Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

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From the abstract of the paper you cited:

> Yet race remains related to funding disparities and schooling experiences in ways that raise concerns about the role of school finance in perpetuating racial opportunity gaps.

What you are pulling out seems to be narrowly-focused and highly-contextualized.

Consider [1]:

> Property taxation and school funding are closely linked in the United States. In 2018–2019, public education revenue totaled $771 billion. Nearly half (47 percent) came from state governments, slightly less than half (45 percent) from local government sources, and a modest share (8 percent) from the federal government. Of the local revenue, about 36 percent came from property taxes. The remaining 8.9 percent was generated from other taxes; fees and charges for things like school lunches and athletic events; and contributions from individuals, organizations, or businesses.

[1]: https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/2022-04-pu...

> What you are pulling out seems to be narrowly-focused and highly-contextualized.

It's the most straight-forward and objective measure. That the main result of a paper would be omitted from the abstract and "highly-contextualized" is not surprising, given social science's bias. If a study gets the 'wrong' findings, it tends to be rejected:

The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...

Suggesting that the authors intentionally omitted the main result of their study from the abstract and hid it under layers of obfuscating details for sharp-eyed readers to uncover is basically a conspiracy theory. The far more straightforward explanation is that the authors saw it as one fact among many that contributed to their overall conclusion stated in the abstract.

It's not a conspiracy theory, but an empirically validated fact, as the study in my link showed. It is not the only one with such findings:

Ceci et al. (1985) found a similar pattern. Research proposals hypothesizing either "reverse discrimination" (i.e., against White males) or conventional discrimination (i.e., against ethnic minorities) were submitted to 150 Internal Review Boards. Everything else about the proposals was held constant. The "reverse discrimination" proposals were approved less often than the conventional discrimination proposals. - https://jsis.washington.edu/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/...

This quote has to do with research proposals, not study results.

But study results are only published if the study is done, and the study is often only done if it gets institutional approval for the proposal.

Yes, but a study's conclusion isn't preordained. It's entirely possible for authors to end up disproving their hypothesis. So it doesn't follow that, because more research proposals about "reverse discrimination" were rejected, then more studies concluding "reverse racism" (holding all else constant) would be rejected.

Yes, both are covered. Studies that specifically look for inconvenient facts don't get funded, and studies that accidentally find them don't get published.

It's suggesting a disagreement as to what counts as "main result". That's quite normal and need not imply any conspiracy.

OP confirmed in a reply that they meant the authors were doing this intentionally.

From the article you linked: https://www.lincolninst.edu/sites/default/files/content/04.2...

Compare California and Massachusetts. It seems to demonstrate the point of the poster you replied to. Despite MA relying nearly twice as much on property tax, as state revenue versus California, it seems to have better outcomes. Mostly because as the article discusses, MA appears to use targeted transfers from state revenue to poor districts.

And, as is often the case, there's a very loose relationship in Massachusetts between per-student spend and educational outcomes as measured by tests. It's common for urban districts in particular to have high spend and generally poor outcomes.

Property tax in California has its own history and complications that makes it difficult to compare California's funding of things based on property tax to anywhere else in the US.

can you link to an article detailing this issue? i'd love to dig deeper on this topic

https://www.kqed.org/news/11701044/how-proposition-13-transf...

https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/greater-la/california-props-...

Late edit: the Wikipedia article would also be something to read up on - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

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