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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."
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.