Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools

Re:Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools by bombcar on Wednesday May 07, 2025 @10:20AM (#43916052)

But unless you control for it very, very carefully, you end up with results like "free and reduced lunch programs cause kids to do worse" - which isn't supported by the evidence, because there may be other factors that coincide with those who are eligible for them.

You'd have to do something like take the high-performing SF district and give half the students, randomly selected, free lunches.

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Re:Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools by pc86 on Wednesday May 07, 2025 @10:23AM (#43916094)

Reduced-price lunches are a proxy for socioeconomic status. That it's a proxy means it isn't perfect but we're talking about the entire country you can absolutely draw conclusions from it based on the mountains of data we have available.

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Re:Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools by lolinder on Wednesday May 07, 2025 @10:24AM (#43916100)

> unless you control for it very, very carefully, you end up with results like "free and reduced lunch programs cause kids to do worse"

Nonsense, you end up with results like "free and reduced lunch programs are correlated with kids who do worse", which they absolutely are!

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