Call me pragmatic but I see those problems to be not (easily) solvable. Rather than endlessly debate about what the cause is, my proposal would be to involve young, energetic outsiders to come up with solutions and move quickly to implement them. Not all of these will be workable but some will (remember the Go entry from yesterday and how Monte Carlo methods are much better in developing strong AI compared to truing to come up with good computer strategies? Similar approach).
Call me pessimistic, but I think the last thing underprivileged education needs is a bunch of douchey "fail fast" startup types "disrupting" a problem they could never understand.
No, they need every bit of help, even from douchey people who can get off their asses and try to help rather than wisecracking on HN. Have you ever done something to help underprivileged kids? If so, try provide feedback rather than witticisms.
"Young, energetic outsiders" in the "startup set" are disproportionately likely to also be in the set of individuals from privileged backgrounds; in America this means they're also more likely to be white and male. They haven't got the empirical foundation necessary to even comprehend the depth or scope of the problems, much less devise "ingenious" solutions to them.
My point was that making a full understanding of the students' plight a prerequisite to helping them is a mistake. I teach programming to a low-income high school in the South side of Chicago. I am male and "white" and was born and raised in a different country far away in quite a different culture. I cannot even begin to understand the problems these kids are facing everyday.
Yet, there I am helping them, raising money for equipment, buying them rPi's, trying to teach them Python, implementing software for their FRC robot and trying to act as an all around mentor.
My cost to the CPS is negative (I bring in all the money, $1k-$2k here, from my company). This is the solution I'm talking about. Of course, my impact is minimal. But money from donors such as Zuckerberg could be used to create bigger grassroots efforts and amplify the impact greatly.
Ask yourself: What is the solution that YOU suggest? Reading the thread I was only one concrete suggestions, using the $100M to open a calling center in the area. Is that the best we can do?
They haven't got the empirical foundation necessary to even comprehend the depth or scope of the problems
How ironic. You write off an entire group of people because of their background as not being able to understand a problem and then throw out the privilege (AKA: "You are being preemptively blacklisted from this argument) card. In a thread about education.
Note that "not having the background to understand a problem" isn't the same as "incapable of understanding a problem." However, having the capability and having the experience are two different things.
If a group of people haven't got the background to understand a problem, they aren't likely to produce a solution that is viable. I don't see how that's a controversial statement. We "exclude" on this basis all the time in our every day lives (e.g. by selecting doctors for solutions to medical problems, as opposed to, say, firemen or physicists), because it's entirely rational and the empirically correct thing to do.
The answer to that is to get people the background to understand a problem.
People go to to med school to become doctors, you don't automatically blacklist everyone of a particular socioeconomic/racial background (NB: there's a word for this..) as being incapable of having the background necessary to be a doctor.
