Real-world problems are so much messier and more frustrating than the clean abstractions many of us choose to work with. But this is really meaningful work that should have concrete social benefit. We should all hope to do good as you have.
Do you think more user and stakeholder engagement would have helped the public accept your research? I have no idea if BPS has the bandwidth for supporting this type of engagement, but I imagine a lot more fears would be assuaged if parents could have some role in "co-creation" of the algorithm, rather than just accepting results.
A lot of research from the fields of citizen science, public understanding of technology, and user experience show that participatory design techniques can enhance acceptance. E.g., https://www.bmj.com/content/319/7212/774.short
I am sure more engagement is always a good thing! One of the tricky tasks of BPS is to make sure that this engagement is "balanced", i.e., everyone's voice is equally heard. And you can imagine how hard that may be in practice. For example, Boston Public Schools had this survey asking people for their preferences on the start times. But most of the answers from these survey came from schools with less economically disadvantaged families. One way to do it is to call the families directly or have a lot of local meetings. But it is still a complicated problem.
I think this project was useful because it started this debate and brought more information to the table. For example, I found that a lot of people did not know how much the start times affected the district costs (tens of millions of dollars every year), or how the schools times seemed to be unequitable.
And this Boston Globe article allows even more people to read about this issue and make their own opinion. Ultimately, a lot of people in the US want later start times for high schoolers. This work can provide some information about the ways to implement such a change, as well as the consequences.
That's a ~9 month notice?
Yes. This is what separates the pros from the not-pros in major systems design and operation. The transition plan is the major key to plan, not the algorithm (which plays the role of Shiny Object in this case).
It is lots harder, lots, to get smoothly from A to B than to simply big-bang B. It takes enormous attention to detail and thinking through of every angle, and when done well is a thing of wonder.
I think in this case your team was not well served by how it was tasked.
Thanks again for responding, and for your team's efforts in the design.
Can you talk about how you made this tradeoff? There's research that suggests high schoolers do better with later start times. But is there any research that backs up doing it at the expense of younger students? ie, is it possible that all students benefit from a later start time?
> Research findings suggest that changes occur in the “biological clock” during adolescence. As a result, teenagers have a natural tendency to fall asleep later and to wake up later. This is referred to as sleep phase delay.
> A correlation was found between subjects' melatonin secretion and their stage of development. The results indicated that melatonin onset occurs later in adolescents, making it difficult for them to go to sleep earlier at night. At the same time, the hormone “turns off” later in the morning, making it harder for them to wake up early (Carskadon et al., 1998, 1999).
It's like things are happening to the body during puberty.
Presumably, you are already doing that, by limiting the start/end times from 7am-10am, or something similar. In this case, instead of a global time restraint, there would be a local time change restraint +-1 hour for each school.
Also, it is an algorithmic challenge to find a "path" of good solutions that go step by step to the good final start times.
In my mind, this alleviates a lot of the “would have to change jobs this year” concerns, because the people making changes would ALREADY be making bigger changes (starting to take their kids to school), and the most extreme schedule changes would be deferred until the children on the existing schedule had aged out of that grade’s current schedule.
(Done enough optimization modeling to know this isn’t an easy path... but seems like it has some potential.)
Similarly, (maybe this was just the article dumbing down reality a bit, but it sounded like the transit expenditure vs parent happiness units were somewhat fungible. Any possibility of offsetting a bit of upfront expenditure with future savings of the more efficient (say from year N/2 onward) future state?
Another way to ask this question is: were there volunteer transit, ride share, or pre/post-school care incentives included in your algorithm, to balance the potential negative impacts to parents?
I guess volunteer transit is always a positive thing for the parents and the districts. The algorithm was just trying to fulfil the objectives given by the district (costs, later students, fairness...). The compensations are what should happen after the algorithm: what do you do with the saved money, how do you help the most impacted parents? These negative effects were expected to disappear with the years as new parents start to choose the schools after the start times have changed (and therefore choose schools that can accomodate their schedules).
[1] http://web.stanford.edu/~niederle/SFUSDBoardPresentationFeb....
Now I am sure we have done some communications mistakes. For example the algorithm does not "decide" the start times. You just give it a (long) list of preferences and objectives (e.g., less HS students starting early, more fairness across the population...), and then the algorithm generates thousands of solution that try to satisfy these objectives. Solutions are carefully reviewed, and the objective updated if we think we can do better.
So in the end, this research is just a tool, it does not solve all the problems, and in the end people still need to find a way to agree. Hopefully they have a little bit more information to do so!
So, was the real motivation here one of efficiency and cost-savings then?
That is a clear thorn they might have wanted to solve.
Is the added sleep beneficial to students, all other things equal? I'm sure it is, but was the real motivation a cost savings and the sleep deprivation a nice cover for the real motivation?
There has been a lot of research on high school students lack of sleep, and it seems that the school times do have a important impact on the students :
BPS is pretty forward-thinking, and lots of research has shown that high school students are better off with later start times. Don't dismiss this as the actual motivation.
Maybe some will remember this if money for student transportation comes up to ballot.
http://mitsloan.mit.edu/actionlearning/labs/a-lab.php
My company had pitched the students of the A-Lab a couple years ago, but unfortunately we didn't get picked. BPS was one of the others pitching the students at the same event.
In the meantime, there is some available information that is listed on my website: https://sebmart.github.io/media.html
I would argue that although it could have been more transparent, it is way more transparent than the status quo, where each individual school can try to pressure the district to get the time that they want, without considering the "big picture" and the impact on other schools/neighborhood/budget.
All decisions were made after a lot of group conversations with parents/staff/principals... But I am sure some things could have been better, in the end we were just the grad students trying to help :)
That also completely ignores the fact that what you propose would deepen the existing structural inequalities for students, and presupposes that schools are and should remain stratified by income. I vehemently disagree with this unstated premise.
What you are suggesting would be politically very complicated to implement. Also, one need to take into account the characteristics of the district:
https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/cms/lib/MA01906464/Centr...
66% of the students are economically disadvantaged.
Additionally, a lot of schools have both "rich" and "poor" parents, but still need to have a unique time.
Adding money into the mix, when there's a large difference of means between families, adds a level of incentive that shouldn't be there -- one that has nothing to do with the district's goal of providing an equal education to all its students.
When the district looks at the results at the end of the year, and all the poor kids have poor grades/attendance because they were all in the worst time slots, they can't say "well, at least the parents are slightly richer because of this, from the secondary trading market." Rather, based on the objectives they are concerned with, they may have just made inequality even worse.
</snark>
... I also took economics in college. To me it seems obvious that calling a fanciful solution like this "obvious" except for "human pride" is woefully inaccurate.
Distasteful as the parent's comment might be, they are talking about Pareto optimality - finding a situation where both parties would agree it's an improvement.
How so?
A happily paid worker with their own free time isn't likely to revolt and kill you. Even an unhappy worker who hates you will just quit. Is your calculations forgetting to count such costs?
And a machine that replaces a person is far far more efficient. So machines backed by human operators/fixers/etc. end up outperforming humans, and free humans will have far better education possibilities.
>From an economics standpoint there is no point to the elderly they should be killed off once they are no longer viable laborers.
You are clearly zeroing out the cost of having all non-elderly realize this will be their fate as well. That seem an arbitrary cost to zero out and makes the results of your calculations unusable.
>Children are only useful if they show potential slave labor ability
A free child that is educated has a much higher return on investment on average.
>otherwise should be killed in adolescence if there are obvious shortcomings
Once again completely ignoring the costs of taking such a course of action.
I'm not really having any confidence in your models.
Historically, slave revolts are extremely rare. Most slave populations are deliberately beaten into a state of learned helplessness so that they don't even believe that revolt will get anywhere. Or they are given just enough such that there is something to lose (besides their lives) in revolt, and the natural human aversion to loss kicks in. Many slave economies in human history have relied on this - see ancient Rome as an example.
> A free child that is educated has a much higher return on investment on average.
But that ROI takes 20 years to be realized. How many people, really, are going to forgo ROI today for bigger ROI two decades from now? There is a reason why on a normal yield curve, loans with long term maturity have higher rates of interest - psychologically, we are biased towards present income vs future income.
> your models.
Human history and empirical human psychology?
That's (part of) what governments are good for! They are great for making decisions in situations where larger investments over longer time periods pay good dividends.
( Book I chapter 8 of the wealth of nations seemed to have some information that might be pertinent: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations; Direct link: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...) .
At one point he discusses the wages in North America, and how high wages seem to correlate to rapid economic and demographic growth. That does seem to mean he doesn't quite agree with you on what is more efficient.
In other places, Adam Smith seems to think slavery is rather inefficient. One argument he presents is: who do you trust more with the upkeep of a person? * a master who may have many priorities; * or the person themselves, where their upkeep is by necessity their own highest priority?
Skim it for yourself and see what you can find!
Well, probably not slavish enough for your conscience.
In the past 100 years, it seems that individual freedom and economic prosperity of the society as a whole correlate. It is hard to tell what is the cause and what the effect. But it pretty obvious that - on average - less free societies are not very successful economically.
With respect to the elderly, if I would be killed on retiring, my incentive to work hard and generate wealth until then would probably not be very high. I think that - not only, but also from an economical point of view - it is much better to let people pay into a pension scheme instead.
And all economic experts agree that a robust legal system is much better for economy than murder, war, and violence.
Utility maximization is a core concept in economics. The definition of what utility is can vary. Utility isn't equivalent to money. Anything quantifiable - and you can quantify qualitative things if you give them some dimensions - might be input to your utility function. What economics does is gives you tools to reason about the systemic effects of decisions that balance competing utilities, and how to apportion scarce resources.
What you are really doing is just parroting what laissez-faire trickle down econ people... oh wait, by your definition they wouldn't be commenting on something so broad, macro, sociological, anyway they parrot that junk as if the redirection of wealth to the very few is some mathematical law, as if the pirate distribution game theory actually applies to a massively complex chaotic system like the real world.
Right.