Re:Why are there so few black people in STEM?
by opportune on Sunday June 14, 2020 @10:43PM
(#23523304)
No amount of funding towards schools can make up for a home life or general environment that's not conducive towards education. I wish we in the US looked at solutions beyond throwing money at it (or at least, in a different way) because it obviously doesn't work.
Re:Why are there so few black people in STEM?
by ReticentVole on Monday June 15, 2020 @10:44AM
(#23527834)
End the drug war, legalise marijuana and decriminalise everything else, send Black men to get married and raise their kids instead of sitting in Jail.
Only 36% of Black kids live with married parents: https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/FT_18...
Stop giving additional welfare to single-parent households.
Re:Why are there so few black people in STEM?
by tuatoru on Monday June 15, 2020 @12:18AM
(#23523762)
Yeah, it depends where the money is thrown.
Experiments in Brazil and India suggest that the really simple, dumb solution works best: give poor people money, no strings attached.
Sure, they'll waste some of it. But not all that much, maybe a third. To economists, that's very effective targeting.
(If you demand perfect targeting and use of funds here, why not with private-sector investments (67%-90% loss rate) or 'normal' government investments (50% - 75% losses)? )
But India and Brazil still don't have great social mobility. Most studies in that area are still pretty young and it's too early to say if that can increase social mobility in the long term.
Baltimore City has less than half the local education funding of Anne Arundel (a predominantly white, upper middle class county containing Annapolis and the Naval Academy). But state and federal funding more than makes up for it. Baltimore gets $12,200 per student from the state, versus $5,300 for Anne Arundel. And it gets an extra almost $1,000 from the federal government. In all, Baltimore getting about $3,000 more per student than Anne Arundel. Allegheny County, a mostly white but lower income county, also gets significantly more funding. Note that cost of living is also higher in Anne Arundel than the other two places.
In most states, poorer districts actually get slightly more funding than richer districts: https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-....