[zeroCalories]

All of those have multiplicative effects. Good home/parents make students more motivated, good teachers are able to work well with motivated students, capable classrooms are able to handle more demanding classes. I don't suspect socioeconomic integration matters here though if everyone is getting the same treatment. Standardization is also good when we see wildly different results in different classrooms. Harder to do in more fragmented and less well funded school districts.

But these are all well known factors. Not much to learn drom here, but it's nice to see it confirm the theory.

[ethbr1]

This. Mother and family spent careers in early childhood education.

- In order for learning to happen, kids have to be non-disruptive.

- In order for kids to be non-disruptive, they have to have their basic needs met: safety, food, stability, etc.

- In order for a kid's basic needs to be met, there has to be a source of income and time to care for them.

Absent that chain of dependencies, young children are in no state to learn anything, and distract the kids around them. And every minute of every week spent papering over deficiencies there is one less minute devoted to learning.

F.ex. in Title I schools, it's not uncommon to have families where the only book in the house might be one a child is sent home with.

If teachers received tabula rasa children, results would be much more even.

But they don't, which results in kids at bad schools being unable to focus, which means they don't learn basic material, which perpetuates income disparities later in life, which continues the cycle through lack of time and money.

The military has many bad aspects, but a parent with a steady job, housing, and benefits is a solid foundation for childhood academic success.

[zeroCalories]

Yeah I have family in education too and it's a sad reality that schools just can't help most students because they come from broken homes. There are marginal improvements you can make like providing free lunch and good after school activities, but an actual solution would require other fundamental problems to be solved in society, or a radical reimagining of public education.

On a more nutty note, for the possible reforms I've heard of everything from public boarding schools so kid don't have to spend time in their bad home, to firing all teachers and paying children for testing well.

[ethbr1]

At the root, caring for and raising children well is an extremely time intensive endeavor.

It's hard to see a way we could fundamentally afford to pay someone to do it, at scale.

And the solutions that don't involve "someone" (at an extremely low child:caregiver ratio) don't seem like they'd produce success.

I do think schools should financially incentive performance, though! Not firing teachers, but just paying students directly for academic achievement -- make kids care.

[joshhart]

I think these are good points, I am hugely in favor of expanding food stamps and child tax credits for this reason. One estimate is that every $1 spend on food stamps expands GDP by $1.50, so this is really good for the overall economy. I have heard of much higher estimates, but cannot easily find the source. We definitely need to help poor families break the poverty cycle. Schools should have free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and after school programs as well to deal with lack of food at home and 2 parents working full-time.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2019/july/quantifying-t...