For those who think this is hyperbole, see [1] for a mathematician taking down the framework.

California's new standards were written by folks without a background in math nor neuroscience. They misquote neuroscience papers [2] while making mathematical mistakes in their policy paper.

[1] https://sites.google.com/view/publiccommentsonthecmf/?ref=st...

[2] https://drive.google.com/file/d/17O123ENTxvZOjXTnOMNRDtHQAOj...

I've gone around in a few circles thinking about this. My kids curriculum is really different from when I was a kid. They've almost completely dropped grammer, spelling and cursive writing. They're teaching a lot more problem solving techniques in math. Some of this surprised me, but some of it I realized was actually pretty great.

I think there's some really necessary attempts to go back to first principles on education. Some steps will be missteps but I'm really happy some people are willing to take some risky efforts. Do kids take math class because they need to learn math? "But teacher, I'll always have a calculator". Damn right. A calculator and Wikipedia and chatgpt. Remembering the quadratic equation is literally useless knowledge to retain. "More math" isn't an end goal to anything aside from the 0.01% who will pursue math as a career and keep the wiki pages up to date for the rest of us.

So what the hell should kids be learning? Good question. I'm not really sure but I'm open minded about the answer.

> "But teacher, I'll always have a calculator". Damn right. A calculator and Wikipedia and chatgpt. Remembering the quadratic equation is literally useless knowledge to retain.

Remembering the quadratic equation allowed you to make an educated argument against its usefulness, so it isn't "literally" useless (badum bum psh).

While I agree that there is tons of room for improvement on how/what/when we teach students different subjects, I think we should be very cautious about offloading subjects to tools before students have a firm grasp of the material.

In my opinion, one of the greatest benefits of deeply engaging with a variety of subjects is getting into the habit of asking "why". I think this is important because it encourages students to dig deeper. I can only speak for myself, but the times I have learned the most is by far when I took an interest and started asking how and why things work.

Imo, it's okay that students engage with complex subjects that they will never use, if for no other reason than that it will provide ample opportunities for them to ask why. Perhaps somewhere along the way they will discover that they are in fact in the small minority who will pursue math as a career.

>"But teacher, I'll always have a calculator". Damn right. A calculator and Wikipedia and chatgpt. Remembering the quadratic equation is literally useless knowledge to retain.

Memorizing the exact formula of the Quadratic equation may not be necessary - knowing that the quadratic equation exists and what it is does is the useful part. Even more useful is to recognize a problem and realize the quadratic equation applies to it.

Trigonometry or calculus are better examples of this. Memorizing every formula and then promptly forgetting about them 5 minutes after passing the test is not useful but learning the concepts and the fundamentals and how they apply to solving a whole slew of problems is the useful part. Algebra is extremely abstract (especially if you are a school pupil - "I'll never use this in the real world") but understanding it unlocks a whole lot of higher level conceptual ways of thinking and approaching problem solving.

You'll have far better success using a calculator (or chat GPT or Wikipedia) if you know not just what to punch into it by the why as well.

More useful yet is knowing how to derive the quadratic equation as was in my curriculum (small public highschool in Canada).

>"More math" isn't an end goal to anything aside from the 0.01% who will pursue math as a career and keep the wiki pages up to date for the rest of us.

I feel like that's the point of primary education. It's a sample board of various topics and subjects to help you figure out what you like. I sure as hell wouldn't be in my career if I wasn't forced to struggle on the quadratic formula for years on end. Meanwhile, I'm sure some bio/chem high schoolers could run circles around me for how much of that I retained. It depends on the student.

>So what the hell should kids be learning?

we'll certainly never come to a consensus, but I think the primary 4 subjects taught are a fine enough base. You should understand basic arithmetic and how to speak your country's native language. You should have some underlying basis of science and how to approach experimenting as well as an understanding of the history of your country and a general world history. so general K-8 education feels fine.

it's secondary education that has you really go out in the weeds. If I could choose classes there the way I could choose in college, I'm not sure if I would have given my self 4 years of english and history, nor bothered with further biology and chemistry. Hell, the 1 quarter of english and bio/chem I was forced to take in college felt like too much (I remember literally nothing about those classes). Things by high school become less strictly defined in my eyes.

Oh my, I read your first link in its entirety and, "Yikes."

The Public comment #5 section regarding chapter 12 (which covers homework and assessments) was especially shocking.

Chapter 12 in the 2005 version of the CMF was 5 pages long. The same chapter in the current draft is 70 pages long, almost entirely due to a slew of opinions against homework and other testing practices.

The entire CMF draft was (and still is even after corrections) littered with improper citations that at times entirely contradict the opinion it's meant to support.

I find it the height of irony that a group of educators arguing against homework appear to have... not done their homework.

This brings to the forefront a concern I haven't seen mentioned much in this thread: let's put aside how such a policy might affect any particular student's performance in school... what kind of adults will this policy create?

Imo, policy like this will create adults who put in about as much effort into their work as the 20 people employed to oversee this iteration of the CMF. A single professor did their work for them, and even with his help they still haven't fixed it.

"Oh, you got an F on your assignment? No problem! Just turn it in again next week and I'll give you an A."

To be clear, the specific policy I just mentioned really is part of the document - allowing students to always redo work for a better grade.

That reinforces that idea that it's okay to do a half-ass job because you can always "fix it later". In the real world however, poor decisions can have devastating effects the very first time, and there might not be a chance for a "do-over".

Homework also normalizes the idea that things will be expected from you in this world if you are to be employed. It's not only about engaging with the material, it's also about practicing being a hard-working and fastidious human. Our grandparents might have said that doing homework "builds character", and I would agree with them.

Finally, the idea presented by the CMF draft that homework just isn't very useful is absolutely wrong. Case in point, piano practice. The only way to get better at playing the piano is to practice. The difference between someone who pokes around on the keyboard every blue moon and someone who practices daily is stark.

Some might argue that becoming proficient at playing a piano is inherently different than becoming proficient at math, to those folks I would ask: How is training muscle memory and engaging with new material so different between the two?

> To be clear, the specific policy I just mentioned really is part of the document - allowing students to always redo work for a better grade.

If you've learned the material and fulfill the requirements, and the course is still ongoing, why should it matter you were late? Are you teaching the subject, or is [literally every course all the time] really mostly a study in time management? (hint: it's not for the student's sake, it's about managing teacher time and resources. Which is obviously necessary, but not otherwise positive)

> That reinforces that idea that it's okay to do a half-ass job because you can always "fix it later".

I'd say it might equally mean not pointlessly throwing in the towel and phoning the rest in just because you performed poorly early on and (rightly) feel like it doesn't matter anymore.

> In the real world however, poor decisions can have devastating effects the very first time, and there might not be a chance for a "do-over".

Sure. Exceedingly rarely though, compared to school.

> Homework also normalizes the idea that things will be expected from you in this world if you are to be employed.

Most jobs don't involve additional work after you've finished work. Nor constant artificial deadlines that never let you truly relax. Constant stress is bad for humans, it's not something that hardens you, and pointlessly subjecting people to it "just because" is not just useless but counter productive, because you get blunted. It's important to have something extra to tap into when shit truly hits the fan and it's time to step up, but the contrast gets lost if it's a neverending blur.

> If you've learned the material and fulfill the requirements, and the course is still ongoing, why should it matter you were late?

The same reason it matters if you are late meeting deadlines for a customer or your job, because there are consequences. Turning in a paper late to school may not cause you to lose a client or get fired, but the fact remains that something was required of you and it was not delivered. Imo, students should be thankful to learn from their teachers that "yes, there really are consequences when you don't perform in your role as expected", as opposed to learning this from their (probably previous) employer.

> I'd say it might equally mean not pointlessly throwing in the towel and phoning the rest in just because you performed poorly early on and (rightly) feel like it doesn't matter anymore.

The fact that some people give up because they weren't able to meet the requirements of a class does not justify lowering the requirements of that class for everyone else. You're attending a class, the class isn't attending to you. If that's unacceptable then it sounds like you're probably in the wrong class.

> Sure. Exceedingly rarely though, compared to school.

Right. Which is why it is valuable to learn about consequences while you're still "practicing" in school.

> Most jobs don't involve additional work after you've finished work.

You don't have "most jobs", so that statement is not based on evidence. Moreover, I didn't suggest that jobs require taking home work, simply that homework for students reinforces the idea that work will be expected from them. You mention how stress negatively affect people... can you imagine how stressed out a person who has never done homework in their life would be if they were suddenly given a huge workload? Contrast this with someone who is used to spending hours on end studying, for whom the task would likely seem much more surmountable.

Work deadlines, at least where I've worked and with some exceptions for rare hard deadlines, are rather more fluid. In the sense that they might have to be pushed, or the work adjusted, because they were too optimistic or circumstances change. Because your boss knows you know what you're doing and aren't talking out of your ass when you give them a heads up things are not on track. More importantly they're there for some legit reason, not "so you'll learn the importance of hardship". Getting stuff done and having an impact is motivating enough, producing worthless schoolwork of no use to anyone is not.

> lowering the requirements

They're the same requirements, just with a different, looser, time constraint. You couldn't get a better grade without actually learning the material. Performing tasks on time, managing time, etc is incredibly important, obviously. But in an ideal world with more resources there'd be a time and a place for practicing it, reasoning about it, actually studying it, not this "absorbing it by osmosis from a constant grind" where it's all artificial. Work smart, not hard.

Consequences are still there, you still have to perform, it'd just be less time constrained.

Why would a person who has never done homework in their life be more stressed over a huge workload? They're used to working all day, _in school_. Just like how they'll be working all day, at work. Obviously I'm not talking about not having assignments/papers to write (preferably with at least some time allotted during school hours), but the kind of busywork that is the bulk of homework.

It's not fair to other students if there's a no-penalty late policy. If some students turn in their work on time, and others turn it in late, it's not fair to the former if the latter have zero penalty. The reason for this is that the students who turned in the homework on time had to make other sacrifices in order to do so. For example, they might have studied less for a test in another class in order to turn in their homework on time.

This unfairness exists unless all teachers allow for late submission for all assignments and re-taking of all tests. If this were allowed, then students would all take tests multiple times, so they could cram for the specific questions on the test (not the entirety of the course materials — the rest of the material could be forgotten/never learned).

Right but that'd actually be one of the benefits. Getting perfect grades in high school for me without spending all my time doing school stuff was a mad juggling of focusing/neglecting classes on rotation, always ensuring to get an A by the smallest possible margin, knowing how to properly front-load and have each teacher thinking of me as the kind of guy who gets an A, so I could get away with performing poorly at times before making a comeback.

A weird dance I happened to be good at, but not a skill to cherish or practice _because real work is rarely overloaded enough to make it necessary_

School should be about learning, not whatever meta bullshit the above was, at least for me.

Having more flexibility over pace would go a long way I think.

It's almost like the reason they argue against homework isn't for logical nor evidence based reason but underlying personal biases....

Hmm... what could a group who enjoy 1/4 of the year off from their primary duties and arguably have never been outside the school system (12 to Post secondary and back to k-12, nothing between but fun) have as an underlying incentive?

It couldn't be that they just don't want to mark the work, could it? It couldn't be that they expect children to do work after an 8 hr work day, where the teachers waste most of the time either engaged pointless self aggrandizing and power games or otherwise self involved, but refuse to hold themselves to the same standards could it?

Nah, that couldn't be it... never... /s

>That reinforces that idea that it's okay to do a half-ass job because you can always "fix it later". In the real world however, poor decisions can have devastating effects the very first time, and there might not be a chance for a "do-over".

I feel that's a much more philosophical POV than you let on. But let's digress from that argument of redemption and reparations for now.

While there are certainly some careers where you don't get do-overs, I see the other extreme happening more with the current state of mind; they realize that they are out of time, feel like they can't extend deadlines, so they just say "fuck it", throw out some sloppily put together report or attend a meeting without the knowledge necessary, take their D in stride and move on.

You can't always delay in life either, but I think as a society we at least shouldn't shame when certain non-mission critical aspects of work need more time to cook (be it in the project or the people involved).

> I feel that's a much more philosophical POV than you let on. But let's digress from that argument of redemption and reparations for now.

It's not at all clear to me what you are trying to communicate in the paragraph I quoted above.

> While there are certainly some careers where you don't get do-overs, I see the other extreme happening more with the current state of mind; they realize that they are out of time, feel like they can't extend deadlines, so they just say "fuck it", throw out some sloppily put together report or attend a meeting without the knowledge necessary, take their D in stride and move on.

I'm also confused about what you are communicating here. Is this a simple lamentation, or are you trying to make an argument?

From the article:

> It does not matter if they grow up in foster care or a two-parent family.

But it does! Very much. I just don't understand why the US tries everything other than fixing the most glaring cause. Lots of problems can be fixed by encouraging and aggrandizing stable two-parent families instead of getting schools and teachers to fill proxy parenting roles.

Something about patriarchy or white supremacy or something.

My mothers been an educator for many many years now. She says the single biggest factor is parental involvement.

But hey convincing both parents to be gone all day and slave away for the corporate masters was smashing the patriarchy and breaking the glass ceiling or something, and the fact that it doubled the labor pool causing supply to go up is entirely unrelated to the fact that wages started stagnating at the same point.

But really what use is a family anyway, I mean who needs that when you can have a "community" on a platform that is dedicated to "content" for you to "consume".

Parental involvement works when there's just one parent, too, it's just harder on the single parent because they have to work so hard to be able to provide for themselves and their child; and, it only gets worse with the struggles the everyday person experiences - lower relative wages, etc.

> parental involvement

How does that work for black mother of three kids on social programs, whose biological father is incarcerated/nowhere to be found around?

This is the typical story of low achievement/high crime kids in public school system.

You realize that even by applying your question to a sad scenario you are still asking the basic question, "How does parental involvement work," right?

Parental involvement "works" by taking an active interest in your child's activities and development. That's it.

You cant magically start “involving” absent parents thats what I wanted to say, problem is much deeper than “oh, it is just parental involvement”

Nor can a child be raised without at least one parental type figure. There is no magic involved.

“Parental involvement” as a term is misleading because it assumes there are parents and you just need to start involving them ( like Asian tiger moms are super involved, now lets just make other parents befome as involved).

More correct term would be “dysfunctional family”. Family where one parent is incarcerated, another is drug addict etc etc.

This term more correctly describes situation that kid is alone in his education aspirations and needs state assistance

You speak of parents who have landed themselves in prison and become addicted to drugs as if they have no responsibility for these things. "Parental involvement" will always be waiting right where they left it if ever those parents can manage to stop doing drugs or going to prison.

My problem with this term is it centers around parents, regardless of whether they are alive/free/sober/gainfully employed/mentally stable/etc.

But kids are going to school today and now, they cannot wait for their parents to get out of jail and get sober. These kids need solution asap and waiting for their parents to show up and get involved is a waste of time - and is a primary reason why US is failing kids from low SES and maintaining pipeline of people from hood to jail.

> My problem with this term is it centers around parents

To be fair, the term in question is "parental involvement". It's understandable that some might be confused about why the "parental" part of the phrase is offensive.

The children who *are* in a single-parent household do also need to be helped, and demanding that their parents "duh, get married, forehead" doesn't help the individuals that need that help. And there are a lot of single parents who will never want to have a significant other ever again for a multitude of entirely valid reasons.

I find it absolutely bizarre that you framed this situation as other people "demanding" that parents get married. Since when is opining that two parent households are beneficial for a child's development the equivalent of some dystopian society in which marriage is a forced affair?

It's hard to think of a less charitable interpretation. It makes me wonder, what is your point?

In my opinion, much of this comes down to blind empathy. Folks are more worried about hurting people’s feelings than about their life outcomes. They would rather “lean in” and embrace the huge rise in single parent households than push back, even with the knowledge that these social changes have resulted in millions of children living in poverty who otherwise would not have! It’s absolutely bananas.

What the hell does pushing back on single-family homes look like? Christian fundamentalism? Think about this from a perspective of getting positive outcomes from the actual world that exists. Divorce happens. Unplanned pregnancy happens. Family planning is being actively dismantled by the same people who are pushing for increased privatization of schooling and decreases in social safety nets. I don't think that's a coincidence.

I think being overly sympathetic is infinitely preferable to merciless cynicism. Removing poverty is also much more preferable than, what?, making it harder to divorce? We could probably makes huge strides in education outcomes by adopting universal healthcare and free school lunches so single parents aren't so burdened.

Stop incentivizing single parenthood. This reestablishes social norms around staying together as they (the parents) need each other. Trying to approximate that via social engineering and creating clients of the state has failed for 50+ years.

No one has ever incentivized single parenthood. We offered protection for children born into difficult circumstances not of their making.

There’s 0 evidence of that. What has happened is the lower class family structure has been decimated as generation after generation of mother becomes a client of the state and dads aren’t around because they aren’t actually needed. The kids have not benefited from this (there’s no metric that shows this and in fact the achievement gap has widened and prison outcomes are increased for lower class kids) and in fact are probably worse off.

But, the state has created a massive bureaucracy to manage this and gobs of money to get distributed to both public and private managers of these clients. Yeah, it’s about the kids lol.

> dads aren’t around because they aren’t actually needed

They're incarcerated [1].

[1] https://nij.ojp.gov/media/image/19511

You're telling me there's zero evidence of my claim and yet you are going deeper down the hole of thoroughly disproven theories. Child poverty numbers in the US were the best ever recorded just prior to the pandemic and you can draw very direct lines from government anti-poverty programs as being a major contributing factor.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/09/record-drop-i...

All that chart shows is how they have successfully ganked more and more money from taxpayers. Where does it show outcomes have been improved or that the outcomes of kids from single mothers (those that have been "lifted out of poverty") are improving relative to traditional families? The outcomes I see VS 75 years ago is that incarceration rates are through the roof, premature death due to drug use is through the roof, and suicide is too.

The fact that being "lifted out of poverty" is somehow seen as a victory when the state has aggressively promoted and incentivized single motherhood for the last 50+ years is astounding. Because that's all a dad was good for. Things.

I'm not sure if it's men that allowed this to happen or if women just fell for it. But it's clearly indicative of the massive decline the West has seen.

75 years ago? For reference, Ruby Bridges is 68 years old as of today and active on Instagram. If you think too many single moms are the biggest cultural shift of the last 75 years, then you are just drawing absolutely arbitrary connections.

Drug use, drug convictions, drug deaths are a big shift from then for sure. Some of that is deliberately abusive policy-making by legislators who had been constitutionally barred from segregating so they pivoted to incarceration. Some of it just that we're way, way better at making narcotics than we used to be. None of that seems to be caused by single parents so I really don't know what point you're making here.

You still haven't come close to explaining who has been promoting single parent households. And now I'm forced to ask what decline has the west seen? Almost everything you're complaining about is specifically about America. And there are few if any practical measures by which are declining. This very much reads like a lament for white privilege.

Means tested welfare actively discourages marriage in poor people. As we’ve added more and more of these programs the divorce rate of poor people has skyrocketed. This has actively destroyed their communities and made them reliant on the state.

The welfare state should reward and incentivize marriage. The tax system does for middle and high earners and you see lower rates of single parenthood. The fact you can lose benefits if you’re lower income and married is the worst possible incentive.

Citation needed. Absence of a legal marriage does not preclude co-habitation and co-parenting. Especially for parents who may be doing something for the benefit of the children. Furthermore, if you created incentives to marry, you'd just be inundated with fake marriages done for financial benefit (a la citizenship marriages). Go google the phrase "medical divorce" as another data point. If you are worried the system is being gamed, adding more rules and loopholes is unlikely to solve anything. And you have to ask what outcome your are trying to incentive. This thread started talking about educational outcomes for kids. Marriage is not a particular useful end unto itself. I'd posit that just adopting universal healthcare would increase the marriage rate and do so by improving outcomes.

Just do the most basic Google search. Here, I'll start for you:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK230345/#:~:text=This%2....

However, a majority of the newer studies show that welfare has a significantly negative effect on marriage or a positive effect on fertility rather than none at all. Because of this shift in findings, the current consensus is that the welfare system probably has some effect on these demographic outcomes.

Based on this review, it is clear that a simple majority of the studies that have been conducted to date show a significant correlation between welfare benefits and marriage and fertility, suggesting the presence of such behavioral incentive effects.

But it's also just obvious.

And then the effects of kids from single-mother homes:

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/are-children-raised-with-....

This is all widely known and generally agreed on. That the outcomes of kids from single-mother homes are far worse than married coupled homes when you control for income, etc.

> What the hell does pushing back on single-family homes look like?

A previous poster spelled it out:

> by encouraging and aggrandizing stable two-parent families instead of getting schools and teachers to fill proxy parenting roles

You seem to be thinking of "pushing back" as some sort of attack upon single parents, when I believe that the original spirit of the comment was more along the lines of:

Let's strive to spread awareness of the myriad of benefits two parents can provide in a child's life.

Let's try to move the conversation an inch or two away from 'my happiness above all else' and slightly more towards 'sometimes being part of a family requires sacrifice.'

Hell, let's create a national holiday dedicated to households with two parents raising children together as a team.

Let's remind people that they aren't freaks for not getting divorced as soon as the initial spark died down. That it's okay to continue trying to make things work for the benefit of their children.

So often today I encounter the sentiment that "there are so many fish in the sea, and it's so easy to find them, why bother putting effort into it if it isn't perfect from the get go?"

In my opinion, the prevalence of this school of thought is harmful to the propagation and stability of two parent families. American society at some point became so obsessed with "self care" that, you guessed it - they forgot about the children.

That's a load of fluff policy ideas that you have no possible reason to believe will be effective. I'd also hazard a guess that promotion of loving relationships and realistic depictions of responsible parenting in mass media are at all-time high.

> That's a load of fluff policy ideas that you have no possible reason to believe will be effective.

Would you care to enlighten me why I have no possible reason to believe that my suggestions will be effective? Surely you know better than I.

I think the person you are responding to may have forgotten they are no longer posting in the Reddit tab. I've been on this site for a long time - unfortunately these vitriolic types have been bleeding over into this forum more than ever the last few years.

I was thinking the same ironically. Lots and lots of conservative propaganda on HN in the last few years.

No idea whether it's conservative or liberal as I'm not real enthusiastic with the red/blue team stuff. Emotional is probably the best way I can describe it.

I'm saying you have no evidence for your ideas. I doubt any exists. And it seems tantamount to other disproven theories like violent video games and heavy metal music are corrupting the youth.

Your post is content-free, and it says much about the value of your thoughts. This is not a problem of emotions, except in that it's a useful tool for others to manipulate your emotions. The only effective solution would be to subsidize these relationships via taxes, ideally to the point where one partner can devote themselves to childcare. In this society, you want something, you pay for it. You should probably contemplate why this isn't being proposed by the people who are supposedly concerned about this problem, but I suspect you'll find an answer that lets you keep thinking that you're thinking, rather than being played like a fiddle.

>his is not a problem of emotions, except in that it's a useful tool for others to manipulate your emotions.

we do it with every other form of advertisement, why not use it to encourage good lifestyles too?

> You should probably contemplate why this isn't being proposed by the people who are supposedly concerned about this problem

simple:

- they aren't concerned about the problem to begin with. Be it apathy, ignorance, or malice. There are different solutions depending on the cause.

- they are, as mentioned above, more afraid of upsetting single families by imposing what can arguably be a healthier family dynamic

- the school board feels that issues with family are outside their purview so they do not even consider it, despite the fact that parents are the biggest strain on any given school teacher.

Maybe take your own advice? They at least gave propositions, while you are simply engaging in rhetorical attacks without contributing anything worth a conversation. What does "you want something, you pay for it" mean in a conversation about government funded education? We're all already paying for it.

Yes, I'm sure you have wonderful reasons for wanting to legislate your morality. No, that person offered zero in the way of concrete suggestions, and it staggers belief to see how you would even think that. The immediate subject at hand is not government funded education but family structures, and I was pretty explicit about the solution; since you seem not to have the correct context I suggest re-reading this discussion more carefully.

> Your post is content-free, and it says much about the value of your thoughts.

It's hard for me to get behind the logic of someone who opens their response with a direct personal attack. I stopped reading as soon as you started making abusive comments (the very first sentence). I didn't deserve to be told that my thoughts are without merit, and when you resorted to saying so it really did tell more about you than it ever could me.

it all comes down to Mother's decision to sustain pregnancy in unstable relationship.

Currently America incentivizes single mother childhood because all social handouts are increased if 1) mother is poor/low income 2) has dependents 3) more dependents => more handouts

Things like Section 8, Medicaid, SNAP, EBT - were supposed to have social safety net - the lowest standard that any mother can rely on.

It ended up that many mothers cannot rely on anything else.

once you are in the hood and on government's program - there is no incentive to leave them. People can't even get a fulltime job, because that would mean disqualification from Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, EBT, etc

The vicious cycle of black poverty continues... This is what keeps black people locked in the hood:

1. Black women get locked by social welfare and kids out of wedlock

2. Black males get locked by adolescent crime (culture of "background checks" with lifetime record of crime), keep themselves in the jail system forever / outside legal employment system

This reads like rational debate, but is really just pure conservative fantasy and at least a little racist. Every time you mention black people in the hood, I assume it means you have never been within 100 miles of an urban environment and have no idea what you're talking about. You act like poverty and broken families only exist with black people.

Welfare Queens don't exist. Absolutely no human being in existence since the New Deal has considered having a baby to be a profit-making venture. I can submit that maybe some, but vanishingly few consider a life on government assistance to be sustainable. The reason something like Medicaid can be a trap is because private healthcare in this country is capitalist hellscape. ACA made the miniscule effort to raise the Medicaid eligibility window and half the country rejected it. Programs like Medicaid, CHIP, SNAP are intended to prevent descent in penury and/or to protect the completely innocent children. Less so the parents.

Your opinion is really just the lowest form of victim blaming. These problems are almost entirely unique to America in the developed world. We have undeniable objective proof that being more generous with benefits improves everyone's lives and does not breed dependence.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3487602 https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/welfare... https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/business/the-myth-of-welf... https://epod.cid.harvard.edu/article/dispelling-myth-welfare...

And for good measure here's someone who thinks dependence is genetic and all the people who think he's a terrible scientist: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/09/adam-perkins...

You are exaggerating my point, but on the way you exaggerate yourself and make false arguments.

If welfare queens dont exist - then how do you call beneficiaries of these programs like meeicaid?

Poverty exists in white and asian families, but interesting fact - only in black hoods it leads to high crime, high fatality, high incarceration rates.

How do you explain the fact that poor asian neighborhoods dont have crime and have much better achievements among kids?

And I am not sure that more handouts will help, because these handouts come from taxpayers and US a lot of Us taxpayers will be against it

> If welfare queens dont exist - then how do you call beneficiaries of these programs like meeicaid?

Uh, "beneficiaries"?

I literally gave you a wall of citations that they do help. A lot of taxpayers being against it is a political argument. Of course they will. They've been fed lies by politicians who have given them fallacious rationalizations for why they don't have have any responsibility to promoting an equitable society. It's called the "I got mine" theory of civics. If you just don't _want_ to do anything, then go ahead and say it. Just stop pretending that greedy self-interest is anything but that.

It turns out that a lot of what makes a relationship work is also what causes the children of 2-parent families to do better. Namely, if you remove the stress of scrambling just to make ends meet, and remove food and housing and healthcare and employment insecurity, then people have more time to spend on their families. And provided the parents aren't terrible people, that leads to better outcomes, more stable marriages, etc etc.

Its very easy to say "if we could just keep more parents together..." as if the availability of divorce after giving birth was the problem. Solve the major reasons why relationships fail after giving birth, and you'll likely create the situation where kids have more engaged parents too.

there is relationship (as in one night stand) and there is lifelong relationship.

There is fundamental conflict:

1. All people (especially young) want hook-ups due to hormones and stuff, as many as possible. These leads to pregnancies and kids.

2. Family requires you to limit your desires only to your partners and create lifelong commitment, which means responsibilities (not only for yourself, but for your partners and kids).

There is mismatch fundamentally. Either hookups culture needs to die, or kids have to be allowed only by stable families

The birth rate (especially the teenage birth rate) has been dropping for the last 20 years. But sure, it's hookup culture that's causing single parent households, and not an evolution of how people of child-rearing age think about marriage, or that the changing shape of the economy means that marriage-as-a-mainly-financial-arrangement is dying a long-overdue death. It's definitely not that legalizing so-called no-fault divorces allows women (especially mothers) to escape abusive situations that are, for one reason or another, impossible to prosecute as such. And that's all to say nothing of the known impact from over-policing of low income communities.

Dropping birth rate is not a problem at all, Europe Scandinavia Australia has dropping birth rate but much better social situation.

The rest of your argument is incoherent and does not have a point, so I dont event understand what is it about.

Overpolicing is a myth, because cops are policing where crime actually happens. Doesnt make sense for police to patrol law abiding medium/high class neighborhoods if crime doesnt happen there. Police must be present where criminals live, this is actually the only correct approach

> cops are policing where crime actually happens.

Alternatively, crime happens where police are.

Eg. Police might excessively arrest in particular communities as a form of overbearing bullying .. and the arrest and conviction rates in these areas climb.

There is much written about this, your take in your comment above seems naive at best.

The world is rarely as first order simple as you appear to believe it to be.

Of interest (although admittedly not all that compelling as it's a small rich unicorn area)

Crime Rate Goes Down After Half A Cop Shop Quits

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/17/if-the-crime-rate-goes-d...

The only causal link between less police leading to less crime: is fewer police reports. People give up reporting crime if police is nowhere to be found.

Look at san frasicko: people wont even bother registering crime if their car window broke or cat stolen.

On paper crime rate is lower, in reality it is different.

Ok, I'll clarify:

Your claim is that "hook up culture" is causing all these kids to grow up single-parent households. This flies in the face of all kinds of studies that show that, starting with millenials, kids are waiting longer to have sex, and are having fewer partners than e.g. baby boomers. At the same time, young adults are waiting longer to get married than baby boomers, are getting married less often, and once married are getting divorced at a lower rate than their parents generation. They're also having fewer children.

And yet, the number of unwed mothers has steadily risen in the past 50 years, only plateauing in the last 10 or 15 (at or about the time "hookup culture" became a thing that people clutched their pearls over). Why is that? I hypothesized, in my post, that there's an "(1) evolution of how people of child-rearing age think about marriage, or that (2) the changing shape of the economy means that marriage-as-a-mainly-financial-arrangement is dying a long-overdue death. (3) It's definitely not that legalizing so-called no-fault divorces allows women (especially mothers) to escape abusive situations that are, for one reason or another, impossible to prosecute as such"

So let's break those down. Point 1 is sort of indisputable. Young people are waiting longer to get married (but also getting divorced less). Clearly, people are being more careful in who they choose to settle down with, including who they have children with.

Point 2 I claim is driven by the fact that single women are no longer obliged to treat their job as a match-making opportunity. Women make enough in the job market, and have enough jobs available to them, to not enter into marriages strictly as financial partnerships, that carry the obligation of sex and child rearing.

Point 3 is subtler, but also the main reason why just discouraging divorce will, I believe, actually lead to worse outcomes for children. Thanks to the various advances in women's rights over the last 100 years, a woman can actually get a divorce from an abusive spouse, without requiring police cooperation. This is huge. We are on a downward trend for domestic abuse, and a lot of that is because an abused partner can actually leave (and why you saw a spike in domestic violence during the COVID lockdowns) without the police getting involved. So the options are "have a single parent", or "grow up in an abusive household". Given how frequently abusers are themselves victims of prior abuse, I'd argue that growing up in a single-parent household is, ultimately, the lesser of two evils.

Speaking of police and their ability to choose not to make an arrest for a given event, there's my point about over-policing low-income communities. A person from a high-income community can get busted over 1.01 ounces of weed, post bail, and be back to work the next morning, then plea it down or have the charges dismissed, provided the police even stop them to begin with or think that an arrest is worthwhile. Meanwhile, a person from a low-income community has no choice but to take the months or years of jail time, for the same charge. And since we say "put police where the crime is", the police are themselves more likely to stop a "suspicious" person, and arrest them, because the police think there's more crime there too, and "going easy on them will just encourage them". All of this adds up to parents ending up in jail when they should be raising their kids, on charges that other people aren't even held for.

your argument is only true for normal, trouble-free, law abiding, functional families. You are right, millenials take their time to have babies later, because they plan, because it is expensive to have kid etc etc.

You are probably projecting yourself as a well-off individual to the society.

this is not true for low SES stratum: the girls in poor hoods start hookups in middle/high-school. They get pregnant at high school, have unplanned babies without father etc etc.

It is almost as if we are talking about two different Americas: white & black. Medium+ class and Poor class

Speaking as the brother to a teen mother, I am saying you're wrong, and the data backs me up. Speaking as a person who was quite poor in his twenties and early thirties, I'm saying you're wrong, and the data backs me up.

Teenage pregnancies are dropping, across the board. Children are waiting longer to start having sex, across the board. Young people are having fewer sexual partners ACROSS THE BOARD.

> as a brother to a teen mother, I am saying you're wrong,

> as a person who was quite poor

You literally proved my point, brother

That may have been true when my sister gave birth in 1992, but the data is clear, the teenage birth rate has dropped by a factor of 4-6x in the last 35 years.

https://opa.hhs.gov/adolescent-health/reproductive-health-an...

My point is that things aren't now the way things were when I was experiencing it first hand.

>Either hookups culture needs to die

I think increased awareness of Birth control already solved this problem. Almost every first world country's population is starting to fall under the rate needed to increase the population while most third world countries contribute to the overall global population increase.

I'd also say the lack of stigma around abortions, but ofc we know how that's going in the U.S...

> Lots of problems can be fixed by encouraging and aggrandizing stable two-parent families

I agree 100%. But how would the US government fix this? The only political movement that I'm aware of that focusses on stable two-parent families are the conservative Christians. Or are there any others?

You will get similar focus on two parent households from Orthodox Jews, Muslims, LDS, JW and several other religious groups other than conservative Christians. However, your point is still the same. With today's stance of "separation of church and state" the US government will not promote this ideology of a two parent household being desired.

Our 41st president had a Faith-Based Initiative which was successful in many areas. It cost the tax-payer 75% less to have a faith-based organization head up a relief program than it did for a similar governmental program. Why? Because it was a volunteer based organization and they were incentivized to keep costs low.

Also see: Labeling theory and self-fulfilling prophecy.