could be very useful in-doors where solar is not possible and wiring is not practical. A lot of sensors do not have to be on all the time - occasional reading is more than enough.
So you are saying that before money laundering laws those criminals took over the government. It is almost like said criminals just don't want any competition now
Money laundering laws emerged after criminals started getting organized about managing their wealth. Before Prohibition and Meyer Lansky, they were all small timers.
Specifically: "Under Maryland law, a truant student is one who is “unlawfully absent” from school for more than:
8 days in any quarter,
15 days in any semester, OR
20 days in a school year."
Also,
"What happens when a student is found to be truant?
The student will be referred to the county board’s system of active intervention. Note that each county must develop a system of active intervention for truant students.
A school system representative will investigate the cause of the truancy. This representative may provide counseling or even notify the Department of Juvenile Services. "
There is whole system designed to handle such cases and it failed miserably
If the system tries to force compliance, it is invariably attacked for disproportionately penalizing minorities (even if the penalties are proportionate to non-compliance rates). How is the system actually going to force compliance without being attacked as racist?
It seems very logical (however shameful) that the system would optimize for passively allowing students to age out of the system, as letting minority students fail doesn't have anywhere near as much blowback as fining or locking up disadvantaged people for truancy.
Not sure why this comment is being downvoted. This is one of the unintended consequences of viewing every unequal outcome between ethnic groups as proof of racism.
The big problem is that no one more capable wants to work there.
We have a mild teacher shortage across the board (which may become major with reports of as many as 40% of teachers seriously considering leaving the profession this year). And then in turn, inner city schools are worse workplaces... which attract worse peers... You need a hell of a martyr complex to take this on, and even if you have it you won't last.
And throwing money at comp won't fix this, either: that's not a great motivator to get the people with the passion to fix this.
Yup, but money isn't great at motivating people to work hard; a lot of evidence implies it even does the opposite. And a huge chunk of that money is vacuumed up by administration.
Inner city school systems are great at grinding up passionate personnel, making them quit or just surrender to do things that look good on paper but don't improve anything.
Is it? How do you know? Have you reviewed the budgets? Do you work in education in Baltimore, and thus, have a sense of what an appropriate number would be?
I don't know the answers, but I do know this -- it's a hell of a lot less than what gets spent in the NY metro area.
According to the US Census[1], out of the largest 100 US Public School systems Baltimore ranked near the very top in spending per child (5th out of 100). Baltimore spent $15,793 per child. Only New York and Boston spent considerably more.
Fines and jail time are the "actual outcomes" of truancy charges, and are much more immediate than proficiency tests and graduation rates. You simply can't force people to go to school without also punishing some of the parents and students, who are disproportionately in disadvantaged groups.
In this specific case I didn't any failure of enforcement at all because there weren't any. The school administration just dropped the ball without any explanation and no corrective action against _itself_. I guess tree-jobs-mum doesn't have much time going to school and make sure administration does its job.
We've had years of Obama administration policies specifically designed to prevent enforcement actions against minority students on the grounds of such enforcement being racist. The system is in perfect alignment with the incentives given to it. The problem is that those incentives sometimes lead to outcomes like the case we are discussing.
A new administator or new system with the same incentives is likely going to give the same results.
That would be true if said intelligent people were optimizing exclusively for the metric you're looking at right now. In reality they usually are not, as they are themselves stuck in a system where their incentives are to optimize for things other than their supposed mission statement.
The world is full of tangled messes where everybody is acting with respect to their own local incentives and everyone is worse off as a result
Even the most intelligent person in the world will consistently make false deductions if she starts with false premises.
Ideally there is a process of incorporating real-world results and revising one's beliefs, but that process seems to have pretty much shut down in favor of strict political orthodoxy.
Intelligent people correct their actions when they see the results. It is fair to say that there is enough information about "unintended" results by now.
It's not like the systems we're talking about were performing well under Reagan/Bush, under Clinton, under G.W., or under Trump, either..
Truancy enforcement didn't work too well. Whether laxer truancy approaches end up with better outcomes overall is open to debate, but it's not like there's a clear answer.
That's a good point. If this school is as terrible as it sounds, the students probably wouldn't be learning much even if they were in school every day. We need serious reform on multiple axes; reforming one in isolation probably won't help much.
Truancy does make teaching effectively much harder. You're forced to either go over the beginning material over and over for the people who missed it, or you just abandon them and teach the handful of people who have attended consistently. No matter what you teach, you're teaching the wrong thing for half or more of the class. Then people get bored, and they skip school...
Yup-- Frequently these classrooms have packets of worksheets thrown at the students. There's a little direct instruction to a crowd that has never learned to accept information that way. If you or I were put in that situation we'd seek to avoid school, too.
And imagine being the one new excited, passionate teacher trying to rock the boat and get some effort. You're upsetting parents who wonder why you're all up in their business and don't understand the value. Your gradebook creates issues for your administrators. Other teachers who have given up react defensively and seek to undermine you. And the students are not thankful, and can be extremely disruptive.
I don't know how you fix it. Project-based learning has some evidence that it can work in situations like this, because it can draw out participation and interest by gamifying more of education. But it's not like a little more PBL is going to make the system suddenly work.
I worked as a tutor in prison, helping out in class. The teacher I worked with longest said that she felt safer working in prison than she did in public school, because there were guards right down the hall. Discipline is apparently a lot easier to enforce in prison than it is in public schools.
I felt like I was pretty successful providing individual instruction. For instance, I found a way to teach basic algebra that worked for guys with 3rd and 4th-grade level test scores. It didn't teach them the principles they would need for greater math education, but none of these guys were ever going to study college-level Calculus. They just needed enough math to pass the GED. Unfortunately, teaching that way involved a lot of moving around the classroom, and I didn't really want predators staring at my ass behind my back. So I didn't stick with it.
It says a hell of a lot that teachers find that kind of environment safer than public school. That suggests to me that discipline & safety have to be comprehensively addressed before any other changes will have a chance to work.
Yup. On the other hand, the prisoners who are working on schooling may be more motivated students than many kids in lower SES schools (greater maturity, more incentive, less competing distractions, etc).
That class was for guys with 3rd-5th grade level test scores. Most were forced to attend school and didn't really try to progress. I don't know the exact progression rates, but they were quite pitiful. You'd see a guy who last tested at 4.0 grade level take the next EA test and score 3.4. I suspect that quite a few had some degree of brain damage whether from drugs or violence, and covered up an inability to learn with a front of not caring. I helped one older guy for months, and he would constantly forget things that he previously had down no problem. It seemed like he would forget as much as he had learned. The higher-level classes had more students who were actually trying to graduate.
I later took college classes, and that was a different story. One teacher said that his prison students were much better than his free-world students, as they generally weren't partying all weekend etc. and were motivated to be in school.
It is usually the parents that are penalized, but that's still pretty devastating to the kids. As for what kind of fucked up system does that, I was surprised to learn that it's something that some progressives have been pushing for[0][1], so I gather that it's a bipartisan thing. But it's fortunately fairly rare for someone to actually be jailed. In my personal experience, it was the threat of jail time that dramatically escalated the stress of the situation.
Why does the school system need to fine or lock people up? Sure that’s what would be required to force compliance but I don’t think the issue is that kids don’t want to go to school at all.
The parent comment even mentions that they have the option to contact juvenile services but can also provide counseling. That seems like the real answer in probably the vast majority of cases.
> I don’t think the issue is that kids don’t want to go to school at all.
This is an incredible assumption. There are probably millions of people (Paul Graham, for one) who would agree with Scott Alexander's "description of experiencing school as tortuous": one such example, "Scott, your description of school-as-hell deeply resonated with me. I can say without exaggeration that my time in the public school system was more miserable to me, and left me with deeper scars and issues, than my time in Iraq."[0]. Most of these complaints about child-prison hell-schools are from people who went to far better schools than the one in the article. I spent ten years in prison, and I have far more hatred for the public school system than I do for the prison system.
I agree that counseling could help in many cases, perhaps most, but it's deeply mistaken to say that the vast majority of kids are willing to go to school. There will always be a significant number of kids who simply don't want to go, or would rather spend their days involved in drugs or gangs. Plenty of people think that going to school is "acting white".
A friend of mine is a public school teacher. They have a standing policy to not report anything to the state for minority students, even violent ones. This is because it shows up on reports and makes the school look bad, school gets accused of racism.
Let's say the school failed miserably in notifying the parent about this kid (and that's not settled fact, the school claims they did, but for argument's sake let's assume they didn't)...SO WHAT??? How does that absolve the parent of responsibility? How could this parent not be aware what her kid has been doing all these years? She didn't bother looking at his report card even once(the web portal is open to all parents)? Didn't bother meeting one of his teachers even once? Who is ultimately responsible for raising this kid? School or the parent?
The report said the parent was working three jobs. I don’t know how we can expect someone like this to be a good parent. The blame here at least partly goes to a system that doesn’t provide all parents with the resources to raise successful children.
It's the system's fault. It's society's fault. It's the school board's fault. It's the school's fault. It's the teacher's fault. Who else's fault is it?
I think the argument is yes it's the parents' fault. But that's not something we can directly fix. We can directly fix school budgets and stuff so that's what gets the blame. How do you fix broken families from a government perspective?
Abolish divorce, criminalize adultery, castrate men who knock up women out of wedlock...
Something less drastic?
How about this..
Look at this thread. You’ll read all kinds of excuses for and blame of the mother.
Yet nobody mentioned the father.
A father — under our system — faces no penalty for neglecting a child. None. In a custody order where the mother has primary, the father has NO OBLIgATION to see the kid.
This is so engrained in our culture that, like I said, the thread doesn’t even mention a father...
Some would say it's the single biggest problem. A big chicken and egg problem-- fathers abandon boys who then expect to abandon their own kids, and girls who expect to be abandoned by the fathers of their own children. Can't really have a healthy human culture with that going on.
Yeah, it's messed up, I agree. Not sure how you can force the father to help, especially if the father is also a teen. Maybe flip a coin at the child's birth, heads the mother is 100% responsible, tails the father is 100% responsible. Maybe then we would have an equal number of single fathers raising kids as single mothers.
You don't need to 'force the father to help' if the law deters illgitmate children in the first place.
In my line of work, I know of men who have upwards of a dozen children from just as many women. There is nothing in the law that deters this activity. Nothing. There used to be. And, when there was, it didn't happen.
Penises and Vaginas, orgasms and lust, haven't changed one iota in the past 10,000 years. I have little patience for those who wring their hands, fretting about how to stop this insanity. We know exactly how to stop it. You can open any legal code older than 100 years and see exactly how it is stopped.
The fact is, this society has made the deliberate and intentional decision to eradicate any responsibility on the part of men, leaving women absolutely fucked (and the daughters of these women even more screwed.) Ironcially, it was all done in the name of feminism.
In any case, nobody ever linked ‘adultery laws’ with school.
There are many ways to incentivize nuclear families and discourage illegitimacy.
And, many ways to do the opposite.
In US, for whatever bizarre reason, society had been trained to recoil at the idea of a nuclear family. Indeed, some readers will reflexively gag at my use of the term ‘illegitimate.’
It’s strange.
Occasionally you get these stories where people are ‘shocked’ that a kid in Baltimore didn’t go to school! Yet, the fact that he has no father is just ho-hum.
Missing the forest for the trees.
* Until recently, there was no no-fault divorce. You couldn't up-and-leave a marriage without good cause. If your husband was beating you or your wife committed adultery, that was a valid reason. If you got bored, existential ennui, or married for child support in the first place, you were SOL unless the other party agreed. People were expected to make it work.
* All sorts of fraud laws around sex and sexual behavior. If we had sex because I promised to marry you, I was expected to marry you. Marriage was viewed as a legal agreement.
... and so on.
Most of it had problems, but there were some good ideas in there too. Adapting those to a 21st century framework of equal rights would be challenge, both intellectually and politically. There was a history of perverse, unintended consequences, intertwined changes, etc. and a discussion like this would be a political hot potato.
Divorce is also a massive industry and political lobby. It intertwines itself with social justice and feminism, so it's hard to tease out, but a lot of work is actively done to break up families, since lawyers, guardians ad litem, etc. profit. A lot of that hits low-income families, despite low-income divorce happening without bringing this industry in.
Maybe we shouldn't be expecting the government to solve every problem in society, and the fact that we have this expectation might actually be making the problems worse by not allowing other non-governmental forces to play out?
> I don’t know how we can expect someone like this to be a good parent.
You either are or not. My bet would be that the parent is fully aware, but ashamed and in denial about the situation.
A busy mother is still a mother. Should know when their son is lying. She could be tricked for a month, for one year maybe, but when 4 entire years passed and she claims that didn't suspected anything... either she barely talks in the dinner with the boy about his day or she carefully circumnavigated the theme and don't really wanted to know the details of his education.
And some parents just don't like the school system. I know a case of a divorced mother that deliberately boycotted the education of her daughter repeatedly asking her to be at home so she didn't feel alone. The outraged school wanted to do a point and the truant girl had to repeated several years, with the same outcome and less effort put on it each year. Everybody, was relieved when she eventually reached the legal age, was dumped from the school, show the middle finger to everybody and keep with their former life (Partied hard, socialized a lot, found a partner and married). We could say that she is doing fine, in fact.
> This is a lie you tell yourself to be able to... (unrelated bad thing, you should be ashamed, blah, blah, blah...).
Not, this is a dichotomy covering all the possible outcomes, thus can't be a lie, by definition.
Some people are good parents, other are terrible at parenthood. Where is the lie in my statement? There are millions of examples.
If your son failed the school for four years, failed in ALL classes, didn't learn anything in your face, and you are clueless about that, don't blame other people. You have a responsibility in this train crash. You must calm down, do damage control and exercise more the communication part in your parenthood. You can be busy and tired, but this is no excuse for not showing the slighest interest for your boy's life, future plans, interests, or education. Not at this level.
Being a good parent is more than being just a food providing machine.
The system did provide the resources to raise successful children. This parent chose to ignore all of it.
Parents have to care for a child to do well (or even mediocre) in school. A child isn't going to choose to do difficult homework in lieu of video games if left up to their own choices.
If we examined the parent's school grades, we'd probably find a similarity, unfortunately. Same with the parent's parents. All this ultimately leads to working 3+ low-skill/low-education jobs just to keep a roof over your head. Every statistic about high school graduation rates firmly says so.
I think a lot of the people here just don't understand how overwhelmed/exhausted people in serious poverty are. In the USA, with enough gumption and know-how it's theoretically possible to get government-provided internet/food/health care and work your way up to a decent career.
BUT that's a very challenging process, and we should still have compassion for people who haven't managed to pull it off yet.
(I have no input on the specifics of this situation though, just trying to provide some context)
I recently helped an unemployed friend with getting healthcare. It was actually incredibly easy and took maybe thirty minutes start to finish - where "start" was "Do you know if I can get health insurance through this program?" And "finish" was having good health insurance with active coverage confirmed on the phone with papers about to be mailed.
The idea that we can offload child-rearing to the government is insane and will never, ever work. When shown proof of that, your response is to double down on your mistake. Parents need to actively encourage and discipline children. The fact that this isn't obvious to everyone is deeply troubling.
What we're seeing here is the breakdown of extra-legal authority and responsibility. Truancy laws and CPS only work when the vast majority of parents do their job.
Realistically and objectively, the answer has to be yes. Although you get into all sorts of issues if you actually go down that line, so practically the answer is no.
I think the point was the student will still fail. Truancy laws can force them to sit in a chair. But they can't make the student care about passing when their parent isn't holding them to any such standards.
In general I agree, except he was in the top half of the class... So it sounds like at least half the school just routinely does not show up. So how does the system deal with a situation like this? I think it would completely overwhelm the school/local PD.
Well, the school was fully aware what is going on and instead of taking any action as they are obliged to do they decided to do exactly nothing. The school might not be able to do much in this case, but the _school system_ has enough resources to change the situation.
They were very slow and weak about responding, but you're overstating. They did a few things over the three years, up to and including finally bumping the child back to 9th grade.
The mother apparently did exactly nothing. Until the school's actions finally hit home hard enough.
The headline literally says "ranks near top half of class with 0.13 GPA". So it is not an isolated incident. That is a lot of mothers who did exactly nothing
My complaint is with your misuse of language to make a point. "Exactly nothing" means beyond zero is excluded. At worst you need to use "essentially nothing" or some such vague/weasel words rather than stating logical falsehoods.
When only 60% of kids show up to school on a given day, as in this school, there is nothing the school can do to fix things. Laws and rules and enforcement are there to nudge occasional non-compliants back in track. Social norms are what are supposed to make the vast majority of people follow the rules.
It is not just the school's fault; it is society's. This is a systemic issue with how the poor are treated. Our medical system is a shambles, so disorders go untreated. Nutrition is a problem (can't have a healthy mind when you don't have enough good food to eat). Parents were victims of the system so they'll rarely be able to get a job that will get them out of this. It's cyclical, the parents, and eventually the children of these kids, go through the same thing. Over and over and over. It won't stop on its own.
F# is only functional language supported by big corporation. It is not Go level but still it is safe to say that Microsoft has some serious commitment to this language.
> F# is only functional language supported by big corporation
It might be the only functional language developed “in house” at a major corporation, but it's not the only one supported by a big corporation, as Microsoft (under the GitHub name) is a leading sponsor of the new Haskell Foundation.
I've been coming to the opinion that I'll just never be happy with nominal static typing for data science or engineering. I'm curious about structural typing, but, of the languages I've tried so far, only dynamic typing has kept me happy for the long run.
I say that as someone who, prior to getting into the data space, was a fanatical partisan of static typing.
For actually implementing the core bits of analytics and ML tooling, I have a hard time seeing past languages that can match the performance of Fortran/C/etc and are able to expose a C ABI. Because those languages let you write one central, highly-optimized implementation that everyone can access from their favorite higher-level language.
It's not _quite_ meant specifically as a better Python, but it can play that role and there is every intention of making that something that has "product truth" to it. You can look forward to some concrete improvements along those lines this year, specifically in the notebooks tooling space and some library support!
In terms of my current use, the new scripting feature with "r# nuget:.." is game changing because now we can freely share .fsx files and they...just work. Compared to praying to the pip/virtualenv gods in the python space.
Really excited to see what ya'll have planned for 2021
Oh yeah, it’s a great feature. People like it a lot more than we thought they would, and we already had high hopes for it! Still more improvements to make there, though.
I am starting to use this to port some of python data munging scripts. Especially those that have to call external apis because Fsharp data providers are voodoo magic.
