
What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity with an algorithm - sopooneo
https://apps.bostonglobe.com/ideas/graphics/2018/09/equity-machine/
======
mikeash
I have a miniature version of this, as I'm in charge of the duty schedule at
my flying club and I wrote a program to generate the schedules for me.

There's a function which takes a schedule and generates a score. Leaving a
spot unfilled or scheduling someone who isn't available subtracts lots of
points. Scheduling someone much more or less often than the median subtracts
points based on how much of a difference there is. Scheduling someone on a day
they prefer adds points, and so forth.

Then it's a simple hill-climbing algorithm starting from an empty schedule. I
get people's availability and preferences into the program, hit run, and out
pops a schedule.

I learned early on that I must check the result before publishing it. The
algorithm itself works fine. Hill climbing probably isn't finding the absolute
optimal schedule, but it does a good job. The problem, of course, is the
scoring function. Sometimes it turns out to be missing some important
constraint. Much more often, I need to tinker with the weights assigned to
various conditions.

People assign too much agency and intelligence to computers. They are, of
course, just tools. A nail gun will put a nail into whatever you point it at,
whether it's drywall or flooring or feet. Likewise, a computer optimization
system will optimize whatever function you tell it to, and will probably do an
excellent job, but it's up to you to make sure the function accurately
describes what the humans want.

~~~
ac2u
Hi, I did my masters research into this very problem. A lot of research here
does just simply revolve around iterations of hill climbing [1]

One thing which has been done quite a lot (and that's not to say you don't
already do this), is to measure the gradient of improvement of your fitness
function, and if it's been flat for too long, to relax the conditions/weights
by X percent (X becomes another thing to tinker here, but I start with 10%).
The flatness here suggests that you may be in a local optimum in the candidate
space.

This will allow worse solutions for many more iteration, (and a graph tracking
the fitness will go the wrong direction), but in the end, you might find that
you end up with a solution that is much 'fitter' than before the algorithm
relaxed the conditions. (In the academic papers I read at the time, various
words were used for this, sometimes it was called 'reheat')

It seems that even if you don't do this, you know about it intuitively anyway
since you talked about tinkering with the weights, just thought I'd chime in
to mention that the tinkering part is often automated now.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Deluge_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Deluge_algorithm)

EDIT: A sibling comment pointed out Simulated Annealing also, which provides a
more analogous means to discuss the 'reheat' stage here.

~~~
mikeash
That's cool. I'll keep that in mind if I need improvements or just feel like
doing something more with it.

I don't think tinkering with the weights is quite the same thing. That happens
when the algorithm is doing a good job of optimizing the scoring function, but
the scoring function isn't doing a good job of representing what people want.

It does remind me of another thing I occasionally do when I don't quite get
the results I want, which is to manually change one of the assignments and
then have it climb the hill from there. Sometimes I'll just clear some
assignments and re-run, which is pretty much a manual, ad-hoc version of what
you describe.

~~~
ac2u
Ah I understand, half the battle is terminology (I was introduced to the
'weights' as hard and soft constraints, with corresponding penalties against
the fitness function score).

Even though I did research on it, I found that the field is subject to a lot
of colloquialisms (for lack of a better term) when it comes to different
research cliques, and therefore the terminology I use isn't any more of less
correct as a result.

It seems like you've got as good a handle on it as anyone.

My research was mainly involving investigating parallelism of the above
algorithm (not very friendly to parallelism without work).

Nowadays, there's so many academic open source optimizers, as well as
commerical, that I would usually tell people if you're solving for a business
case, it's often more cost effective to frame your problem in a format
digestible by the solvers and let them at it than writing the solvers
yourself.

Of course, where's the fun in that? I'm jealous that you got to use this for a
problem that you had, rather than in my approach which was for a problem I
didn't need solved myself. I bet that was satisfying.

------
lodrein
I am one of the two PhD students that conducted this research with Boston
Public Schools. I'll be glad to answer any question you may have.

~~~
lazyasciiart
Did anyone suggest making the change, but announcing it today and having it
come into effect a year (or even two) from now? That would give parents time
to plan adjustments to their schedule, and would give a lot of people the
chance to move schools if they really wanted to.

~~~
mrcodedude
> District officials expected some pushback when they released the new school
> schedule on a Thursday night in December, with plans to implement in the
> fall of 2018.

That's a ~9 month notice?

~~~
lazyasciiart
The first round of applications for schools in Boston is January, so it's only
a few weeks (over Christmas!) for families to figure out if they can make it
work, if it's worth moving schools, which school they want to move to, etc.
(Your chances of getting into your first choice school decline rapidly after
the first round).

------
lacker
This article doesn't mention it, but the biggest problem with Boston Public
Schools transportation is that students don't actually attend the school in
their neighborhood. The school district assigns you a school that may not be
located particularly near you, in order to increase school diversity. So a lot
of this transportation time and expense is taken up to shuffle students around
to far-away schools.

~~~
Balgair
Denver Public Schools have a 'choice' model that works alright[0]. You can
opt, for free and without restrictions, to go to another school other than the
neighborhood one (you are automatically put in the 'closest' as a
placeholder). Generally, there is no busing with DPS, as school kids ride free
on public transit. The Denver School of Science and Technology[1] is a
'charter/public' portion of DPS that regularly pull from across the metro,
mostly via public transit. There are _many_ other issues with DPS, but the
'choice' model they use, along with the assistance of public transit,
generally works pretty well.

[0][http://schoolchoice.dpsk12.org/schoolchoice-
round-1/](http://schoolchoice.dpsk12.org/schoolchoice-round-1/)

[1]

~~~
bobthepanda
New York City also uses citywide school choice for high school. School choice
_really_ doesn't scale up. You end up getting a yellow-pages sized book of
schools (and each page is a single school!), you trek across the city to view
schools, there are entire forums and such dedicated to navigating the process.
It's like the college application process in miniature.

We also generally do not use busing, but New York City is so large and
congested that you start asking a _lot_ of kids. I went to a school that was
90 minutes away by public transit on a good day, so I'd wake up at 5am to make
an 8am start time.

~~~
Balgair
> I'd wake up at 5am to make an 8am start time

Oh man! A friend in HS had swim practice before school and woke up at ~4:30
for it 3 days a week. On each of those days, she was just a zombo. I can't
even imagine doing that every year. Do you think it was worth it for you?

~~~
bobthepanda
The other choices, unfortunately, weren't much better. New York calibrates its
schools to match up with parent commutes so that kids leave at the same time
or earlier, and these parents in my neighborhood often had the same 90+ minute
commute. As an example, there was a much closer in school that was 45 minutes
away by bus, but they started at 7am, so it would've required an _earlier_
wakeup time.

There was a school within walking distance, but the graduation rates weren't
too hot. The nice thing about school choice, in theory, is that it doesn't
cause neighborhoods to gentrify or disintegrate due to the quality of the
local school. But if you scale it up to a million kids you basically make it
so that only people with time and money can really game the system. I wouldn't
consider myself particularly blessed, but I definitely was not the worst off
person.

------
rossdavidh
This, essentially, looked like a grander scale version of almost every web
design project ever. What is different is that, over time, web teams have
learned to use "mockups" or "wireframes", to put in front of the end recipient
some simulation or approximation of what the final result will look like. Why?
Because otherwise you get this sequence:

1) end recipient tells you what they want

2) you build that, perhaps exactly

3) they don't like it

Thinking in abstractions, and imagining what that would really look like once
implemented, is more or less a job description for programmers. It isn't, for
most other jobs, and thus most other people. If you don't do frequent reality
checks during the process, you will be quite likely to get this result at the
end. Of course, the students doing the programming in this case, were unlikely
to have had multiple software projects' experience, to know this. But someone
there should have, and should have insisted on putting sample results in front
of parents to see what their theoretical response would be. I find that
management, and probably also politicians, don't like doing that because they
can't control how the conversation goes, and it could bring them bad news. But
putting that off until the end, brings worse news.

~~~
ghaff
Isn't that more or less what they did? Having a couple of grad students
compute exactly what shifting high school later without costing a lot of extra
money sounds sort of like the definition of exploring what the change would
look like.

ADDED: To be fair, they did try to take the results and try to run with them.
It seems as if there would have been less of an issue had they taken the
results and did more outreach to find if this was a change parents were
actually OK with.

~~~
towelr34dy
Yeap, the article has a very heavy handed one side to it.

I mean, it sounds like "Silly users don't like my smart product that no one
uses" without considering, maybe, just maybe, the product wasn't good?

The author did touched on it a little by mentioning the difficulty for working
parents to move their work schedule, but it seemed glossed over. I'd think
changes that interfere with the the household bread earners ability to earn
would be a serious consideration and a deal breaker for any proposed change.

Not to say politics aren't incredibly inefficient and way more emotive than
logic prone.

------
quirkot
This genre of article, which I call "poor little algorithm," is very
interesting.

1) We hear about how hard the algorithm worked (vs the programmers tangential
involvement):

> _" Sorting through 1 novemtrigintillion options — that’s 1 followed by 120
> zeroes — the algorithm landed on a plan"_

2) We hear about the push-back:

> _" But no one anticipated the crush of opposition that followed"_

3) We are assured the algorithm was an upstanding citizen:

> _" They couldn’t help but notice, though, that most of the critics hailed
> from wealthier sections of the city"_

4) Finally, we say it wasn't the poor little algorithms fault:

> _" IN THE END, the school start time quandary was more political than
> technical"_

~~~
towelr34dy
The Boston Globe is owned by John W Henry.

The man operates algorithm trading systems; it's the reason he is a
billionaire.

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you that I read algorithm positive news stories in
his newspaper. Shocked!

------
keithpeter
UK: most schools start at around 9am to 9:15am

Children who live too far from the school to walk catch a bus, an ordinary
scheduled bus on a standard route, or the train# or the metro. They get
special bus passes (some get them free, I think most now).

What I'm saying I think is why on earth is the Boston school system in the
public transport business to start with?

(#) Doing your homework on the train on the way to school is one ritual I was
amused recently to see is still going strong. I did this and my _dad_ did this
(pre WW2).

~~~
twic
> an ordinary scheduled bus on a standard route

I'm pretty sure that when i was at school in the UK, there were specific
school bus routes. They weren't operated by the schools or the local education
authority, so i assume they were special services run by the local bus
operators, using stock that would be used on other routes at other times.

I believe each route served multiple schools - kids from my school would share
the bus with kids from other schools. Since we were the grammar school, full
of nerds in garish purple blazers, and they were, well, not, this was
sometimes a stressful experience.

It may be relevant that this was in Colchester, a town with numerous schools,
some quite close to each other, whose catchment areas take in lots of small
villages, where there isn't necessarily a good normal bus service.

Mind you, i got the (ordinary!) train, so i'm not sure of the detail.

~~~
keithpeter
I take your point, villages -> local market town probably needed special runs.
Big city comprehensive boy myself.

------
perl4ever
I was asked to choose someone to receive a small prize/incentive, out of a
list of fundraisers. I'd never done anything like that before, so I thought
"I'm going to do this right!". So I went to random.org to get a real random
number to select from the list.

Alas, my first selection was rejected by my supervisor because they were
related to a co-worker. Ok, try again.

The next selection was rejected because she knew they weren't able to utilize
the prize.

The next selection happened to be someone who had raised the least of anyone
on the list. That wouldn't do.

I finally said "ok, _you_ choose someone that's deserving and hasn't won
recently".

Computers have a way of exposing you when you think you know what algorithm
you want, but you don't.

------
Spooky23
This is nothing to do with the algorithm, and all about the downsides of
centralized administration.

If anything, it's just a case of political leaders failing to communicate and
take action to garner support for doing something with abstract/non-existent
benefits and concrete, likely, and easy to measure risk. They did use the
arrogant and paternal approach of big tech company, though.

Based on the figures shared in the article, it smells like the district had an
objective of saving some cash, while getting some attention for saving high
schoolers from sleep deprivation. To meet the goal you have a few strawman
arguments that would waste time or money, then settle on a solution that met
the cost target, using difficult to argue with rationale like racial equity as
an justification.

It would have made more sense to slowly introduce changes, and perhaps measure
the stated outcome before disrupting everything. Given the really high cost of
daycare in Boston, it seems unconscionable to force parents into situations
where you need a much larger block of afterschool care.

------
Floegipoky
How little the health of students counts compared to the whims of their
parents.

When did it became a right for parents to put their kids on a bus? They wait
on the sidewalk, the big yellow truck comes by, they get on it. It's not that
hard. I managed to do it without parental intervention every day from 2nd
grade on (legally required before that where I grew up), because my parents'
work schedules conflicted with the bus schedule.

And I'm not some old-timer complaining about kids these days, I'm < 30 and I
still remember being completely unable to fall asleep before 1am as a teenager
and being expected to wake up at 6:30 and go work for 14 hours a day. On
behalf of their kids, fuck all of these parents.

~~~
pas
Student health is very directly dependant on parents having a job.

Shuffling schedules makes things very bad for parents with few opportunities
(due to having insufficient negotiating power in the labor market).

And there are certain things to do with kids in the morning, other than
putting them on the bus.

That said, I got only a wake up from Mom and Dad when I was in elementary
school, and later only the alarm clock did that.

------
logfromblammo
> _Sorting through 1 novemtrigintillion options — that’s 1 followed by 120
> zeroes —_

"Trying 10^120 options..."

We can stop padding our writing to make page length and column inches now.
Digital media has a page area that is exactly as large as you need it to be.

If you're a journalist, even in long form stories, your working vocabulary is
essentially the 3000 most-used words, and anything outside that should be
easily understood from context alone. If you have to follow a word with its
definition, you need to write something else. I don't know who edited this,
but their iron palm of author-correction should have started the smack after
"novem" and finished it before reading to the end of the "illion". A large
number doesn't need a large word to describe it.

The essence of the problem is this. Balance the following factors:

(1) Supervise the children of working adults, without interfering with their
work day.

(2) Transport those children between their homes and their schools, at minimum
cost.

(3) Teach the kids how to be working adults after they graduate. (3a) Prepare
a fraction of the kids for further education, to associates or bachelors.

In light of research into school start times as a factor of academic
performance, they asked some MIT grad students to improve on goal (3) by
giving high-school students later start times, with minimal impact to (2) from
the new bus schedules. The algorithm devised to do so failed to sufficiently
account for goal (1)--with all of its obfuscated hidden requirements--which
made the whole plan fail.

They simply forgot, or never knew, that the primary purpose of public
education in the US is to allow both parents to work outside the home, and to
subsidize companies that have extended business hours with state-provided
supervision for the children of their employees--a benefit usually paid for by
the employees themselves via the property taxes on their homes.

The technical solution is easy. The political solution, which includes an
admission that this is one of the goals baked into the public schools system,
is nigh impossible.

~~~
lodrein
I think "novemtrigintillion" was just a harmless joke about this very large
number of possibilities, nothing too serious about it, I also had to Google
the word I doubt anyone knew it.

> (1) Supervise the children of working adults, without interfering with their
> work day.

That is indeed an important objective. I want to underline that it is
impossible to achieve it in practice. Each parent has a different life with
their own constraint, but each school can only have one time. The complexity
of school assignment and start time choice is to find a way to do as well as
we can. Unfortunately to the best of my knowledge, there is no perfect
solution.

~~~
logfromblammo
That's not strictly true. The schools each have one time when mandatory
attendance starts, and one time when mandatory attendance ends, but they all
open their doors earlier, and close down later, when the student presence is
still _permitted_. The bus schedules revolve around that 90% of kids that show
up just for class and then leave for home afterward, but if there is a local
need, it is usually _technically possible_ to fill it. It just takes money.
The problem is that the need and the money only rarely intersect.

Some school cafeterias even serve breakfast--mostly for kids with subsidized
meals, who may not be able to eat regularly otherwise. That is state or
federal money available to open earlier. Youth diversion program money can
keep a school open later. It is entirely possible for a kid to be at school
continuously for 12 hour intervals, every weekday, with no additional burden
on the local taxes. Meanwhile, in the suburban schools, the clubs and
extracurricular activities are powered by fees paid by the parents directly,
and some kids get picked up and dropped off by private cars, as part of their
parents' commutes, never even seeing the inside of a school bus.

~~~
kidofthestreets
You're right that public schools in Boston and elsewhere benefit from a rich
ecosystem of after-school programs that allow students to continue learning
outside the classroom (and yes, give parents more time to work). Adjustments
to school schedules also impact these after-school programs, especially ones
that enroll students from several schools with different schedules.

------
MrTonyD
Exactly. I was working on some machine learning code when I realized that
there were implicit moral choices in all machine learning results. Every
dataset has implicitly made choices about data to include or not include.
Every "weighing" algorithm, even if emergent, is choosing "values" to weigh or
not weigh. Now I see data in a whole new way - and find that I can easily
dismiss most conclusions, since they represent value systems which are very
distant from mine. (Most often, they represent a value system based on profit
- effectively keeping others down rather than lifting others up. How many
people even noticed that costs were a major consideration of the article? We
are so accustomed to our value system of profit over people that we fail to
look at the system as a whole - and consider the incredible wealth of our
society and wider impacts of actions.)

~~~
bitL
Most people don't get it as they don't understand reason behind their
"reasoning" \- usually driven by feelings, instincts (biology) and default
modes they learned from their parents, friends or at school. So implicit
choices made for them already ("common sense") cover the reasons about what
really drives them and these are completely out of their radar, but we have to
cope with them when we want to get anywhere near automated intelligence and
morality.

------
StefanKarpinski
It's not mentioned in the article, but Julia was used to solve the huge
optimization problem for this project—specifically, the JuMP optimization
package [1]. This SIAM article has more technical detail:
[https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/a-school-bus-trip-to-
th...](https://sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/a-school-bus-trip-to-the-
crossroads-of-policy-and-optimization). This seems to be a preprint of the
paper that may describe the algorithm used in Boston, although it seems to
talk more about the well-known New York taxi data set:
[http://web.mit.edu/~jaillet/www/general/travel-
time-18.pdf](http://web.mit.edu/~jaillet/www/general/travel-time-18.pdf).

[1] [https://github.com/JuliaOpt/JuMP.jl](https://github.com/JuliaOpt/JuMP.jl)

[2]
[http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/trip_record_data.shtm...](http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/about/trip_record_data.shtml)

------
ageitgey
One thing many programmers fail to realize is that almost all problems in the
world are ultimately political, not technical. Data analysis is almost always
a tool, not an answer.

The hardest job in the world is getting a large group of people to all do
something. The way you message something can be as important as what you say.
If I was working on a major schedule change project like this, I wouldn't even
tell people about the algorithm. That's just a tool to help you arrive at a
schedule. People don't want to feel like their life is controlled by an
unfeeling machine even if the result is better for them.

I'm not saying this particular situation was winnable. But I've seen this kind
of thing happen over and over in the tech world.

~~~
Bartweiss
Certainly there are an awful lot of startups that fail over issues like this.
They either invest massive effort into seeking technical fixes that don't
exist for human problems, or they find genuinely superior technical answers
that are impossible to achieve - because they upset key parties, or because
the cost of change is too high, or because they just sound too damn _silly_ to
sell people on.

But in this case, I'm not sure there was anything to be done. (As you
acknowledge - I'm not disagreeing, just looking at the point.) Two grad
students whose background was overwhelmingly technical were brought in to
provide a technical solution. They had enormous amounts of logistical
information, but it's not clear they had social/political information about
their task, and certainly they had no control over messaging and notification.

The outrage appears to have been less about the use of an algorithm than about
massive disruptions to schedules. It's a predictable outcome - school start
times are largely set around common parent work schedules - but it's also an
irreducible one. The desired outcome _was_ the source of the anger, however
much the computer derivation added insult to injury. Doctors have been calling
for these changes for years and been utterly ignored. The school district I
grew up in tried something a lot like this a decade ago, with no fancy
algorithm, and was slapped down with similar fury.

At a certain point I think the error was not the superintendent seeking a
technical solution to changing start times, but seeking a solution _at all_ on
a topic where parents didn't want change.

(If I were to _really_ get inflammatory, I might mention that school is a
classic principal-agent problem, and the proposal failed because it tried to
trade the agents' convenience for the principals' health. But that's another,
uglier debate.)

~~~
ghaff
>(If I were to really get inflammatory, I might mention that school is a
classic principal-agent problem, and the proposal failed because it tried to
trade the agents' convenience for the principals' health. But that's another,
uglier debate.)

Or, at least (to phrase it in a slightly less negative way) to trade
relatively incremental, diffuse, and somewhat abstract benefits for the
students with specific and sometimes disruptive change for parents.

Furthermore, just about any change to an accepted status quo--even if it's
arguably a mild net positive--is going to have a lot of vocal critics. Those
who like the change will mostly not feel very strongly. Those who don't like
it or have just learned to live with the status quo will often hate it.

------
apenney
I'm not surprised it failed, with such drastic changes. Why couldn't they add
a constraint of no more than 15 minutes change and reapply every year for 5-10
years until they reach a point they are happy with?

~~~
lodrein
It is typically very hard for the parents when we change a school start time,
sometimes even when the change is small.

Doing small changes can help, but it is so politically complicated to change
the school times that some districts prefer to do it all at once.

------
Copereno
What are the downsides of having middle and high schools start at 9am with
elementary schools starting at 7:30am? Basically a reversal of what is in
place today.

Just go through with one fell swoop and swap every single starting time.

~~~
AllegedAlec
Where do you live that schools start at 07:30?

Also, it'd have a huge side effect: middle/high schools kids can go to school
on their own. Many kids at elementary schools cannot. With this, you force
parents to drop their kids off much earlier, which would fuck with their work
schedules.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
I'm from indiana. 7:30 is a common starting time. I'll add that most parents
in the areas I lived didnt take their kids to school. A lot kids take the bus,
either from home or from a daycare. Additionally, many schppls offer before
and after school care, usually starting at 7 or 7:30 for the parents that will
pay for it.

~~~
scentoni
Indiana has the most complicated time zone history of any state in the US
because of a long-running battle between those who want to be on Eastern time
for synchronization with the East Coast and those who want to be on Central
time because that’s where the state’s longitude puts it.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Yup. As far as I've witnessed, syncing with either Ohio/Eastern time or
Illinois (Central time) is the main bits of the matter. Northwest Indiana is
pretty in line with Chicago: Terre Haute (southwest-ish) more on Illinoise.
Lafayette (central west/Purdue area) is in between. Central Indiana doesn't
matter so much due to Indianapolis. Southeast is more in line with Louisville
and the entire eastern edge, once you are outside of the easily Indianapolis
area, is more reliant on larger Ohio cities. (Cincinatti, Cleveland, and to a
smaller extent, Toledo). Ft Wayne I'm not as sure about, though I think they'd
rather stay in line with Ohio's time.

I*m not entirely sure why it is a big deal: Either way, it is only an hour at
this point. To be fair, it was more difficult before indiana adopted Daylight
Savings time.

------
40acres
Parents are a really tough constituency, especially the wealthier, former
yuppie, homeowner cross-section. If you look at any major initiative to
transform urban living, from housing to transportation to schooling you will
find this demographic resisting with force.

I'm surprised that the school district did not foresee this resistance.

------
lackbeard
I think something important is being glossed over by this article:
"...distributing the best school start times more evenly..." Can someone
explain to me what makes a start time "best"?

There was a section describing parents whose elementary school kids would have
to start earlier, and they didn't like that because the kids would have to go
to bed earlier and it would be tough to rearrange their work schedules to
accommodate. But won't this also be true when their kids are in high-school?
If they can't cope now, how will they cope then?

I always though it was obvious that elementary school and high school start
times should just be swapped because in my experience elementary aged kids
always wake up far earlier on their own.

~~~
alistairSH
"Best" is a combination of... \- minimizing cost to the district (number of
buses, etc)

\- high school starting later in the morning (adolescents need more sleep)

\- ensuring adequate child-care options are available for little kids. Early
start means more PM care, late start means both AM and PM care, etc.

Then you get compounding factors... \- high school athletics. Parents don't
want high school to start too late, because then there is no daylight for
football practice (yes, this is an actual argument I've heard... parents would
prefer their kids play sports than maximize the kids education). \- race and
income issues - either correcting existing disparities or avoiding creating
them.

~~~
lackbeard
> "Best" is a combination of... - minimizing cost to the district (number of
> buses, etc)

No. The paragraph I quoted implies that the parents have some notion of "best"
start times that has nothing to do with the district's perspectives. But the
article makes no attempt to describe what that is! (Other than what I already
mentioned and questioned.)

Child-care, and not having your kids practice football in the dark is the kind
of thing that makes sense.

But what does school start time have to do with race and income?

~~~
alistairSH
_The paragraph I quoted implies that the parents have some notion of "best"
start times that has nothing to do with the district's perspectives. But the
article makes no attempt to describe what that is!_

My best guess... people are generally change-averse and parents are generally
selfish a-holes. Lacking irrefutable evidence that the new time is better FOR
THEIR CHILD, parents will violently protect the status quo (even if it's
obvious to outside observers that the district as a whole would be better off
with the change).

------
ashelmire
I've experienced this pushback against the algorithm firsthand. I work in NLP,
and I was asked to write a script to select data for annotation based on a
number of criteria, including some automated balancing of a few factors. It
turns out, this was very unsatisfying to some. It led to questions like "why
is this document being selected, but not this one?" without an answer that was
really satisfying. I ended up changing it to give total control to the person
running the script, and removed the self-balancing feature. Since then, I
pushback against any sort of black-box auto-selection sort of ideas, because I
know that, while they might result in faster and ultimately equivalent
results, people want control.

~~~
jstarfish
People don't want control so much as those _answers_ you yourself didn't get.

Nothing is more infuriating than not being told why you're being punished, why
someone got accepted into a school when you didn't, or why a judge won't
consider your appeal.

We can even handle injust answers-- "his parents are alumni that donate a lot
of money." That sucks, but it's the answer.

But we can't handle not knowing. Denying people the ability to reason is one
of the cruelest things you can do to them. The Amish figured this out
centuries ago.

------
Ice_cream_suit
The constraints of the problem seem to have been poorly specified:

"...the algorithm would eventually propose — shifting school start times at
some elementary schools by as much as two hours. Even more.

Hundreds of families were facing a 9:30 to 7:15 a.m. shift. And for many, that
was intolerable. They’d have to make major changes to work schedules or even
quit their jobs. And because their kids would have to go to bed so early,
they’d miss out on valuable family time in the evening."

------
mjevans
A major portion of the problem is that schools aren't just about educating
children; they're also about warehousing them as public daycare for workers.
The hours matter for that.

If they hours didn't then it would be possible to have home-study for some
time of the day and do all the bus transport mid 'school' day at various times
for a massive reduction in resources.

------
johnkpaul
I'm unclear as to why this change was made between one school year and
another. Unless I'm mistaken, there was no lead time. This seems like a big
bang software rewrite.

This kind of massive change should have a year or two or even four of prep
work. People can adjust their jobs and schedules much more easily over that
kind of time than a single summer.

~~~
arbitrage
FTFA:

> District officials [...] released the new school schedule on a Thursday
> night in December, with plans to implement in the fall of 2018.

That's more than six months. That's not really 'no lead time'.

It's also the first line in the article. Like, it's right there, at the top.

~~~
johnkpaul
Sure, but 6 months is nothing. I'm talking about years. If parents knew that
in 5 years the times would change, they could adjust their work schedules over
that timeperiod. Especially if everyone in the whole district knew, even the
childless.

~~~
oh_sigh
There is still a single point where you have to go from, say, starting work at
9am vs starting work at 7am. And a lot of jobs do not provide this flexibility
at all.

------
slaymaker1907
Can we please stop with writing out “... 50 bazillion zeros...” and just write
using scientific notation? It’s part of a basic high school education and is
much easier to read and understand.

------
dwighttk
>Even if the algorithm promised to reduce inequities, the upheaval involved —
with nearly 85 percent of the district getting new start times — would hit
black and brown families especially hard, the groups argued.

The article never really goes into this any farther. Was this just an empty
point from the selfish wealthy families, or were they correct?

------
stephengillie
Request was for a system that perfectly understands you.

Reality is, instead of a human misunderstanding you, it's a robot (like Rosie
from Jetsons) misunderstanding you.

~~~
lodrein
It makes sense that it can be easier to be misunderstood by a human than by a
robot. And what about the case when any decision will always be bad for some
people? I would argue that using (at least partly) an algorithm can add some
fairness to the process, as without an algorithm systems can favor people who
know the system the most.

------
abalone
Something like this just happened in the San Francisco school district. As of
last month they decided to undo a key piece of an Ivy League authored school
assignment algorithm and there's talk of scrapping the whole thing.[1]

If you know a parent with small children in SF you've probably have heard some
consternation about the school lottery. Although the majority of families get
their first choice, there are copious horror stories. Top economists were
brought in around 2010 to design a new school assignment system.[2] They
designed an algorithm. It tried to solve for a few goals: diversity, proximity
and choice. They tried to make it "strategically simple" to avoid gaming the
system.

The algorithm works like this: You rank the schools you want. Assignments are
handed out according to a series of preferences called tiebreakers: First to
siblings, then residents of low test score areas (to promote diversity), then
residents of the neighborhood, then by lottery draw. If you didn't get
anything on your list it'd assign you to the nearest school with space.

Then it did a neat thing: If it saw a mutually advantageous trade between
families, it'd do it. If Family A got B's top choice and B got A's top choice
they'd both get upgraded. It's called the Transfer Mechanism, commonly known
as "swapping". This was meant to cut out complex strategies to get the school
you want so you could just honestly list the schools you wanted in order.

Welp... After many years of horror stories of families getting assigned clear
across town, the verdict finally arrived that the system utterly failed to
improve diversity too. Here's what's going wrong:

1\. That low test score area preference (called CTIP) is disproportionately
used by the few white and asian families in those neighborhoods to get out of
their local school. It's a golden ticket to any school in the city.
Perversely, what was meant to help diversify actually increased segregation
while rewarding the most privileged families.

2\. The neighborhood preference (called Attendance Area) is woefully
inadequate to ensure assignment to a nearby school. Many schools don't have
enough capacity for their area, and if you don't get into your neighborhood
school the other nearby schools might also be filled up by their own locals.
That means you could be assigned clear across town to the nearest school with
capacity -- which means not a very popular school either. No consideration is
given to "bumping" a set of people over one neighborhood, for example, or
otherwise more gently distributing the pain. (EDIT: I just noticed the
original proposal had an "Overfill" preference to address this very issue.[2]
Didn't get implemented.)

3\. Far from simplifying strategy, the Transfer Mechanism actually opens up a
whole new kind of strategy. Clever families list schools with "swap value" in
the hopes that they'll transfer their way into an otherwise inaccessible
school. This is exacerbated by the existence of speciality schools that don't
have an Attendance Area preference, i.e. language immersions and K-8 programs,
creating a kind of niche swapping opportunity with AA-bearing families. This
results in excessive "false" applications to these speciality schools, bumping
more "true" applicants to their oversubscribed local school, bumping other
locals, replacing them with swapped-in clever families, and creating a sense
of injustice. Worst of all, this strategy is, you guessed it,
disproportionately utilized by privileged families.

So last month SFUSD just decided to suspend the Transfer Mechanism.[4] This is
big news and I'm not sure most families realize it yet. And there is a
proposal in the works to rethink the whole system, taking inspiration from
Berkeley.[1]

[1] [http://www.sfexaminer.com/school-board-member-proposes-
scrap...](http://www.sfexaminer.com/school-board-member-proposes-scrapping-
student-assignment-system-focus-community-schools/)

[2]
[http://web.stanford.edu/~niederle/SFUSDBoardPresentationFeb....](http://web.stanford.edu/~niederle/SFUSDBoardPresentationFeb.17.2010.pdf)

[3] [http://www.sfusd.edu/en/assets/sfusd-
staff/enroll/files/2019...](http://www.sfusd.edu/en/assets/sfusd-
staff/enroll/files/2019-20/Transfer_Mechanism.pdf)

