Second: Even if this school has good results, it seems unlikely that it will scale well, because it's relying on more money (from outside donors, etc.). You can't throw more money at a problem, then declare you've come up with a general solution.
From Larry Summers talking with Tyler Cowen:
COWEN: And this is K–12.
SUMMERS: Yeah. That’s likely to be the most effective thing that you can do, but that you need to be very careful not to succeed by cannibalization. Many, too many, philanthropists interested in education decide they’re going to set up a charter school. Only their charter school is only going to admit highly motivated kids with highly motivated parents.
Their charter school’s going to pay 20 percent more than the regular schools and cherry-pick the best teachers out of the regular schools. Then they’re going to be really thrilled about how they have better achievement than the regular public schools when it’s clear from the nature of their model, selecting the kids and cherry-picking the teachers, that it is supremely nonreplicable.
I would say impose a replicability constraint on yourself and innovate in the area of education. My general view has been that a lot of the way successful innovation happens is alongside big systems.
>>You can't throw more money at a problem, then declare you've come up with a general solution.
You can if "not enough money" was the problem in the first place. And for public schools in low income areas of America, that might end up being a big part of the problem.
This feeds into the 'if everybody can't succeed, then put up roadblocks to anybody succeeding'.
Sometimes charter schools are there to do exactly what's been described there: create at least one good school. Because the public system is largely underfunded/broken. To defy this impulse because it isn't replicable, is to deny the part the govt plays in creating the broken public schools.
> Sometimes charter schools are there to do exactly what's been described there: create at least one good school.
Mostly, charter schools select for the best students by, even if no other filters apply, selecting the students whose parents are engaged enough to select a non-default school.
There are mounds of evidence that “good schools” in the US—whether traditional private, traditional public, public-subsidized private charter, or public charter—are a product of getting the right student population rather than substantive differences between schools.
> Because the public system is largely underfunded/broken.
That's really not the problem.
The problem is that American society is largely broken, and we expect the public schools to perform as if it weren't (or to magically make up for it.)
OTOH, the schools are an easy scapegoat and distraction, and because the problem isn't fundamentally there, there is no risk that changes there will ever relieve the outcome problems enough for it to stop being a useful distraction.
> There are mounds of evidence that “good schools” in the US—whether traditional private, traditional public, public-subsidized private charter, or public charter—are a product of getting the right student population rather than substantive differences between schools.
I think a lot of this comes down to the metrics used for gauging good schools. Which are usually test scores, graduation rates, and discipline rates.
Assuming that the test scores measure something worthwile, test scores is always reported as a point in time measurement -- but really a progression would be more informative. What I really want to know is will my kid go up or down or stay the same in test scores if they attend school X, it's not super important what the average score is ; especially since the progression may vary significantly based on the input score.
Graduation rates could be low because of many factors outside of school, or could be high because the standards are low, and are often reported only at the high school level but kids who don't graduate high school were often not well prepared at other levels, etc.
Discipline rates can be meaningful, but if one school doesn't expel anybody because all the children are angels, and one school doesn't expel anybody because they haven't noticed the large numbers of murders during recess, the numbers look the same.
> Discipline rates can be meaningful, but if one school doesn't expel anybody because all the children are angels, and one school doesn't expel anybody because they haven't noticed the large numbers of murders during recess, the numbers look the same.
I think any town not named Sunnydale would notice the dwindling class sizes in the latter case.
Well, they noticed dwindling class sizes. If their discipline problems included murders during recess, that would likely be lost in the noise from vampires and other supernatural hazards.
On the other hand, it's clear that sucking good teachers, good students, and good parents from public schools into selective charters is a form of "brain drain" that negatively impacts the performance of students at public schools.
Ontario has this effect as well with the separate Catholic school board, which is a long-standing bit of political football. Publicly funded, but pays better and has no mandate as far as providing special education, remedial programs, etc. So yeah, no surprise that the Catholic schools perform better than the public ones, which leads to a narrative that they're "doing something right" and makes a discussion about merging the two systems that much harder to engage in.
Public schools have been doing this for decades. Creating at least one good school for high intellect students. They are called magnet, governor's school, or experimental school. Where it is hoped the teaching methods tried there can be passed into the broader public school system.
Charter schools do not share that motivation. If they find a teaching method that works better their objective is not to share to but instead use it to capitalize and enrich themselves.
Finally, charter schools are publicly funded. If they are taking tax-payer money the results should absolutely be replicable.
Same source also has as-percentage of GDP figures, and while it does move the US more towards the middle, it doesn’t refute GPs point that the US spends a lot on schools. Perhaps it is distributed inefficiently or inequitably, but that wasn’t a point GP raised.
Is it? For me that sound more like 'if everybody can't succeed, then make sure you succeed at the cost of decreasing the level for everybody else'.
If I am taking the good teachers from the other schools, I am not fixing anything, I am just transferring social capital from someone else kids to mine.
The reason the school days are long is because the kids generally have nowhere to go and are susceptible to gang violence or other trouble since there are rarely adults who can pick them up at 3. It is trying to give them shelter and a place to stay out of trouble.
That's all good, but you can do such things without longer structured school days. The school does have some of this, happily.
I'd much prefer the school to have fun morning activities before class (games in the computer lab, for example, bonus points if you can tie that into learning without the kids realising it) while having an official starting time that is late in the day. This covers kids that have to wake up early due to their parents schedule, but lets kids that can sleep, well, sleep. If the days are going to be longer, is there more recess? More downtime? More art and music and otherwise "fun" stuff? These things help with learning. Same for after school, honestly.
A great bonus that is included is support for schoolwork that is missing at home. I'd rather have a no-homework school in lower grades as it makes more sense, but this is the next best thing.
I might also mention that these are 2nd and 3rd graders. I don't know if they are the sorts that are actually susceptible to gang violence outside of what happens around them. They do, however, have the issues poverty brings up, which is what the school seems more geared towards. Food banks, job help, GED help, and free counselors for those that have endured trauma, which comes in many different forms outside of gang violence - poverty is one predictor of having it.
Trying to replicate may be the biggest problem with education.
LeBron grew up in Akron. He knows the problems these kids are facing, and he's going out of his way to solve it specifically for them.
That kind of local leadership combined with updating the school day and curriculum for kids with specific problems that are best understood at the local level can't be replicable.
How that is applied to apportionment is an open question. Vouchers always seemed like the best solution to me, but I'm not expert on this subject.
> You can't throw more money at a problem, then declare you've come up with a general solution.
I agree in general that throwing money at a problem by itself is rarely useful. However, I think your statement sets up a false dichotomy. Is the answer to give every school 10 billion dollars? No. Is the answer to fund schools enough that they can give free meals to students and pay teachers enough to stay? Maybe.
It’s so weird to come on HN and read how money isn’t the solution and we’re just throwing money after problems, then go onto my Facebook and see gofundme campaigns from my teacher friends trying to afford supplies for their students.
It really enforces to me that most people don’t let their lack of knowledge or interest in an area stop them from passing judgements.
The general solution is adults doing what they can for children...and not just their own. James is in a position to do something for a significant number of other people's children and he is. Sure, goodwill for poor children doesn't scale to everyone, and James is just helping a drop in the ocean. But even Summers has shown goodwill for the children of the rich and powerful with his acceptance of the Harvard presidency. All that's left is consistency on that cherry picking thing.
When Schwartz and Friedman wrote their monetary history, they found three variables that contributed to the total money supply:
1) High powered money supply produced by the central bank
2) Money held in deposits, available to be increased via the fractional reserve multiplier effect
3) The deposit:reserve ratio, which shows the strength of the fractional reserve multiplier effect
The financial crisis seems to have tanked 2 & 3, such that the Federal Reserve would have needed to do much more QE than it did to keep up with demand for money.
They also found that price growth and wage growth are affected by history: a history of slow money growth predicts an increase in money supply will be absorbed by more output. A history of high money growth suggests that more money growth will lead to modest output changes and an increase in inflation.
Scott Sumner echoes your fear about a coming recession, but thinks that appropriate NGDP growth via the right amount of money printing can lead to a soft landing without inflation. Given that this has been his entire career, I think it is very possible that we won't necessarily see renewed high inflation.
I've been reading through Anna Schwartz's papers on monetary economics and I think they're the real story on what economists still don't get about the 2008 crisis.
If you read through the old monetarist research, you see that change in money supply has a better correlation with recession than basically anything else. This holds true even when you control for the possibility of reverse causation, when you make sure that you're actually dealing with a leading indicator of this cycle rather than a lagging indicator of the next cycle, etc, etc.
Keynesians think that the only measure of how tight or loose monetary policy is comes from interest rates, so they can't wrap their heads around how 1% interest rates can still be tight money. The real story of the economics crisis is that the banking crisis deposit:reserve ratio through the floor. This means that a bunch of money disappeared as banks preferred liquidity. The central bank didn't do enough to replace this money, so people couldn't hold the money balances they wanted and stopped spending. The Fed said they were doing all they could to spur inflation, but that's obviously false. The central bank can always inflate the currency and the fact that they weren't hitting their inflation targets shows that they had tight money.
Keynesians ultimately don't think money is important enough to model and until they change that, they're going to be confused.
Totally agree with your post, I explain it like this:
The problem with the old monetarists was always that they assumed a constant demand of money (or velocity) how they called it. Now they had some empirical reasons for this (see PhD under Friedman) but they missed something that earlier economists had already figured out. Namely that monetary demand can shift for all kinds of reasons and that any good monetary system needs to adjusts to that.
However they were totally correct on interest rate and that interest rate are a terrible guide for monetary policy.
When you actually study New-Keynesian it is perfectly clear that it is not the interest rate that sets monetary policy (or indicts it) but rather interest rate relative to the natural rate. Why New-Keynesian never explain this to anybody when giving interviews or anything like that boggles my mind sometimes.
So in New-Keynesiansim everything hinges on your assumption of the natural rate. 1% interest rate can be contracting or expeditionary depending on the natural rate.
What happened in 2008 is actually quite simple, the Fed had the interest rate fixed and didn't lower it (inflation fears because of oil prices, see FOMC meeting late 2008).
While in the real economy the natural rate was making the Fed policy more and more contractility.
Modern monetarists (Market Monetarists) like Scott Sumner have been point this out since 2009 of course.
I've played it a few times with friends and I have to agree the defenders have an easier time (although it certainly feels more intimidating to play the defender). I think defenders heavily benefit from most people's familiarity with chess. It's very easy to distract someone with pieces they can capture, then sneak your king out the side.
> While the hc QI community was getting over checklists because of the number of studies showing it to be a largely ineffective intervention, he ignored the pile and kicked off a second wave
It seems like there are problems getting people to agree to do checklists or keep with them, but if you come up with the right checklist and get the right buy-in, you do see fewer complications.
> but if you come up with the right checklist and get the right buy-in, you do see fewer complications.
Bingo.
What the state of the research shows is that you have an active QI-focused culture and buy-in, checklists work over the medium long term, but not better than anything else. If you don’t have those things, the checklists do nothing after 3-6 months (a lot of studies hide this by rolling up the study period, but everyone in the field knows how rapidly the effect decays). I haven’t seen any meaningful data on them >2 years out, but let’s let that slide, out of pragmatism.
What that suggests is that checklists are irrelevant to this discussion. It’s just a lot harder to sell something as vague and nebulous as “creating a safety-focused and quality-driven culture” than it is to sell “checklists!”.
Seems to give a huge productivity boost.