Looks like that study wasn't peer-reviewed, and compared voucher students with those of the general population. A later study compared voucher students with those who applied for vouchers but didn't win the vouchers, and the bad effects largely disappeared:
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2017/6/26/21107301/students-given-...
With school choice, bad schools are finally allowed to die and be replaced with good schools.
The elephant in the root is that the US already experimented heavily with a hybrid public/private model for educational delivery in its higher ed (colleges/universities) sector. Perverse competitive incentives on all fronts drive prices through the roof, quality stagnates/declines, and the downmarket options make impossible promises while offering curricula with such terrible outcomes as to be borderline fraudulent. When public funding is cut, it's replaced with debt, and people are deep under water to the investment class before they even start life.
I'm not here to defend the status quo, but reformers should carefully consider "how do we prevent turning American K12 into American higher ed."
> Perverse competitive incentives on all fronts drive prices through the roof
I don't think it's been established that competitive incentives are driving the price through the roof. There are other theories, e.g. that massive increases in subsidization via guaranteed loans and other mechanisms are driving the price from the demand-side.
Sure, but if you are a private school charging $20k a year now, why wouldn't you charge $25k when every potential student gets a $5k voucher? Then we need to increase the size of the voucher to meet the original goals of the program. Rinse. Repeat.
Every child must either meet some government-mandated educational standard, or enroll in a program which brings some threshold percentage of its students to said standard. $VOUCHER_AMOUNT is adjusted on a per-region basis based on the average tuition within each region. If the institution's tuition is higher than $VOUCHER_AMOUNT, the parents pay the difference out of pocket. If the tuition is less than $VOUCHER_AMOUNT, the parents keep the difference.
Parents obviously want to minimize the amount they're paying out of pocket, and they'd like to keep some of the voucher money, so high-end schools as well as low-end schools are incentivized to keep their costs down.
Parents putting their kids in K-12 private school aren't optimizing for cost. They are optimizing for exclusivity and educational "quality". If their school just became more affordable to the unwashed masses, they will gladly pay the premium to keep them out.
That is true for some subset of wealthy parents, and if they want to pay extra for exclusivity, that's their choice. But I think it's reasonable to assume that the parents of the 90% of K-12 students who attend public or charter schools [1] are prioritizing cost over exclusivity.
It's true that many families will pay more to buy a house in a good school district, but I suspect that the school itself isn't the whole story: rather, many people interpret the school district's reputation as a proxy for the safety of the neighborhood and socio-economic status of its residents, as well as a proxy for their own socio-economic status.
Ulimately, I suspect that with the free market voucher system I described in my parent comment, legacy private schools would continue to charge outrageous tuition. But I think we'd also see some new, possibly virtual "bang for your buck" schools which would compete on price and which would be exclusive due to entrance exams and high academic expectations for enrolled students.
I'm not sure I follow. Many students/families choose community college for the freshman and sophomore years to minimize cost. Many opt for state universities over out-of-state/private universities for the same reason.
Well, you see, we take the naïve dupes who borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars in non-dischargeable, uncapped student loans for an MFA in film at Columbia, and extrapolate that to the rest of the population.
> I don't think it's been established that competitive incentives are driving the price through the roof.
I suppose the money for fancy facilities and armies of recruiting staff grew on a tree in the quad?
> There are other theories, e.g. that massive increases in subsidization via guaranteed loans and other mechanisms are driving the price from the demand-side.
As I stated,
>> When public funding is cut, it's replaced with debt
And, actually, that's the good outcome! The more realistic outcome is folks can't afford the price spiral and decide that Johnny doesn't need much more than a 6th grade education. Which I'm sure will bode well for our country.
An additional outcome in higher-ed was the perceived dilution of the religious characteristics of Catholic universities (a large portion of the prominent private universities) who took the money; the more-religious types complain about Jesuit schools, Notre Dame, etc. for being beholden to the whims of the state for so much of their funding that they cease to serve their mission, and their remaining supporters are mostly the ones who care about sports and the brand-value of the school name. For charter-schools at the secondary level, I'd expect the same kind of thing, only much faster.
In the college sector, the price ramped after Clinton signed law to prevent student loans being discharged in bankruptcy. And now parents co-sign and the parent's social security is sometimes taken to pay the child's non-dischargeable student loans.
K-12 public school is government paid.
1. The state has to remain in the school business as a back-up for schools that fail, kids who get kicked out, and regions that have insufficient capacity because it's not profitable to run schools there. The public schools need to provide excess capacity so the private ones can operate at capacity and take financial risks. As a result, the state bears the risk.
2. A fleet of SUV's hit the road at 6:00 AM every day to carry kids to the far flung schools that their parents managed to get them into.
3. A shortage of available capacity, turnover in administration and ownership of schools, statistical variance, and opaque metrics make it impossible for parents to actually make an informed choice based on the quality of schools. It will be a crap shoot.
> opaque metrics make it impossible for parents to actually make an informed choice based on the quality of schools. It will be a crap shoot.
Nope, people will probably figure out the "best schools" via their private social networks and cloistered communities, and find ways to pull up the ladders behind them.
...or they'll send their kids to evangelical-Christian "schools" that don't really teach much except counter-factual history and creationism and of course their own particular ideology. The very same people who have totally fabricated a panic about teaching CRT in public schools are more than happy to do far far worse in their own schools. Most of my cousins spent at least some years in such schools. They were worthless money sinks even long ago, and I don't imagine they've gotten any better.
In my view the worst thing is that those schools can be well funded, and easily price secular schools out of the market. When I was living in Texas, it was before we had kids, but I noticed that among private schools, the secular ones were absolutely priced out of our reach.
Religious hospitals and medical clinics can do the same thing in rural areas.
#3 I think would solve itself. Wow is US News college rankings big business and important. And uppity New Yorkers seem to know quite well what the pecking order is in elite preschools (I'm facepalming that this is true)
Class paranoia is too strong. Something would serve it.
Vouchers would likely involve a lot of fraud, the charter school system already has. A shift to full vouchers would be an expensive cost, one that democrats won't get past republicans.
Indeed, the question is whether emulating the current college system would be considered a success or a failure. I'm thinking more in terms of the middle and working classes, who will simply end up trading one bad school for another one that's also 40 miles away.
Also, it would remain to be seen if K-12 schools stay in business long enough to gain a reputation without becoming franchises of one or two giant nationwide corporations.
The for-profit colleges are the worst segment of the already degenerative upper education system. That fact alone indicates we should pause on full-on free market vouchers.
I think the problem is that, at least at the high school level, a school under 1000 kids starts to suffer in terms of services: not enough smart kids, not enough activity participants, not enough special needs for the special teacher. Perhaps "specialty" schools would help a bit ...
We know what happens. Educational outcomes drop. There's a strong bloc of hard-right ultra-religious conservatives who don't care if Jonnie or Jayden or whatever learns how to read or add, and they really don't want Kayden or Charlotte or whatever to learn any biology or autonomy.
They vote with their vouchers for truly terrible schools. It siphons a tremendous amount of money from "traditional" public schools and delivers a hugely negative return.
It's a mistake, but it's a mistake we can't help but keep making because we're so determined to make everything function like a pseudo market.
Is there any empirical evidence for educational outcomes dropping? The ultra-religious types would be homeschooling with or without the financial incentives to send children to private schools.
Not every hard-right ultra-religious parent has the means to homeschool their kid or to enroll them in private school. Vouchers really help lower that barrier.
> Students in Louisiana's voucher program showed a decline in scores, especially math:
Let's see...
> Any changes in the second year of reading were unclear.
Hmm.
> Past research on Louisiana’s school-voucher program came to a bleak conclusion: Students who used the program to transfer to a private school saw their test scores plummet.
> A new study complicates that narrative, finding some good—or at least, less bad—news about the closely watched program.
> The research shows that, for students who received a voucher at the middle or end of elementary school, there were no statistically significant effects on their math or reading test scores by the third year in the program. That’s a boon for voucher advocates who have argued against judging a program by its initial impacts.
> The research shows that, for students who received a voucher at the middle or end of elementary school, there were no statistically significant effects on their math or reading test scores by the third year in the program. That’s a boon for voucher advocates who have argued against judging a program by its initial impacts.
They deliberately cut the results off in the second year because the study was conducted by those whose livelihoods are threatened by vouchers.
> What evidence is there that vouchers are helpful?
> Who benefits? (the answer here isn't "everybody")
In areas that have done charter schools, the result is that poor-performing school administrations/companies (in terms of standardized tests) lose their charter and effectively "close down." Better performing ones are allowed to replace them.
The students benefit because they end up with better quality educations. They're no longer forced to go to terrible schools that keep getting money thrown at them despite having deeply-rooted problems: problems that the school has no incentive to fix due to the way the current public schooling system works.
> Colombia's PACES program provided over 125,000 poor children with vouchers that covered the cost of private secondary school. The vouchers were renewable annually conditional on adequate academic progress. Since many vouchers were assigned by lottery, program effects can reliably be assessed by comparing lottery winners and losers. Estimates using administrative records suggest the PACES program increases secondary school completion rates by 15 to 20 percent. Correcting for the greater percentage of lottery winners taking college admissions tests, the program increased test scores by two-tenths of a standard deviation in the distribution of potential test scores.
> The District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) has operated in the nation's capital since 2004, funded by a federal government appropriation. Because the program was oversubscribed in its early years of operation, and vouchers were awarded by lottery, we were able to use the “gold standard” evaluation method of a randomized experiment to determine what impacts the OSP had on student outcomes. Our analysis revealed compelling evidence that the DC voucher program had a positive impact on high school graduation rates, suggestive evidence that the program increased reading achievement, and no evidence that it affected math achievement.
> We use the introduction of a means-tested voucher program in Florida to examine whether increased competitive pressure on public schools affects students' test scores. We find greater score improvements in the wake of the program introduction for students attending schools that faced more competitive private school markets prior to the policy announcement, especially those that faced the greatest financial incentives to retain students. These effects suggest modest benefits for public school students from increased competition. The effects are consistent across several geocoded measures of competition and isolate competitive effects from changes in student composition or resource levels in public schools.
I benefit by sending my child to a school where the teachers are incentivized to teach them reading, writing, and arithmetic, while leaving their politics and activism at the door.
> What evidence is there that vouchers are helpful?
> James also said that school choice has “not proven effective at improving education.” That is also highly misleading. Ten of the 16 random assignment evaluations on the topic find that private school choice programs increased math or reading test scores overall or for student subgroups at a fraction of the cost. Only two of the 16 random assignment studies, both of which examined the highly regulated Louisiana voucher program, found negative effects on test scores. And four of the six rigorous studies on the topic found that private school choice increased educational attainment overall or for student subgroups. None of the six studies found that school choice reduced educational attainment.
OP probably wants site to be to send notifications even though Firefox’s research on the topic has shown that they are 99+ percent spam. I find it very annoying when I visit a site and there's an annoying pop-up asking for notifications (even though chrome and firefox block most automatically). The Mozilla study showed that sites already try and show 100s of billion notifications to users a year
"Notification prompts are very unpopular. On Release, about 99% of notification prompts go unaccepted, with 48% being actively denied by the user." https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/11/04/restricti...
I also would bet that most acceptance clicks by users were accidental.
I tried using the web notification API for a project recently - a project which is putting users' needs and wants above anything else. Our users wanted to receive push notifications whenever we go live, so the initial prototype used SMS notifications since that's what we were already using.
Over time, the cost of these (completely optional and opt-IN) notifications grew enough that I figured it was time to seek an alternative. I fully implemented WebPush notifications and evaluated them with my users. I found that most Android devices wouldn't vibrate nor make a sound when a notification is received, and iOS straight up doesn't support these APIs. With these findings, I scrapped the entire implementation. It was useless to our users and only led to more confusion.
If I had to guess, I would say that is the exact reason 99% of WebPush usage is spammy. Spammers don't really care about quality of service, they just want to cast a wide net. I'm willing to bet the API would see a massive uptick in legitimate adoption if it wasn't so utterly useless in the real world.
that sounds right, i block about 99% of notifications on my phone, regardless of wehther they're from webapps or native apps. but the 1% i don't block are incredibly useful and the main reason i have a phone in the first place
i hope nobody is deciding that no apps should ever be allowed to send notifications, just because most notifications get blocked. it's still an incredibly useful feature even if most apps use it poorly.
You can say the same thing about email, but yet there are plenty of legitimate use cases. Cases include chat apps like slack, you might want to see when someone has messaged you even though you might not have the slack tab open. Are you attending a music festival and have the schedule open for an artist you want to see, well the concerts have been delayed 20 min, would be handy to get a push notification telling you that.
I find it hard to believe that I would get notified for anything useful but I am absolutely certain I will be notified incessantly for things that don’t matter. In fact the later spoils it for the former because the later train people to ignore notifications.
For instance any shop I create an account with (Best Buy, Ulta Beauty, …) thinks I want to hear from them once a day or more often. If they tried to keep it relevant it would be one thing but it is really a conversation where one side talks talks and talks and the other isn’t listening. Right now on Arstechnia’s Dealmaster they are talking like it is news that Amazon Fire tablets on sale but they ought to just send me a notice when Fire tablets aren’t on sale.
We're talking about PWAs the user chooses to install. Of course they want to get notified. In my case I want to run Fastmail and WhatsApp. What use are they to me if they don't notify me when I get a message.
People in this thread keep confusing notification request from random websites with notification requests from web apps you WANT to get notified from. It's a thing. And all browser offer a per-site preference. Having PWA support doesn't mean being spammed by every site you visit.
It seems like this framework is addressing that but so far a PWA is a disorganized patchwork of features that might seem to fit together if you squint. For instance the user has no control over how much IndexedDB storage is used if any, and that the only thing you do have consent for is notifications…. Which normally is a request to spam, maybe 10% of the time it is a ‘real’ PWA but I am sure the majority of those are spam too.
People who use the web are used to being spammed at every turn so naturally they are going to expect any feature usually used for spam to be used for spamming. It doesn’t help that PWA hasn’t had clear branding that ordinary people would understand.
yes. go and check a regular friends' chrome browser. notifications left and right, constant irritant of "breaking news" and "check this out" from essentially spam sites. i am grateful of preventing notifications by default
> Because you couldn't trust anyone, not your friends or family. Everyone was part of a big network out to get you, so you were sort of locked in your own head.
Have you seen Twitter?
How does someone talking tell you if they can actually do basic programming... I think you would be surprised at the number of people that apply for software engineering jobs but barely know how to program.
Yeah, those competitions are not really representative of actual skill.
I was into competitive math as a teenager and was somewhat successful, but I actually kind of suck at math.
Similarly, I'm a professional developer but I'm really bad at competitive programming: what usually happens is that I know how to solve the problems but the time limit is too low (for me, at least).
I'd say success in competitions is a good indicator of dedication and perseverance, but not sufficient to spot someone who's good at the job.
Because you can determine if they organize and test things in a repeatable and maintainable way or do they have trouble organizing structures and make questionable performance decisions. Are they clear on the hasA vs isA. Do they know what a mutex or static scope is? These are the things that will cause huge debugging nightmares. Syntax issues are no where close to as problematic so why use whiteboards vs an actual computer? In my experience of interviewing, questions about Security and Threading(performance / micro-opts) are good for separating the wheat from the chaff.
By the same way we have doctors do surgery in place, construction workers do a toy house, teachers give a class for free, cooks spend one day serving meals for free,...
We, in fact, have added more regulation in that area. Outlets installed below 5.5 feet are required by code to be tamper-resistant so that they aren't dangerous to children.
It's somewhat pragmatic for the Linux developers. Support a stable kernel API probably wouldn't be that expensive. It's clearly a political decision against writing close source code that does anything low level.
