The middle one is absolutely true, the other two I really doubt e.g. in Finland or Germany, schoolday starts around 9AM and ends around 2PM, yielding 3h30 to 4h studies a day accounting for breaks, 5 days/week, with little homework (maybe 5h/week total). Afternoon is usually dedicated to clubs.

In the context of at-risk kids, I think the idea is to maximize the amount of time the kids get to spend away from their toxic and stressful home environments.

I am a bit skeptical of the overall "minimize idle time" idea, though. They seem to be on board with giving the kids enough free time to do independent study and stuff, but whether that's any good will depend on how it's implemented.

It seems that everyone is recognizing this is the problem, but the solutions all revolve around school, when it really doesn't have anything to do with schools.

Edit: Or boarding schools.

Because the prospect of forcibly separating kids from their parents based on the decisions of aloof and poorly managed bureaucrats is a political and ethical nightmare.

The solution revolves around schools because schools are considered a legitimate area of public concern while individuals' family-lives (barring some extreme circumstances) are not.

Also, this program provides job training and counseling services for the parents of the kids too.

Boarding schools don't work for poor communities because the kids are often relied upon to do work for the family. This can mean helping with the family enterprise or it can mean older kids taking care of younger kids, elderly family members, or just helping out around the house.

That's not at all what was being suggested.

I fail to see how fixing broken homes (which we don't have a ready-made solution for) is an easier solution than making school more helpful to kids (one solution to which is what this article is about), so I don't think the parent's argument is made in good faith.

who is going to fund that? wouldn't it be better to support the families as they are? help improve peoples lives instead of ripping families apart

> My findings suggest that on average, parents who are on the margin of incarceration are likely to reduce the amount of schooling their child attains if they instead remain in the household. This can be explained because the removal from the household of a violent parent or a negative role model can create a safer environment for a child (Johnson, 2008; Jaffee et al., 2003). Incarceration is also a mechanism that can limit the intergenerational transmission of violence, substance abuse, and crime to children. This result also relates to findings in other fields that conclude that See Kling (2006), Aizer and Doyle, 2013; Di Tella and Schargrodsky (2013), Mueller-Smith, 2015; and Bhuller et al., 2016, among others. For example, using data from Sweden, Hjalmarsson and Lindquist (2007) report significant father-son correlations in criminal activity that begin to appear between ages 7 and 12, and are 3 the positive effects of being raised by one’s parents depend on the quality of care they can provide (Jaffee et al., 2003).

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5664c583e4b0c0bb910ce...

The one study you’re citing here might suggest your summary statement if “parents on the margin of incarceration” was equivalent to “children from at-risk families”. But those are very different concepts.

You can have an at risk family just by being low-income. Certainly many low-income families are drawn into crime, but by no means all, or even a majority, of low-income families, have a parent who is at the margin of incarceration.

I think the only thing you can reasonably conclude from this study is that leniency in the judicial system towards parents just because they’re parents may be misguided.

They are overlapping. Moreover, "parents on the margin of incarceration" are an extremely significant group of parents for whom the discussion of "supporting families as is" vs. "ripping apart" is meaningful at all. For most poor families it's irrelevant as there's no grounds for dissolution.

I believe you can't deny that it's much more common and publicly acceptable to claim that such a criminal parent should be shown leniency when possible, because having no parent at all is horrible. Yet we have evidence to the contrary.

I concede that this may be inapplicable for some other cases (or at least that we have no proof that it would be applicable yet). However, I personally think that those "at risk families" where parents create an atmosphere that's detrimental for stydying (by being aggressive, anti-intellectual etc.) may well be worse than outright criminal ones, and I believe it'd be proven in due time.

For most non-violent crimes, this study was unconvincing (generally speaking I’d like to see incarceration alternatives for non-violent crime, why send people to crime school at tax-payer expense?).

I agree that for these groups, there’s an elevated chance that the parent is actively harming their family. I just don’t think it would be statistically justified to separate families that aren’t criminal.

And, of course, it would be deeply inhumane.

The poster you are responding to didn't even suggest a course of action. He mearly provided evidence that the "obvious" course of action might not be so obviously correct. You are free to (as another poster did) question the relevence, interperatation, or quality of the evidence, or provide other evidence or arguments to disagree with what the poster was presenting. But you should not attack someone for trying to have an evidence based discussion.

Even if he turns out to be completely wrong, figuring out how he is wrong will likely be far more enlightening than simply asserting that he is wrong on moral grounds.

I don't see how that isn't a suggestion of a course of action -- one that that is a blatant misuse of a study (with small effects only measured over a small time period) toward ideological ends, i.e. supporting the seizure of children of disadvantaged parents.

Moreover, I refuse to have an evidence-based discussion about whether certain people deserve human rights. That shifts the Overton window to present such ideas as acceptable, when in a civilized society they should not be.

Returning to the meta discussion. Let us trace the course of the conversation in question:

neuland: ...focus on building a better foster / adoption system and encouraging people to use it

house9-2: wouldn't it be better to support the families as they are? help improve peoples lives instead of ripping families apart

textor: For what it's worth, children from at-risk families achieve better education when the father ends up incarcerated. So we can absolutely make a case for "ripping families apart" and against supporting "families as they are".

The only proposal being made here is a voluntary foster/adoption system with encouragement. This is then framed as "ripping families apart". While this framing is arguably unfair, it is within the bounds of reason so, giving it the most charitable interpretation possible, textor responds to "ripping families apart" in the context in which it was introduced and provided evidence that keeping blood families together is not inherently the best course of action. To be clear, at this point the conversation is about how much we should be supporting voluntary adoption; and textor is arguing that the idea is not as inherantly bad as house9-2 seems to be assuming.

Stepping up a level of meta:

>I refuse to have an evidence-based discussion about whether certain people deserve human rights.

This is what political correctness looks like. Literally. You are interested in what is politically correct, evidence be dammed. Further, no one in this discussion has argued for denying people human rights. Even further, every society on the planet accepts that we can violate "human rights" in some sense for the greater good. Eg. prisons deny people their human right of freedom; taxes partially deny the right of personal property.

At risk of entering into the merits of the original discussion, leaving children in poor home environment arguably denies them their human rights, including their right to: education security of person, and food.

How do we balance these conflicting goals? With evidence to inform us what our options are and what effects they will have with regards to our goals.

Going meta again:

> one that that is a blatant misuse of a study ...

It is not a blatant misuse; it is extrapolating beyond the facts of the original study. The first step of evidence based inquiry is to work with the evidence you have. This informs the questions you can ask, so you can look for the evidence you want to have [0]. Once you've done that, you can move onto making the evidence you want to have [1]. Each step of this process provides a foundation to build the next step.

And yes, the process is not as simple as I lay out. You need theory crafting. And once your theory starts to develop holes, it may be time to revisit an earlier step until you have enough of a foundation to make the later steps worthwhile (either because your foundation is strong, is the lower tiers are short of relevant evidence)

> ... toward ideological ends,

Please take a moment to rethink who is arguing towards ideological ends. In my experience, it is generally the person arguing against the concept of evidence; not the one trying to ground themselves in evidence.

>That shifts the Overton window to present such ideas as acceptable

And what about the overton window you are moving towards. Where it is accatable to blatantly argue that evidence should be ignored. Where the very concept of introducing evidence is morally abhorant. Is that the window you want us to live in?

>when in a civilized society they should not be.

Are you arguing that the very concept of seperating children from their parents has no place in civilized society? Child Protective Services might disagree with you. They do place strong emphasis on keeping families together where possible; but they acknowledge that sometimes conditions are so bad that it is unacceptable to leave a child in that situation. Where is the line that determines what warrents CPS to remove children from their families? Again, evidence is the best approach to find it, unless you want to remove children unnecessarily while leaving others in bad situations that they would be far better off out of.

Going meta again:

The discussion is not simply two extremes. Even if we agreed that one (or both) extremes was morally untenable, by seriously exploring the benifits of it, we can look for ways to obtain those same benifits by other means: such as turning school into a 'second home', as this the content of the original article, or voluntary foster care with active involvment of the birth parents in a non-primary-guardian capacity.

[0] And by want to have, I mean the evidence that answers the questions you want to ask; not the evidence that supports the conclusion you want to reach

[1] Again, in the sense of the evidence that answers the questions you want answered.

Common Core specific: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bill-gates-pulle...

Or we could just try to fix th social problems that produce the toxic home environments rather than ripping apart the families that society has already failed.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle. That's not allowed here, and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of your politics; it's destructive of what this site exists for. Please stop doing that and use HN as intended, in the spirit of intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. We'd appreciate it.

Also, all too often accurate of their physical environment, and the two aren't completely unrelated.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1540200070126380... "Students at the late-starting school reported waking up over 1 hr later on school mornings and obtaining 50 min more sleep each night, less sleepiness, and fewer tardies than students at the early school."

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.3.3.62 "Results show that starting the school day 50 minutes later has a significant positive effect on student achievement, which is roughly equivalent to raising teacher quality by one standard deviation."

https://www.ohio.com/akron/news/education/i-promise-school-a...

>I Promise kids’ school days will start an hour later than their peers. They’ll also receive an additional hour after school every day called the “illumination period,” which will be a time for extra mentoring, studying or club activities.

Not only does the school day start an hour later, the extra time in the day comes from support of extracurricular activities.

Part of it is the assumption that kids can't get to school on their own. I was walking by myself to school when I was 6.

And in a lot of places the built environment is such that kids really can't get to school on their own. Schools are either far away, public transit isn't possible, or there just aren't sidewalks, crosswalks, or safe routes to walk.

Fortunately the densely built areas don't have most of those problems. As long as the neighborhood kids travel in groups they're fine. And the "I Promise" program gives them their own bicycles and free rides to and from school within 2 miles.

Nairobi would probably have questionable security compared to the US, but I’m guessing we are probably judged quite harsh here in US.

There was just this article other day where a woman faced jail time or massive fines because she left her “not-so-baby” baby in the car. My dad used to leave us in the car all the time with windows open.

I can’t do any of that. Mostly because I may end up in jail. That’s the reality of US.

-- Mr Holland's Opus

[1] http://www.feedingamerica.org/our-work/hunger-relief-program...

Also Ganztagsschulen (all-day schools) are getting very common (more than 60% and rising, see https://www.ganztagsschulen.org/de/19001.php). Kids stay there at until 4pm or so.

I don't know why you mention Germany in the first place, it's education system isn't top notch compared to Scandinavian schools.

NSPCC recommend 1:6 ratio for 4-8 year olds doing activities.

I'd say max 1:3 if you want to give parent level care engaging with a child in activities the child is choosing in a meaningful way.

That's a ridiculous generalization. Most developing countries have lower crime rates than some American inner cities. Heck, many developing countries are safer than some developed countries.

Finland is 21% less wealthy than America on a per capita basis.

Finland GDP per capita - $35,964.77

US GDP per capita - $45,759.46

-http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Finland/Uni...

This fact, combined with Finland's well-known social safety nets leads to the obvious conclusion that you would be hard pressed to find living conditions like those in the slums of Akron/Cleveland in Finland.

[1]https://data.oecd.org/finland.htm#profile-government [2]http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Finland/Uni...

Isn't it possible that Finland's well-known social safety net is at least partially responsible for the lower poverty, income inequality and violent crime rates?

I don't know this to be true or false, but is there any evidence of it? And is there any evidence that it has an effect on educational effectiveness? I wouldn't expect an effect; people learn to read, write and do math in K-12 all over the world.

- Maternity boxes - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternity_package

- New child leave - Expecting mothers in Finland can start their maternity leave seven weeks before their estimated due date. After that the government covers 16 additional weeks of paid leave through a maternity grant, regardless of whether the mother is a student, unemployed, or self-employed. The country also offers eight weeks of paid paternity leave. - https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-with-best-parental...

- Partial Care Leave - After a child turns three, parents may take partial care leave, meaning, you can work fewer hours per day or week in order to spend more time with your child — and though you can’t take partial care leave at the same time, both the father and the mother can take the partial care leave at a different times. This innovative leave lasts until the end of the child’s second school year. - https://inhabitat.com/inhabitots/finlands-family-benefits-pr...

- Universal Healthcare - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Finland

To be honest, you don't even have to go as far as the US, there are very similar issues in European banlieues and the likes. Long school hours used to be a typical postwar demand of progressive worker-rights movements, because it freed parents (especially women) to pursue career advancement and focused kids on academic achievement. I am a product of that sort of system, myself: from the age of 6 to the age of 12, I would be in school from 8:30am to 4:30pm, 5 days a week - plus an optional extra hour at both ends because my parents couldn't pick me up sooner. Unfortunately, after the social regression of the last 20 years, that kind of system is slowly disappearing in Europe too, and for all the bad reasons (cost-cutting).

Bad schools are throughout the United States, especially in poor areas, of which predominantly African-American regions make up only one part.

Also, while the parent's claim is a common excuse for inaction and lack of funding, I have yet to see any basis for it. While every case is different, we can all learn from others.

For example: With Children that have a rich home environment, plenty of interactions that stimulate them, keeping them at school longer may hamper development.

On the flip side you have an environment where this is not the case. Examples include socio-economic factors like parents/care givers working long hours.

I recently did research into this exact problem in South Africa. What are the factors that impact on education in communities that have socio-economic challenges?

The challenges are numerous and as this article says. The environment around the children just makes it extremely difficult for them to break out of the cycle of poverty.

These factors include:

being hungry,

crime,

lack of sanitation-this is a problem in South Africa they get sick more often then their counterparts in other areas.This results in them missing more school which puts them behind.,

Parents working long hours, travelling distances to get to work

Lack of resources in schools or support

There really is a multitude of problems each impacting the other creating a self perpetuating cycle of poverty.

Out of the research into the problems I developed a concept for a social enterprise that could solve some of these problems.

Trying to identify some funding sources as traditional vc will not be suitable. Maybe impact investors?

If the above sounds interesting, you are keen to explore leveraging education for social change or exploring alternative educational models mail me. Email is in profile

The entire point of the finnish model is that this doesn't happen, there is no homework and there is no suggestion or expectations of parental teaching. There is extensive support for both kids and their parents (including good free meals and teacher-provided tutoring), but all teaching is done by the teacher.

If that's the good public school of the area why wouldn't they?

Both those countries are also very prosperous and innovative. It seems the people or culture are what makes them do so well not the amount of school hours.

For all we know parents in those countries are far more supportive of their children. And may also be intelligent enough to assist their children with the homework. By intelligent I mean they are able to teach their children well I don't mean to be able to understand what a six year-old is learning (if not there is a far bigger problem!).

They had a really good after-school program for me and the other 30 or so kids whose parents had to work long hours with no flexibility. We were supervised by an adult to make sure we didn't kill each other but it was mostly about having free-time to do homework, read books, and play pick-up soccer or whatever.

Edit: To be honest, it's probably a better environment that we would have gotten at home, even with caring, attentive parents. We had access to the whole school library and our adult supervision actually knew our curricula so they could help us with the homework better than our parents could. Home computers weren't really a thing yet, so being able to use the shelf of encyclopedias was huge.

Where does an inner city African American kid go after school if both parents (or single parent) are working? Who pays for that?

In countries with adequate social services, this is less of an issue.

Of course, people haven't yet gotten the idea that we should try to accomplish sufficient learning with minimum classroom time.

There's really solid evidence that intellectual performance drops sharply long before 40h/week. Unless the "classroom time" you talk about includes a lot of off-time and non-butt-in-seat activities it seems you'll be deep into diminishing returns if not outright losing if you increase the length of the school day. My own memories of schools are that by late afternoon many students had stopped following altogether.

for example, school could open at 6am for parents who work early, but not start until 9am. the intermediary time could be nap time, unstuctured play, or guided exploration (gardening, science experiments, even animal husbandry in rural areas). between structured classroom time, they could have more breaks for more naps, play or exploration. school could end later so parents can pick them up after work, and have shorter and more frequent vacations so kids don't forget so much in-between.

you could even have morning or evening joint learning times, where parents join in to learn how to teach and encourage their kids (such programs seem to help break the cycle of poverty).

My kids (4th and 7th) attend a school with a year-round schedule, and we (kids and parents) love it:

* They are less stressed because there is more breaks throughout the year. Teachers seem less stressed, too, because they don't have to pack so much in.

* They retain more in the summer.

* Outside of academics: it's really nice to have the option to take longer vacations outside of spring break and summer break.

I'd love to see more schools move to it... 3 months off in summer seems very antiquated in hindsight.

But what about those of us who need the extra hands to help with the harvest!?

I know that the 3-month summer break stems from historical harvest/planting schedules... but when there's 20 inches of snow outside and the wind chill is -10 F, I'll take 3 months of summer vacay over 6 weeks of summer and 6 weeks of winter breaks any day.

I don't think the alternative is 6/6. I think it's more like 3 in winter, 3 in summer, 3 in spring, and 3 in fall. Or even more spread out.

I'd have to actually check though, been a while.

At some point, though, personal responsibility has to come into play. Having 5+ children when you have no resources... this is the true elephant in the room. It seems talking about it gets labels thrown around. I guess it's a conversation we can't have right now, though.

What, besides providing extra resources to underpriveleged children so they are not punished for their parents mistakes, can be done?

Are you suggesting we make their parents "pay" somehow? Or a program to prevent the parents from having 5+ kids when they don't have the resources?

There's a great scene from a Michael Winterbottom movie called Jude where --spoiler-- a child asks his parents why they had him if they could not afford him and his siblings. The child doesn't like the answer and ends up hanging himself and his siblings.

I don't know if there is a solution. People want to have kids, even if they can't - in my opinion - afford them. Some religions encourage having lots of children - it's a big thing in the catholic community, at least where I grew up.

Anecdote: My cousin is married to a catholic latina, he's already struggling to make ends meet taking care of the one kid they have. He lives with her grandparents and cousins in a tiny apartment in a low income neighborhood. There is no way I could talk him out of having another child, even though I know it's fiscally irresponsible in my opinion.

I think it's a conversation worth having but I just don't know how it can go anywhere, and I have struggled to come up with an answer that isn't just me being upset with the parents.

Due to the way government assistance is structured it encourages parents to 1) not get married, 2) have more kids, 3) not begin working if they don't already work.

If we changed government assistance to encourage parents getting married that would help reduce fatherlessness and all of the negatives that come with that.

If we changed government assistance to encourage parents to have less children they would be better able to take care of the ones they have.

If we changed government assistance to encourage parents to work it would reduce the number of people who grow up on government assistance and live on it their whole lives. This would have long term positive consequences.

That's not really a good idea. I know my godson's parents, and if they getting assistance was reliant on getting married, they would end up killing each other.

"If we changed government assistance to encourage parents to have less children they would be better able to take care of the ones they have."

How, exactly would you do this? And do it without punishing the kids by leaving their parents with even fewer resources?

I don't have as good of an answer for reducing children. It would probably be best to work on reducing the number of children by providing easier access to birth control.

You're completely and utterly ignoring the fact that raising children, especially multiple ones, is an extremely difficult task, even for two people. I know of very few people who would opt to do it themselves, even if the financial incentives to do so were worth it (they aren't even close).

I just want to point out there are a lot of poor women raising significant numbers of children. The woman next to my mom has 5-7 (it's hard to tell, and she just had a new one). They father (of some of them) is around a little, but mostly not around. And it looks like there are several fathers. Yes, raising children well is hard, but I would not describe what this woman does as difficult. Older kids are raising the younger ones, etc, etc.

So, I would definitely disagree with your assertion.

Out of curiosity, what have the sociologists concluded from China’s one-child policy?

You don't punish the problem away, you help people avoid it themselves.

Even better would be free birth-control medication or IUD's, as these put the birth control in the hands of women, while condoms especially might not be used in the face of social pressure.

Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here.

Unintended consequences. I believe it is generally accepted that the policies in the 70's led to the destruction (dismantling?) of the urban/poor family (yes, predominately African American).

Also, we've seen that this issue has significantly fueled the rise of people like our current POTUS.

It's a hard problem. I don't know what the solution is.

These problems existed long before then. For example, a famous and controversial report from 1965:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For...

The problems are largely due to systematic oppression of African-American people for generations, denying them access to adequate housing, education, income, credit, access to legal protections, and exposing them to risks of violence by the state and by white people.

Which policies of the 70s and 80s contributed and where is evidence of that? I ask because I try to be careful to distinguish between oft-repeated narratives and hypotheses with actual evidence.

Isn't that surprising; globally, number of children goes down with both prosperity and, even controlling for prosperity, strength of social safety nets (a common explanation for the latter being that with no or weak public safety net, your children are your old-age social safety net.)

The US has been proudly dismantling it's social safety net since the 1990s, and it already was notoriously weak for the developed world. Simultaneously, access to birth control and abortion is also under perennial assault, and even where access is maintained, well-funded shame campaigns are directed against both.

Strangely, the people backing all of those efforts are also the ones that complain the most about poor people having too many kids. And do so under the banner of “personal responsibility”, without any hint of intentional irony.

In other parts of society we'd say "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time."

I know this is a very unpopular opinion the world over right now, but: This applies loosely to sex as well (Don't have sex if you can't afford to have kids).

The fact is the child has no control over their home environment, and you're effectively damning them to a life of lower achievement based on the fact that their parents can't afford enough bedding. Is that really the kind of world you want to live in?

A parents lack of self/impulse control shouldn't be the child's responsibility. And we should strive as much as possible to prevent people from doing something that might cause that to be the case. Obviously once a child is born we need to work on making sure they have a bright and fulfilling future, but why not stop it at the source?

We are truly lost as a society.

because it's a ridiculous opinion that ignores human nature and provides awful advice.

It doesn't ignore human nature, it asks that you embrace your humanity. Until recently people would have argued that "unwanted advances" were "human nature." NO! As an adult human you're better than that. Control yourself.

I'm not really understanding why it provides "awful advice"? Why should your children bear the responsibilities of your lack of self control?

That is hardly the only problem. Society isn't at fault for all of the ills of low income areas.

This mentality is pervasive in the elementary and middle schools that my kids attend and it's unfortunate that adults haven't grown out of it. Thank you for your comment.

True leadership says that we need to work toward fixing the problem, while selfish ambition says, "not my fault, not my problem."

The sad reality is that in the other hand, thanks to the ever present tragedy of the commons, there are selfish people that take advantage of this thinking "someone will fix it, doesn't matter if I contribute to the problem for my own benefit".

[edit]typo: "doing" -> "going"

Our federal and local governments often make it harder for these people, and I'm all for fixing that (with my notion of what a "fix" looks like of course.) That's not the entire story though; how do you make fathers stick around? How do you solve for poverty? You don't, at least, we have never been able to do so, and now you get into philosophical territory about whether or not that's even possible.

My issue is that I have no idea how to fix it. Pumping more money into low income schools is not a cure-all. Don't get me wrong, it can help, but we have many cases where it made little to no difference because teachers and iPads can't do it all.

Anyways, that's a lot of rambling. My point is that I don't think the sentiment of "these people are oppressed" (which is what I assume most mean when they say it's "society's fault") is correct. It's far more complicated than that.

It actually doesn't. Everyone is a responsible as they're capable of being, given their genetics and their environment. If you're a very responsible person it's because you were fortunate to have your particular genetics and/or environment.

Some people are born into terrible environments but have the genetic luck to be highly responsible. Some people are born into great environments but have the genetic misfortune to be highly irresponsible.

No one chooses to be responsible or irresponsible.

The onus is on the genetically/environmentally lucky people to help the unlucky ones. There's absolutely no shame in being unlucky and no pride in being lucky. There isn't much the lucky people can do to improve genetics (yet) but there's a lot that can be done to improve environments.

Really? Everyone's level of responsibility is purely based on a genetic lottery and have nothing to do with one's own willpower?

edit: I can understand environment having an effect

And behavior isn't necessarily a static thing. This same person might read a good book (which would become part environment) which might move them to be more empathetic.

you seem to assume a lot about people "having 5+ children when you have no resources". even the idea of "no resources" has a number of in-built assumptions. what are they? do you work with populations of people like this? do you personally know people in this situation? are they truly hopeless?

certainly we can have an adult conversation, but don't beat around the bush. start the conversation with an earnest and reasoned argument, rather than an inscrutable lament.

My wife works in a low income school, largest and poorest in the area (a relatively large city.) Pumping more money in does not help. More after school problems does not help much. As far as academic achievement is concerned, these kids are completely stuck because they have what we would consider terrible situations at home.

Sometimes the parents just don't care, sometimes they just don't have the time (multiple jobs). More often than not there is only one parent at home. There's only so much a teacher/school can do if the parent is picking up the ball when the kid gets home.

I feel personally insulted when people say we shouldn't fund these afterschool programs because they don't feel they are working.

Having a good plan and the resources to execute is what works.

I know it sounds like I'm talking about a minor difference, but I think it's a lot bigger than that. You can add more money to a lot of the broken systems in the US. It helps, but it doesn't fix core problems and the systems are still incredibly inefficient.

BTW, one data point holds more value than zero.

[1]: http://review.chicagobooth.edu/behavioral-science/2018/artic...

What makes you say that's an actual problem that has a significant impact on American education?

Only if you're looking to blame something so you can feel smugly superior to them. If you're looking to actually provide services or improve conditions, that's not something worth talking about, because it doesn't change conditions now.

EDIT: And especially not when we're talking about Ohio, which is one of the states looking to outright ban abortion.

If there is a household with one parent, 5+ children, and not enough beds for them, the problem has occurred long before. One cannot blame the parent for "that day", but certainly the adult bears some responsibility for creating such a household. Having 5 kids without planning for beds, or income, or stability, is a decision SOMEONE made. It doesn't just "happen" like weather. There is human responsibility here.

In my view, "I Promise" is making up for those mistakes. Its a good thing, but let's be clear about why it's valuable.

Some things actually do just "happen", like weather.

This realization does not have to incur any sort of "well you deserve this outcome and sucks to be you" sort of logic, however. It is the parent's fault for creating the situation, but society can choose to bail one out for poor decision making.

My situation is probably drastically determined by some stranger 200 years ago who decided hopping in a pile of potatoes on barge headed for the US was a good idea. Thank you distant relative, that was a genius idea!

The point isn't to act like people aren't responsible for their own actions, of course they are. The point is to be realistic about how much of our situations are attributable to our personal decision making. People don't exist in small vacuums where they control everything.

Ohio (where this school is) lacks quality sex education and access to abortion. Ohio law doesn't require teaching at all about contraception. Ohio law allows parents to block their kids from having an abortion. Ohio law doesn't require teaching students about consent.

So there is a huge swath of people in Ohio schools who are totally uneducated about sex. Certainly SOME of the blame should go to the decision of the Ohio legislature to withhold information about birth control from students.

It's valuable because the American Right has been making a sustained and successful attack on the integrity, stability, and viability of poor families for at least three decades (and other powerful forces, whose modern incarnation is also part of the American Right, has been doing so to families of color, who are disproportionately poor, since America was colonized.)

It is true that addressing that cause is useful in thinking about more complete, comprehensive long-term solutions.

And you can be completely fine and have plenty of resources for all 5 kids until your wife gets cancer and you drop 1 million dollars of medical expenses into that money pit and then she dies anyway. Now you have 5 kids, single income, and way less than no money.

Strangers on the internet say it’s your fault.

Enjoy

Well I guess it’s your fault for having kids in a country with scant social safety nets. So you’re kinda right

Schools don't have to tell kids that birth control exists, let alone show them how to properly use a condom (which is a non-trivial skill: condoms are 98% effective when put on properly but 85% effective in real life)

Schools don't have to tell kids abortion exists. Even if kids did know, their parents can block them from getting an abortion. Also, getting an abortion requires traveling to a clinic, which often requires a car.

I mean, hell, I have an extremely stable job at an extremely stable company. And I still fear losing my job, and the effect that would have on my family!

If we just pray a little harder, people will stop having kids! Teenagers will stop having sex! Condoms will stop breaking!

Yes, perhaps the husband/wife that was the single/primary earner in the family happened to die and thus the family found itself in hard times.