lodrein

Yes and no. The algorithm runs with historical student data and therefore only considers students using the bus system in order to compute the effects of school start times on transportation. On the other hand I think the district had planned to used the saved transportation money (~18 million/year) in order to help the most impacted parents (pre/post school care...)

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).

I am no specialist of children health, but my understanding is the following: I guess starting too early is never good for any child, but there is something specific with teenagers that makes it a lot worse. There is much more medical literature documenting this fact than for the younger kids. So yes, in a way, given the constraints of costs, the algorithm had to choose the lesser of two evils.

Yes incremental changes looks like a good solution. I think it is hard to do it with the delta minutes changed, as you could have dramatic consequences on the costs (the ripples on the transportation systems can be quite surprising, in that changing the time of one school can have a big impact on the number of buses needed). As to the number of student start time, the main question is how do you choose the schools that change first? How do you make sure that your changes are not interrupted in the middle for political reasons, which would be unfair for the first schools and maybe the whole system.

Also, it is an algorithmic challenge to find a "path" of good solutions that go step by step to the good final start times.

We talked about it at some point, and it seems like a good idea. There are two main issues with it: first it can be hard to do a step by step change that is (a) fair (how do you choose the first schools to change?) and (b) works for every step (make sure that the transportation costs do not explode in between).

That could be a way to do it, and Boston decided to do it all at once. I think their reasoning was the fairness of the process (it's hard/unfair to use beta testing on public schools). Also, it is such a hard change that maybe it is easier to do it all at once. You may also want to consider the political implications that are very important when making this kind of decisions.

Thanks for sharing!

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.

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

This can happen and did happen before. Maybe being suspicious of an algorithm is not a bad things, we should have extremely high standards for them ! My hope is that some people will just have a better view of how complicated this problem is, and be able to construct their own opinion from there. And this would already be something I would be proud of!

No, as far as I know having later school start times for high schoolers was the main objective, and that was the strongest one in the solution that was chosen by Boston when they used our algorithm.

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 :

https://www.cdc.gov/features/school-start-times/index.html

No, although the A-lab have a lot of interesting projects. We are part of the Operations Research Center:

https://orc.mit.edu/

It's true that it was fast, maybe too fast, although the district was planning this conversation for more than 10-20 years. But even if it has not been implemented, the debate itself may have been worth the trouble. The complex problem of start time choice is an incredibly deep and interesting question, and so is the interface between algorithms and public policy.

That's interesting. Our approach is based on Mixed Integer Programming and Generalized Quadratic Assignment.

We submitted it to a journal that has a fast review process, and we are towards the end of it. We did not think soon enough to put it on arxiv, and we should be able to do it soon (it requires some editing to remove the journal-specific things).

In the meantime, there is some available information that is listed on my website: https://sebmart.github.io/media.html

Thanks! I am actually very excited about this thread, our main hope is for this project to start a conversation !

The process went too fast to be entirely transparent. Boston tried to communicate as much as they could, and anything can be requested (Freedom of Information Law). We also have a paper that should not be too far from publication that details every detail of the thing.

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 :)

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.

I think "novemtrigintillion" was just a harmless joke about this very large number of possibilities, nothing too serious about it, I also had to Google the word I doubt anyone knew it.

> (1) Supervise the children of working adults, without interfering with their work day.

That is indeed an important objective. I want to underline that it is impossible to achieve it in practice. Each parent has a different life with their own constraint, but each school can only have one time. The complexity of school assignment and start time choice is to find a way to do as well as we can. Unfortunately to the best of my knowledge, there is no perfect solution.

Yes it did.

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.

I think changing the start times is something the district had wanted to do for a long time. Therefore once the research and the algorithm suggested it was a good idea, they quickly jumped on board.

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!

That's a great question, that I asked myself a lot.

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.

I agree that the role of politics is important, and maybe it is for the best if it can help create a conversation.

One of the main objective of this particular project was to make a complex problem more accessible to a general audience, so that such a debate could take place. For example, before this "algorithm", it was harder to understand the impact of your school time on the other schools and the budget of the district. And this budget is also what pays for teachers, nurses and buildings.

My hope is to convey that yes, algorithms can be scary when they decide for you, but sometimes they are just tools that bring information to the debate and help the minorities be heard. And ultimately, humans make the important decisions.

It makes sense that it can be easier to be misunderstood by a human than by a robot. And what about the case when any decision will always be bad for some people? I would argue that using (at least partly) an algorithm can add some fairness to the process, as without an algorithm systems can favor people who know the system the most.

It may seem feasible on the long run. Indeed, it can be easier for the parents of the new children to adapt their schedule.

But it can be very hard for the parents that previously chose the school (partly) because of its start time, and adapted their own life & work schedule around this time.

It is typically very hard for the parents when we change a school start time, sometimes even when the change is small.

Doing small changes can help, but it is so politically complicated to change the school times that some districts prefer to do it all at once.

I am one of the two PhD students that conducted this research with Boston Public Schools. I'll be glad to answer any question you may have.