charity belief and is not something one thinks is a valid mechanism for acquiring accurate data and facts that map to observable, testable reality.
I think most people wouldn't have so much difficulty distinguishing philosophic positions and fact acquiring methodologies, I mean some people view physical reality as not existing and all material endeavor and observation to be a waste, surely that's an equally valid worldview to inculcate and spend tax money on, so as long as mandatorg testing scores are within the margin of error these beliefs have no downside to fund with tax dollars?
I mean if we draw no lines than why teach math or have an SAT at all? Being able to identify and record observable facts are not a critical part of education in some people's estimation it seems.
"These are all confounding factors to a simple and frankly wrong narrative...
Unless you have well designed co-hort studies most of the data just isn't really useful."
Interesting that you claim the data isn't really useful, but then are forceful about a narrative being wrong. This seems like the issue you are complaining about - holding beliefs without facts or contrary to facts.
1. "Religion" is not a monolithic category. It is effectively synonymous with "worldview". The content of a given worldview matters. So, pace modern doctrines of "tolerance", not all worldviews are equal. The notion that they are is simply absurd, as they all vary and differ and make different claims.
2. Doctrine is inevitable. As the Chestertonian quote goes, there are only two kinds of people: those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don't know it. A person cannot function without doctrine. The trouble is that the liberal order has managed to convince us that its doctrines aren't doctrines at all. They're just taken to be "obviously true" or "obviously neutral", which they are not.
3. Since doctrine is inevitable, then all schools at the very least insinuate the doctrines of the governing worldview in the manner things are taught and structured and in the way the school is run. In state schools, these are typically liberal doctrines. That is obvious: why would the state propagate doctrines of a worldview other than the one that it is governed by? It may demonstrate a certain tolerance for other worldviews, but the limits of this tolerance are determined by the doctrines of the governing worldview. This is inescapable, and it is dishonest to deny it.
4. Teaching doctrines is not opposed to knowledge. In fact, if a doctrine is true, then learning it is learning knowledge.
5. Now, among schools we classify as "religious", Catholic schools certainly teach both religious subject matter as well as all the sorts of subject matters you might expect to be taught in a school. We're not talking about some weird American Protestant sect here. Fides et ratio.
Too many lean into the crude caricatures of their imagination.
Great comment. Liberalism (in the broadest possible sense of the word) sets itself up as a dogma-free, 'neutral' worldview, when in fact it is teeming with dogma and substantive ideas about what is good and evil.
Hi, geye1234, its good to be meeting up with you so soon after our previous discussion!
I have to say, however, that it seems slightly tendentious of you to pick out liberalism (albeit in broadest possible sense of the word) in this manner. Is there anything to justify seeing this issue as being specific to, or concentrated within, liberalism? Prior to your comment, liberalism has not been an issue in this discussion.
I had heard rumors about it. The first time I really believed it was when a friend of mine was student teaching and was forced to give no less than 50% if the name was on the paper. He said there was one kid who refused to even write his name to get that free 50% and they gave him an incomplete or something instead. I probably wouldn't have believed it until he told me about all this. He ended up getting his teaching license but never taught due to how bad the schools were policy and behavior-wise. I have other friends who are teachers and I'd say close to half will only teach at private schools for those same reasons.
The key thing is that in the US there are two distinct kinds of religious schools: indoctrination focused, like "evolution bad, women stay in kitchen" level in some cases, focused on "the Bible" and anti-secularism, and these usually have an academic cap because they're not going to do advanced math or stem, or teach accurate history, because of the focus on religion.
On the other hand you have more traditional religious private schools, whether Catholic, segregation academies, etc., and these kinds usually have good academic standards and are probably more comparable to what you refer to. They are also rarely intersecting with the charter system.
So in theory their charters are more secular, but they're going to get as far up on the line as they can.
I have (a not close) relative who is sending his kid to a different charter where their whole website is about how much patriotism and flag rah rah is in the curriculum and how they adhere to traditional gender roles, but for the life of me I can't remember the name.
I also have numerous acquaintances working in various capacities in schools (public, charter, and private) and have to say I regard all the things mentioned in the linked articles as severely under-reported. Retaliation against teachers and staff who try to get kids services at charters is a thing. Public school districts and counties having to foot evaluation costs for parochials is a thing. Refusing and avoiding evaluations for kids in charters so they can be kicked out for behavior and then the publics have to foot the evaluation costs is a thing.
I completely think if local districts (and/or families) had a spine or the right legal resources they could be suing charters who've not even tried to follow or service existing IEPs left and right when those kids are constantly enrolling in publics mid year (with those kids generally exhibiting broad spectrums declines against academic and IEP goals).
I’m baffled by this. My wife worked at a charter school and it was nothing like this. The teachers were constantly trying to get certain kids out of their classroom who were actively threatening staff and other students, and the administration would never do anything. The assumption being that losing a kid would hurt numbers and impact funding.
Your wife needed to know how to demand special ed evaluations most likely (or get the parents to), since that would create costs and cause action. What you're reporting is typical for a profit driven charter that doesn't have much pressure to show high academic performance and is driven by profit motive. Keeping the kids in the seats keeps money coming in. Probably didn't have much of a wait-list to give them more discretion with behavioral bouncing.
Half of her kids had special education needs. You “demand special ed evaluations” and the result is, the kid comes back to your class with an IEP and congratulations, you now have to create an alternate version of each lesson plan.
The parent comment captures the education system’s attitude toward teachers perfectly. The problem is always due to a shortcoming of the teacher, and the solution is always the responsibility of the teacher.
TBH that sounds a lot more similar to the average public than most charters I've heard employees discuss.
Do you have pull out programs, self contained classrooms, etc.? How common is it to have manifestation hearings for the kids your wife thinks are risky in the classroom?
I’m realizing the term “charter school” is probably overloaded.
The charter school my wife taught at (in CA) had to prove itself to the district and fight for public dollars, hence the inability to lose any kids (and dollars).
The charter school I went to years ago sounds more like the kind you’re talking about. Basically a private school that received no public funding.
Huh, I've never heard of a charter model where the local district had any oversight.
To me a charter is just a school that is privately run, usually for either ideological or profit motives, or both, that parents can choose to send their kids to instead of a public school, and which gets money from the state, usually a bit less than a public school would, for each attending child. In turn, the charter school is usually subject to different and less stringent oversight and standards than the public school.
Unlike publics, usually charters do not have to accept mid-term enrollment and parents have to figure out transportation. In demand charters can cap their enrollment and use a lottery for admissions.
Okay, I think that probably describes the charter school my wife taught at, though it was not run for ideological or profit motives, it was inner-city.
The key though is this point:
> gets money from the state, usually a bit less than a public school would, for each attending child
So the charter is under the same pressure as the public school since compensation is directly tied to headcount, the top priority is keeping kids or you won’t survive. I’m not sure how the schools you’re mentioning are able to push kids out and not lose money. Maybe they’re just in affluent areas.
All that to say, I’m not a huge fan of charter schools but I doubt they’re the source of our problem.
One side of the coin is basically softened McCarthyism as a school, which "encourages families to be actively involved in religious organizations of their choice" and [paraphrasing] "supports the national Motto of the United States: In God We Trust."
The other is taking advantage of the angst among professional and white collar parents and runs a curriculum several years ahead of grade level, and takes advantage of filled wait-lists to create high pressure and somewhat rigid environments where kids who don't perform at a high level in even one subject get held back a year and get pressured to leave.
I can't speak to the more "American Exceptionalism" oriented schools as much, despite relative ubiquity - I've heard of them refusing to service IEPs (or resisting doing evals) here and there.
But the BASIS style ones are constantly sending kids back to the public schools that are somewhat psychologicaly damaged despite performing at quite a high level. Typical policies are things like "After grade 9, students must maintain an average score of 3 or above on all AP Exams or the student may not receive full financial support for AP Exams beyond the six that are required for graduation." I have the impression that students go back to publics because of things like not wanting to repeat a year because of struggling with Mandarin and developing self esteem issues. I think they (BASIS) also have non required courses available that have extra fees associated and aren't actually included with the state funded enrollment.
Both angles are able to effectively select student populations that cost less to serve than the student population overall and avoid IEP kids and services for them.
Obviously there are others, but anecdotally, other types don't seem to have a lot of longevity.
Funding varies by locality, but yes, the public schools get funding from the federal government, the state government, and the local government. Most local funding is provided by property taxes, which can vary by local housing valuations. Most state funding programs try to allocate funds to equalize the per student funding across the state to help correct the discrepancy by locality. Federal funds are usually grant related, but oftentimes those grants are need-based or targeted to higher needs groups (% on IEP).
Some of these articles are just generic bashing of school choice, and not relevant to the discussion about whether charter schools reject or push out more challenging students.
e.g. the last article is about Arizona's ESAs, which compete with charter schools.
I'd say the conservatives in AZ are transitioning AZ to ESAs over charters because it lets them fund religious education more easily and with less oversight, does away with the equal access fiction behind charters, and is a way to mess with budgets.
Why is this a bad thing? Its possible I'm missing some nuance because I have not dealt with the US education system in a long time, but I think one fundamental problem with universal education is that one really bad student can easily ruin the education of dozens of others.
If anything, there should be some sort of behavioral/educational reform schools, probably operated in something closer to a military fashion, to help out not only these kids, but the countless others who they'd otherwise be disrupting.
This issue is one (of many) for why if I did decide to have my children go to school in the US it would be at a high performing private school. I'd actually prefer they have the less bubbly experience of public school, but I'm not willing to tolerate having their classes disrupted by kids who are just bee-lining to jail anyhow. I had that upbringing and I think it substantially delayed my 'educational maturity'.
Exactly, ~10-15 years ago Denmark decided to start integrating "problem" children into the regular classroom and scores have dropped across the board. Currently private education enrolment has been massively on the rise since private schools are not forced to accept these kids, and/or they can more easily kick children out.
What's really sad is that now the parents are not only paying extremely high taxes to cover the standard school, but now also are having to shell out extra to make sure their child gets the eduction they deserve.
Why this is shocking is that Denmark (the whole nordics) has an extremely strong public education tradition which is being very quickly eroded. Just 20 years ago private education was seen as something for the elites (e.g. Royalty) but now it's becoming an expected expense.
Almost everyone is frustrated by this: teachers, parents, students, as well as their special needs counterparts. The only people winning are the politicians who get to morally grandstand.
As someone that spend most of school except for the last year in my hometown's low ranking one I cannot compreheend why you would integrate problematic kids like that.
I was doing my best, but with others' constant attention seeking behaviour (shouting, interrupting the teacher, and other more insane things) it was impossible for the teacher to teach and me to concentrate.
If it wasn't for my last year at a private school I wouldn't be where I am now.
I understand they want to create an environment where the kids may feel guilty or something else, but the problem isn't with who they're with in school, most likely. And by problem I mean the CORE problem. That is in most cases a deep issue at home.
In Ontario, Canada they completely got rid of special needs classes recently (so they aren't treated as second class or something), as well as gifted classes, and from two teachers and one child psychologist I talked to it's been a nightmare. Some classes will have 5+ disruptive students constantly yelling or fighting. And in the younger classes when a student has a "meltdown" they aren't allowed to send the kid to the principal, instead they clear the other kids out of the class to wander the halls, bring in the social worker lady (who is always on call), and wait until the problem kid calms down. They told me it was happening at least once a week in one classroom.
We're basically running social experiments on kids.
There are problem kids, but the effect of concentrating them is much worse than the effect of distributing them, much like piling things on one section of net is more likely to break it than distributing them.
There is, in IMO, a ceiling to the percentage of behavior and academic IEP kids you can have in one classroom without it impacting regular kids substantially. (Though for very extreme kids it might just plain not be viable or safe at all.)
Historically reform schools have not been an effective model, but they were also often basically just a way to keep problem kids away from more normal ones and would have treated teen pregnancy the same as severe autism the same as emotional disorders.
You do see more and more self-contained rooms in publics for severe case kiddos that can't be in normal classrooms, which is a bit similar.
Which is to say one child really can ruin the experience of other children. But making it so that private schools and charters have means to keep down the ratio of destructive traumatizers, IEP time wasters, etc., compared to publics doesn't solve anything. It just artificially makes public schools seem worse, cost burdens them, and creates more social stratification.
You basically end up with a tiered system where most public schools have turned into bad reform schools that can't avoid underperforming. Meanwhile, it's not that charters are good, it's just that they've been able to take advantage of two layers of selection to filter out cost centers that decrease performance.
And in turn you are now damaging the prospects of any kid whose parents aren't interested in keeping them out of the public school compared to the other options.
My public school denied education to 99% of students because they let the 1% of students who shouldn't have been there disrupt the classroom every single day.
The outcome for society is that every single student got a sub-par education, because things moved at a glacial pace, had constant interruptions, students felt unsafe, the pace was so slow that students felt bored, etc.
A far better outcome would have been to make a small public school for the highly-academically oriented students (top-10%, future doctors and engineers) a disruption-free normal curriculum (middle-80%) and a special-needs school for all the students who had learning disabilities, behavioral issues, etc which prevented them from being able to thrive in a conventional classroom.
> special-needs school for all the students who had learning disabilities, behavioral issues, etc
What about the students that fit into more than one group? I did not "thrive" in any classroom nor would I still. I had behavioral problems and a learning disability (though I was still an A/B student). I still became a software engineer, but I didn't know I had a learning disability until my 20s. Had I know when I was a kid, where would I have been placed? I had special needs, which were completely ignored (and still are), but I turned out average to above average enough.
Well actually, I did have one instance of being in an 'under the table' special needs program when I was in 6th grade. I was never told why I was in this program for part of every school day, and my parents were never informed. Idk about anyone else, but I did not enjoy being treated like a 'lesser person' because of something I could not control.
Also, what good are these special needs programs for students with learning disabilities when there is no place for many such people in the working world? If anything, I find these programs set people up for more failure than success. The golden rule of non-visible disabilities is to never mention them to any prospective or current employer. Often times, it's a one-way ticket to an eventual PIP/lay-off/firing. 1.5x time on tests is cute, but virtually no employer is giving someone 1.5x on a deadline because they are disabled.
Unfortunately schools err on the side of IEP kids because not enough non-IEP kids' families sue them for being denied FAPE because of the classroom antics of severe children being mainstreamed. (Whereas they are frequently in litigation with insane parents of IEP kids.)
"Any child of any ability, race, socioeconomic background has a right to an education."
Public education is notoriously bad at addressing the situation when some particular child frequently disrupts education of twenty others who would like to make use of their right. This is something that the noble proclamations like yours tend to just ignore.
"The charter school - better for your child? Sounds like it.
Better for society, no."
I'm curious how you think this is true. If it's better for the children in them, then they should have a better education and be more likely to contribute to society yo their maximum potential. So there's the positive side. What we would have to show is that there is a significant negative side for the students still in public schools that was not there before. The only real argument I've heard from this was about how to reduces funding from public schools. However, it also reduces costs for the reduced number of students, so it doesn't seem like a big factor. In fact, most studies show public schools having significantly higher per student budgets than the charters. So what is the negative impact on society?
Don't these scores sort of suggest a negative impact? We've been leaning further and further into charter schools in the US and I don't see where education is thriving.
If there are positive impacts on society, I would think you could very easily show us over the past 20 decades. We have more than 10x the number of charter school students today than in 2000.
==In fact, most studies show public schools having significantly higher per student budgets than the charters.==
Charter schools are generally considered public schools, but generally aren't called "public schools" due to the charter structure. "Public schools" in this example are TPA (traditional public schools). TPAs have higher per student funding than charter schools.
You are presenting a generic correlation between downward trending test scores and prevalence of charter schools. Are there any studies with a real correlation that corrects for other factors? Let's remember that correlation is not causation. Especially consider that achievement was already on a downward trend and that 10x number you quote is only resulting in 6-10% of all public school students today. Even if there is a correlation with the number of charter school students and a decrease in test scores, what is the actual reason or mechanism? Just saying overall scores are still going down and charter enrollments are up doesn't show anything.
It is. They can't put it in bold, but they can avoid special ed evaluations and services, have policies that make undesirable students repeat grades so their family will put them elsewhere, and more. It's just very much "unofficial."
A charter school is a public school that may provide instruction in any combination of grades (transitional kindergarten through grade twelve).
A charter school shall admit all students who wish to attend the school; however, if the number of students exceeds the school's capacity, attendance shall be determined by a public random drawing.
That's the thing with on-paper rights... there is always a way around denying undesirables their rights. Be it onerous voter ID requirements as a tactic of vote suppression, onerous requirements for paperwork and apply systems [1] or kafkaesque processes [2] to make it harder to get unemployment insurance, or in schools looking away at instances of bullying that aren't outright violence, unfair grading and other forms of retaliation.
Magnet and charter schools have a lot in common. You could look at state charter school statutes as encouraging school districts to be proactive about setting up academy model and magnet schools.
No, that doesn’t reflect the situation. Charters enshrine the public school revenue by allocating some of it to “better” schools. They make it harder to lower school district revenue as they (in the eyes of parents) make the established system work better.
That’s different than aiming to reduce district tax levied. I’ve read a variety of statements from charters themselves, including that one. There are also proposals to privatize administration of school districts using the same reasoning. In education, no matter who is speaking, typically the focus is on performance, retaining teachers and meeting more diverse student needs.
I think it just has to be understood that "choice" means choice for some but not for all, and society has to be OK with that. (I'm not OK with it).
In a system with a mixture of public and private schools, the public schools will always be a necessary feature of the selectivity of private schools. Not only to accept "problem" kids, but also to operate in areas where it's not profitable to run private schools, or in cases where private schools run into financial and management problems and must be bailed out.
So it's not so much that the private schools are "better" but that they both function as interdependent parts of a system.
On the other hand, there will always be a need for special education... mainstreaming all kids in one classroom hasn't worked very well either.
2. Religious private schools do not need to meet the same educational requirements as public schools.
3. Charter schools have some selection pressure, but public schools dont have a profit motive.
4. "Charter Schools" as a category is wildly varied, with some excellent institutions, and others that are grifting off the taxpayer dollar.
The most important thing however, is the vicious cycle they introduce. Public schools are required to educate every child, regardless of the expense of doing so. Charter schools face no such requirement. So when charter schools exist in that system, every student that leaves the public school and takes their little chunk of funding with them inherently makes life more difficult for the public school they're leaving. This in turn increases the incentive for every other high achieving student to leave, which makes the public school's situation worse and worse each time.
GP talked about charter schools as being non-secular. Where I live, charter schools are secular. Is that not the case where you live?
Charter schools where I live are required to educate every child. Admissions is via lottery. Is that not the case where you live? (Of course, this doesn't apply to private schools, which definitely cherry pick students, but we're talking about charter schools.)
Re: "public schools don't have a profit motive", this is technically true, but there are plenty of people working for public school districts who contribute little yet draw large salaries and lifetime pensions. A charter school that doesn't make ends meet is forced to shut down. A government-run school district that doesn't make ends meet gets given more money. (This is true in San Francisco at least. I realize that teacher and admin compensation varies widely across the US.)
BTW in most places (even places like Arizona which are relative pro school choice), the per-pupil funding of charter schools is much much less than the per-pupil funding of government-run school districts.
Because charter schools (at least here in California) have to accept any student, just like any other public school, they don't contribute to the cycle you describe. (Obviously private schools do, but I don't think you're advocating outlawing privately-funded schools.)
> Charter schools where I live are required to educate every child. Admissions is via lottery. Is that not the case where you live?
Here they’re required to educate BUT they can do a lot to deter expensive students. If they don’t have support staff, kids with special needs won’t apply. If they require a test to advance grades, those kids will leave. If they require lots of homework, anyone without a nanny or stay-at-home parent and lots of support will leave.
My wife used to teach at one of those schools and it followed an arc over a decade where they started claiming they were cheaper but once they added the legally required support staff they were only cheaper to the extent that they paid their staff less by hiring young teachers and burning them out before they got old enough to expect better pay or have major health insurance expenses.
That is basically the arc of every charter school: every few years you’ll hear about someone doing miracles on a tight budget, but over time it’ll either disappear as regression to the mean sets in or turn out to be some form of selection to avoid expensive children. There just isn’t one weird trick an entire profession has somehow missed.
In my state charters often advertise religious-adjacent or patriotic angles despite being ostensibly secular. Though it is more common for true religious schools to be private non-charters, which sets them up to have some extra hoops for state funding.
In AZ also keep in mind that the funding difference is complicated by education scholarship accounts, which are bankrupting the state.
I agree, and I think a policy shifts should include:
* NOT subsidizing private schools
* NOT determining school funding based on child count
Like so many things, schools are a public commons / good / investment in functioning society that a given goal should be determined, books kept, waste prosecuted (criminally), and services provided according to a defined standard. Then whatever that costs rolls into the next budget as the base tax rate for that year.
Which is entirely not how things are run right now. Government inefficiency frequently relates to 'yearly budgets' and places that look to continue to spend a given year's budget because otherwise it'll go somewhere else. Rather than just doing what's necessary when it's necessary irrespective of how much or little doing the most effective and efficient thing costs.
There's also the elephant in the room on how IEP (btw for the acronym haters: "Individualized educational program". Those of older gens may know it as "Special Education") needs more funding but absolutely no one wants to give that funding to the specialized care-takers/educators who train specifically for such situations. Definitely some not so PR-friendly reasons for this. It's a mess all around.
My daughter has a genetic condition and needed an IEP. The middle school she attended would not give her an evaluation until we indicated we knew they were legally required to evaluate her and they should consider this an official request.
All my previous requests were rebuffed as they tried to steer her towards a 504 plan (504 is not legally binding).
I had to pay to have her evaluated by a Pediatric Neuropsychologist (about $500, despite my excellent American Insurance). He diagnosed ADHD and referred to a Neurologist who found nothing, but referred to an MRI, which found stroke damage, then we were referred to a geneticist who identified her mitochondrial disease and put us into a Pediatric Developmental office.
Finally we got some resources that helped us navigate the school issues to get her IEP.
It was so much time, money, and effort.
One district in my area has lost like 40% of their school psychologists since the pandemic resulting in widespread use of 5/4ths contracts, expanding case loads, uncovered schools, and offers to do extra cases at piece rates. It's (IMO) trending towards some kind of collapse.
As a taxpayer I hate waste. As a long-serving business owner I accept that some level of waste is a cost of doing business.
There are several problems with the concept of "waste".
firstly it's most obvious in hindsight. It's much less obvious in foresight. We spend money with an objective in mind, and in some number of times we fail to meet that objective.
Take marketing as an example. It costs money to attend an event. Will we get a return? sometimes no.
Of course the easiest way to avoid waste is simply not to take risks, not to spend anything. If we prioritize "avoid waste" we create an environment where "nothing is attempted".
Your suggestion to criminalize this with personal accountability makes things worse. What you'll get is no money spent at all, because the risk of spending -any- money could see you in jail.
Secondly, in order to criminalize waste you need to detect it, measure it, prosecute it, defend it, and so on. None of that comes cheap. So you spend money to save money?
Of course we already do this to some extent. We keep books. We have audits. If we detect waste we might examine it, consider alternatives, learn lessons to avoid it. But that's a long long way from the costs of criminal prosecution.
Thirdly you create perverse incentives for bad actors. Don't like a teacher? Accuse them of waste. You can probably find some cause. Your competitor got a contract at a local school? Be sure to loudly proclaim that as waste because you "would have done it cheaper". Sure you would do a crap job that may have failed in 2 years instead of 20, but who's to say?
Send a few teachers to jail - does that increase or decrease the likelihood of people growing up wanting to be teachers?
So yeah, I dislike waste. But preventing waste comes with a price, not just in money. Be careful in what you choose to optimize.
> every student that leaves the public school and takes their little chunk of funding with them
Is this a state thing? In California, I don't get to stop paying taxes if my children go to a charter school. Or, am I just not understanding the point you're making re: "funding?" Are charter schools not also public where you live?
You lose a head at your school, you lose funding for that head. Some heads are more expensive to educate, like special education students, but the state gives you the same amount for each head. So as a school, you might want to keep the cheaper to educate heads and get rid of the more expensive to educate heads.
But if, theoretically, there were a way to count students, and also a hypothetical way to count money, someone might draw a correspondence between them?
Eventually school districts do close schools that have emptied out as kids have gone to charter schools (source: spouse is on school board and they are closing public schools because kids have moved to charter schools)
[0] I strongly disagree with the conclusion that, if government-run schools have excess capacity, then we should prevent charter schools from being opened or expanded.
Any source for this? My understanding is that most states have criteria for what needs to be taught in a primary and secondary school, regardless of public or non-secular. In my experience (attending, touring, friends who are teachers), the non-secular schools had higher standards.
"concentrating behavior issue and IEP kids in public schools"
Public schools in many areas are increasingly doing this by sending G-IEP to entirely separate schools. Indirectly, they are also doing this by increasing school population. Smaller communities tend to better self-police. The biggest issue is the lack of appropriate involvement followed by the lack of leverage the school has. In some areas, some non-public schools even get district IEP resources for their IEP students, so they aren't all avoiding it.
Why would "COVID" only impact the US? It's a global pandemic? If anything the comment would be exclusively about education policies. Because the education policies around COVID would be worse. But also just looking around at my own region of the US, there's a lot of talk about how to lower the school budgets where I live. Which would be lowering on top of inflation's effects Seems like a pretty easy correlation in my head.
Aside: Your 2 comments are sounding alarm bells in my head, and I can't pinpoint why. Especially when the numbers seem to demonstrate the exact opposite of what you're describing in your first comment (scores amongst white students seem to shift downward).
I'd want to hear more about this on a global level, but there's many many accounts on how children in schools became more unrily and apathetic in class post COVID. As well as this rising narrative on treating teachers as "babysitters" more than educators. I haven't heard as such in other countries.
Doesn't mean it hasn't happened elsewhere, but that may be a cultural issue due to many of the social safety nets that exist in other countries simply not being a thing in the US.
There have definitely been problems post covid in the UK - a huge increase in mental health issues for a start, and a definite effect on academic achievement (exams were made easier for a few years afterwards to offset it). IMO it accelerated existing deterioration rather than doing anything new, but it did have an effect.
The government certainly seems teachers as babysitters to some extent. There has been a push for more time in school, from having breakfast at school to more after school activities. More parenting being taken on by schools (I just read about "supervised toothbrushing" in schools on .gov.uk).
How well schools coped with it varied too. My older daughter's school (a well funded sixth form college) had relatively good IT, enough laptops to give them to kids who did not have computers at home, headsets and cameras for teachers etc. My younger daughter was home educated so it was easier to adapt but she still missed out on quite a lot of things, or had to do them online instead of in person and while she came out of it OK, its must have done some harm.
Breakfasts aren’t provided as a form of babysitting. The prevalence of breakfast clubs in schools in low income areas should be a hint as to why they’re instituted. After school activities are more babysitting adjacent, but if parents can’t afford after school minding but really need to hold down a job, it seems like a great idea that also gets kids into sports or chess or whatever.
Why they choose to do it in school rather than providing parents with more money so they can afford to feed their kids is also a hint as to why they are instituted.
"if parents can’t afford after school minding but really need to hold down a job"
i.e. if you want to expand the workforce by providing child minding on the cheap through schools.
The references within and citations of this paper * are as good a place to start as any.
It's Australian and more specifically focused on Victoria, a state with some of the longest global lockdown periods, while more generally comparing to other global educational research on the pandemic effect.
No one paper has all the answers you seek, but a handful of nodes in an interlinked web might do the trick for you.
My oldest is in 4th grade now, and the most relevant maths are from 2nd and 3rd grade. Basic division, multiplication, and fractions matters (3rd grade) - but so does adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers (2nd grade) because multiplication/division is now multiple digit (which is the actual, new, 4th grade material). Interestingly, she used almost no adding and subtracting in 3rd grade, to the point where the teacher supplemented required coursework to help stave off attrition, so you could actually get by 3rd grade while being terrible at adding and subtracting.
Her covid year was kinder. It made her cohort pretty bad at writing. But that seems to have largely worked itself out over the past 4 years.
It's not clear to me when these tests were taken, and that kinda matters - were they by people who were starting 4th grade, finishing 4th grade, or completed 4th grade?
It matters because it tells us what they missed due to COVID - if these 4th graders had 1st grade for COVID, I'm not sure if that would be a huge deal. The most relevant bits are also taught in kinder, and they cover adding and subtracting again in 2nd. But if their main COVID year was 2nd, I could see 4th being a huge problem, especially with the general lack of adding and subtracting in 3rd grade.
> My oldest is in 4th grade now, and the most relevant maths are from 2nd and 3rd grade. Basic division, multiplication, and fractions matters (3rd grade) - but so does adding and subtracting multi-digit numbers (2nd grade) because multiplication/division is now multiple digit (which is the actual, new, 4th grade material)
Are the standards really that low? AIUI in most developed countries w/ the significant exception of the U.S. (and to a lesser extent, other English speaking countries), 4th and 5th grade math are for teaching the earliest elements of pre-algebra. (Meaning that algebraic expressions are very much not used, but the style of reasoning is clearly intended as preparation for that). They may get a lot of practice with fractions or multiple-digit arithmetic, but the basic procedures are not new to them in 4th grade. It seems to me that the U.S. educational system is underserving these kids quite significantly by not catering to their potential and actual skills for mathematical reasoning, which while not fully developed (and very much tied to "concrete" skillsets, as opposed to a real capacity for abstraction) are still quite substantial.
You might double check that the way you number the grades is the same as the way the parent comment numbers them. For example, as I understand it, in the US most kindergarteners are 5 years old and most first graders are 6, while in NZ most first graders are 5 years old and most second graders are six. So to convert from US grades to NZ you add one because in the US kindergarten isn't given a number.
The US has a highly regional system, but as I understand it pre-algebra is taught starting around sixth grade (~11 year olds), which may line up a little closer to your expectations.
> The US has a highly regional system, but as I understand it pre-algebra is taught starting around sixth grade
In most advanced countries this would be the beginning of Junior High a.k.a. Middle School. By that time the students have been thoroughly introduced to pre-algebraic reasoning already, and are broadly getting practice in it (and being taught some more advanced notions around, e.g. exponents and powers, which are of course foundational for later teaching) as preparation for actual algebraic expressions to be introduced.
I can attest that in this US state, 6th graders are being taught those same concepts, at least at the local middle school. (systems of equations with single unknown, introducing multiple unknowns, powers, roots, types of numbers, irrationals, simple geometric problems using multiple shapes, pythagorean triples..)
Anecdotal data from Estonia: I just checked what's the level of maths we have for the 3rd grade (which here corresponds to 9-10 year olds):
(Google Translate):
* reads, writes, sorts and compares natural numbers 0–10,000;
* presents a number as the sum of units, tens, hundreds and thousands;
* reads and writes ordinal numbers;
* adds and subtracts numbers mentally within 100, and in writing within 10,000;
* knows the multiplication table (multiplies and divides by single-digit numbers mentally within 100);
* knows the names of the members and results of four arithmetic operations;
* finds the numerical value of a letter in equations by trial and error or by analogy;
* determines the correct order of operations in an expression (parentheses, multiplication/division, addition/subtraction).
So you have elements of pre-algebra but actual algebra will be covered only in the 4th/5th grade (10-12 yo).
There is a strong push in many districts to delay algebra until high school, since many students are ready for it much earlier but would get an advantage over students who aren’t ready for it. But ya, we are short changing our students while China mostly isn’t (at least in urban schools).
> 4th and 5th grade math are for teaching the earliest elements of pre-algebra
at one large public school district -- 80 elementary schools, middle schools and high schools -- almost half of 8th graders cannot do basic elementary school math problems.. (edit) official estimates are that about 13% of the students do not finish high school at all.. that is the local school district here in a crowded port city in California near San Francisco. also note that more than forty unique non-English languages are spoken at homes existing in this school district.. also a non-zero number of homes where serious drug abuse occurs.. things like that..
Even 40+ years ago algebra was not introduced until 8th grade (13-14 years old), and only the kids who passed a qualifying exam got that option—the rest took it in 9th grade.
My experience in India is that simultaneous linear equations were taught in the 7th standard (12 years of age). I looked it up and it is common https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beMAypc7ju4
I do not recall it being particularly difficult and most students were able to do this stuff. I'd say that by the end we had 100% success at this out of the 50 students or so in my class. Is this algebra in the US or is it the group theory stuff we studied later on. The group theory stuff was _much_ later (12th standard - 17+ years) and we didn't go too advanced. Mostly simple stuff like proving something is a group or Abelian, etc.
The syllabus I studied was the Tamil Nadu State Board, which is considered less rigorous than the Central Board, so I can only assume the kids elsewhere were studying more advanced stuff. But overall, that sort of timing hasn't hampered me or most of my classmates from then, so one must assume it's not too bad to study group theory that late.
> I do not recall it being particularly difficult and most students were able to do this stuff. I'd say that by the end we had 100% success at this out of the 50 students or so in my class. Is this algebra in the US or is it the group theory stuff we studied later on.
Your parent comment is talking about solving a single linear equation such as "5x + 2 = 1". That's where "algebra" begins in a US pre-university context.
In a university context, "algebra" does indeed refer to group theory, and the basic concept of manipulating a numeric variable goes by the more elevated name "college algebra".
Thank you for explaining. Hard to believe that 13 year olds could fail to do this, or at least formally manipulate the equation till they have a satisfactory answer. Something is wrong with pedagogy or the process of practice.
What's wrong with the pedagogy is the idea that no one should be taught any material until everybody is capable of learning that material. Variable manipulation can be easily learned by 4th graders. But it can't be learned by all 4th graders, so everyone has to wait.
Just in case you think I might be misleading you somehow, here's a cheat sheet product for a "college algebra" course; again, "college algebra" refers to the material that would normally be covered in or before high school, except that it's being covered in college. So the idea of this product is that current college students will buy it to help them understand what's going on in class, or to review for a test.
Many 4th graders would have genuine trouble grokking the notion that a variable (a "letter") may be used in an expression to stand for some arbitrary number. This is why it may be more sensible to reinforce quasi-algebraic reasoning at that age by indirect means, such as practice with non-trivial word problems and with e.g. computing expressions that involve a variety of operations w/ rules of precedence, parentheses etc.
Yeah I'm just saying that even at that time, algebra as a subject was high school or for the "advanced" 8th graders. Calling 4th/5th grade math topics "pre-algebra" would be a real stretch IMO.
I have a preschooler, it's been observed by the local preschools that kids need OT and other interventions at substantially higher rates in the covid cohort than in the non-covid cohort. We are likely to see an ongoing wave of kids experiencing some disruption due to the covid period.
For much of my child's formative infant year, people were screaming bloody murder if we wanted our infant to develop a sense of facial expression in strangers and in public. They were also hell bent on banning much of the social events that people might bring infants to that may help develop early socialization. You do not get a more neuroplastic year than the first one.
There was a lot of stuff going on where one has to wonder how much we disproportionately sacrificed the children for disproportionately the elderly. It still deeply bothers me what effect this could have had on my child.
Only time will vindicate this belief. If you said the same thing two years ago you would have been shouted down and labeled as a “bad person”.
It now is getting to the point where this topic can be discussed without it immediately devolving to attacks.
I agree with your take, humans are also very poor at making long term tradeoffs. Just look at the environment and global warming and what we are doing as a species to stop that.
You also have to consider how covid lockdowns further split class divides. Since we didn’t produce as many things for 3 years there are less things to go around which causes the price of things to go up, hence inflation. Those who belong to unions and have higher leverage (tech workers, MBAs, etc) can push for higher wages to keep up for inflation but those who do not have that leverage are left behind and become poorer.
Im a little bit worried about the reverberations of covid which are causing global instability, and possibly war. A second order effect of lockdowns and inflation is that it makes any government which was in power during lockdowns very unpopular, this has and will continue to lead to more dramatic leadership changes across the board which further reduces stability.
It caused a shitstorm for our family. The prices of houses went 3x in our area due to covid era ~0% interest rate policies, leading me to work so hard to try and keep up I had health issues and was working ~80 hours a week just to be able to buy 1/2 the house I could have before the great leaders printed their way through their policies. I finally managed to secure housing but only after working twice as hard and physically building the house myself one block at a time with completely undeveloped land (this was the only real estate not exploded into oblivion by mortgage bidders), something last done by common people circa the great depression.
The cure may have been worse than the disease. They basically carpet bombed anyone who started a family right at the time the pandemic broke out.
There is general discontent in the population, who would have expected that a CEO being assassinated would be the strongest point of unity for the American people maybe since 9-11.
As more average people get pushed to the margins it will accelerate change. People will realize that it isn’t about left vs right, or race, or creed. It is about class, and those in the higher class echelons don’t want you to know that.
IMO the real culprit there isn't "people screaming bloody murder," it's that because we have no social insurance for pandemic type events, lots of single parent working households, lots of two income working households, lots of one child households, etc., so kids could not get sufficient socialization at or near home despite getting lots of socialization at or near home being totally possible, especially if parents were able to organize a bubble pairing to another household with kids. Instead, kids screwed around on mobile devices at home by themselves while parents worked rather than engage with them.
Many societies covered their faces when outdoors all the time for practical reasons - to protect against the cold, the sun, dust, etc. Some for cultural or religious reasons.
Babies in as diverse of backgrounds as Alaskans to Arabians were raised for thousands of years with significant face-coverings donned before going outside as the norm.
Being worried about "facial expression in strangers in public" because people covered their mouths as a harm to your baby's development is... about 10 steps past absurd. This isn't even making mountain out of a mole hill, this is making a mountain out of a grain of sand.
And of course, compared to the risks of permanently-lowered IQ due to covid brain damage, or permanent lung damage or the various fatigue and other issues millions of people suffered from covid, the risk from the infection to a baby is literally millions of times worse.
This is an interesting strategy you've taken. You're basically setting a trap where you want me to specifically go after Alaskans or Arabians to prove my point.
I'm not taking the racist bait.
I have no reason to think it causes any more or less issues in Alaskans/Arabians a anyone else. The fact that Arabians or Alaskans did or didn't cover in public doesn't sway the outcome one way or another. There are all sorts of cultural factors that compound outcomes, and both mainstream America and Arabs have some that succeed with in spite of, others they succeed because of.
i think the impact of COVID lockdowns and de-SAT-ing would be harder to reverse than to build logical and mathematical reasoning into ChatGPT. The former is political and the latter is technical problem. Our whole industry, great at solving technical problems, is throwing tens of billions today, and it will be hundreds tomorrow, to solve the latter. So the math skills for the majority of the population is probably going the way of the "paper map" skills, etc.
The problem is that mathematics education isn't just about learning times tables.
It's also the primary medium schools use to communicate analytical reasoning and deductive analysis. If you cut math as a target without fundamentally reworking curricular elements, you'll have a ton of graduates who are much worse at negotiating the validity of competing logical arguments.
> It's also the primary medium schools use to communicate analytical reasoning and deductive analysis.
That would be news to History and English teachers among others. You need to learn to make a structured and coherent argument based on evidence in many subjects and the evidence for the existence of transfer learning is so weak it seems unlikely basic Math makes the average or even 75th percentile student better at reasoning. Most people follow a formula at best, and forget that much rapidly after the end of school.
I'd differentiate here between deductive and inductive reasoning. While english and history - through argumentation - expose some deductive reasoning, the vast majority of it is inductive.
>negotiating the validity of competing logical arguments
ChatGPT would soon do that for you better than you do it yourself. That begs the question - what is the core competency of humans? I see so far only the one - the ability to discover, to dig further into unknown. I think though once we get ChatGPT a bit further, such an ability would be pretty easy to add, and it would do much better than humans as it would be able to generate, prune, evaluate, verify hypotheses much faster and at incomparably larger scale/numbers.
> ChatGPT would soon do that for you better than you do it yourself.
And this is based on..? LLMs suffer from all logical fallacies humans do, afaik. It performs extremely poor where there’s no training data, since it’s mostly pattern matching. Sure, some logical reasoning is encoded in the patterns, but clearly not at a sophisticated level. It’s also easily tricked by reusing well-known patterns with variations - ie using a riddle like the wolf-lamb-shepherd with a different premise makes it fall into training data honey pot.
And as for the main argument, to replace literally critical thinking of all things, with a pattern parrot, is the most techno-naive take I’ve heard in a long time. Hot damn.
you're listing today's deficiencies. ChatGPT didn't exist several years ago, and will be a history in several years.
>to replace literally critical thinking of all things
Nobody forces you to replace. The ChatGPT would just be doing it better and faster as it is a pretty simple thing once the toolset gets built up which is happening as we speak.
>it’s mostly pattern matching
it is one component of ChatGPT. The other is the emergent (as a result of simple brute-force looking training) model over which that pattern-matching is performed.
i already do it when it comes to the translation from the languages that i don't know, ie. almost all the human languages. Soon it will be doing other types of thinking better than me too.
For anything weight bearing, I really wouldn't trust it for translation. More than once I've gotten an output that had subtly different meanings or implications than the input. A human translator is going to be significantly more interrogatable here - just as a logical reasoner.
The same way the entire US educational establishment officially groups and tracks students for the purpose of outcome comparison: by self-identified racial classification primarily, and by country of origin for immigrants secondarily. Was it not clear from my original comment, where I talked about white Americans and immigrant students?
It’s not so much unclear as premised on a number of false distinctions that make it unfalsifiable. For example, at what point and under what conditions does a foreign-born child of Polish immigrants that immigrate to the U.S. become white such that they move from one group to the other? How would you correlate however said group membership requirements correspond to test performance? Why does your curiosity about the relevance of Simpson’s paradox disappear when discussing the category of immigrants, a group with more diverse membership than any of your racial categories, and thus more probable to being prone to its effects?
That's what I was thinking given it's America, it just makes no sense in relation to the rest of your comment. If you want to know how COVID effected students, the most natural grouping is by school policies with regard to COVID.
Perhaps IQ is becoming a poorer measurement as we progress? As in, IQ tests might test for more attributes that are less advantageous in modern times. I do not believe students are less intelligent now than previous generations. However, I do believe attention spans have a decreased across the board as a whole (adults too).
I'm probably explaining it poorly, but what if IQ was not a test of just 'intelligence', but perhaps some proxy of intelligence, attention, motivation, and other factors combined? Having taken the WAIS-IV myself, I am not convinced the measurements are all they are cracked up to be.
Think about Homer's Odyssey. The entire epic poem was passed down verbally from memory. If I am not mistaken, Homer thought reading would make people less intelligent because reading would diminish the one's capacity for memory. Does not having the ability to recite the entire Odyssey from memory mean we have become less intelligent, or perhaps, maybe we do not need to memorize the Odyssey because our intellectual capacity is better spent on other endeavors?
COVID is known to cause neurological damage including brain damage. I think we're now seeing the collective impact to IQ due to repeated COVID infections.
Sure but be intellectually honest and acknowledge the vast, vast, vast majority of the learning decline was due to closing schools.
Blaming “covid” for learning loss in a group of people who was hardly at risk of any covid issues at all is… well… doing kids dirty. Which is par for course when it comes to the nonsense society enacted during the first half of this decade.
They closed them then re-opened them in time for one of the biggest waves of asylum/undocumented immigration in recent history, part of which incentivized bringing children (who often need ESL and cultural integration assistance) who then are entitled to attend public schools whether or not the school has been allocated the resources for such influx. Such re-allocation of finite resources to include so many students with extra integrative needs would track well with across the board drops regardless of race.
I can't imagine what it is like to be teaching 29 or 30 students and one pops in after crossing the Darien Gap, possibly witnessing people being raped and swept away by the jungle, then having to go on and go straight into learning arithmetic -- and then realize this is happening at mass scale. "What is 5 - 1?" The number of us remaining after we crossed the last stream.
Visa based immigration pathways, especially the non family linked ones, tend to display this effect less prominently since professional visas bring in people who on average paying higher property and other taxes and have had the resources to prepare their children for school in the US.
While there are certainly specific districts and schools where this is a problem, this effect would not be remotely significant compared to the overall US population. There just aren’t that many new immigrants, regardless of whatever sources you’re reading say.
I always enjoy hearing the dichotomy from various sects of society that simultaneously the immigrants are such drop in the bucket they can be educated for a dozen years at costs that would not be "remotely significant" in measurable change of learning in others, yet simultaneously we're lead to believe deporting them is a monumentally expensive effort that would break our backs.
There is weak evidence - some of the oft-cited studies are just online surveys. If you know of a solid study showing long term, widespread, cognition effects, please share. We know in extreme cases Covid can cause brain injury, but in the mild cases that are the norm for early elementary school kids, there is no reason to believe there is any long term physical effect on the brain.
If covid did that, and as Peter dazic said coronavirus are “driven by their spike protein”, then what exactly were the impacts of messenger rna telling your body to replicate the spike?
>... but these effects are definitely exaggerated by the reweighing of population proportions.
Thanks for sharing the data, but your own data doesn't appear to support that comment.
If I'm reading correctly, the overall drop in US scores was 18 points. The drop in US scores of the two largest populations were 16 points and 17 points respectively. This isn't Sampson's paradox at all. This is exactly what it looks like, each subpopulatuon dropped significantly in score between the pre-covid test and this one.
To call a difference in score of 17 vs 18 (the overall average) an "exaggeration due to reweighting" is quite a misleading stretch of interpretation.
To consider, represent, or cause to appear as larger, more important, or more extreme than is actually the case; overstate.
As you point out, the weighted difference is ~17 which you can clearly see in the data. Increasing this by a full point is quite significant and most people do not even have the intuition that it is even mathematically possible to increase 17 to 18. This is why we teach Simpson's paradox. I also posted the data so people could come to their own conclusion. Just because you use a definition of exaggeration to mean some nonsensically large difference, that does not make my claim misleading.
I would say that it’s quite disturbing that anti-immigrant bigotry, draped in the most threadbare example of pseudo-intellectualism, is the most upvoted comment in this thread, but this unfortunately seems to be the order of the day. Perhaps as a corollary to this study, someone should do a statistical analysis of what has caused this decline in reasoning ability among tech workers.
A quick review of the parent comment would tell you that it never rises to the level of being a hypothesis because it is rooted in category errors and false distinctions that make it neither testable or falsifiable. For example, the appeal to comparison of immigrants as a bloc with shifting American fictions about what constitutes membership in its racial categories. These boundaries are too ill-defined and overlapping with each other to be used in this fashion. What is the process by which one transitions from being an immigrant to one of these groups and how would you observe and control for how any of these (unstable) requirements are correlated to test performance? And of course the same appeal Simpson’s paradox would also have to be applied to the category of immigrant itself before it could ever be considered in this way, since this umbrella contains even more and diverse members than the racial categories with which it is contrasted.
That's nonsense, it's clearly (obviously!) possible that the math score of a country decreases because of immigrants having lower test scores and immigrant share increasing. Which makes it a valid hypothesis. Any problems with definitions are orthogonal to that.
If you believe definitions constituent to a hypothesis are ever orthogonal to it, this would be a mark in the ledger in favor of there being an overall decline in reasoning ability. By this logic, I can simply say “x is a responsible for a decline in y, as evident by the comparable measure of z” without ever having to define any of those variables and always be correct. Does that seem rational or useful to you?
Look, I can understand what you say, and you can understand me, without us defining all or any of the words we use. We don't need a definition of definition. We can know what things mean without having a definition of "knowledge" or "meaning".
That more abstract claim was never what is at dispute. The OP’s claim instead requires clear and consistent definitions of the categories involved in order to be a falsifiable hypothesis, which were not provided. Your defense of this is apparently that because it also exists on the low end of the spectrum of some basic intelligibility that also makes it a hypothesis, which is, again, also incorrect. It’s a supposition that never rises to this level because it lacks these aspects.
This is what you get if you shun uncomfortable discussions, try to shirk finding explanations in problematic cultural practices and promote right wing idiocy by running around with a half collapsed air-castle of comfy half-truths, kept propped up only screaming power of the civilized half of society.
Controversial statement I fully believe in. It is not a decline. Tech workers were always like that. We just liked to not talk about it and call everyone who notice "sjw". Because it felt shameful.
This is where the Goverment should practice what it teaches. I understand that this data is interesting but it is utterly useless. Useless because race isn't as important as the geographical location and economic situation. Race is what you can use once you've narrowed down the demographics to the specific location and socio-economical impact, but it provides little substance without more contextual data.
If a poor neighborhood in a major city is failing math it is the a combination of the neighborhood being poor as opposed to race.
It also has specific undertones... and often people will come with a bad conclusion whether they subconsciously recognize it or not. My guess a better thing to also look at (besides what you pointed out) would be school funding. We have a problem with this in the US. Schools are going massively underfunded and we can observe a massive disparity from school to school. On the political end of this issue, there is a concerted effort to choke out school funding and to push private schools that are funded with tax dollars.
Are they underfunded though? How much is enough? Chicago for example pays probably at least 15k per student yet scores poorly. How much do they need? 20k? 50k?
Fund utility is good in addition as well. Plenty of well funded schools fail. Sometimes it is what those funds are being used for that actually drive down education.
Thanks for the links to the data. I wanted to see if they broke it out by state, but I don't think they did.
I did notice many of the top countries have this fun footnote, "National Defined Population covers less than 90 percent of National Target Population (but at least 74 percent)". Which probably translates to they didn't measure the worst performing kids which likely gooses the numbers pretty decently...
The U.S. has this one, "Met guidelines for sample participation rates only after replacement schools were included." Which means some schools declined to participate so they had to ask others.
I am not a race or genetics expert, but I think "Asian" is not a race.
Asia includes the Indian subcontinent, including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Natives of the subcontinent are different from Orientals, such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean, for example, but both are Asian.
Neither is "White". An Australian is completely 180 opposite of Canadian in almost everything and there is almost nothing common except monarchy and English language.
Are Amish white? People from Turkey? Sicilians? Argentinians?
I find the whole concept of "race" perplexing and catering to the lowest common denominator.
You could make the same point about the actual color “white”. You can point to various items of different colors and ask “is this thing actually white?”. You’ll have some people agreeing on most of these things, and disagree on some of these things. Would it make the whole concept of “color” meaningless and useless? Hardly.
If you had some people that were from India, some from Japan, some Siberian Russia, then actually I could see the answers being significantly different
You are missing my point: Asians - vietnamese, chinese, japanese, naga indians, have very little in common from educational/ecnonomical/social point of view.
Same with "whites" (whatever the definition is and for the life of me I just dont understand).
An Australian moving to Canada has a culture shock that is inversely similar to a Japanese going to Paris.
Americans are weirdly still clinging on to the race concept
There are common physical traits that form a family resemblance.
There’s also skull shape and nose length. But what’s the point of binning by these traits? US usual racial division is nonsensical (and I’d say offensive if I was american) and no one dares to question it. You literally blow the question of genetical origin to 100x size compared to the rest of the world. And yet don’t even do it in a way that could make sense instead of being a phenomenon similar to racism but by ignorance and meaningless overgrouping. And then avoid talking about it cause it’s a taboo. It is uniquely American.
>It’s probably the place where discussing race has the least social tolerance.
No. the rest of the world doesnt discuss it because it makes the least sense. I gave you examples above. It doesnt make sense to put an Aussie and Canuck in same bracket, neither does it make sense to put a Thai and Japanese in same bracket for whatever data point you want.
Even within India a sikh has nothing in common with naga has nothing in common with Tamils.
Race is an absurd abstract. Why not hair color? or eye color? or eye shape?
to show what I mean. See those words in the context of the sentences in which they occur, and it can be seen that you are not giving any evidence for your claims either.
Do your own research, if my comment is so important to you.
Also this is HN, a forum, not a court of law. Tons of other users on here, regularly and casually make comments which may seem false to others, without giving evidence for their statements.
>Notice that a charged label on a Wikipedia page is enough for you, a skeptical person, to make an absolute conclusion.
Don't try to mislead, by using words like "charged label". The conclusion is clearly made by the Wikipedia page, not by me. I merely quoted it. Anyone who doubts that can go read it first, before making "absolute conclusions".
>Notice that a charged label on a Wikipedia page is enough for you, a skeptical person, to make an absolute conclusion.
Notice what charged label on the page [1]? By common sense logic of conversation, if you considered that I was using a "charged label" (whatever the heck that means) in my argument, the onus was on you to, at a minimum, mention that label, which you clearly did not do, although I think I can guess which one you mean.
>If it’s so obviously false, can you share the landmark study or experiment that disproved it?
How about you first sharing "the landmark study or experiment" that proves it?
And I wonder if you read the whole article, seeing that the word "discredited" (referring to phrenology) appears at least 5 or 6 times in the article, in many cases with citations.
>All that’s true, but you can still identify them trivially. There are common physical traits that form a family resemblance.
That's exactly what I implied by my above comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42383753 ), which means the same as this part of yours: (i.e. you can still identify them trivially. There are common physical traits that form a family resemblance.).
But mine was referring to the differences between Indians on the one hand, and East Asians (and some others) on the other hand.
Here, the ”East Asians” includes Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese and Koreans, among others, and the "some others" also includes Tibetans, Nepalese, Bhutanese and Sikkimese, and Burmese, and people of the North Eastern states of India, such as Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland, and Tripura.
All of these above people can easily be distinguished from (the rest of) Indians by their narrow eyes.
I don't know what is so difficult to understand about this. Nor is it discriminatory. It is simply stating obvious facts, that anyone can visually ascertain for themselves.
It is the people who behave in a discriminatory way towards anyone, based on where they come from, or their ethnicity, who are the real racists, not those who talk in an innocuous way about distinguishing visual characteristics of various categories of people.
>Yeah, I’m not buying that race is a uniquely American construction. It’s probably the place where discussing race has the least social tolerance.
(
>American
Say the word right, dude. USian, not American. :)
)
Discussing race may have the least social tolerance in USA (or not), but when it comes to actual behaviour, i.e. racism?
And I do not mean to single out the USA. There is plenty of racism in Europe and Asia too. I have myself experienced it in both places, and have heard of plenty of anecdotes about it from people whom I trust.
There's probably high genetic kinship (Britain) for Canada and Australia amongst 'white' people, the US too has a large body of genetic kinship with Britain, it's definitely not your 180.0.
- Building codes have changed. Things are much safer now than in the past. The chance of dying in a fire has decreased 1/4 since 1950 [1].
- Houses are much bigger. Houses have almost tripled in size [2].
- Quality of finishes have increased. People will probably debate me on this because things have generally gotten cheaper over time but that means that the expectation for a house now is quartz countertops and not vinyl.
- Desirability has changed. For example, the number of sports teams have tripled since 1950.
I definitely agree that there's much more to housing prices than most simple analyses present.
Some food for thought in the other direction, though:
- Tools (e.g. nail guns, paint guns, concrete finishers, horizontal drilling for utilities, etc.) and materials (e.g. pre-engineered trusses) are significantly more efficient, so labor costs can be reduced which should drive pricing down. At least enough to offset changes in building codes, but likely more.
- Triple house size does not equal triple building costs.
- I would definitely debate on quality of finishes. Some might be better, but plenty is worse. For example, crown moulding is not as common (in my experience), and skirting is typically much cheaper, and I rarely see chair rails anymore. More often than not I see vinyl floors replicating wood instead of real hardwood floors.
The use of pneumatic nailers has substantially reduced the time required to frame a house.
Regarding labor costs and productivity, there is vastly more specialization in building a house now than there was in 1950. I suspect that in 1950 you only had a few types of skilled labor involved: carpenter, electrician, plumber, and maybe a flooring person (the flooring may have also been done by carpenter at that time). Now, there are additional specialties that need to be involved - roofer, concrete, HVAC, tile, countertop, appliance, etc.
Efficiency gains only lead to lower prices if they are bigger than wage increases. And those are driven by efficiency gains of the rest of the economy. Sure you can gain here and there some wins, but in the end construction is still a very labor-intensive job.
The percent efficiency gain in labor when we moved from hammer & nail framing to nail gun framing significantly outpaced the percent wage increase framers experienced.
But yes, absolutely, you are right that there are many variables at play. Which is what my original post, and the person I replied to, were trying to convey.
>Productivity in building construction has not improved much, according to data, even if tools have improved.
What data are you looking at? I worked in construction (to be fair, industrial and commercial sector) for over a decade. Productivity rates changed quite a bit during the decade I was an estimator. I will dig up my productivity books from when I first graduated and compare to the last one I purchased (a few years ago) when I get home.
>Even if tripling house size doesn’t literally triple costs, that is a straw man.
A straw man? Even if labor only accounted for 10% of the cost of building a house (it is much more), changes to labor productivity absolutely affect the cost to build. Productivity rates are different for a new build of 1000sqft and 2000sqft. Not sure how that's a straw man?
Also, just to clarify, I'm not really presenting an argument. I agree with the parent comment that these maps/analyses aren't able to capture all of the variables. They gave some variables to consider when looking at the article data. I'm giving some others.
>It certainly must account for some of the cost increase.
I said it's not a 1:1 relationship, not that size didn't account for costs at all.
Crown molding only it isn't common anymore because it isn't very desirable.
I wonder if we could do housing the Chinese way and just give people a concrete box to renovate (houses aren't sold new renovated in China, and you are expected to do your own re-renovation after you buy a house second hand), but that really hasn't helped housing prices over there very much.
The things you are pointing out are largely styling choices. The difference in quality of finishes are, like mentioned, solid surface quartz counters which are basically stain proof, large porcelain tiles, toilets that flush more effectively, low voc paints, engineered wood flooring that doesn’t warp and creak, etc.
I'm not quite sure I understand the distinction you're making. In construction terminology, at least, pretty much everything you can see or use is considered a "finishing material".
All of the things that I pointed out, as well as all of the things you point out, would be considered a "finishing material". Some are generally more high quality (e.g. counter, toilet) some are lower (e.g. vinyl flooring), some are no longer really bothered with at all (e.g. crown moulding).
If you asked me whether I would want to pay 5x more for a house that reduces my likelihood of dying in a fire from 0.00427% to 0.00104%, I think I would choose to roll the dice (and maybe DIY install a $20 smoke detector).
1950: 6,405 fire deaths / 150,000,000 US pop = 0.00427%
2022: 3,490 fire deaths / 335,000,000 US pop = 0.00104%
These are guesses but I think the main reduction in fires from 1950 to 2022 are:
a) better electrical wiring and circuit provisioning. Overloaded outlets or circuits were more common in the 1950s. Fuses could also be tampered with more easily than circuit breakers.
b) Matches everywhere. You had matches in the kitchen for lighting the stove, and around the house for lighting cigarettes. "Kids playing with matches" was a common cause of fires. You don't hear about that nearly as much today.
Arguably came and left. In the early 00s battery pack explosions in cell phones wasn't a super rare event. Now Li batteries are a lot safer with better protections to keep fires from starting. Additionally, the biggest batteries someone is likely to setup for their homes are LFPs which are quiet resistant to starting fires. If sodium batteries are successful they'd go even further in being a non-issue.
I think that many rural homes were still in the process of getting electricity around 1950 and that there were some that still used kerosene lamps for lighting.
Death is a well tracked statistic and a severe and fairly distinct outcome. Other statistics might not be as available or accurate.
Similarly the murder rate is a more accurate than other crime rates. Burglaries, muggings and assaults are often not reported to police whereas violent deaths almost always are.
Gred's post however strongly implies that the only outcome worth considering is death. That might be true for them, but I'm not sure if that applies broadly.
Speaking from experience, losing your house to a fire is traumatic, expensive, and you lose things that can't be replaced. Even when there are no deaths.
> Houses are much bigger. Houses have almost tripled in size [2].
I know the numbers support this but I always wonder why my observations are so different.
When growing up (I'm Gen X) all my friends houses and mine were pretty big. Most of us were lower middle class so these were cheap houses. Land was dirt cheap so houses used the space and still had huge yards. Houses were simple, but spacious.
By the 90s houses had shrunk, since now land was quite expensive so builders had less space.
All the construction going on right now in my town is even tinier, since land prices have skyrocketed, so builders have the incentive to stuff as many tiny units into tiny plots as possible.
I just had this conversation with my grandmother today. She was describing her own grandmothers house- and how huge it was. The large bedrooms, a whole room dedicated to the telephone even! The way she described it, it was a straight up mansion.
I was curious what this house looked like, so I asked the address. Looked it up on Redfin. It was less than 2400sq ft. The house she was standing in and comparing to was twice that size.
The big houses are REALLY big. And, while I can find a small apartment, new homes under 2000 sq ft are tough to find. The house I grew up in was 1500 sq ft and plenty for a family of four. I wish I could own a 1100 or less sq ft home but they’re all very old
I suspect that something has changed in the way square footage is calculated. Perhaps there are more finished basements or something. I was very involved in several moves my family undertook when I was younger. I feel like I got a good sense for home sizes. Many of the ones listed for 3000 sq ft. today look more like the 2000 sq ft. houses from yesteryear.
I also think about Louis Rossmann's quest to find a NYC storefront for his repair business a few years ago. He brought a laser measure with him, to document how the actual space squared with advertisements. I don't know that he ever found a place that wasn't lying. Yes, New York and, yes, commercial, but I wouldn't be surprised to see similar tactics in place for residential, across the country.
Almost all of the middle class tract homes built in California (for example) in the 60s/70s are around 1200sf. They also used cheap materials, had no insulation, maybe 2 bathrooms but often 1.5, very simple kitchens, etc.
The stuff that people buy now are much bigger and much more luxurious even at the bottom end.
Looks like normalizing to price per sqft might make the price flat at least in some parts of the US? I always debate with my brother, an architect, why people consider an 80-sqm apartment big enough for a family of 4 (Europe), but wouldn’t aim below 150 sqm when considering a house.
Much of the US housing stock includes homes built before 1990 (30 years ago). If most of the median home price increase was due to build quality there would be a bimodal distribution of housing appreciation with newer homes having appreciated more than older homes.
Most of the appreciation in housing is due to higher household incomes due to two income households.
I would change your last sentence to: is due to higher household incomes due to two income households without a similar increase in the supply of housing near where jobs are.
Why bimodal? Houses are being built every year. So maybe houses built in 2023 have appreciated 1% more than in 2022, and those have appreciated 1% more than 2021, and so on, leading to a smooth distribution.
sorry what do you mean by saying "Desirability has changed. For example, the number of sports teams have tripled since 1950." ? I am like not American and I do not get how that is related to housing
Houses near desirable locations (e.g. sports stadiums) are more expensive. There are more of those desirable locations now (more sports teams = more sports stadiums). So the average is driven upwards even with no change to the housing itself.
Is living near a sports stadium really that desirable? I lived a few blocks from the Giants stadium in SF, and I'll never make that mistake again.
Running a 15 minute errand on a game day could take hours. It was impossible to get my car out of the garage or get on/off the highway. The food/trash left on the streets was terrible too, which made walking my dog a PITA instead of a pleasure.
I think the point is that if you live in an American city with a professional sports team, you’re living in an area that offers way more than just a sports team; there are many things of note to do within a 20mi radius.
People who choose to live, say 250mi from the nearest major professional sports team are going to have a ton less job opportunity, things of note to do, but will generally have a lot less to pay because no one else wants to live there.
Ah that makes more sense, thank you! I wasn't looking at it as a proxy for surrounding development, but now I can see why that might be a more nuanced metric than just region size/population.
Yeah, it's the sports stadiums and not where the paying jobs are. KISS. People want to be comfortable and secure. To be secure you need wealth. To be wealthy you need a high paying job. To get a high paying job you need to live in an urban center. To live in an urban center you need to compete with millions of other like-minded, capable individuals.
If the market was flooded with options nobody would be talking about housing prices. People don't give a single thought about sports stadiums or if you're near a highway/airport or any of that soft nonsense. People are hard: they want a big house that isn't damaged on a nice plot of land above the flood plane where they don't spend 3 hours a day commuting to their job.
>Yeah, it's the sports stadiums and not where the paying jobs are
Who said that?
>People don't give a single thought about sports stadiums or if you're near a highway/airport or any of that soft nonsense.
You might not, but other people definitely do. It's common for people to have criteria when looking for a house (e.g. not having an airport or train station directly in your backyard, being near a good school, being close to x and y amenities, being on a main bus line, etc.). They don't go to a real estate agent and only say "I want a house". Being close to work is a starting filter. Most people apply more filters.
Stadiums were just an example of what people might consider desirable. I think the broader point hervature was making was that what is considered a desirable location (and the cost of being near those locations) has changed in the last 70 years. That is an effect on housing prices which is not clearly captured in the article's analysis.
That conclusion assumes there are options when there are not. There are millions of people priced out of secure housing. People buy what they can. There's no reason to hunt for patterns in noise.
I don’t think it is causative at all. The statement sounds like an AI hallucination. But this is testable. You do probably see some gentrification in the immediate area but you also have the negative externality of parking…
I think this is likely a distortion caused by zoning regulations, resulting in "missing middle" housing.
Basically, if you are only allowed to build single family housing on a plot of land, it doesn't make sense to build anything other than a large luxury home.
I wonder, should arguments like this be used to justify the issue? With technological advancements things should become better (i.e. safer in this case) without raising inflation-adjusted costs. Wouldn't it be very similar to saying that processors should have become more expensive because they became faster or hard drives because they have larger capacity? Additional costs built into the new codes should decrease over time as builders become more efficient at implementing them or technological advancements allow them to become more efficient.
Not every safety item is necessarily an extra expense due to inefficiency. The simplest example would be electrical wire. 2 lead, paper insulated aluminum wire is less expensive than 3 lead PVC insulated romex, regardless of manufacturing efficiency. There's not a lot of modern AL electrical wire for price comparison, but Home Depot lists a 1000ft spool of #2 AWG USE-2 AL wire from Southwire for $0.80 / foot. The same spool from the same manufacturer in CU is $2.32 / foot. So while not a perfect comparison, if you imagine going from a 1950's 2 wire AL situation to a 2024 3 wire CU situation, you're talking a baseline price increase of over 4x with modern efficiency. And that's before you consider that modern building codes also require many more outlets and circuits than they used to. My home, built in the 70's has 3 circuits in the kitchen. 1 counter top, 1 fridge, 1 range. IIRC the modern building code is 1 circuit for every hard wired appliance, 1 for the fridge, 2 accessory circuits and a circuit for the room walls in general. If you assume a modern house with a fridge, range, dishwasher and over the range microwave/hood combo, that's 7 circuits minimum for the kitchen. So in addition to the 4x increase in wiring costs for the existing circuits, you also have a 2x increase in the number of circuits for just that room let alone outlet spacing requirements in other rooms and the like.
This can't be it, much of the housing stock is from pre 1950s and adding those finishes or code improvements does not make a house 5x as valuable.
My theory is that we simply don't allow building anywhere near the rate of increasing demand, which is reflected by the anemic supply growth compared to population increases.
My grandmother compiled a book of letters from families in my hometown that she gave all of the grandkids a copy of before she died.
One of the letters talked about how common fires were and how the standard practice was to just pull up a chair in the middle of the street and watch it burn.
- Square-footage-maximizing floorplans, with a 3-foot wide lawn that your HOA still wants in pristine condition
- "Open floorplans" so you can listen to the roar of your dishwasher, washer, and dryer from the comfort of your living room (is it cheaper to get rid of interior walls and doors?)
- Mandates to use more-fireproof sticks and boards, and non-carcinogenic insulation
- Incremental improvements in the technology of home appliances, no thanks to home-builders
I hate that's the sum of "progress" in housing quality. I wish more expensive homes meant something more than extra bedrooms with the same race-to-the-bottom construction and townhouse-level neighbor-separation as the next development.
It would also be interesting to see the numbers relative to mortgage rates and availability. It looks like the 1950's had mortgages starting around the 5% range, but that steadily increase to a peak of near 20% in the 80's before dropping through the 90's and bottoming out around 2.5% in 2021. Along with that I imagine qualifying / getting a mortgage in 1950's was more difficult than modern times with 0% down first time home buyer loans.
When the zoning/permitting process limits the building of new houses, builders are going to build what gives them the biggest return: large, luxuriously finished houses.
> builders are going to build what gives them the biggest return: large, luxuriously finished houses
In a lot you could build one largish luxurious home and sell it for 1.5 to 2.0M
Or do 8 tiny townhouse units and sell each for 800K for a total of 6.4M
I don't see how the single home will ever be more profitable if a builder is doing it.
We're seeing a lot of these 8 townhomes per lot (4 on each side with small driveway in between) popping up everywhere, precisely because it maximizes profit per lot for the builder.
Exactly that: you've got a limited number of lots and a limited number of units that can be on those lots, so max the value of those units. With the lot supply and zoning, that equals replacing whatever might already be there with a giant McMansion. This drives up housing prices while also deleting the middle out of the market.
> that equals replacing whatever might already be there with a giant McMansion
That's the opposite of what we see around here. Developers buy houses from the 1940 to 60's (big houses on big lots), tear them down and build an 8-pack or 6-pack (depending on lot size) of tiny townhomes.
The only people building large houses are wealthy individuals building for themselves (as opposed to a development company building to sell) because they can afford to take the potential-profit hit and just build what they want.
Houses are bigger, but seem less thoughtfully designed with a lot of useless space that seems to be there to maximize the sq. footage to justify high prices.
Hard no. I've been going to many open houses and there is a strong trend towards more functional layouts over time. The 1940s houses might have a large number of square feet, but the % of that taken up with unusable walkways and narrow rooms is much higher than things built later. 1960s era is better, 1980s better still, and best of all are new builds.
I disagree, each marginal square foot is not equivalent. (Access to owning the first few hundred over zero are in particular market is very important!) I think overall housing supply vs overall demand is still a useful way to look at it, because it captures how we're under building cheap housing.
Are you an American citizen or ever had a desire to immigrate to another country? Do people fall in love and get married without thinking of the practical consequences? Yes. Do people also not get married to their love because it messes with their immigration? Also yes. Both are reasonable.
This is my (not Peter's) advice for Canadians/Mexicans for TN, Australians for E-3, and seems to apply for Singaporeans/Chileans for H-1B1: If it is an automated system, just put no. That may be an automatic filter. There will be time to talk to a human and say "all we need is X/Y/Z" where X/Y/Z is something the hiring manager can do without involving a lawyer. If a human is asking you, then just say "Yes. I need a visa but I can walk you through the process. No lawyer needed."
Hi, I'm Australian and have applied a few times for us based tech roles and ticked 'require sponsorship'. I never really got far with my research - are you saying that the e3 is an automated process and I can get away with ticking 'do not need sponsorship'?
I’m Australian and have been living in the US for the last 7 years, working for the same employer the whole time. I was originally on an E3 which was renewed twice, before transferring to a H1b and finally a greencard.
The E3 is not “automated” in the sense that some interactions with CBP are. You have to attend an interview at a consulate outside the US (my first was in Sydney, renewals were all in London) and while it’s not really stressful or has a high rejection rate it’s not something I’d personally risk without a lawyer having prepared the paperwork.
As for how I communicated this when applying for jobs, I always selected that I needed sponsorship and then the first sentence in my cover letter explained that I’m eligible for an E3. I interviewed with probably 100 companies back then and only one of them that I got to a first phone screen with cared about the visa thing and it was because they wanted to fill the headcount asap. Once companies get to a certain size they are either ok with sponsorship for all roles or not ok for any, and it’s just something that gets handed off to legal after a hiring decision is made. I wouldn’t worry about the companies that automatically cull your application based on needing sponsorship.
> It is a critique (in poor taste if you ask me) that everything does not require a double-blind study.
I think the real point is that systemic reviews often will have a pretty tilted set of included studies, because they are influenced by what things researchers choose to study.
Indeed, you probably couldn't publish a study saying that parachutes work; it's not an interesting enough finding for publication. So the only stuff you'll find, in many cases, are studies that buck the prevailing wisdom.
I assume you are pointing this out because it is the first reference in the paper and getting the recognition it deserves and you are simply providing this link for convenience to those who do not go to the references.
Yes, it was very nice to see it was the first citation in the paper (and cited several times throughout).
The World Models paper is still one of the most amazing papers I've ever read. And I just really keep wanting to show that, in case people really don't see that, many in-the-know... knew.
This is the Bayesian vs. frequentist view point. What the OP is talking about is assigning a Beta(1,1) prior on the distribution and observing n heads in a row would yield a distribution of the bias of Beta(1, 1+n) and the mean of that distribution is 1/(n+2) which means the OP is off by one in the denominator but still good for memory. However, that is if you take the mean as your best estimate of the bias. If you take the mode, then the OP would be satisfied that even the Bayesian approach says that tails would be impossible. The frequentist view would say your best estimate is the average of the observations which would yield a completely unfair coin.
Having a distribution over possible coins isn't related to frequentism vs. Bayesianism, I don't think. In frequentism, you can ask, "If I have a whole bunch of mystery coins with different biases, what is the distribution of their biases, and for how likely am I to flip k heads in a row for each possible bias?" And in Bayesianism, that distribution can just be the prior/posterior distribution for a single mystery coin.
Math is more than symbolic manipulation. You need to explain where the equations come from. The best I can decipher is that you are calculating the median of a Binomial distribution given k=0. Your "error" comes from the fact that you are positing that all biases are equally likely. Thus, you should not be surprised that you are getting a non-zero probability because you yourself are saying they are non-zero.
You have me confused a little because your original post seems to suggest you wanted it to equal 0:
> I was uncomfortable with the use of biases to assign non-zero probabilities to events that fail to occur after some number of trials.
Anyway, it entirely depends on your world view. When you say "There are other probabilities that can lead to zero successes" then that sounds like a Bayesian framework and that you have to pick your prior on the world. A natural choice is uniform (also Beta(1,1)) and update your prior as you collect data. You would then use the mean/median/mode of your posterior as your estimate for the bias. In your case, it appears you are operating in a Bayesian world but forcing your prior to be constantly uniform despite observing data. The frequentist perspective is that the probability is the relative frequency of observations. In this example, a frequentist would say that the probability of heads is 1 and tails is 0.
