
How Does Your Kindergarten Classroom Affect Your Earnings? - luu
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8J_qdFYwNJ6OS1WSHhzVGxZZzQ/edit
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pavel_lishin
> _This article has shown that the classroom environments that raise test
> scores also improve long-term outcomes. Students who were randomly assigned
> to higher quality classrooms in grades K–3 earn more, are more likely to
> attend college, save more for retirement, and live in better neighborhoods.
> Yet the same students do not do much better on standardized tests in later
> grades._

> _Yet the same students do not do much better on standardized tests in later
> grades. Researchers who had examined only the impacts of STAR on test scores
> would have incorrectly concluded that early childhood education does not
> have long-lasting impacts._

This seems to pretty definitively end the argument I'm having with my wife in
her favor; my thought was that early school education probably doesn't matter
too much, since they're learning very basic things that we can teach them at
home anyway.

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ThrustVectoring
Uhh, that's not entirely clear. There's two causal explanations for why
students assigned to higher quality classrooms do better: either good
environments cause beneficial outcomes, or bad environments cause negative
outcomes. Like, the important factor may be something along the lines of
"don't send your kid to what's best describe as a dystopian hellscape".

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taneq
What about the glaring third option, "kids who go to nice kindergartens are
probably well off and hence well positioned to succeed in life"?

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sergiosgc
That's not a causal explanation, in this context. ThrustVectoring specifically
limited the comment to causal explanations: why do better kindergarten classes
cause better life outcomes.

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taneq
Common cause is a causal explanation.

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throwaway4891a
Also, middle-/upper-oriented people are more likely peer-pressured to placing
in the "best" kindergartens, whereas lower-oriented people may skip it (much
like skipping parental-school involvement). And, I suspect both nature and
nurture aspects are self-amplifying: smarter/more competitive kids may make
more money and attempt to seek similar mates to have improved offspring and
try really hard to inculcate successful attitudes. Plus, having more money
helps reinforce getting into selective kindergartens and making more childhood
friends of future powerful people, leading to better social access to higher
quality mates (better genes), more money and hopefully better lifestyle-
choices.

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jannotti
Right, I'd really like to know about the "random" process that assigned
students to classrooms. I know that when I was in elementary school the
assignments were theoretically random, but if parents really wanted to
influence them, they could. Since this study gets a lot of its results from
clustering, they might just be finding that certain classes were perceived to
be better (right or wrong) and so involved parents influenced the school to
get their kids in it. Now it really is going to be "better" by the metric of
those kids' later success.

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andrewclunn
I am wary that these nature versus nurture studies will always find some way
in which purchasing or investing in additional or more expensive schooling is
key. That is until such time as genetic engineering become consumer available,
then I imagine a slew of studies proving that people with x heritable trait
succeed. Of course, I'm a father with a 1 and a half year old already in
Montesory school because despite my wariness that it's all just marketing
pretending at science, I can't not want to give me daughter every advantage I
can. They've got me over a barrel!

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perseusprime11
Not sure why we even have money to spend on these kinds of research. These
trials are always random and inconclusive due to the nature of sample sizes.

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matt4077
The ultimate purpose is to improve education until no body ever again spews
this bullshit again.

The sample size here was 22,000. Is that enough?

(the answer, by the way, is "It depends on the effect size you want to
measure". I can do a study with n=2 that is pretty convincing. Question: "are
these pills actually cyanide?". Study design: "I give one pill each to two
healthy undergrads, after they tried to appear smart by saying 'correlation
does not prove causation'". Observation: "The ethics board should definitely
not have approved this!" Discussion: "Background death rate from non-violent
causes for 22 year old males in the US is 0.01096/100000/day. Pill is
poisonous with p<0.000000000000012")

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ourmandave
You're going to have a hell of a time getting participates to fill out follow
up surveys for a long term analysis.

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baldeagle
Get them to 'donate their body to science' and you can keep observing them
forever, or until the cryo machines stop working.

