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Comment by Jach | Hacker News Reader

The achievement gap is maybe ~25% due to socioeconomic factors, if you're being generous. Take everyone out of poverty, you're still going to have an achievement gap that's already mostly (~70%) due to IQ and one's Conscientiousness. Instead of throwing even more money at the socioeconomic problem (seriously that's been the 'solution' for years and has had many implementations in many forms) why don't we try something different, like making sure pregnant mothers are consuming enough iodine, or novel research into cheaply manufacturable nootropics?

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... Except you are factually wrong. The highest predictor of academic success, is the academic success of ones parents. The next highest predictor is the socio-economic status of ones parents (or guardians). This is true the world over, but the research was pioneered in the U.S... It's interesting because other countries have taken the U.S research and started applying policies to fix it.. but the US is still caught up on treating it as a "Schools" problem...

So.. if you levelled the socio-economic part, you'd start a positive cycle of generations improving, rather than the negative cycle of things getting worse.

>The highest predictor of academic success, is the academic success of ones parents. The next highest predictor is the socio-economic status of ones parents (or guardians).

Of course they are, but the confounding factor is genes shared between the parents and children. What do adoption studies say about those 2 variables?

... As I alluded to with the "(or guardians)". Genes have no major correlation. I'm sure there are obvious exceptions with learning disabilities etc. If a higher class family adopted a lower class child, the childs academic achievement would improve.

Conversely if you have super intelligent biological parents... but are raised in a low-socio and low-education level family... your academic results are poor.

In summary: Genes have nothing to do with it.

If you are actually interested in good education policy you should read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_R._House

The cheapest and safest "nootropic" there is is exercise.

Students dramastically improved their grades in several schools once they were made into exercising with a heart rate monitor (higher heart rate - higher grade) every day:

http://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-B...

I love dramastically as a portmanteau neologism, but I guess you meant dramatically AND/XOR drastically.

Hehe, I was in a rush while writing that post, it wasn't intentional. I'm not sure which word I intended to write (probably a little bit of both). :)

That being said - it's a fun new word that's actually pretty accurate in this situation. The improvements were drastic, and how drastic they were shocked a lot of people (the drama).

Nope. If I have to put my energy and resources into feeding and caring for myself and my family, then my "IQ" - my ability and experience in engaging with abstract data - suffers.

Yes, there will still be an achievement gap - that the achievement gap currently reflects socioeconomic factors is unfair.

Throwing more money at a problem to try and fix it in the way that makes sense in a very surface level way isn't smart when the stuff you want to fund has been shown to be minimally effective.

Not sure what you mean, unless you are saying food and shelter is minimally effective?

Do many poor children in America also feed and care for their families? I think it's still parents doing that. Of course some children may not have secure access to food and care, but they don't commonly provide it for their families on top of that.

It's more blurry than you'd think. 15 year old kids who are blowing off school so that they can make some money to ensure that their 5 year old sibling has enough to eat? That's definitely a thing. I have no idea how prevalent, but not unheard of.

My own wife's school work suffered because she had to spend her evenings raising her younger siblings while her parents were at work. Same with my niece, whose has one disabled parent and one in the software development field. She gets to act as part nurse, part nanny, and part student. Guess which one suffers.

Money doesn't help nearly as much as time, until you have enough money to hire someone else (or not work).

Agreed. Many students are looking after their siblings if not working, or taking grandma to doctors appointments etc. One of my current students missed our meeting this week because he had to bring his grandma to medical appointments and couldn't work much over break because he is working at a call center. A lot of my children-of-immigrant students have to go to doctor's appointments/government appointments (say with welfare worker or social worker or parole officer) to translate because their parents don't speak English and translation is not otherwise available.

Getting a job as a young teen to feed the family is pretty rare overall. Being the parent for one's little siblings because the parent has a second/third job to feed the family is far more common.

Actually it's also pretty uncommon for poor folks to have even a first job.

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2012.pdf

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