If you're going to be actively involved in your child's education, it may not. This was a randomized test: it's not clear that means good early education is additive versus binary. For instance, it may be that for a significant number of students, the only education they receive is at school. And so for them a great teacher sets them up with a great foundation. But if you already set that great foundation up at home, it's not clear that the teacher will significantly affect improve upon it. Just that for enough students for it to show a significant correlation, the great early educator mattered.

I wish they could have controlled for parental involvement, but that's probably very hard to even measure.

Right, speaking for myself, my parents were REALLY involved (they were both teachers themselves), so even though I attended a lackluster public high school in rural Pennsylvania, I ended up doing pretty well, going onto a top 20 university and becoming a software engineer in Silicon Valley. I also loved learning and computers though, so I learned a lot on my own just by tinkering in my spare time for fun.

Hm, I'm sure there are good proxies, like the number/length of parent-initiated phone calls/emails to the school/teachers.

These are good proxies for parental involvement with school, but as Mark Twain famously suggested, school != education.

Which is clever, but all that matters for validity of the metric here, is whether a parent with a child in school, would be willing to make all these calls to the school, but otherwise be an uninvolved parent. It doesn't seem likely IMHO.

Helicopter parents can be highly involved with school but not effective in supporting their child's education. I know far too many parents who do their children's homework for them, as an example.

There are also many parents actively engaged in their child's education who don't feel the need to be in constant contact with a teacher.

The issue is whether "being involved with the child's education" has predictive power over long-term outcomes that explains away the influence of the school itself. While it may weaken the correlation for the different involvement types to be more vs less helpful, I was only speaking to the issue of whether your could measure involvement at all.

And my statement was that involvement with school ignores other types of involvement in education.

Randomized assignment to the classrooms is controlling for parental involvement, so long as the quality of the classroom is not correlated with parental involvement.

The grandparent comment explains how it still doesn't tell whether the parental involvement matters or not.

The experiment results show only that on average the kids perform better in better classrooms. But it's still possible that kids with better parental involvement have no benefit of it, and the statistical difference happens due to better results of just the kids with worse involvement.

In other words. Yes, the article controls for the fact that better parents can send kids to better kindergartens. It doesn't control for the fact that kids of better parents benefit from the better kindergartens.

It's possible that adding an interaction term for classroom quality and involved parent would show that there's zero marginal benefit to a good classroom if you're an involved parent. That result seems orthogonal to their research goal, which was estimating the mean impact of a quality classroom for the "average" child.

The phrasing, "they should control for" has a specific statistical meaning, criticizing the model as having an omitted variable problem -- that they left out a regressor that is correlated with both the dependant variable and at least one of the other regressors. That is a different criticism than suggesting an interaction term.

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".

Since they are defining quality classrooms after the fact, based on how well students did, the third causal explanation might be students who do well in K are the kinds of students who will succeed in life regardless. Though the experience level of teacher and size of class appear to have an impact, many other studies show a poor relation to class size and outcomes.

Yes, the big missing options were no kindergarten, and kindergarten without formal teaching. There was a recent article in the Economist that said that almost all of countries with the highest PISA scores don't start formal teaching until children are aged around 7.

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

Yeah, that's definitely a thing as well. I wasn't terribly precise in how I worded things. I was getting at something like "given that going to a nice kindergarten causes better life outcomes than going to a shitty kindergarten, there's two mechanisms that explain that causal link."

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.

Common cause is a causal explanation.

What's the difference between the two? Either way, a better environment leads to a better outcome.

They're the same if you're wondering which school to send your child, but different if you're deciding whether to send your child to school.

Oh, I see what you mean.

Super hard to prove either way. The best I could do to rationalize why I believe early ed matters is to see a 'good' classroom versus a 'bad' classroom.

Seeing good teachers who are able to instill critical thinking into kids who were learning language and math for the first time had me stunned (in a good way).

>definitively end the argument

Based on one study that has never been replicated ?

> small (S) with 13-17 pupils

Would a class size of < 10 pupils mean even more success in life ? Would your 1:1 attention at home mean even better outcomes ?

> Would your 1:1 attention at home mean even better outcomes ?

Almost certainly; I'm not just gonna stop interacting with my child if she gets into a better school :P

Fancy seeing you here Pavel!