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MIT's Elegant Schoolbus Algorithm Was No Match For Angry Parents (bostonglobe.com)
"Computers can solve your problem. You may not like the answer," writes the Boston Globe. Slashdot reader sandbagger explains:
"Boston Public Schools asked MIT graduate students Sebastien Martin and Arthur Delarue to build an algorithm that could do the enormously complicated work of changing start times at dozens of schools -- and re-routing the hundreds of buses that serve them. In theory this would also help with student alertness...." MIT also reported that "Approximately 50 superfluous routes could be eliminated using the new method, saving the school district between $3 million and $5 million annually."
The Globe reports: They took to the new project with gusto, working 14- and 15-hour days to meet a tight deadline -- and occasionally waking up in the middle of the night to feed new information to a sprawling MIT data center. The machine they constructed was a marvel. Sorting through 1 novemtrigintillion options -- that's 1 followed by 120 zeroes -- the algorithm landed on a plan that would trim the district's $100 million-plus transportation budget while shifting the overwhelming majority of high school students into later start times.... But no one anticipated the crush of opposition that followed. Angry parents signed an online petition and filled the school committee chamber, turning the plan into one of the biggest crises of Mayor Marty Walsh's tenure. The city summarily dropped it. The failure would eventually play a role in the superintendent's resignation...
Big districts stagger their start times so a single fleet of buses can serve every school: dropping off high school students early in the morning, then circling back to get the elementary and middle school kids. If you're going to push high school start times back, then you've probably got to move a lot of elementary and middle schools into earlier time slots. The district knew that going in, and officials dutifully quizzed thousands of parents and teachers at every grade level about their preferred start times. But they never directly confronted constituents with the sort of dramatic change the algorithm would eventually propose -- shifting school start times at some elementary schools by as much as two hours. Even more... Hundreds of families were facing a 9:30 to 7:15 a.m. shift. And for many, that was intolerable. They'd have to make major changes to work schedules or even quit their jobs...
Nearly 85% of the district had ended up with a new start time, and "In the end, the school start time quandary was more political than technical... This was a fundamentally human conflict, and all the computing power in the world couldn't solve it."
But will the whole drama play out again? "Last year, even after everything went sideways in Boston, some 80 school districts from around the country reached out to the whiz kids from MIT, eager for the algorithm to solve their problems."
The Globe reports: They took to the new project with gusto, working 14- and 15-hour days to meet a tight deadline -- and occasionally waking up in the middle of the night to feed new information to a sprawling MIT data center. The machine they constructed was a marvel. Sorting through 1 novemtrigintillion options -- that's 1 followed by 120 zeroes -- the algorithm landed on a plan that would trim the district's $100 million-plus transportation budget while shifting the overwhelming majority of high school students into later start times.... But no one anticipated the crush of opposition that followed. Angry parents signed an online petition and filled the school committee chamber, turning the plan into one of the biggest crises of Mayor Marty Walsh's tenure. The city summarily dropped it. The failure would eventually play a role in the superintendent's resignation...
Big districts stagger their start times so a single fleet of buses can serve every school: dropping off high school students early in the morning, then circling back to get the elementary and middle school kids. If you're going to push high school start times back, then you've probably got to move a lot of elementary and middle schools into earlier time slots. The district knew that going in, and officials dutifully quizzed thousands of parents and teachers at every grade level about their preferred start times. But they never directly confronted constituents with the sort of dramatic change the algorithm would eventually propose -- shifting school start times at some elementary schools by as much as two hours. Even more... Hundreds of families were facing a 9:30 to 7:15 a.m. shift. And for many, that was intolerable. They'd have to make major changes to work schedules or even quit their jobs...
Nearly 85% of the district had ended up with a new start time, and "In the end, the school start time quandary was more political than technical... This was a fundamentally human conflict, and all the computing power in the world couldn't solve it."
But will the whole drama play out again? "Last year, even after everything went sideways in Boston, some 80 school districts from around the country reached out to the whiz kids from MIT, eager for the algorithm to solve their problems."
What about providing optimal bus routes without changing start times? Or what about factoring in a cost for changing start times to only do so when the new start time makes a huge difference in the bussing cost? They just need to take into account the political cost of moving start times as another set of parameters.
Hundreds of families were facing a 9:30 to 7:15 a.m. shift. And for many, that was intolerable. They'd have to make major changes to work schedules or even quit their jobs...
This sounds like a perfectly legitimate argument against the plan. The plan wasn't nixed because people were angry to it, the people were angry because it's a bad plan.
Turn all schools into boarding schools. No babysitting problems for parents!
Something really stinks about this. Moving timeslots like that would completely distrupt the already chaotic morning routine of any house that actually has kids in School, and working parents. What the fuck?
Talk about an attack on MIddle / Lower class. We're not slaves no matter what your "computer simulation" finds. Keep that shit where it belongs, in Prisons and Eastern countries.
Ivoy League my asss. What a waste of money.
What exactly is bad about starting school at 7:15AM?
For most people, that means drop the kids off at school, then head to work.
It's only a problem if you've organized your life around the 9:30 start time. The change would be difficult for some. (I suspect that for many it would be less difficult than they make it out to be. People often complain loudly about change, then when that doesn't work they make some simple adjustments to adapt to the change.)
Doing the right thing sometimes costs dollars. But some people seem to think that every cost should be reduced to zero dollars. Unless it involves an iPhone. That is why so much is going belly-up in today's world.
Given there have only been around 4.3 x 10^17 seconds since the big bang, it seems unlikely that they actually sorted through 10^120 options.
The Soviet Union was full of this type of ridiculous problems. The idea is that centralized social control can 'optimize costs', what it actually does is make life miserable for millions of people, and waste an enormous amount of time and money.
and enough walking paths and security so children can get to school without a giant diesel spewing yellow monstrosity that has no seatbelts
Where is Patrick Henry Winston, when his nation needs him?
Answer: Probably working on some over funded defense project that will never amount to a hill of beans.
Home schooling. Problem solved.
Another case where the installed base wins over new things because it is too disruptive to change it.
The school scheduling equivalent of COBOL.
Civilized people are dead at 7:15 AM. What kind of an asshole would demand that you get a kid to school so early?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Programming would be so much easier without the damn user!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The big question being: Are you really willing to stomach the results? So optimsing school bus usage for highest effciency brings morning schedule out of wack by 2 hours and more for on the far ends of the queue? Gee wizz, what a surprise. Who would've thunk?
In other words: Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Too-early start times, especially for high schools, are a well known reason for poor academic performance:
http://time.com/4741147/school...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/s...
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Nearly 85% of the district had ended up with a new start time, and "In the end, the school start time quandary was more political than technical... This was a fundamentally human conflict, and all the computing power in the world couldn't solve it."
No, it wasn't 'political'. The algorithm successfully computed an optimal schedule for the students with regards to bus transport, but did not include any data at all about the optimal schedule for the parents.
If they wanted to find the optimums, they should have included the whole system and not just the least impactful part. The parents schedules are the most important ones since they are responsible for making it all happen; from breakfast to dinner to bedtime.
I see this all the time. Brilliant programmers and mathematicians that think they can just throw the data into an algorithm and get an answer without understanding the data itself or how to interpret it medically/biologically.
Is night-shift common there? If the parents are around before 9:30 AM why aren't they around before 7:15 AM? I suspect this rejection is caused by the laziness of parents and the failure of child-care services and sporting clubs, not the inability to change routine.
This is precisely what happens when programmers don't understand the real issues and get caught up in the coolness of their work. If these MIT grads had a family and regular office working hours - No not the anytime Grad student life types, the sheer stupidity of their proposed solution would have been apparent. How does an average family adjust to a sudden two hour shift ?
What kind of idiot researchers do they have at MIT who didn't think of the fucking parent's not wanting to get up 2 hours earlier, or stay home an hour longer?
If they really did sort through 10^120 options, assuming an option took at one single clock cycle, and assuming they used a 1 million yottahertz processor would result in it being processed in 10^82 years.
Sure they can probably optimize it down to, say, 10^40 (10^-80 times as many) options, then with that impossible million yottahertz processor it would only take 300 years.
Impressive to say the least.
I honestly doubt that the majority of parents in that geographical area would 1) choose to homeschool vs work a job making >20k/yr and 2) be able to provide that level of education on avg.
...if I had a mere dollar for every project that failed because they failed to identify the primary customer and understand their needs.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Bugmen BTFO how will you ever recover
MIT's algorithm wasn't elegant. It was a complete failure. Still, it is being spun as some sort of success. They're blaming the field of algorithms. The brilliant and elegant men of MIT could not fail.
All this university branding ...
School starting at 7:15 is ludicrous. Especially for older children for whom getting up early is counter-indicated by biology. (There are studies but I can't be bothered looking up references for a /. comment.) And wouldn't that mean school is then getting out for the day at 1:30 or so? Or do school days run longer in the US than I'm familiar with from when I went to school. Where and when I went to school, it ran from roughly 8:45 or 9:00 to about 3:15 or so, which meant I could get up at 7:00, do the necessary morning stuff, and *walk* to school and be there with a substantial margin before school started. Said schools provided zero bus service within towns. Maybe it's time we start allowing children to walk to school and stop bubble wrapping them? Especially the older ones, but even at age 6, I was walking to school and crossing a *highway* to do so.
If it works in theory, try something else in practice.
The real root of the parents complaint is the lack of individual situational data into the algorithm. Plug that data into the system, and the results would not be as dramatic, but I guarantee they'd still pay for the project itself multiple times over.
I wonder why they overlooked the individuals as components of the algorithm versus just scheduling the bus. It's like they were programming a motherboard bus where people are 1s and 0s instead of dealing with complex human individuals.
Here's a good exercise for them to remember to think of people:
Create a program to determine where an office full of 15 people can eat lunch on Fridays. Take into consideration, work schedules, personal restaraunt preferences, food preferences, allergies, location of eatery, menu options, service level, eatery reviews, avoid repetition, transportation, weather, traffic, eatery wait times, busyness by hour, price.
Humans negotiate a lot of that in a conversation and usually with a larger group, there's some sacrifices that need to be made. A program should be able to do this, and MIT should have done something like this before attempting the schoolbus problem.
So you asked a bunch of college students to solve a problem that involves something they have zero familiarly with:
1) Working a job
2) Having kids
I wonder why this didn't work out...
At a business meeting I attended, management wanted to increase the return on assets. A suggested solution was to discard some assets.
Is that problems like this didn't happen when only one parent had to work to support a family. The 'homemaker' stayed home and handled things like weird school times, plus you know, actually teaching their own kids about life. Now both parents have to work, isn't it nice that now it takes two people working full time jobs to earn enough that used to be done by ONE full time parent? This tells me that your job is only worth half the value it used to be! Progress for corporations, at the expense of your family, indeed.
shifting school start times at some elementary schools by as much as two hours. Even more... Hundreds of families were facing a 9:30 to 7:15 a.m. shift.
Elementary school kids should start at 7:15???
When are they supposed to leave the house? 6:45?
When are they supposed to get out of bed? 5:45?
When are the parents supposed to get out of bed?
Hello!!! That is torture!!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"Computers can solve your problem.
Computers do not solve problems. Computers run programs written by humans. Those humans try to solve the problem via computers. When (if?) humans take responsibility for the problems they tell the computers to create, then and only then will we be able to better resolve the problems that face us.
This algorithm says you're literally delusional. These bus routes are a stand-in for society. You think you can control society and you can't even handle bus routes.
Idiots.
So, give the money directly to the parents to choose whatever educational options they think best (including homeschooling and private schools). See my essay on this from about a decade ago: :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it becomes, because there are more families close by with which to meet during the daytime (especially in rural areas). And sometime just knowing an alternative is possible can give one extra hope. Who would have predicted ten years back that NYS would have a governor who was legally blind and whose parents had been forced to change school districts just to get him the education he needed? So, there is always "the optimism of uncertainty", as historian Howard Zinn says. We don't know for sure what is possible and what is not."
https://www.pdfernhout.net/tow...
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
On why early start times are terrible teenagers:
https://www.theguardian.com/bo...
"The book bears a sobering and vital message, too, about the centrality of sleep to the proper development of young minds. Early school starting times - particularly in the US, where, barbarically, almost half of public high schools start before 7.20am - are disastrous for the mental health of teenagers. There is serious evidence, Walker suggests, for viewing lack of sleep as a factor in the onset of depression and schizophrenia."
Were not the recent mass shooters home schooled? Just sayin'
https://hsinvisiblechildren.or...
....it was the choice of cost function. They could have chosen the cost function so that no school had their time moved up more than, for example, 30 minutes. The end result might not have saved as much in bus costs, but by removing the objectionable results, they might have successfully implemented the optimized schedule. If they had asked parents about acceptable start times in the surveys, surely they should have exposed the problem up front.
Stupid as. Private for profit, their only purpose to serve the wallets of the investors, if they could rent the children out as slaves they would, their last priority is teaching children, their first priority profits, honestly how well do you think that will really work, it routinely fails to provide good services every where else, if fact ' cheap shit service, lawyers and lobbyists and maximum profit' are their motto (that's cheap to provide, charge maximum amount of course, else where the profits).
Basically education should be taken out of local purview and be shifted up to state level. Each school should serve a catchment zone the obviates the need for school buses, except for larger regional zones catchments.
So in the majority of instances no school buses what so ever, done and finished. If necessary more smaller school if catchments are too large to be done on foot, by bicycle or parents dropping off kids to school. Worried about the kids travelling, no problem, the highest possible number of police officers should be on the road patrolling at school start and finish times. Same should be done for the police, turn them from junk yard dog enforcers, to proper police officers caring about their community, drop the insane local show and go for properly managed state based policing.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
shifting school start times at some elementary schools by as much as two hours. Even more... Hundreds of families were facing a 9:30 to 7:15 a.m. shift.
Elementary school kids should start at 7:15???
When are they supposed to leave the house? 6:45?
When are they supposed to get out of bed? 5:45?
When are the parents supposed to get out of bed?
Hello!!! That is torture!!
Funny I have to do that to remain employed. Why can't they? Not everyone gets to be a rockstar and live 5 miles from the office. My company forbids work at home and I have people who need warm seats at 8 and live 80 minutes from work. It is good to teach children the value of arriving to work on time and going to bed early and getting up early.
After all school is to prepare them to be adults and this is what it's like to be a grown up who isn't a badass programmer who has an understanding boss.
http://saveie6.com/
Maybe if we didn't condition kids to accept unnecessary suffering from an early age, they'd push back against asshole bosses who made ridiculous demands of them. Give a generation or two, and we might even end up with a 40-hour average work week in the US again. Would that be so bad?
If you've ever worked with a fresh college grad, you know that they are very, very junior. College does not teach students how to be software engineers, it only teaches them how to write code, and maybe a bit of logic theory. To be worth much in business, it takes a few years of experience.
Missing the actual reaction of humans who use a system (in this case, parents dealing with bus schedules) is very typical for a young person just out of school, or in this case, still in school.
I mean, what nation decides to place a higher value on an arbitrary start time for work than it does at making certain its children are able to attend school?
Oh. Wait. That would be our nation.
It's downright silly to put such demands on people. To tell them simultaneously that they must ensure proper care and education of their children and that they have to be employed while being without recourse or protection of the law should the first priority come in conflict with the second. Only psychopaths demand that sort of thing. And I don't know about the rest of you, I'm not one of those.
Cruz?
M.I.T. is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, across the river from Boston. Both cities are havens for leftist loony toons, so it's no surprise that there was no wise oversight of the project before it was presented to the community.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Bicycles. Let the mother fucking dipshits ride to school on a bike or walk or ride a horse. Youncould buy every 1 of those mother fuckers a cheap Next bike and they would be awake by the rime they pedaled to school.
I know this will not happen because the mother fucking liberals all have a mojor interest in the bus and taxi companies that are raping the middle class to subsidize the diesel guzzling busses that clog up the roads
The United States contibution to world society is to have conclusivly and definativly proved that Democracy just doesnt work. Fnord.
Redicilous? Where do you live? In the US, Germany, and Nordic countries tardiness is never ever acceptable PERIOD. Sure you can be a few minutes late every now and then but if it is a common occurence then prepared to be disciplined.
I have to get up at 4:45am to get to work at 8am due to traffic and other variables where I live. I was late 3 times when they demanded I come in earlier last month and I was angry too. Then I thought about it and realized if I didn't be there on time they would fire me and replace me with someone else who will. I am a contractor and the customer is always right too in the US.
How do we prepare our kids if they expect to show up late and be fired all the time when they enter the workforce? Also in my neighborhood I see cars heading out starting at 4am! Obviously they have no problems and are thrilled to be up early and have a job.
But I studies international marketing in college. Germany, Nordic countries, and the US/Canada do not tolerate tardiness and have more clocks per capita than everywhere else. You can't change the culture of Americans when someone else is happy to do your job for less and be there on time.
Just go with the flow or be unemployed with no benefits as being late counts as misconduct.
http://saveie6.com/
Arriving to work on time sure, thats a fine value
Why is going to bed early and getting up early a value? Its all arbitrary. At least all of the shops I know of and have worked at dont really give a crap what time you show up (at least before noon so you can be there to discuss things with others or to make it to a meeting when scheduled). As long as you aren't inconveniencing someone else by not being there what does it matter, do your 8hrs of work and as long as you get it done adequately who cares
Of course this doesnt apply to shift work, when you have to be there at a certain time, but for anything non shift going to bed early and getting up early is a preference, not a value
It looks like the algorithm just sucks. After evaluating 1 novemtrigintillion options all it can do is shave few percents requiring life changing sacrifices from the clients. This can't be right.
Did school district just stumble on near-optimal solution which MIT can't improve? Considering these things usually just grow over time naturally it seems unlikely.
"It's just want I asked for, but not what I want!"
Get a city map. Study the layout as concerns where people live and where they work. Get back to me when you realize five miles isn't that far from work for most people. Hell, I now live in a tiny town and know people who live on one side and work on the other. Over five miles.
As much as I look at this there was no defined measure of success. What was good enough. That even recognised all the stakeholders.
Whoever at MIT was supervising this was either not listened to, or just sitting there waiting for an inevitable epic fail.
What has getting up early for work as a guy over 30 to do with getting up early for school for a 6 or 7 year old?
Easy answer: nothing.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
What a fucking waste of time. Let's do it again!
come in earlier so the older kids could come in later. That would make the day care situation worse, not better. That's more than likely why people complained about the change. That plus most folks build their work hours around their kids.
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for factory work. Until you get to the fancy private schools that is...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Back in mu day, we walked to school.
If this is such a hassle, what is the advantage of the US school bus system?
Netherland has no school buses; all schools start between 8:15 and 8:45, and kids go to school on their own bike. Young kids are brought by their parents. Especially in a city like Boston, I would expect the distance to school to be too short to justify buses.
If the participants would "have to make major changes to work schedules or even quit their jobs" to reach the designated start times, that's not a "political" failure. That's failure to meet the goals of the stakeholders, and a fundamental design error. It's not "Computers can solve your problem. You may not like the answer", it's NOT THE RIGHT ANSWER. How on earth could the right involve having to quit your job?
Simply, fucking, brilliant. Buses have no place in urban or even suburban areas, only rural. The rest need to have more but smaller schools.
So, create an algorithm which migrates from the current times to the new times over a longer period of time. and does so in short segments? Hmm
In the UK schools are allocated on the distance your house is from the school. Rural villages are then allocated a school in town and a bus route setup. While living here we have never been more than a 10 minutes walk from our kids school.
If you dont like the local government school you can always choose a nice public school, but you will be talking about 20K a year in fees.
Note that a public school in the UK means the opposite - a private school.
We don't really have those problems here.
In first world countries, it is assumed that people work for a living and that the average work day spans from around 7am to 5pm with a little time for drifting. As such, in first world countries we have government subsidized day care that operates from 7am to 5pm. This means that everyone should be able to make their work window happen during those hours.
For children who are too young to be home alone before and after school, the schools are open early and there are people watching the playgrounds. Then there are programs sponsored by the government to provide after school activities (similar to day care) for kids up to around 6th grade until 5pm.
In these environments, we don't have school buses... we simply have public transportation. The parents drop off and pick up using public buses... even if you live on a farm 500km from civilization... there should be a regularly serviced bus stop nearby.
Parents often make groups to walk kids to and from school each day... and the single parent with a long way to go to get to and from work generally don't have problems because no one would consider making one of their child's friends mother have to quit their job.
Then there's the issue of making sure that mom or dad don't have that problem. Whether you're a 1%er or you're the bottom 1%, the government pays your child welfare to make sure their have what they need. This pops an extra $300-$500 a month into your bank account. So you can afford to have a slightly more flexible job or even to be a student long enough to make things easier later on.
We pay for this as tax payers in the first world and don't think anything of it. It doesn't matter whether we choose to have children of our own or not. What matters is that the people we work with need to be healthy. The people who work for us need to be healthy. The people who pick up the trash on the road need to be healthy. The people who we pass on the street need to be healthy. Otherwise, you get second world problems like school shootings because people aren't healthy. Or equally disgusting... people live in neighborhoods with security gates and guards because they're terrified of their own lives.
The first world is willing to live with a little less to get a lot more. We have governments with parties who we don't trust, but are smart enough to make sure there are enough parties that they can't make any choices without actually debating those laws openly. So while we don't trust the people in the government... we trust their enmity towards one another to keep them from hurting us. We also trust the government to make sure our tax payer money is spent in a way that will get them reelected because we can see, touch and feel how much better our lives are than the second world Americans on TV.
This case does not need AI.
Not everything can be solved by AI.
Using AI in this case is like pushing a square peg into a round hole.
The thing blew up not because the busses are not optimal.
The thing blew up because MIT's so-called 'elegant solution' was attempting to solve a problem without identifying that ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM - which is, the busses.
It is the busses that have become the BOTTLENECK.
If one really wants to solve any problem, the bottleneck must be identified and eliminated.
To eliminate that bottleneck in this scenario one either
1. MASSIVELY INCREASE THE NUMBER OF THE BUSSES,
or
2. Stop bussing the students altogether.
This is a classic software development failure. The developers set about finding an optimum solution, spent hours on it creating the algorithms, programming them, and rush in a mad deadline to finish. They finish, the solution works as designed. But only later do they discover they solved the wrong problem!
This happens all the time. The article makes it out as "political" (which it's not), it's a functional problem. Changing start times is a massive headache for parents. You try getting your 10 year old up at 6am. Personally I _hated_ getting up this early in HS, and it'd have been 10 times harder in grade school.
Of course the parents petitioned and put the kibosh on this. It was a stupid idea designed to save money at the expense of anything. Saving money to the exclusion of everything else is rarely the right solution.
I fail to understand the importance of having two hours more sleep during 7 to 9 AM instead at 9 to 11 PM.
One could only expect those results when all of the following took place:
1) Those that were most affected (parents), were not consulted
2) Those that foot the bill (see above) were not consulted
3) AI was used and actual intelligence (common sense) was disregarded
4) Those doing the calculations have no experience with children or jobs, but know how to program
Almost nobody can just change the start or end times of their jobs. No, geniuses of slashdot, slowly adjusting it wouldn't help either and would likely cause continued issues as the changes kept coming.
If your boss told you at work tomorrow that you need to stay an hour late, you might be irritated. If you have kids, you might have to tell him to fuck off. What if you he told you that you need to come in early tomorrow? Same.
This isn't a theoretical thing we're talking about, it's the very thing people deal with in real life when you have a job and kids in school.
Why are they calling this an "elegant" algorithm when it reaches an intractable solution? I'll bet these MIT nerds don't have any kids because a 7:15-9:30 time window is just stupid. They didn't even consider in their design when parents have to be at work. They claim they interviewed parents to find preferred start times and still landed on a solution that every parent knows is just plain stupid. They only optimized the actual routes regardless of necessary constraints of parents' schedules. Yet another example of overhyped nerds failing to consider all the constraints of a problem, and coming up with an overcomplicated, utopian solution to problems that completely miss the mark in the end.
Hmm, I get up in the 4AM to 5AM range most mornings. No, it's not torture, since I don't bother with an alarm (actually, I have a 6AM alarm, because there are a couple things that absolutely must be done before 7, but I've only been awakened by that alarm twice this month)....
No, humans aren't hardwired to any particular wake-up time (other than dawn), nor to any particular sleep time (other than sunset).
Now, are modern parents/children wired to particular times for waking and sleeping? Well, I guess that depends on what TV shows are on at any particular hour....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
So funny in the light of recent news about children sleep being destroyed by early school start times... parent's are correct, the computer did not "figure out the correct answer" because it was not correctly parameterized, specifically with the requirement that children don't end up with very poor sleep. Perhaps some children already do and the naieve designers of the algorithm thought that simply maintaining the average would therefore be ok - which shows a complete lack of understanding of reality of how people respond to change, imagine being told your kid's school start time was changed from 9 to 7:30.
It's called a public school because the public can attend, for a fee.
There are schools in the UK so elitist that the public cannot attend for any price.
Who says anything about tardiness? What's wrong with shifting ACTUAL start times (work or school) to better accomodate human circadian rhythms?
The real irony being that loads of real experts in child health say that we shouldn't be putting kids in school so early in the first place (the current school schedules are primarily to serve the convenience of adults).
I.e., just one thing is apparently yes teenagers do in fact need 10-11 hours of sleep per day.
If you have three kids, that is $60k a year. That is about the average household income in the USA. And since household income is often unevenly distributed between two working parents, even just $20k a year is about what one parent might be making, say, working at minimum wage at a convenience store (especially if not quite full time). And $20k a year would go a long way for some families otherwise living near the edge of poverty (especially in rural areas where the cost of living is generally lower). For farming families with a couple of kids, this money could mean the difference between a parent needing to work off the farm to bring in income (maybe with a long commute) or not.
There are so many free resources on the internet now (e.g. Khan Academy) that providing learning opportunities to children is much easier than it was decades ago. There's a difference between supervising a child's education and teaching everything yourself.
As more families homeschool, it becomes easier for all of them since there are more near-by families with kids around to interact with and share resources with. Also, with all that money in the hands of families with kids, they can afford things like educational travel, tutors, and learning center classes -- boosting those areas of the economy. And decent public school teacher could probably do as well financially working in those growing areas and would probably be a lot happier teaching only people who actively want to learn in those areas.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Work for the parents starts at set time. They have to be at 'work' at a set time. That work shift time cannot be changed for many working people.
Distances and time needed has to count back from that very important start of work time.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
According to research cited in Matthew Walker's excellent book, teenagers shift their sleep schedule later by a couple of hours compared to their younger years. This may be because of evolutionary benefits to a tribe of having some people in a village awake to watch for danger when others sleep. A couple of unsupervised hours at night also provides a chance for teenagers to learn to operate independently from their parents while still being part of the family, village, and tribe. So, if you take a teenager who naturally may go to sleep close to midnight and wake up at 10am, and you force them to wake up a 6am to get to a 7am class, you are disrupting their natural sleep cycle which has all kinds of health an cognitive consequences (since naturally they will still stay up late and will thus get less sleep). Examples in the book include a huge reduction in car accidents in an area among teenagers who are better rested. Studies also show vastly better test scores for well-rested teens. Lack of sleep may also be contributing to the teen obesity crisis, the teen heart disease crisis, teen mental illness -- among other negative health impacts from lack of sleep.
More on this: https://www.sleepfoundation.or...
As an additional complexity, some people are naturally "larks" (early morning risers, about 10%, according to link below) and some are naturally "night owls" (later risers, about 20%) while most others are "hummingbirds" in the middle. There is very little that can be done about this since this sleep preference is genetically determined to a significant degree -- although sleep schedule may change as we age as above. Caffeine may help some night owls get going anyway in the morning -- but there remains a significant health impact of getting too sleep -- since most night owls simply are not going to go to bed earlier even if they are forced to wake up earlier.
https://www.nasw.org/users/lla...
People suffer if their sleep schedule does not reflect their natural cycle. So, forcing a night owl to perform early in the morning is just a bad idea -- whatever the person's age. Similarly, the cognitive performance of someone who stays up a few hours late or who gets a few hours too little sleep is typically similar to that of someone who is drunk -- which is why drowsy driving kills more people than drunk driving. If an early morning school schedule is terrible for a regular teenager, it is going to be even worse for a night owl.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Some people of all backgrounds do bad things. Someone growing up badly is more likely to happen when parents and the community do not have enough resources to make time for kids and for each other -- since "it takes a village to raise a child well". So, making more money available to people outside of formal schooling seems (to me) to overall be likely to lead to a reduction in violence and other bad behavior across the board -- including by reducing stress levels. (A universal basic income would be another way to address this.)
The mostly forgotten purpose of Prussian-inspired schooling in according to Gatto is to turn children into obedient cannon fodder for a military empire. That includes increasing class and race prejudice in structural ways (e.g. the medium is the message, regardless of the content). Give public schools more money and they will only do that distasteful task even better.
So, without public schools derived from Prussian militaristic ambitions, would the USA overall -- including wars -- be a less violent nation?
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The Prussian education system refers to the system of education established in Prussia as a result of educational reforms in the late 18th and early 19th century, which has had widespread influence since. It is predominantly used as an American political slogan in educational reform debates, since it was adopted by all American K-12 public schools and major universities as early as the late 18th century, and is often used as a derogatory term for education in the service of nation-building, teaching children and young adults blind obedience to authority, and reinforcing class and race prejudice. The actual Prussian education system was introduced as a basic concept in the late 18th century and was significantly enhanced after Prussia's defeat in the early stages of the Napoleonic Wars. The Prussian educational reforms inspired other countries and remains important as a biopower in the Foucaultian sense for nation-building. Compulsory education on the Prussian example was soon mirrored in Scandinavia, and United States started to adopt the Prussian example."
And in general, by John Taylor Gatto: https://archive.org/details/Th...
"John Taylor Gatto is a former New York public schoolteacher who taught for thirty years and won multiple awards for his teaching. However, constant harassment by unhelpful administrations plus his own frustrations with what he came to realize were the inherent systemic deficiencies of our `public' schools led him to resign; he now is a school-choice activist who writes and speaks against our compulsory, government-run school system.
THE UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION is a freewheeling investigation into the real - as opposed to the `official' - history of schooling, focused on the U.S. but with examinations of other historical examples for the purposes of comparing and contrasting, as well as for tracing where ideas and concepts related to education originated. You will discover things you were never told in the official version, things that will, at times, surprise, disgust, and scare you. You will also be introduced to the little-known historiography of the the darker side of the construction of compulsory government schooling.
In the final analysis, Gatto believes that compulsory, government-run schooling is inherently destructive to true education, the cultivation of self-reliance, and indeed to individualism - which used to be a defining element of the American character. The true purpose of our public school system in reality has more to do with control than it does with learning. This does not mean that rank-and-file teachers, principals, and even superintendents believe they are making students dumber, more conformist, less self-reliant, less capable of genuine analytical, independent thou
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
A long long time ago, known as the '80s, we still had people called "general business consultants". These people were hired by businesses, for lots of money, purely to look around and make decisions. They didn't justify those decisions (with any sort of data) at all. They simply said thing like "I believe this is the best course of action.". You believed them because they had a good track record and experience in the field, or you didn't.
Nowadays, general business consultants have been replaced by data engineers -- people who like to collect huge amounts of data points, and have dumb-ass machines make decisions based on those data points. Alas, like every study that's ever been done with data points, it all comes down to whether or not you have enough of the right data points, and not too many of the wrong data points. And that's a skill that absolutely none of these data engineers has ever had.
I can make the cost of transportation absolutely $0. It's really easy. I'll just cancel all of the buses. Oh, wait, you actually want buses? I hadn't thought about that. Okay, I'll take your children at midnight. Oh? You don't like that either? Here's a thought, I'll get more buses, not stagger anything, and you'll be happy. Oh wait, we don't have that much money?
Look at that. Balancing costs and services can't make everyone happy. Maybe happiness costs money, or customers. Shock of a lifetime.
Maybe one day, data engineers will be able to put in the very important data point that says we're never trying to solve a problem. Solving any problem is ridiculously easy. We're always trying to solve a problem within another problem -- within a context. Like, in this case, within a parent's business day. That's hard, if not impossible, every time.
Are you a parent? If not, you better stay read-only w.r.t. this article.
While your kids are young (that is they cannot get themselves to school in the morning without help yet), one of the harshest effects of parenthood is permanent sleep deprivation. Especially when new babies are born into a family with kids. Even if the stars were lucky and the birth went well without complications or emergency (you *never* know in advance until it is over), the mother is virtually glued to the baby, she may suffer from post-birth depression, and she is surely tired of pregnancy and birth. The father takes care of everything else, plus he must give the mother several hours of rest (changing diapers, walking miles from one corner of the room to the other at night with the crying baby on his arms, bathing, cooking, feeding, cleaning, and what-not). The father's share of home chores increases dramatically. The father must also attend his job (look carefully at those happy new fathers that do not have any external help at home, when it is them and their wives---these men are walking zombies that I would not permit to drive a car). It gets so hard that it reminded me my toughest times in the military---sleep deprivation accumulates.
Modern economy *expects* *both* parents to work (it is not a right anymore, thanks to "feminism"): there were times when my wife said that she is so burnt out that she would prefer to give up her skilled office job and just stay home with the kids if I had a way to make up for her share of our income. Planning morning and evening transportation is an ever-reoccurring nightmare: both parents are expected to work at least 10 hours a week in order to stay competitive. Having one kid is usually less of a problem: parents can take turns. Having two kids or more will turn you into a Master of Scheduling. Just imagine that your two 7 and 9 years olds that go to *different* schools were scheduled by that algorithm to start at 0730 and 0930. It means that a parent loses two hours daily thanks to the algorithm.
There is no politics in this story, just plain stupidity and not knowing first hand what being a parent actually involves. That algorithm literally make parents to hate its inventors for lost hours of work, sleep, quality time with their with kids, etc. I think that it is enough for getting people out to the streets.
Engineers fail to take into account human factors and respect the way things have evolved over time. It will be the same with self-driving cars and vehicles. There are the laws of the road, and then there are the human laws of the road - and they are not the same. You can program in fixed laws, but you cannot account for the understandings and accepted abnormal behaviors of people in software.
E Proelio Veritas.
For good or bad, in the USA we live in a capitalist society with a (somewhat) free market. We can try to make the most of that because -- given appropriate regulation by the State and a fair distribution of purchasing power -- markets can work. See: ..."
"Planning Through the Market: More Equality Through the Market System" by G. William Domhoff
https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.e...
"Most importantly for our purposes, markets can be reconstructed to make it possible to plan for a more egalitarian economic future. It turns out it is possible for strong governments to use the market system for planning. Once it is realized that markets can be viewed from a governmental point of view as administrative instruments for planning, it can be seen that with a little reconfiguring they can serve collective purposes as well as the individual consumer preferences trumpeted by conservative free market economists. In this form of planning, the information is supplied by the price system that is so central to the considerable, but far from perfect, efficiency brought about by markets. There is thus no need for one big planning apparatus. Instead, the planning tools within a reconstructed market system are simply taxes, subsidies, government purchases, and regulation. This point may seem very mundane, but these well-known government powers can be potent when applied to markets.
Just like there are some good cars out there out there (e.g. Toyota Camry) and bad cars (e.g. Ford Pinto), there are some good private schools out there which can be beneficial to specific families with specific needs and interests and there are also some bad private schools. Even the same school can be good or bad for a family depending on circumstances. For example for an overall good school (especially for families with kids who are a little extroverted), consider the Albany Free School:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
For parents who don't want to home educate (or otherwise can't do it for some reason), they could spend the $20k per child per year on private school instead. There would thus be a lot of money around to support alternative local private schools (like Montessori schools and child-directed Free schools as well as other types of schools). These schools would have to be very responsive to the needs of families in order to prosper given the potential for competition with all these other educational approaches and other private schools.
People choosing what they want to learn (and spending money on those choices) seems more compatible with a supposedly free-market capitalist society like the USA -- compared to what we have now with most young people being turned into standardized minds in government-owned "education" factories called schools (see my other comment on Prussian-inspired schools).
Local libraries might also be big beneficiaries from this shift. As John Taylor Gatto writes in "The Underground History of American Education", the "public" in public libraries means something very different than the "public" in public schools. Public libraries are inclusive institutions where you pick what you want to learn about on your own schedule and the librarian is not looking over your shoulder at everything you read. By contrast, public schools are only available to some people in the community (and exclude participation to everyone else) and, if you can enroll in them, are essentially mini surveillance states dictating what you learn and when you learn it (regardless of your individual needs or interests).
I's actually prefer a universal basic income over money spent just on families with children. But both of those solutions are in part about the same thing -- addressing a growing destructive rich-poor divide. Both capitalism and democracy can only function well when wealth is roughly evenly distributed across the society. Otherwise regulatory capture and
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"we do not claim that homeschool students and graduates are any more or less violent than individuals otherwise educated."
From your referenced article. Just sayin.
A few themes here made me want to comment: 1. Who pays for the schooling system 2. Choice within the schooling system 3. Purpose of the schooling system To point #1: everyone who pays taxes. That includes myself and my wife, who both work hard for our money and who donâ(TM)t - and never will - have kids. As such, I have a stake in this but donâ(TM)t receive any direct benefit. To point #2: as someone who grew up and was educated in the UK the choice available was simple: any of the local schools within a certain catchment area/radius, or pay to go to a private (fee paying) school. The local schools all had generally the same start times (8:30 - 9:00) and you were expected to be there. It wasnâ(TM)t the schoolâ(TM)s responsibility how you got there, and there would be penalties for being late. If you lived out in a remote village then the city would ensure a bus was available (either existing public transport or a school bus). It was your responsibility to catch the bus at whatever time it was due in order to be at school on time. This was an early lesson in the requirements of adulthood. Since we were at school with kids from the same streets, sometimes literally next-door neighbors, we knew many kids at school and could all walk/travel to and from the school together, making it safer and ensuring we all got there on time. Also, it was common that at least one parent would have some schedule flexibility on a particular day so after school a whole bunch of us would go play at that house until our parents were home. To point #3: the basic and undeniable purpose of schooling is to learn. Racial/gender/religious/ considerations are nice but shouldnâ(TM)t drive any of the decisions around which school you can attend. If you leave school without the ability to write, listen, process information, and contribute new ideas then itâ(TM)s a fail. Not being able to do this but having a firm grasp of random sensitivities is still a fail. The number of folks that decide to have kids but only factor in the cost of things like a pushchair, diapers, clothing, etc. rather than the entire cost of their upbringing continues to disappoint me. If you want your kid to go to school A at times B and with diversity C, then donâ(TM)t expect the _public_ system that I help pay for to meet these goals. Canâ(TM)t afford the choices youâ(TM)d want your kid(s) to have? Then you should either not have kids, adjust your expectations, or find some way to make more money. This entitlement crap drives me crazy. Growing up, we were always taught that schooling was a privilege - not a right - and that we should treat it as such. The number of parents who believe that society should pander to accommodate their kids is jarring. You made them, theyâ(TM)re your responsibility, they get no special rights over adults, and I will admonish them if they are doing something that bothers me...exactly as I would do to an adult. Iâ(TM)m content to pay taxes for systems that benefit the wider society but donâ(TM)t directly benefit me, as I recognize that they improve the society I live in and hence improve my quality of life. On a couple of additional points... Homeschooling is a terrible idea for all the reasons already provided (parents are terrible educators, parents canâ(TM)t be expert enough in all subjects, kids grow up with relationship problems, religious nutbaggery, etc,). Safety of kids on the commute: statistics show that kids are safer now than in the past and itâ(TM)s the (social) media who are responsible for whipping people up into a froth about such concerns.
just another arrogant junior developer thinking they can solve an actual business problem by looking at only the technology and numbers. jeez..
nothing new to see here, move along.
City thought it was saving money by putting a couple of gradschool students on the job. that too the geeky ones living in a parallel universe of MIT. no wonder.
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All those folks saying "move the schedule a bit at a time" fail to recognize that there's a fundamental granularity and sequencing problem. All schools at a given grade level have to start at the same time - so you really have only 6 orderings: elem, middle, high; H, E, M; M,H, E; and the other 3 permutations.
Then there's a set of general sequencing constraints which work like this:
High schoolers perform academically better if they start latest; however extra-curricular (EC) activities such as athletics prefer to start early afternoon, particularly in the fall/winter - some districts forbid interscholastic competition after dark for (misguided) fear of violence. In today's "everyone has to compete for selective college admission" model - EC activities are perceived to be important; and, of course, HS athletics has always driven a lot of decisions.
Elementary schools don't want to start too early, because "stay at home parents" (who are politically powerful, since they have time to spend on it during working hours) don't want to have to get up too early - the model is: get wage earner off to work, other kids off to school, take young kid to school, then volunteer/socialize with other SAHPs. For working parents, there's a whole infrastructure of child care, etc. that tries to structure on a "arrive late, leave early" basis -
Middle schoolers - eh, nobody cares about them, so they get put where the other two aren't.
So you're not going to be able to gradually creep the High schoolers later and the Elementary earlier - Sooner or later, one has to jump over the other, and that's a 1 hour jump at least. a 1 hour jump *is* disruptive, no matter how you look at it. It's going to create a firestorm of criticism, along with all sorts of specious arguments like "my first grader will be walking to school in the dark" - no they won't because you drop them off from your SUV; but YOU will have get up earlier to get yourself dressed and ready to drive them, and that means competition for home resources (cooking, hot water, etc)
Maybe they should try optimizing the families.
If they could reorganize the families into two parent households with a homemaker / stay at home wife / mother shifting start times would have generated much less push back.
This is why we can't have nice things.
There is a fallacy of averages in play here.
We try to provide an education for all students, and there are federal laws protecting that right to an education. But some students cost more to educate than others. Special needs students are very expensive to educate. Most charter and voucher schools find ways to get out of taking their fair share of special needs students, and few parents will have the resources to home school them.
But voucher systems typically pay the district-wide average of student cost, rather than the average cost of educating a non-special-needs student. As a result, they overpay for what the schools are delivering. Students who are less costly to educate leave the public school system, leaving that system with a higher percentage of those expensive students while simultaneously damaging its economies of scale. The result is a downward spiral of public education.
What about going back to neighborhood schools?
More grades in one building isn't so bad - when you aren't scooping them up from all over the city. Bonus, they could take the same bus and wouldn't need staggered start times.
None of these options are actually optimal for the kids, and the school shouldn't be a day care for kids while parents work.
Kids should be in school at the time when they can learn. Getting them into school like cattle at the crack of dawn ruins that potential for the entire day.
The optimal environment is when kids have support at home, a two-person family where only one person *has to* work. Unfortunately, like any good market, our society adapted and converted "ability to have a career for both parents" to actually making it necessary for both parents to work to survive at all.
This can call be solved with a single ALTER TABLE to add a column "user_preferred_start_time" and reruning their gigawattBS algo.
But no, let's make a political post on /. or some other crappy news site.
Noting that not all fee paying schools are public schools (most are not). So we have state schools which are free to attend, private schools that cost money, and public schools which are all very old and very elitist, think Eton, Harrow, Rugby etc. Note the oldest school in the UK (and world as I understand it) with continuous teaching since 692 AD is technically not a Public school, and the state school in the next town to mine growing up known locally as Qegs or the Queen Elizabeth Grammer School, where thats Elizabeth the First, and the school is getting on for 500 years old. So its not just about age.
That is a very concise summary of the problem with charters that can skip out on the requirements that public schools must operate under.
The aeticle states "In the end, the school start time quandary was more political than technical."
Well for 85% who may have had to modify their jobs, start or end times, etc, it's hardly "political", it's a real world constraint. Did the smart MIT schoolbus algorithm also find new jobs for those who would be affected?
Not so smart now ey?
What would happen if you were not in your seat at 8? Would the world stop? If it would you must be very important.
My world would stop frankly.
I agree on principal that everyone would benefit if we worked less and hired more people and stopped obsessing over time.
But in reality my posts are about hurting parents who need to work and an intollerent society of not showing up early or before 9am outside of programmer jobs.
I had to not work for 2 years because of this problem as kids had early release at 1:30 Friday's to appease the teachers union. No one would hire me as a result.
http://saveie6.com/
Which part of:
The kid is tortured to get up at 5:45 (to get to the school so early it will spent the first hours sleeping), don't you get?
No, humans aren't hardwired to any particular wake-up time (other than dawn), nor to any particular sleep time (other than sunset).
Seems you never worked in an environment where it was obvious: yes, 50% of humans are hardwired. E.g. me. And the others aren't, like you.
E.g. the typical, hard wired, "I get up somewhat early and like to work from 8:30 to 15:30", that is the classical school teacher. You will hardly find one who likes to sleep into the day, or gets up for fun at 4:00 in the morning.
If you can shift your sleep and wake times around, you belong to the happy 50% people who can. I guess it is probably only 25% even. As I don't know anyone in person who can do that.
Well, I guess that depends on what TV shows are on at any particular hour.... Kids usually have no TV in their rooms (where I come from).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
For a 3-5Million dollar saving, you could build schools within walking distance of the students. - Oh wait, this is America not the rest of the world where kids actually walk in the fresh air and get exercise before school by using their legs.
I'm kinda surprised they didn't suggest scrapping the school busses altogether. Problem solved, no big computer project needed. - I'll collect my consultancy cheque now . thx.
Note that a public school in the UK means the opposite - a private school.
I'm from the Uk and I've never heard a private school called a public school. Private schools cost fees, public schools are free and do all the catchment stuff.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
That $20,000/year figure is once they wrap in special education student costs.
One disabled student can easily cost $100,000 once you include a $30-60,000 paraeducator to walk from class to class with the student and assist them with every need (including reading the materials to them when they're below grade level, transcription from however the student can communicate to legible text, assistance with going to the bathroom, pushing their wheelchair, emotional outbursts, transporting them to a sensory room so they calm down during an incident, etc), plus visits for rehabilitation that the school must pay for, etc. English for Speakers of Other Languages curriculums are incredibly expensive as well for children who did not learn English at home, you might have five kids sharing one $60-80,000 teacher who is fluent in their language.
Gifted students also cost more than the average to properly educate, but they're easier to sweep under the rug by putting in the back and giving them some extra credit to work on in a normal classroom.
Hand every home-schooling family $20,000 per child, and you'll find the special education parents at your door with pitchforks wanting their larger slice of the pie when the money runs out.
If necessary more smaller school
A lot more in some places. In rural areas people can live many miles from the nearest school. You would need little bitty schools that serve the handful of families in walking or biking distance. I think the one-room rural schoolhouse is probably not going to make a comeback though.
Conversely buy enough buses to serve both elementary/middle schools and high schools and the problem goes away too.
It's not about the buses, it's about the bus drivers. My current town has 3 different start times staggered so that they can have full time 8-5 bus drivers. They basically work 4 hours in the morning and 4 hours in the afternoon with a lunch break like a normal job. Where I grew up, the bus drivers were mostly farmers or people who had other jobs. They would drive for 1 hour in the morning, go to work and then drive 1 hour in the afternoon. My current school also has a large number of before and after hour care which is even more needed now that schedules are staggered and the teenager can't be home to take care of the grade schooler. It seems like another easy solution to the busing problem is counter intuitively to extend the school day. If kids went to school the standard 8-5 then there would be less need for bus drivers and more bus drivers available. People could work a normal day job and then still run the buses in the afternoon. Another option would be to have the school teachers drive the buses. If the school teachers did the busing during a normal 8a-3p/9a-4p school day they would have a normal 8 hour 7a-4p/8a-5p 40 hour week.
The capital class is obsessed with worms.