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."

Comments

Optimal Busses

[crow]

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.

Re:Optimal Busses

[Dutch Gun]

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing - parametrize the costs of change. It's actually a pretty big blind spot that they missed this, but it's understandable. They tried to fix their issues in one giant step, which naturally flopped.

Instead, tune that algorithm to make very small, yearly changes that move things in the desired direction. Essentially, they need to factor in the human / political element of this, which states that people resist change of all sorts. So the challenge then is to find a path which minimizes the pain of this transition for the most people. So it's a ten year plan instead of getting fixed in one shot.

Re:Optimal Busses

[Entrope]

Changing things a little each year for ten years won't fix problems like school times that sharply conflict with work schedules. It will, however, make a bunch of people raise a stink for each of those ten years, and increase the total cost of the transition because you're changing things every year.

Re:Optimal Busses

[sjames]

Actually, it flopped because they, like you, didn't consider the full effects of the change.

You see, if school starts 2 hours early, it means it lets out 2 hours early. No big deal if the high school student gets home at 2:30 or so when mom and/or dad don't get home until 6:30, but it's a really big deal if the kid is 5 or 6 years old. That's not minor adjustment level changes either.

So that's the real reason it failed, they failed to codify all of the constraints when they optimized the problem. They now need to either stay where they are, try again with the constraints corrected, or come up with a practical way to loosen the actual constraints that costs less than the current non-optimal scheduling.

Re:Optimal Busses

[sjames]

But this plan was burning parent's money. It would make the older kids who would be fine at home alone for a few hours get home later and the young kids who shouldn't be alone that long get home earlier.

So take a single parent that's just managing and impose that on them and now they're fiscally sunk. I'm betting you'd complain about that too if you were in their position.

Re: Optimal Busses

[terrycarlino]

Because in the vast majority of places in the U.S., i.e. everyplace that that is not New York, Chicago or Boston there is no public transportation ssytem.

In the places that do have public transportation what parent wants their kid riding public transportation? Except in the few cities mentioned above public transportation consists of buses basically going down major routes, the places no one actually lives. People even in towns and cities live in cul-de sac communities specifically designed not to be driven through. Trying to get buses in there is a nightmare, one reason school bus routes often require a hour to take a kid somewhere that would take their parents ten minutes to drive.

For people who don't know cul-de-sacs are mazes design specifically to prevent through traffic. It's home builders/developers answer to buyer's complaints about not wanting to live on a street that has lots of traffic. Typically a neighborhood has one entrance with short streets going off a common road, each having its own short streets, ending in a circle around which houses are built. They are built to only be easily traveled by car. It is common to only be half a mile geographically from a major road, but be miles away by road.

Re: Optimal Busses

[drsquare]

In the places that do have public transportation what parent wants their kid riding public transportation?

Parents who don't want to raise lazy, fat, spoilt kids?

People even in towns and cities live in cul-de sac communities specifically designed not to be driven through. Trying to get buses in there is a nightmare

That's why you put the bus stops on the main roads. It's not rocket science.

Re:Optimal Busses

[fropenn]

Non-teaching staff...you mean the people who cook the meals, clean the floors, fix the computers, help the students with special needs, answer the phone, track attendance, order books and supplies, evaluate teachers, respond to parent complaints, clean the sidewalks...sure, schools would run really well without those people.

Fucking barbarians.

[jcr]

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

Re: Fucking barbarians.

[b0s0z0ku]

I understand that in Germany or Switzerland, helichopper parents who drive their kids to school after age 9 or so are given a "talking to" by school authorities about kids needing independence. Much better model than the US hover-parent model.

They just learned what every programmer knows

[Opportunist]

Programming would be so much easier without the damn user!

Complaining that school starts too... late?

[diamondmagic]

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...

Typical case of mathematicians

[TimothyHollins]

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.

I Would Absolutely Would Be Rich...

[sycodon]

...if I had a mere dollar for every project that failed because they failed to identify the primary customer and understand their needs.

Re:School start times are often too early

[b0s0z0ku]

Traffic is no more dangerous than 30-40 years ago, in fact, it's safer. I don't think a larger % of the population has a proclivity to kidnap and abuse children than before, either.

You sound like part of the problem. In normal places like NYC or parts of Europe, kids walk, bike, or take public transit to school, and parents aren't quaking in their boots in fear.

And the client exclaimed with a snarl and a taunt

[kmoser]

"It's just want I asked for, but not what I want!"

Re:My first thought.

[terrycarlino]

I call BS.

The duel income family is not a result of two parents having to work to meet needs. Its the result of two parents having to work to meet wants.

Why the hell do 2 adults and a kid need 2500 sqft of house? Is it really necessary for each kid in a family of four to have their own room? Why the hell does every member of the family need a $1000 iphone?

The difference in family incomes from 30 years ago isn't that families have half the buying power. Its that they spend twice as much. Most of the increase is for stuff they wouldn't have had 30 years ago.

Let me run down some examples. 30 years ago no one needed an ISP. Most people pay >$150 a month for internet access. No one 30 years ago had a cell phone. Unless you're on Cricket you're paying ~$80-100 a person for a smart phone date plan. You can throw in the difference in price for an 1800 sqft to a 2500 sqft house. Two new cars, vice one new car and a beater. Laptops, tablets, heck desktops, if anyone still has them, none of which a household had 30 years ago.

Now don't get me wrong. Lots of that stuff is nice to have. Some of it, like Internet access and connected devices are even pretty close to necessary today. But it is stuff in excess of what the single income household use to have 30 years ago.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Real problem is to elegantly remove all the bus

[Shirley Marquez]

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.