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"a 9 a.m. class .... He said he actually liked to schedule the class early because it let him leverage selection effects to ensure he was teaching motivated students"

Matt playing wide-eyed innocent here when all along he has been posting at 6a to select for motivated commenters.

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*East Coast Bias

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"East Coast Bias"

It's not bias, Rory, and that's a hateful slander. There's no bias in our hearts. We're just trying to look after the interests of our own little comments by doing what's best for them. It's true that this system does keep our clever little East Coast comments from mixing with the slower, low-performing comments from undesirable time-zones, but that's just an unintended side effect. If those other commenters want to give their comments a better shot in life, then they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They have only themselves to blame for living where they do.

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I think Matt is doing society a noble service by posting at 6 am East Coast time, to allow that part of the country to jump in first. I mean, they deserve some source of pleasure and solace to counter what is otherwise the bleak, West-Coast-less existence they endure each day.

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When you see what they call "mountains", you cannot begrudge them this small advantage.

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I feel sorry for any East Coast skiing aficionado who has a ski trip at Tahoe and then has to go home and being reacquainted with what is available back there.

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I once saw a music concert at a ski resort in Wisconsin, and I took copious pictures of the slopes to share with my friends back in the West for a good chuckle.

It was really hard to resist using scare quotes anywhere in that sentence.

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New Yorker and skier here. I love Alta, the rest of the West is pretty meh. The advantage of living in New York if you're a skier is the comparatively easier access to the Alps. There's nothing in the US that compares to Les Trois Vallees or the Arlberg.

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Easterners also have to suffer through the indignity of late starts to sports on TV. As much as I whine about the time of day SB gets started, I would never trade away the former for the latter.

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Imagine being proud that "first in line" is the best one can say about their commenting quality. You don't have to tell on yourself that you're a "slower, low-performing [commenter]."

Believe in yourself. Show up late to something.

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Thanks, DH! I shall no longer believe that "first in line" is the best I can say about my commenting quality.

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Apr 19, 2023
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I was across the Columbia from where you are now when it happened, and the same thing happened to me.

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Apr 19, 2023
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Live where you want, but just get up early to comment. Your great grandfather had to get up at 4 am to walk 5 miles to school. :)

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Or after work for East Asians bias.

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Parent of young children bias.

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We the subscribers should just get in the habit of using the daily discussion thread at 5PM ET to restart the discussion. In theory the comments should be better because we’ve had a chance to digest the earlier discussion. Even if fewer people initially practice this behavior, should we pioneers actually produce a higher-quality dialectic, then Matt could highlight this in future Friday mailbags to encourage more participation.

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Defect! Defect from the inequitable East Coast Regime! =)

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Eh, I'm usually worn out from the discussion by then, and usually want to talk about something else that I found interesting during the day, or whatever Milan thinks is interesting to talk about.

My dream, if Matt insists on posting the articles so damn early, is if Substack adds a function to program an automatic opening of the comments that's a few hours after the article publishes. The Eastern Time Early Birds can digest the article a bit, as you say, while the rest of us catch up on waking up.

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All comments go into a pool and are selected by lottery like for charter schools. :)

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"All comments go into a pool and are selected by lottery..."

Matt goes full Neo-liberal shill and auctions off positions on the page.

You want your comment to be top comment? We can arrange that... for a price.

And remember, Milan's gotta get his beak wet, too, or the ban-hammer is coming down!

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And the proceeds from the auction of course have to go to the GiveWell Maximum Impact Fund!

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"...Substack adds a function to program an automatic opening of the comments that's a few hours after the article publishes..."

In all seriositude, I would not be opposed to this. Might improve the overall quality of the comments section.

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When I return late in the day to comment on the comments, I re-order to newest first so the last shall be first to be bathed in the elixer of my considered opinion. :)

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The daily 5pm thread is lit right now

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This comment is perfectly designed to get the strongest of upvotes from me: classic DT humor as I grumble into the void at already seeing that 136 comments have been made on a topic I might find interesting while I'm trying to caffeinate for the date.

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Suits me fine that he posts at 11am. I don't have to compete with lots of Americans

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"I don't have to compete with lots of Americans."

Certainly British people are well-advised not to attempt to compete with Americans.

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Hey, I love the 6a time. If I don't read the columns and a few comments then, the day kicks in and I can't get to it until the evening or even the next day.

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I like the early time because it means that by the time I get up and start reading, there’s already plenty of discussion for me to participate in!

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Man, back in my day, our ONLY option for our required controls class was 0740. And it was uphill in the snow, and we *liked* it!

(the lecturer also worked a regular normal engineering job, I think)

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Right, I'm pretty sure it's a law that Intro Calc classes must start before 8:30a at the latest. It's, like, integral to the whole experience (not that that differentiates it from advanced Calc.).

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You're reminding me of the semester I spent waking up at 6:30 to catch my 7:30 "Advanced Non-Linear Numerical and Iterative Methods" course during grad school.

Ugh. Sooo very much coffee that year. Thank Christ I've never had to use any of it because I don't write FEA code for a living.

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Funny what you run into in little corners of the internet. I'd love to poke your brain over a beer on that one.

I took an FEA class /from the math department/ once... the proudest pity-B of my life. "As you all fondly remember from real analysis," (as the engineer furtively glances at everyone else in the room)

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I managed a C. In my defense the language of instruction was Mandarin and this was only my second semester.

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1) Yes

2) : |

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I've wondered when he will change up the schedule to get a different mix of commenters! At 6:44 am I recognize a lot of the names down here...

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"At 6:44 am I recognize a lot of the names down here..."

At 6:44 am it's too early for me to recognize my own name.

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Tried 9am's last semester -- never again

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"Tried 9am's last semester -- never again"

I totally agree -- it's just too late in the day.

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Apr 19, 2023
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I didn't mind earlyish classes (8 AM was about my limit though) and shoving as much classwork in during the morning, so I could hang out and have a good time with friends in the afternoon.

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I love these columns. But I wish they did interrogate left of center intuitions about education a bit more. Here’s what I’m getting at: if there are some Ed interventions that really work on kids with disinterested, disorganized parents, with fewer resources, with low aptitude, etc, doesn’t it make perfect sense to cluster these kids all in the same ‘bad’ schools? maybe it’s hard to recruit ‘good’ teachers then but why are we even assuming a good teacher for the natural a students is a good teacher for the natural d students?

It may be the students with worst potential benefit most from something like direct instruction which the teachers that high SES parents love would never go for.

At the end of the day it seems what many left of center folks (either pro reform or not) are really indicating is that they think the engaged and motivated parents should have to spend their own energy on the children whose parents don’t care as much. And that this can only be accomplished by putting the low performing kids next to the high performing ones and degrading the experience of the high performing children until their neurotic parents can’t stand it anymore and solve the problem themselves. Only there’s no evidence the neurotic striver parents can even do this! And it seems more than a bit of an unfair bait and switch or maybe a confusion of the long running civil rights battles over segregation for the proximate issue.

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Public education is a solidly progressive/left institution.

Conservatives spent a decent amount of political capital trying to reform it over the last 20 years, and it didn't succeed in any real way.

Not only that, but it seems like public schools are increasingly both able and willing to push more blatantly left wing stuff on kids, either through the curriculum or through structural changes with metrics and (loosened) discipline. Especially since 2020.

To the point that it is damaging the left wing as much as it is us.

So why not defect? At least that way I can guarantee that my kids get an acceptable education. And it is far better than futilely trying to assail that fortress again.

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You skipped the part where conservatives came in with goofy ideas like that the intricacy of the human eyeball disproves the theory of evolution.

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That was indeed dumb. It is not representative of conservatives as a whole. Especially not now.

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It was 20-40 years ago!

When they started blowing political capital on this endeavor education polarization wasn't nearly as pronounced and the biases involved were mostly confined to higher education, and widely joked about by students rather than taken seriously.

Conservative attempts to "fix" that were among the trends which made them look like complete idiots to high-SES folks who weren't religious.

Do you remember exactly how much right-pundit ink was spilled during and immediately prior to Bush II on the topic of "intelligent design" in public schools?

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As I'll keep noting, Discovery Institute was basically the big Think Tank in this time period pushing this Intelligent Design garbage. And who started his career at Discovery Institute? Your friend and mine Chris Rufo.

I have to 100% sign on to the fact that pushing Intelligent Design was a HUGE part of the Bush era on the Right. Remember the controversies about Texas school books?

I bring up Chris Rufo because I really think we need to get a handle as to what is motivating this "let's just privatize education" going on with the Right. This is as much about religious conservatives trying to get their way as anything...something I don't think Matt emphasizes enough in this post.

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I was in high school in Alabama during this time, so I definitely remember hearing it.

Never from a science teacher, though!

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Apr 19, 2023
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Can you elaborate on how those two things are connected?

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I mean, this is all well and good if you're intensely worried about your children becoming more liberal than you want, but this was also the argument of white parents in the South arguing for segregation academies.

Public funding shouldn't fuel parallel reactionary institutions, whether they're Islamic madrassas of Christian academies, and if reactionary state governments want to attempt, we should use the full force of the federal government to stop that, for the good of a unified nation.

Also, public education as an institution is left-leaning, is in part due to the choices of conservatives. You guys were the ones who decided that money was the only thing that mattered.

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You mean teach "Left wing stuff" like, "Science", "Math" and "Logic." [Edit: adding /S in case that wasn't clear] /S

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It's an interesting thought... I wonder if it would work in an entirely different world where more resources were allocated for the difficult kids? I get the impression right now that teachers rely on having some "easy kids" in order to have the time for "difficult kids", so the blended schools are a way to accomplish that. (And then part of the current sorting is to get to schools with fewer difficult kids so that more of the teacher's attention can go toward your clever easy kid.)

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>I wonder if it would work in an entirely different world where more resources were allocated for the difficult kids?

Majority Black and Hispanic schools receive more per-pupil funding than majority white schools

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a) really though? I read articles like this that say no: https://edtrust.org/press-release/school-districts-that-serve-students-of-color-receive-significantly-less-funding/

b) even so, the amount required for a difficult student might easily be 2x what it takes for an easy student. I don't know for sure, but just picturing a class where the teacher spends twice as much time on the students who need extra help.

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“On average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively.”

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332858419872445

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I am going to forgive you for using "Latinx" only because it appears to be quote.

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it's the quote

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my friend, can we not agree that is a negligible amount in the scope of per pupil annual spending? I'm in NY where it's over $20k per year per pupil.

I find that paper difficult to read... But it appears to be saying that this funding is not purely instructional, which makes me wonder if it even covers the increased free lunch costs in those schools.

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sure if we're talking about 1-2% of total per pupil expenditures, that's not that meaningful. But the broader point that low-income schools don't suffer from much lower funding still stands.

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The thing with the difficult students is that often the difficulty stems from trauma: abuse, poverty, stressed single mother, often all of those combined. Therapy is expensive and schools need a lot more money to deal with those students. Of course, they are generally the students who are worse academically, scaring away the middle class parents.

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Yes, classrooms have a tipping point. When I had 4 general ed 8th-grade classes and and ONE honors class (that teachers had to sign off for entry), it worked better because every class had a lot of good students to model behavior and academic performance. Now I have 2-3 “honors” classes that are open to anyone and that makes the 2-3 gen ed classes much worse and closer to remedial. The honors classes are also worse because many kids don’t belong there and that affects what we can do.

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The worse thing that happens, is the real honors kids basically get drafted into being tutors.

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And some of the really smart kids get bored and start acting out. With expected results

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Well I don’t know what kind of a resource allocation would be acceptable from different POV on equity. But it’s politically possible in some cases for underperforming districts to get as much $ or more per student as the richer areas. Maybe justice requires like 3x or something implausible like that. But I don’t think equality or a bit better is impossible in blue areas.

I’m not sure about ‘attention’. It is possible there’s some ideal peer group mix that creates an optimal classroom dynamic but it still seem to me like a bait and switch! The idea is some of these kids really need almost no resources from the district and they will doodle or whatever while the teachers do direct instruction on a class that’s really half as big as it appears?

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re attention, I'm talking about the quiet kids who listen to the teacher & understand the lesson easily & don't cause class disruptions. Picture the quiet girls (and boys) pulling down good grades and turning in their homework on time. They require very little individualized instruction time - just the lesson (that is delivered once for all the students) and the test/assignment grading (which is not THAT much effort, especially when the work is good).

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I just don’t agree these kids don’t benefit from attention. It seems that yes you might leave fewer ‘behind’ if you set a low bar half your kids will pass without one on one instruction. But if that’s the idea some attempt has to be made to show it’s useless to try to get the quiet girls to do better than they already are.

I think the type of model you are suggesting is how most schools teach reading. And it does seem somewhat appropriate there, to me. It’s not exactly binary can / cannot read but it’s close enough and it’s an important enough skill to be worth viewing it that way. But I don’t agree that the remaining 10 years or so of school is this same proposition over and over.

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sorry, I might be misunderstanding... Is your proposal that these good kids getting little attention could achieve even more if they DID get more attention! Oh yes, I totally agree with that! I'm saying that's a motivation for the sorting - you want to move to a "better" district where more of the attention will be on your child.

But my younger boy could be taking in the math curriculum at 2x the pace if it weren't slowed down to the class average. My older boy tests at a college reading level but is still doing middle school reading because hey, it's a middle school so that's what they teach at his age.

Or is your point different? Sorry if I'm missing something.

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That is my point, and I think it is a bit more of an open question how much the better performers can achieve if they are catered to or how much is ‘just’ the friend / social network peer effects.

Most of the folks I know that chose worse public schools (usually to have a larger home) believe that in practice their kid is still going to end up learning just as much as they would in the ‘good’ district and that they can just make friends with other ‘nice’ high SES families and get the peer network with little additional effort.

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Great podcast on econ talk where Roland Fryer showed how he turned around a bunch of public schools and provides a road map to do it.

But people don't want to because you got to fire a lot of low performers

https://www.econtalk.org/roland-fryer-on-educational-reform/

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I’m pretty sure clustering all the poor performers together never works in any setting, regardless of the intervention tried.

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You don’t think it works for like the private schools that specialize in teaching rich kids with learning disabilities? I’d imagine the practical issue is more political economy / oversight than something wrong with concept itself.

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Parental influence may be the most powerful reason our society isn't a meritocracy. I think meritocracy is a false idol, but I'm pretty confident a lot of the high-SES parents who are worried about their efforts being "wasted" on poor kids worship it. I would appreciate it if they were honest with themselves.

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Shouldn't we be encouraging good parenting?

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Apr 19, 2023
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I think this is all well and good and in The Discourse is (not incorrectly) understood as telling parents that there is something morally wrong with them if they do not want to send their children to school in highly disruptive environments. Unless you have an answer for that then people are rightly skeptical. And when school districts do things like what that CO district Matt linked to the game is given up entirely.

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Yes. There was a weird conversation between the wife and my son's teacher last year where the wife felt horribly guilty for our son commenting a couple times (at home and directly to the teacher at school) "The teacher spends all her time with Johnny" and kept trying to apologize for his non-enlightened attitude, and the teacher kept apologizing for spending her time with him and he shouldn't be in the class but there was nothing she could do about it. They completely talked past each other for 90 seconds.

Wife wasn't upset at all with mainlining kids with serious behavioral issues and was aghast her 7 year old wasn't as enlightened.

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If you look at public schools in the 1940's you get an inkling of what that must look like. Exacting discipline, in which the standards that aspirational middle- and professional-class parents would expect of their children were applied ruthlessly to everyone so as to create an environment those parents found acceptable and comfortable.

Because at the time there were no alternatives; the private preparatory schools were the playground of rich children and denied even those first generation professional parents who could afford them, there were basically no non-Catholic religious schools, and the Catholic religious schools were a niche for devout Catholics where permitted. So the high-SES parents wielded disproportionate influence over public education because they were all more or less forced onto the same boat as the middle-class and working-class parents.

In the cities, there was likely *some* socioeconomic segregation based on catchment, between good and bad neighborhoods. In suburban rail commuter towns and rural areas, none. There weren't enough people to do so.

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You make all of this sound like a bad thing and I don't understand why.

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What suggests for even a moment that I think this is a bad thing?

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Then apparently I misread you!

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I’ve read similar arguments before. Worth noting that graduation rates used to be much lower. I highly doubt the rise in disruptive behavior is due to kids being passed along, however. That’s probably some small part of it, but the majority, I suspect, is due to low standards.

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All fair in theory, never going to happen in practice absent a willingness to enforce some serious standards of discipline. The victims when they won't are the students who are there doing the right thing, and they should be the priority.

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Apr 19, 2023
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I can't pretend to be an expert at all, but as a clerk for a judge, I was astounded at how complicated and expensive IDEA litigation is. A private cause of action as a solution for special education just doesn't seem like the best way to run a railroad.

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Do you have more details on this? My sense is that you’re on to something but I find the area of special education very confusing and FULL of very strong advocates. And is there anyone you know pushing against this in a smart way that doesn’t sound like they just have some type of animus against the disabled?

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Can you clarify? I’m fairly certain that all IEP cases with which I am familiar are generally highly legitimate and also usually take 9-24 months to realize.

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What does “IEP” mean?

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When my children were in school in 80s Seattle, I walked the halls of the grammar school hearing shouts and chaos from most classrooms. The few classrooms that were quiet were occupied by children whose parents were "pushy" per some teachers' definition. Assuming that teachers can control and socialize children from homes where impulse control isn't taught is false hope, unless, and only perhaps, the ratio of controllers to kids is incredibly high. My brother taught 5th grade for years. He related telling the parents of a self-controlled child that not much would be learned in the school term because his time was mostly spent keeping two others from destroying the classroom. That was his reality.

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One or two kids out of 26 is more than enough to derail the class, speaking from experience. All “discipline” consists primarily of removing them from the classroom. The only leverage admin sometimes has is when the kids are athletes & can be excluded from games or kicked out of programs.

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Apr 19, 2023
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It's externalities all the way down. Cf no tax on net CO2 emissions. We just do not take externalities seriously enough.

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I think there is a core question one needs to answer, and that's whether the point of public schools is to be a public service or a social engineering project (which it sounds like is more your preference). Maybe to some degree it is inherently both, but the more all in you go on the latter the less support there is going to be for the former, which is exactly the dynamic that I think is starting to play out.

Now there's a strain of conservatism that has always said public education is all social engineering. What's gotten a little nuts is now having progressives say that they're right and that it's good actually. That way lies the end of public education.

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It’s not a social hierarchy, it’s a performance hierarchy. We have JV athletics and Varsity athletics; that isn’t a social hierarchy either.

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I think you are giving this evidence a very generous read bc it says something you want to hear. But if true and if it’s the real main impulse behind left education policy it should be much more straightforwardly pitched. The typical left sympathetic person I speak to thinks poor kids suffer in school bc their school building is falling apart and there is no teacher and no pencils or paper.

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I don't know the studies, but my own gut-level hypothesis would be that if you have a school that's 90% high-SES and 10% low-SES, then the low-SES get pulled up and the high-SES kids are not adversely affected in any way - it might even benefit them. But if you have a school that's 40% high-SES and 60% low-SES, then the low-SES kids wouldn't get helped very much (though I don't think the high-SES kids would necessarily get hurt by it either, at least not academically - they'd probably cluster together in the honors classes). The problem is that mathematically you can't make every school 90% or 80% or even 70% high-SES.

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Yes, a school needs a "critical mass" of middle class kids to work. Probably there are two critical masses: first, there needs to be enough middle class kids to be able to offer the type of instruction (e.g. calculus and AP English) that is a prerequisite for admission to and success at competitive colleges. Second, a (higher) critical mass at which the at-risk kids get "pulled up" by the immersive effect of being in a majority middle-class school. To the first point, one can easily find cases where the high performers at majority at-risk schools are completely unprepared for college work, eg: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/graduates-from-low-performing-dc-schools-face-tough-college-road/2013/06/16/e4c769a0-d49a-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_story.html

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