What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity with an algorithm

Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by lacker on Monday September 24, 2018 @12:52PM (#18059213)

This article doesn't mention it, but the biggest problem with Boston Public Schools transportation is that students don't actually attend the school in their neighborhood. The school district assigns you a school that may not be located particularly near you, in order to increase school diversity. So a lot of this transportation time and expense is taken up to shuffle students around to far-away schools.

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Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by Balgair on Monday September 24, 2018 @02:10PM (#18059896)

Denver Public Schools have a 'choice' model that works alright[0]. You can opt, for free and without restrictions, to go to another school other than the neighborhood one (you are automatically put in the 'closest' as a placeholder). Generally, there is no busing with DPS, as school kids ride free on public transit. The Denver School of Science and Technology[1] is a 'charter/public' portion of DPS that regularly pull from across the metro, mostly via public transit. There are many other issues with DPS, but the 'choice' model they use, along with the assistance of public transit, generally works pretty well.

[0]http://schoolchoice.dpsk12.org/schoolchoice-round-1/

[1]

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Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by bobthepanda on Tuesday September 25, 2018 @02:55PM (#18069326)

New York City also uses citywide school choice for high school. School choice really doesn't scale up. You end up getting a yellow-pages sized book of schools (and each page is a single school!), you trek across the city to view schools, there are entire forums and such dedicated to navigating the process. It's like the college application process in miniature.

We also generally do not use busing, but New York City is so large and congested that you start asking a lot of kids. I went to a school that was 90 minutes away by public transit on a good day, so I'd wake up at 5am to make an 8am start time.

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Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by Balgair on Tuesday September 25, 2018 @04:15PM (#18070105)

> I'd wake up at 5am to make an 8am start time

Oh man! A friend in HS had swim practice before school and woke up at ~4:30 for it 3 days a week. On each of those days, she was just a zombo. I can't even imagine doing that every year. Do you think it was worth it for you?

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Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by bobthepanda on Tuesday September 25, 2018 @04:34PM (#18070261)

The other choices, unfortunately, weren't much better. New York calibrates its schools to match up with parent commutes so that kids leave at the same time or earlier, and these parents in my neighborhood often had the same 90+ minute commute. As an example, there was a much closer in school that was 45 minutes away by bus, but they started at 7am, so it would've required an earlier wakeup time.

There was a school within walking distance, but the graduation rates weren't too hot. The nice thing about school choice, in theory, is that it doesn't cause neighborhoods to gentrify or disintegrate due to the quality of the local school. But if you scale it up to a million kids you basically make it so that only people with time and money can really game the system. I wouldn't consider myself particularly blessed, but I definitely was not the worst off person.

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Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by kenjackson on Monday September 24, 2018 @01:31PM (#18059583)

Here in Seattle we used to do the same as Boston, but a Supreme Court case where a white student claimed discrimination due to the process used to do school assignment ended it. Now we have neighborhood schools again. Although even with the neighborhood schools there is a lot of angst since often more affluent neighborhoods will push their way into a better performing school, even to the detriment of neighbors who are closer to said school.

Coincidentally, Seattle, two years ago, also implemented later HS start times and earlier elementary start times. Our elementary child went from a 9:30am to 7:50am start time. It sucks and there was some outcry, but like so much in Seattle -- there was mostly just a collective shrug.

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Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by dcole2929 on Monday September 24, 2018 @06:00PM (#18061850)

I don't know if I'd really characterize that as a problem though. I did a lot of research for this a while back and a lot of research has been done that shows demonstratively, one of the best way to dramatically improve educational outcomes is integration (both economically and racially, though the two are many times closely linked). And because of many factors that almost always involves bussing students to schools in different neighborhoods than the ones they live in. Despite the narrative that bussing in the 70's and 80's failed the honest truth is that all the studies showed that it worked until the more affluent white parents fled to the suburbs (for good and bad reasons). Integration of schools is inconvenient and it takes time for everyone involved to adjust but the research is pretty clear that it is overall a good thing for pretty much all parties involved.

http://school-diversity.org/pdf/DiversityResearchBriefNo1.pd...

https://occrl.illinois.edu/files/Projects/ccr/Library/Newton...

http://www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?Contentid=15664

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/19/446085513/the-evi...

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Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by lacker on Monday September 24, 2018 @06:10PM (#18061912)

the more affluent white parents fled to the suburbs

it is overall a good thing for pretty much all parties

These two statements conflict with each other. If it was overall a good thing for all parties, you would not have people fleeing to good school districts.

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Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by pas on Wednesday September 26, 2018 @06:01AM (#18074396)

There could have been other factors in the decisions of those. Suburbanisation probably happens with or without shuffling kids.

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Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by lodrein on Monday September 24, 2018 @01:02PM (#18059310)

Yes, Boston Public Schools has the second highest transportation budget per student in the country as a result. If I remember correctly it is ~25$/student/day. But one could argue this is the price to pay for increased diversity.

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Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by dopamean on Monday September 24, 2018 @01:40PM (#18059664)

Is that $25 per student overall or per student who uses school provided transportation services? If it's the former that is about a quarter billion in transportation costs annually.

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Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by lodrein on Monday September 24, 2018 @01:52PM (#18059772)

per transported students. The transportation cost are more than 100 million per year.

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Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by iguy on Monday September 24, 2018 @02:00PM (#18059817)

Do you know off-hand how this compares to the rest of the system? I mean non-student public transport... maybe just busses? Per-rider and overall, ideally.

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Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by ghaff on Monday September 24, 2018 @02:58PM (#18060346)

These are the figures from 2015 [1] Subway/bus fares are $2.75 each way (obviously lower with a monthly pass) which covers about 30% of the total so the cost per rider is ~$8 per trip. The overall figures include commuter rail but I'm just assuming that doesn't change the percentage covered by fares all that much. The MBTA carries about 1 million riders per weekday.

[1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/03/02/how-mbta-makes-...

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Re:What happened when Boston Public Schools tried for equity... by iguy on Monday September 24, 2018 @03:57PM (#18060899)

Awesome, thanks. So maybe around 2/3 the cost per trip, compared to school busses, which seems plausible.

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