>Optimizing the algorithm for greater “equity" also meant many of the planned changes were "biased" against families with privilege.
I mean maybe but measuring that by the skin color of those protesting is... not a good method. Of course people marching on City Hall or showing up at schoolboard meetings are going to be the disproportionately privileged, they're the people who have the time for that sort of thing. But even there I'm a bit skeptical, take a look at this:
>Parent Antonia Rodriguez after a fiery address. She says of her and fellow parents, “We don’t have careers; we have jobs!... We’re laborers!” And that makes it hard to handle early starts and early dismissals.
or this video just below:
https://twitter.com/jmlarkin/status/941104843137064960
which gets to the main root of the opposition which was drastically earlier start and end times for elementary school students, two hours earlier in some cases.
>But for those who can’t stagger working hours — specifically single parents or families who don’t have any wiggle room on working hours — kids often see themselves to bus stops in the morning, then wait an hour or so after school, alone, until parents return. I see it every day.
>Under the new start times, and therefore early end times, these kids will be spending up to four hours home alone every day.
>Let’s not sugarcoat: After-school care is for financially advantaged families. Costs vary, but for two children at the YMCA in West Roxbury, after-school care from 3:25 p.m. until 6 p.m. is more than $700 per month (the cost would naturally go up with the extension of hours needed), plus the yearly membership cost of the YMCA (currently $90 per family).
...
>And for what? So Boston Public School can save a little in transportation expenses. And while they save, families will find themselves in increasingly precarious financial straits.
https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2017/12/12/boston-public-sc...
Or this analysis from the Boston NAACP, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, and the East Boston Ecumenical Community Council:
>This ignores the fact that parents of color are disproportionately in lower-wage jobs, and are less likely to have the flexibility needed to build their schedules around a school day that ends at 1:15 or 1:55, let alone pay for any resulting need in after school care
https://www.boston.com/news/education/2017/12/16/naacp-lette...
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Now it's clear that BPS used the MIT students here as a tool, a coating of algorithmic sophistication over a plan they already had, but it strikes me a bit poorly to see those students using 'actually we did everything right, it's just rich parents who stopped us' as a scapegoat.