March 20, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:It makes a fellow proud to be a libertarian
I can't say I'm thrilled to find that there is a statistically significant minority of my ideological quasi-brethren lining up to tell me that it's a terrible idea to try and help poor kids with the school system. For one thing, my interlocutors say, the driving factor in the quality of a school is the quality (for which, read Socio-Economic Status) of its kids. And for another, it's immoral to take money from people to educate someone else's children.
The first point is echoed on the left (though they think this calls for massive income redistribution . . . as if giving someone another $15K a year in income will somehow magically make them care whether their child gets in fights or does their homework.) I don't deny that it is empirically true; people who are screwed up tend to be low SES, and unsurprisingly, they also tend to have screwed up kids. But it is not true that these kids are simply genetic train wrecks who we should be prepared to write off. Disadvantaged kids can be taught to read, write, and perform basic mathematical operations, and they can be taught to behave if their parents have neglected that task. In our system, however, any school that manages to do so achieves this feat only through heroic efforts to overcome the institutional barriers put in the way. For various reasons, this is not happening. I have a novel approach to solving this problem: I propose we . . . pay schools on the basis of their ability to educate these children. I plan to call this system something nifty and new-economy, like . . . a market. That has an edgy, new-millenial kind of feel, doesn't it? I think it's the juxtaposition of the hard-edged k and t sounds with the soft, sensuous labials of the first syllable.
Can the school system overcome all the handicaps that disadvantaged kids are born with? I doubt it. But it could certainly do better . . . and it could hardly do worse than many urban school districts.
Then there's the taxation is theft crowd. I'm sorry if my nom de blog fooled you, but I'm not that sort of libertarian. Children are a perennial problem for libertarians, but what it boils down to is this: children (and to my mind, the severely disabled), have positive rights. They have a right to be fed, educated, clothed, sheltered, and given medical care on someone else's dime. And if their parents abdicate this responsibility, then it passes onto the community, including the state, even if none of us asked said parent to reproduce. So arguing that educating poor children is immoral . . . well, I hardly know what to say, except remind me not to get into a lifeboat with you.
Posted by Jane Galt at March 20, 2007 3:18 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>I agree with your view of children, but I will also note that the types of measures required to overcome the worst or most negligent parenting are very politically difficult. I'm ambivalent about vouchers, but if the schools retain the right to exclude children who haven't been sufficiently socialized, and thus measureably harm the environment for learning needed by other kids, I suppose I see no harm. The city in which I grew up, however, has allowed some of their public schools to devolve to the point where students openly defy teachers in the most vulgar manner, and the students are allowed to remain in school. If vouchers come with the requirement that such behavior must be tolerated, then I'm against vouchers. The first requirement of a civilized city is civilized schools.
Posted by: Will Allen on March 20, 2007 3:44 PM"But it is not true that these kids are simply genetic train wrecks who we should be prepared to write off."
Correct, and it's also not true that Arabs are inherently unsuited for democracy. But in both cases, that's entirely besides the point. Did anybody even say that? For me, the SES point is important to bring up so we can recognize what the main and most important "institutional barriers" actually are.
And to be honest, a random extra $15,000 for low-income families (though not the kind of remedy this lefty was considering) would actually help some folks - it's a lot easier to parent when you're working only one job, and aren't constantly worrying. I mean, some parents could use it to send their kids to private school! Or even move to a less troubled community with higher quality ed. options! And some - those lacking cultural, social or executive-function resources (etc.)would use it in less optimal ways. Hmm. This sounds oddly familiar.
"...I will also note that the types of measures required to overcome the worst or most negligent parenting are very politically difficult."
On aspect of Jane's plan is that educating children who meet some definition of trouble children (which she has not really defined but would presumably include disruptive kids) gets a price premium. Set the price right and some schools will specialize in educating the disruptive children while other schools handle all the easy kids.
My concern is around getting the price right. Set it too low and no one is going to want to take them on. Set it too high and it might make economic sense for the mainstream schools to keep the disruptive children on. Is there a bargaining mechanism that would make this part work?
Posted by: Anonymous on March 20, 2007 3:57 PMJane,
I don't think very many people here are saying that quality of students = socio-economic status. There are correlations, sure, but I certainly have never thought poverty and/or a dark skin meant a kid couldn't be a good student -- or that wealth and a pale skin meant a kid couldn't be a bad one.
Broadly, though, I agree with you. As for the absolutist libertarians, well, every movement has its nuts. ;-)
Posted by: Shelby on March 20, 2007 4:02 PMYes, it would be very possible that some perverse incentives might take effect, anonymous. Creating markets with tax revenues is a very, very, tricky task.
Posted by: Will Allen on March 20, 2007 4:06 PMJane, I disagree with the idea that SES is worth paying much attention to. SES of a child is basically a measurement of his or her parents, not the kid. Rather, we should be attending to innate intelligence, and a few important correlates, namely, disruptiveness and antisociality. All of these are measures of specific individuals, not parents. The vast majority of poor kids could learn perfectly well in any sort of a decent school. SES does correlate with kids' intelligence, but there's no reason to use it when the more powerful measure is readily testable.
And yes, we should, and in fact must, be prepared to "write off" some people. Some people simply cannot or will not learn. These people should be given what they are able to handle, and/or are willing to, but we shouldn't attempt to force them to learn what they won't. Nor should we hamstring the vast majority of kids by attempting to integrate the bad ones.
Currently, we are, in fact, "writing off" a disgraceful fraction of all "inner city" kids, regardless of whether or not they are stupid or disruptive. We are doing this exactly because we have stupid theories requiring them to be educated with their peers, even though they cannot or will not.
As a taxation-is-thefter, I want to make clear that I believe in positive rights for kids; but these rights apply only against their parent(s), or legal guardians. In the general case, though, it is immoral to steal from someone to give to someone else, no matter if it's for a good reason or bad.
However, that stated, we already have a system of widespread taxation to pay for education. Given that, it is important for everyone, libertarians included, to think about how to make that system work as well as possible. This is why I support vouchers for our world, even though I would oppose them in a better world.
Posted by: Leonard on March 20, 2007 4:18 PMOf course, you can always work to ensure that the public schools work as intended. I live in upstate NY, and one of the local superintendents is working very hard to ensure that SES no longer be an indicator of success in the school system. It is a very challenging job, because there are lots of voters out there who just don't want to spend the money to do so, and there are lots of SES students who really don't give a darn, nor do many of their parents. But there is a nucleus of well meaning people, including some of the SES parents, who really think this is the right way to go. As the superintendent said recently, you can't just give up on 20% of the people.
Hard core urban schools are a tough nut to crack, because of the higher than average SES population. One of the problems, which is not immediately intuitive, is that the local school board members come from that same SES, and their priorities are not always the same as yours or mine. The ones who are smart enough to hire a really good superintendent and then set policy and let the superintendent run the district in accord with the stated policy, without a lot of interference, have the best districts. (But that sort of School Board is rare, no matter what the SES of the district.) The ones who see school board membership as a way to support their cronies tend to have the worst school districts.
If you really want to improve public education without vouchers, charter schools, etc., the best way is to (1) abolish teacher and administrator tenure (but individual contracts should be allowed), and (2) hold administrators accountable for results. Good principals know who the good teachers are. So do good superintendents. For that matter, so do the other teachers. Give the school administration the authority over the teachers, and then hold the school administration responsible and accountable, and you'll see an improvement really soon. But in the current environment, teachers and parents have too much power, and the administrators that don't learn how to deal with that soon leave or are booted out, no matter how good they are when it comes to ensuring a good and healthy learning situation for the children.
Posted by: Rex on March 20, 2007 4:18 PMJane, about that lifeboat thing... would you really rather get in a lifeboat with (a) a libertarian who would refuse to tax you even for his kid, or (b) a normal person who thinks he is entitled to your income for his kids' educations?
I'd take the libertarian, and not just for the conversation. People who think they are entitled to your stuff for one thing may get the notion that they are entitled to part of you for something else. After all, he has kids, and you don't. He practically has to cannibalize you -- it's for the children!
Posted by: Leonard on March 20, 2007 4:28 PMMegan,
It is to be expected that "libertarians" are going to include a "significant" fraction of "tax is theft" people, including myself every other Friday.
However, I did not see any writing that nothing should be done for disadvantaged children, or more specifically, those children insufficiently socialized to be in a classroom with socialized children; or those children who are academically behind their peers to such an extent that they draw inordinate teaching time from the other children. With vouchers, which I would support, with an increase in funding if necessary, I would demand a major reform in how children are segregated according to ability and socialization. The way we do it now dooms a lot of salvageable children to the same level as the lowest denominator. Vouchers that allow schools to to discriminate on the basis of academic ability and civility would be required- this may even mean that those most difficult children get relatively greater vouchers to encourage the formation of schools that specialize in such children. However, it must be realized that at a certain point it will have to be acknowledged that some will never be salvaged, and how long, and how many resources you spend to reach this point is a point we, as a society, can debate.
Posted by: Yancey Ward on March 20, 2007 4:33 PMBlogged a bit about this post and the prior one, but I've had trouble with trackbacks lately so take the liberty of posting the link here.
Rex, I like what you say (4:18), but what's the best method of holding administrators accountable? It seems to me that No Child Left Behind attempted a top-down approach to this. Given the difficulties NCLB is facing, we should also consider the bottoms-up, market-based approach that Megan is descibing, which brings us back to vouchers.
Posted by: Timothy on March 20, 2007 4:39 PMYancey, that wasn't directed at you . . . I agree, we have to figure out how much we can do. But we'll figure that out by trying to actually do something.
Posted by: Jane Galt on March 20, 2007 4:41 PMI see a very large problem arising from paying schools more to take difficult kids. Many states give schools more to assist with kids that have particular "problems". So do the feds. In some schools, it's funny how just about every child falls into one or more category that qualifies the school for some extra cash! My youngest daughter was for years classified as learning disabled (something we learned only as we reviewed her school records when we moved from Texas). Well, all that extra money must have helped because her college entrance exams were in the top 1% of the nation and she has several universities offering her full ride scholarships (she graduates from high school in June). As grateful as I am for all the extra help the extra money bought for my child's education, part of me wonders if she might have been a successful student without the school getting a few more dollars-a-day to help with her disability. (I hate being suspicious like that.)
I'm afraid if we start paying schools extra for problem kids we'll end up with a lot more problem kids. You tend to get what you pay for.
I don't object, in principle, to the idea of paying to help poor people's kids. Nor am I beholden to the existing system. My concern is that the attempt to free us of meddlesome bureaucracy will result in more bureaucracy and worse schools, overall.
Posted by: cheerful iconcoclast on March 20, 2007 5:38 PM"So arguing that educating poor children is immoral..."
Although I disagree with your premise that the community/state is obligated to care for children, I in no way think that educating poor children is immoral. I am well aware that it is to my benefit that as many people in my community as possible are educated, and I'm more than willing to dedicate resources to ensure that they are.
Educating poor children is not immoral. Being forced to educate anyone at gunpoint by the state is immoral.
Posted by: sadcox on March 20, 2007 5:59 PMSet the price right and some schools will specialize in educating the disruptive children while other schools handle all the easy kids.
It won't necessarily cost more, any more than it costs more to buy hamburger buns over hotdog buns. Schools will specialize in order to capture market share. It just has to be legal for them to do it.
Our way of government demands that government be fair. This is as it should be. The problem comes in when we then put government in charge of large, variable endeavors like public education. The requisite fairness creates irresistable institutional pressure to serve the lowest common denominator. Each school must more or less be all things to all people. It's an impossible task for any human institution, public or private, and therefore a recipe for failure. We're soaking in it.
yours/
peter.
No one objects to educating poor U.S. children. If that's an important value to you, then by all means, spend as much of you like of your own money educating them.
What I object to is your presumption that your preference for how I should spend my money supercedes my own.
For example, even if one grants that we have a moral duty to "educate poor children", it's by no means clear that the "poor" children of America are the ones who should be getting the money. After all, there are many more children outside the U.S. who are in far more dire straits. Perhaps I would prefer to spend my money helping them instead. On what ethical basis would you tell me otherwise?
Posted by: Chris Rasch on March 20, 2007 6:46 PMChris Rasch, the ethical basis for expecting Americans to help American children first is simple enough, nations are basically mutual assistance societies whose members are obligated to favor other members over outsiders.
Jane Galt's error is not that she wishes to assist poor American children, it is that her thinking on the matter appears dominated by emotion to the exclusion of rational analysis of the problems and realistic proposals for improvement. This is what she demands of liberals when they advocate living wage laws and the like but when it comes to her pet causes nonsense like they couldn't possibly make things worse is what passes for analysis.
Posted by: James B. Shearer on March 20, 2007 7:44 PMChris Rasch, the ethical basis for expecting Americans to help American children first is simple enough, nations are basically mutual assistance societies whose members are obligated to favor other members over outsiders.
Jane Galt's error is not that she wishes to assist poor American children, it is that her thinking on the matter appears dominated by emotion to the exclusion of rational analysis of the problems and realistic proposals for improvement. This is what she demands of liberals when they advocate living wage laws and the like but when it comes to her pet causes nonsense like they couldn't possibly make things worse is what passes for analysis.
Posted by: James B. Shearer on March 20, 2007 7:44 PMThank you, Chris Rasch. Much as I enjoy Ms. Galt's commentary, I too was appalled by her glib willingness to "double spend per student to the tune of $500 billion per year", without at least giving us a ballpark estimate of how many billions she was personally going to fork over.
Everyone wants to spend money to Help The Children. Especially if it's someone else's money.
Posted by: DRB on March 20, 2007 7:45 PMSorry about the double comment, I got an (apparently bogus) error message about too many comments in a short period of time after the first and tried again.
Posted by: James B. Shearer on March 20, 2007 7:47 PMI would venture there are no libertarians who'd say that educating poor children is immoral - but most of us would insist that it is immoral to threaten with deadly force to obtain the funds for this purpose. Many of us gladly give some fraction of our monies charitably. None of us will demand the same from others. We simply tend not to believe that the end justifies the means.
There is another wrinkle to the issue: You do have some monies of your own that you could, at the cost of some deprivation to yourself, give to the poor children, don't you? Yet you chose to keep these funds for your own purposes, and instead you demand that men with guns extort funds from others. The net effect, after paying the gunmen, is that you get to keep your money, some children get a small fraction of the funds, while others are left holding the bag. Is this nice?
So, if you wish to be in a lifeboat with libertarians, do not initiate violence against others under any pretext. Not even for the children.
Rafal
Posted by: Rafal Smigrodzki on March 20, 2007 8:10 PMBack when I was in graduate school (shortly after Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations), I recall my economics professor telling us that the justification in having society bear part of the cost of educating the young was found in the civilizing affect of a public education. That is, many parents would only pay for a child to be taught "useful" things -- like those required to get a job. Parents might neglect topics that would tend to benefit society as a whole, rather than the individual child, such as citizenship, history, and economics. Having educated citizens should lead to better government, a positive externality that society should be willing to pay for. That's why society might justifiably require you to help pay to educate the kids in our country -- even if it deprives you of the resources to help the children who are worse off in other lands.
However, while this concept of externalities might justify public support of education, it is also at the root of much of the opposition of vouchers. If vouchers are used for schools selected by parents, where is the guarantee that society will get the civilizing it is paying for? Parents will be just as likely to spend the vouchers on "useful" skills as they would if paying for education on their own. This concept is also at the root of a lot of the opposition to public education in its current form. A lot of us, frankly, do not like the "civilizing curricula" that public schools are forcing on our children. For example, our eldest came home from kindergarten with materials on homosexuality (part of her diversity training). Kindergarten! When we inquired whether we had, perhaps, mislaid the consent form for this part of her education, we were told that not only was our consent not required, we could not opt out of the program. The point being, when there was a more universal acceptance of cultural norms, it was easier for schools to develop the civilizing curricula. Today, there's much less common ground and therefore less we can agree should be taught to every child besides reading, writing, and arithmetic. If current trends continue, the case for public financing of education will go away. (Yes, Jane makes the case that education is a "need". But parents are primarily responsible for their children's other needs -- food, clothing, shelter. There is no reason, absent the civilizing aspect, that education should be any different.)
Well, I'm glad to see that we are talking about goals to some extent. When you write
Disadvantaged kids can be taught to read, write, and perform basic mathematical operations, and they can be taught to behave if their parents have neglected that task. In our system, however, any school that manages to do so achieves this feat only through heroic efforts to overcome the institutional barriers put in the way.
I think you are heading in the right direction. The key factor for this to work is discipline, which is missing in many of our existing schools. I'm not sure that discipline is a question of money, which you seem to be assuming.
Markets are generally good solutions, though. As long as parents can evaluate the performance of their kid's school to some extent, and are able to move their kids to a school that they think is better, we'll see some improvement. Parents tend to do a better job of this than administrators for sure.
Posted by: Tim Lundeen on March 20, 2007 8:39 PMYes. Mr. Walser just nailed it. Left to a private market people may under-invest in education because they do not consider the benefit their basic level of education provides to society: a more informed public, higher productivity, less crime, and so on. The fear is that a voucher system would undermine the level of education received by the poorest students. I believe this is what Drum was trying to get at in his post as well.
Posted by: Publius on March 20, 2007 8:52 PMI always thought reasonable libertarian was an oxymoron. It blows my mind that you wrote, "children (and to my mind, the severely disabled), have positive rights." I've never heard libertarians refer to positive rights before.
Next thing you'll be telling me you believe that the government should subsidize things that produce positive externalities (education) and tax things that produce negative externalities (carbon).
I'm a liberal with a respect for markets; I believe in the Earned Income Credit, free trade, and school vouchers. I feel like the line between us is blurring. Weird.
Posted by: golddog on March 20, 2007 8:58 PMWell, at the risk of posting what somebody above labeled "nonsense", the poorest students right now are functional illiterates. How could their education be undermined any further?
Posted by: Will Allen on March 20, 2007 9:03 PMThis discussion is so frustrating, because you may as well replace the word market with the word magic for all of the benefits we are supposed to expect. Paying schools for how much they educate children is one of those nice sounding concepts that would be nearly impossible to implement. How do you measure how much children learn? Standardized tests? They are unreliable for small children, and with older children, they measure very little of the spectrum of knowledge and skills we expect schools to impart. Would you rely on schools to administer the assesments? They would have a huge incentive to cheat. Even if you could both measure learning and somehow offset the incentives for schools to cheat, how would you prevent creaming? Schools would have huge incentives to select children based on how well they would learn. A lottery would help, but there are many strategies a school could use to subvert it, including where they locate, the amenities they offer, and how they market themselves. How would you ensure that children with disabilities are treated fairly?
Liberals, of which I am one, desperately want to improve poorly performing schools. We just don't think these schemes will work. It's not that we hate markets, it's that we have seen markets approaches fail time and time again at solving this very sort of problem. Even this specific problem. How come the places that already have voucher programs aren't able to show improvements? Furthermore, we don't trust conservatives and libertarians to implement a voucher system effectively. And contrary to the analysis at this site and many others, it is actually possible to make things a whole lot worse. How about a system that's just as bad except that the teachers have less training, the classes are bigger, and kids are changing schools 2-3 times a year? Which reminds me. A simple solution for a situation that we're told is at a crisis and couldn't get any worse, and it would would be implemented by business-minded people. Where have I heard that before? Perhaps the schools would greet us as liberators.
Posted by: norm on March 20, 2007 9:15 PMWill Allen, they could for example be actual illiterates. Are you guys really arguing the money spent educating the poorest students is completely wasted? If so we should stop spending any money on them.
Posted by: James B. Shearer on March 20, 2007 9:25 PMHas anyone tried to form a coalition between pro-vouchers groups and pro-housing/anti-zoning groups? Here in the SF Bay Area, real estate (both rental and purchase) is extremely expensive b/c the towns have outlawed further growth/increase in density. They don't want more kids in the school districts, b/c they want to keep the quality high. That means the only thing my fiancee can afford is a subsidized 300 sq ft. student apartment. It might end up being a wash for a libertarian. Education becomes more centralized but housing and zoning becomes more free. A good example of coupled systems.
Posted by: John V on March 20, 2007 9:26 PMUnfortunately, Jane, you posted this one week too late - otherwise, I could have linked to Zig Engelmann's book about Project Follow-Through (he posted the entire manuscript for download last week). It's been taking the edublogs by storm for the last couple months.
More info can be found here, but the short version is this: it is very, very possible to give poor kids a good education. It's been done, and replicated. It isn't even terribly expensive. But it requires overcoming an enormous political and ideological inertia which you've only barely begun touch upon.
If you wish, I can email you the individual chapters of Engelmann's book - it describes in painstaking detail exactly how their program worked, and the incredible resistance they faced despite the mountain of evidence showing how successful they were.
Posted by: Independent George on March 20, 2007 9:29 PMTim Lundeen said:
"Markets are generally good solutions, though. As long as parents can evaluate the performance of their kid's school to some extent, and are able to move their kids to a school that they think is better, we'll see some improvement. Parents tend to do a better job of this than administrators for sure."
Good parents may but the problem students are the ones with bad parents who are completely incapable of evaluating their kid's education and who mostly don't care in any case.
Posted by: James B. Shearer on March 20, 2007 9:33 PMPublius, i'm at a loss to understand how the poorest students could receive less of an education than many of them do now. According to a recent study, 36% of residents of DC cannot figure out a bus schedule, or fill out a job application; they are functionally illiterate. DC spends more per student than nearly any other city in the US, IIRC, and the result is an illiteracy rate in excess of 1/3. One would expect such news to dismay the "just pay teachers more and everything will be all right" crowd, and one would be wrong. One would expect the defenders of the status quo to at least admit that for some students, things literally cannot get any worse. Again, one would be wrong.
Defending the status quo is clearly the top priority for some people, no matter how badly served the poor are. I cannot help but wonder why that is, but that's for another time.
Finally, culture matters, it matters a lot. It matters more than money, to be frank. The history of US immigration pretty much proves that.
Posted by: ellipsis on March 20, 2007 9:43 PMOk, Norm, I'll take you at your word. Please be so kind as to tell us all what you would do to improve public schools besides pay teachers more money regardless of their actual classroom performance & make it impossible to fire them no matter what, besides mandate bilingual education in as many different languages as possible thereby greatly increasing the required spending of school systems while ghettoizing students as long as possible and for essentially no return (aside, of course, for creating people functionally illiterate in two languages), besides increasing administrative overhead to as great a degree as is possible, and then going beyond that. Because my experience, going back to before Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education, is that liberals talk a lot, but don't really want to do anything more than spend a lot more money for the same, or less, results. Please prove me wrong, with some details. Thanks.
Posted by: ellipsis on March 20, 2007 9:51 PMJames B. Shearer raises a very good point. Once upon a time, before increasing the self-esteem of every child was our top priority, this civilization knew how to get most (not all) problem students at least to a level of basic competence, where they would be able to get a job, marry, and raise a family. We could do that today, in theory, but we don't.
Posted by: ellipsis on March 20, 2007 9:54 PMIt's not that we hate markets, it's that we have seen markets approaches fail time and time again at solving this very sort of problem. Even this specific problem.
Please forgive me, but I've just got to call BS on this one. (Honestly. There's this guy holding a gun to my head making me type this.) Can you name one example where the education market has failed? Note, I'm looking for an example where the market approach was not "helped" by 50 pounds of well meaning regulations and other market interventions. Vouchers didn't work in this or that city? Why, golly gee, look: the number of vouchers was capped at 1% of the student population; the amount of a voucher was limited to half the amount of the per student public expenditure; the applicants for vouchers were limited by race, education, income, or some other demographic; the vouchers could only be used for non-sectarian schools; the vouchers could only be used for charter schools; or the vouchers could only be used at schools meeting state standards (such as employing unionized teachers). Putting such limitations on vouchers does not constitute a true test of the market approach. It's like strapping a 100 pound weight onto the back of a swimmer and complaining he can't swim. Swim? He can't run, either. Maybe he could swim just fine with a little less help.
Mr. Shearer, if what you mean by "poorest" students is the students that are illiterate now, as opposed to being monetarily deprived, I don't think it matters much what we do. The state can't be reliably counted on to make up for crappy parents. I'm willing to settle for segregating the socially disruptive students from the students who are willing to put an effort in, thus allowing teachers who want to teach to do so, as opposed to babysitting. If vouchers will accomplish that, I support vouchers. If they don't further that goal, I oppose vouchers. I'm not willing to risk the opportunity afforded to people who are willing to operate in good faith by making accomadations to people who aren't.
Frankly, I might be willing to support ending compulsory education.
Posted by: Will Allen on March 20, 2007 9:56 PM[Children] have a right to be fed, educated, clothed, sheltered, and given medical care on someone else's dime. And if their parents abdicate this responsibility, then it passes onto the community, including the state, even if none of us asked said parent to reproduce.
Why must this be done on someone else's involuntary dime? Look around. Hearts that bleed are legion. These bleeding hearts, with a spring in their step, would gladly and willingly look after these darling unfortunates. There are plenty of people who loudly, regularly, and at great length spare no effort to announce that their hearts bleed great gushing gouts. Surely they are not all sanctimonious liars.
Posted by: Oscar the Grump on March 20, 2007 10:00 PMHere's a 'dumb question' from a non-ecomomist. Would the following approach work in theory? (I realize it's never going to happen in practice due to political realities such as pressure from special interest groups):
1.) Every parent or legal guardian of every child between the ages of, say 5 and 15, gets a no-strings check from the Federal government for, say, $5000 per year, along with a letter that says, in effect, "you can use this money any way that you want, but if we come back and find that your child is not getting a basic education, we *WILL* string you up by your thumbs and perform various kinds of surgery on you with a dull knife & no anesthesia."
2.) There is a constitutional amendment saying that the Federal government has no voice whatsoever in accrediting schools or running schools or evaluating schools.
3.) Child labor laws are rolled back to age 14 so that anybody who wants to, is free to leave high-school and get a job.
4.) The States totally privatize the education business, i.e. they sell all the buildings & fire all the employees. But each State does continue to set its own minimum standards that an organization must meet in order to call itself a "school."
5.) Any group that wants to, profit or non-profit, can set up and operate "schools" as long as they meet the minimum standards.
My question is: Would this system work better or worse, on average than the present system. Obviously some children would get "left behind," but on the other hand, millions of children are growing up illiterate under the present system too.
john w. wrote:
1.) Every parent or legal guardian of every child between the ages of, say 5 and 15, gets a no-strings check from the Federal government for, say, $5000 per year, along with a letter that says, in effect, "you can use this money any way that you want, but if we come back and find that your child is not getting a basic education, we *WILL* string you up by your thumbs and perform various kinds of surgery on you with a dull knife & no anesthesia."
Heck, if you are going to postulate stuff from the world of science fiction, why not just go directly to "learning caps" that embed education directly into the brain and be done with it? Another question: Do you know any real, live, single mothers with basically no education and two children by two different fathers? Because I do, and one of the things they tend not to be very good at is "planning beyond the moment". That's how they wound up where they are, and absent a lot of remedial training, they won't get much farther. Handing them a big check like that won't get the children educated in the vast majority of cases. It would work better to hand the check to the local Catholic school, frankly, in the name of the child. Or some other private academy that works with poor children patiently, anything beyond a cash allotment.
Lest you think that short time-horizon is limited to the poor and uneducated, consider the ongoing housing crisis, currently limited to the subprime lending market, a spectacle that has finally captured the attention of many mainstream media mavens (excepting, of course, our own Jane). Here we see people who took so many Home Equity Loans (HELOC) that they owe more on their house after multiple refi's than they did before, and thanks to the last loan being a no-interest-for-a-few years, adjustable rate job, their payments have already gone up and likely will double either in April or August of this year (depending on 3 or 5 year option). Whereupon they will either cut way, way back on their lifestyle, or find out what the new bankruptcy regs look like the hard way. Now, if presumeably smart, middle class, college-educated-people can basically bankrupt themselves this easily, why do you expect high school dropout single mothers to avoid doing anything foolish with a tax-free windfall that is bigger than a whole month's paycheck?
My question is: Would this system work better or worse, on average than the present system.
Some feel that education is basically a philanthropic activity that is incompatible with the profit motive. I think this is wrong. There are numerous for profit schools in the country today. Many are not targeted at the children of the rich. Their greatest obstacle to growth is the competition from public schools. Give them a dependable source of funding (a/k/a vouchers) and they would flourish. Would it be different than our current system? Yes. Look at higher education for an example. The largest private school in the country is the for profit University of Phoenix. Given a source of funding (student loans and pell grants), the University of Phoenix has been able to provide a valuable education on a cost effective basis. Where other schools need a large endowment or funding from government, the University turns a profit.
While a lot of us who went to traditional schools sneer at the University of Phoenix, the school provides a lot of people with what they want -- job skills. (I'm not sure, but I'd guess that the Women's Studies and Queer Studies departments are varnishingly small at the University of Phoenix.) A practical, job skills focus is not an unalloyed good. As members of society, we might prefer a greater percentage of liberal arts in someone's undergraduate curriculum under the theory such training leads to a better society. Few are willing to pay for that education on their own if all they want is a job. (See my prior post on externalities.) The University of Phoenix has enough of these "extras" to meet accreditation requirements, but no more. Nor does the school do basic research. It does what it says it will: provide it's students with a valuable education at a fair price. There is no reason similar model would not work for primary and secondary grades.
Then there's the taxation is theft crowd. I'm sorry if my nom de blog fooled you, but I'm not that sort of libertarian.
Maybe I'm overly fastidious when it comes to clarity in labels, but that's the main reason I've never liked the term "libertarian" and have always thought there's a vanishingly small number of persons who can legitimately claim this term as their own. I mean, supporting the spending, of, say, $500 billion in tax money to insure universal education seems such a huge concession for a "libertarian" to make as to truly render the term meaningless.
I think "free market conservative" or "free market liberal" (or something like that) is a more intellectually honest appellation.
Posted by: Jasper on March 20, 2007 10:27 PMOne thing I think a lot of people here are forgetting is that kids enter the public education system at 5 (sometimes even 4), not 15. Leaving aside cases of real abuse and real disability, it's a great age. They're cute as buttons, educable, eager-to-please, curious. They stay that way for a number of years, too. Furthermore, they're under four feet tall and about 50 pounds, so they couldn't do much damage to you even if they wanted to. It seems to me that the situation we face is a race against time to get children to absorb as much academic material as possible before puberty makes them large, uncooperative, and surly. Our present system minimizes content in the early years, only introducing serious academic work precisely in those school years when children are getting to be a handful.
Posted by: Amy P on March 20, 2007 10:37 PMjohn w.
"... millions of children are growing up illiterate under the present system too"
I doubt the existence of these millions of illiterate children.
Posted by: James B. Shearer on March 20, 2007 10:38 PM, if what you mean by "poorest" students is the students that are illiterate now, as opposed to being monetarily deprived, I don't think it matters much what we do. The state can't be reliably counted on to make up for crappy parents.
The evidence suggests you are wrong, sir. There is something we can do. There is at least one educational programme that has been shown to work with some 99% of students - Direct Instruction. See http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adiep/ft/grossen.htm
There may be other possible education programmes out there. What appears to have made Direct Instruction special was that it was developed by a guy who continually tested it in classrooms and modified based on testing. There appears to be no reason why other curriculum designers could not do the same thing (apart from their puzzling failure to not do so for the last fifty years). Direct Instruction sets the standard for other programmes to meet though.
Of course, one can have doubts about whether the government will ever care enough about educating kids to properly implement Direct Instruction.
Posted by: Tracy W on March 20, 2007 10:41 PMLiberals, of which I am one, desperately want to improve poorly performing schools. We just don't think these schemes will work. It's not that we hate markets, it's that we have seen markets approaches fail time and time again at solving this very sort of problem.
Norm, what about that "scheme" called American post secondary education? Unlike K-12, college level schooling in the US is not characterized by uniformity, centralization, lack of choice, geography-based assignment, etc. Rather, post K-12 in the US is characterized by diversity, specialization, choice, and, most importantly, competition. Universities compete fiercely with each other, and customers are free to vote with their feet. Indeed, post-secondary schools in the US are allowed to go out of business, and many do so each year. They do not, like elementary and high schools, possess a guaranteed pool of customers that insures their survival as long as babies continue to be born in their "territories."
Moreover, American post-secondary education -- in contrast to American K-12 -- not only stacks up well against international competition, but is inarguably the world's finest university system by any measurement. That's right, the American education sector characterized by a widespread requirement to compete for customers is the world leader. The American education sector that is characterized by an utter lack of necessity to compete for customers is a world lagger.
Funny, that.
Posted by: Jasper on March 20, 2007 10:57 PM"Our present system minimizes content in the early years, "
Amy, my wife's a kindergarten teacher. This description might have been somewhat accurate when we were kids. It's not that way now. Kindergarten is the new first grade - the kids learn how to read simple books and such. It's also easy, for the very early years, to simply miss a lot of what's being taught, because we take it so for granted. Basic socialization (extra for very poor schools). What a 'line' is, and how to walk in one. Cutting out things and lacing little cards seems just like play, until one realizes that it's a major step towards developing the skills needed for writing. Sure, there are quite a few years between then and puberty, but one has to remember that cute and curious as they are, and with tremendous potential for learning, during this time they're still children. In fact, that's somewhat of a problem - we tend to forget the importance of play and doing in learning.
Posted by: Dan S. on March 20, 2007 11:03 PMWell, that's just it Tracy. Governments generally can't be counted on to care much about anything, other than obtaining more tax revenues.
Now, private bureaucracies are self-serving as well, but they are subjected to the reality that failure to please voluntary consumers and voluntary suppliers of capital on a regular basis, eventually means failure to obtain more capital, and thus leading to the bureaucracy ceasing to exist, with the people who man the bureaucracy scattering to different endeavors. This doesn't happen to bureaucracies which need only please a highly motivated sliver of society who lobby the state to compel others to supply more capital. For all it's hideous behavior, the bureaucracy known as Enron has ceased to exist, while the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or the D.C. school system, continues on, decade after hideous decade.
In the case of education and crappy parents, there is no regulator of misdirected capital, so it doesn't matter if somebody has developed a fantastic teaching system, just as it doesn't matter that the Space Shuttle is really a very stupid way to get people and things in low earth orbit. The capital flows to those who game the political system effectively, not to those who employ it well.
Posted by: Will Allen on March 20, 2007 11:14 PMJasper, or anyone else -can you think of some important differences between K-12 and higher ed, in terms of structure and function?
Posted by: Dan S. on March 20, 2007 11:24 PMThe biggest difference, Dan, is that the students in higher ed aren't compelled by law to be there.
Posted by: Will Allen on March 20, 2007 11:26 PMI don't want to let the market determine how my country's kids are educated because every market force I can see that has been given a free hand actively works against education. Just look at popular culture and its almost universal disdain for learning and maturity.
Posted by: purple on March 20, 2007 11:46 PMpurple, I have no idea of what you are talking about. There is more high culture easily available to a larger percentage of the population than in any time in human history.
Posted by: Will Allen on March 21, 2007 12:11 AMMs. McArdle, this isn't another of your bait-and-switch routines, is it? I'm still meditating on your declared and absolutely unqualified wild enthusiasm for a large government-financed health-care program in your March 26, 2006 entry -- only to have you suddenly tell us last month (on your Feb. 24 "dating a liberal" thread; Feb. 26 3:54 PM entry) that you REALLY didn't like the idea at all and had only advocated it to try to keep the Evil Statists from successfully getting a bigger health-care program through. So, which is it this time?
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw on March 21, 2007 3:19 AMWas I the only one that did a double take at reading about "the soft, sensuous labials" on Megan's post? I mean, we're one constant away from Penthouse Forum on that phrase.
Keeps the readers here, though, don't it? :-)
Posted by: Flynn on March 21, 2007 4:33 AMBut it is not true that these kids are simply genetic train wrecks who we should be prepared to write off. Disadvantaged kids can be taught to read, write, and perform basic mathematical operations, and they can be taught to behave if their parents have neglected that task.
That is simply wrong. You have internalized a lefty vision in which the poor put a great value on quality education, but lack the means to actually pursue it. Unfortunately, that is simply false. The hard fact of reality is that cultures with a 65% rate of out of wedlock childbirths (higher in the inner city) simply does not put a value on education.
Take behavior. What do you do to a misbehaving child? Detention? That's where their friends are, and they'll talk and rough house all the way through it. Or they may simply skip detention and hang out. Permenant in-school suspension? It's where their friends are, and now they don't have to go through the pretense of classwork. Expell them? They're counting down the time until they can drop out. Call the mother? ( When you have an out of wedlock childbirth rate of 65% as a starting point, and the discipline cases are concentrated among the single mothers, a broken home is a foregone conclusion) If you can even reach her, she'll either say "What do you want me to do, he's an a**hole at home too" or else she'll get angry at the school for saying bad things about her children.
You know what the home lives are like? The houses are utterly filthly with multiple layers of gunk on the counters. Insects and dirt are everywhere. You don't want to sit down. In inner city schools, the children get antsy and high strung on fridays and before vacations, but that is because they *don't* want to go home. Besides the dirt, the mother typically has a live-in boyfriend that they hate. And they may have mildly abusive older siblings.
I've been talking about the worst. There are exceptions. Those are typically married couples that are desperately poor. Both parents work two jobs. The children only have a couple outfits. The parents hold their children accountable and the children are sweet, well-mannered and want to learn. The biggest problem these children face is not a lack of funds, but the risk of falling under the spell of the bad kids who think that studying is acting white.
Posted by: Justin on March 21, 2007 9:14 AMThe hard fact of reality is that cultures with a 65% rate of out of wedlock childbirths (higher in the inner city) simply does not put a value on education.
Justin: it seems to me your argument leads not to the conclusion that we oughtn't spend money on the education of poor children, but rather, that we should demand custody of kids living in such circumstances. Surely you don't think it's the fault of the kids themselves that their lives are so disadvantaged?
Posted by: Jasper on March 21, 2007 9:22 AMAnother question: Do you know any real, live, single mothers with basically no education and two children by two different fathers? Because I do, and one of the things they tend not to be very good at is "planning beyond the moment".
Or single mothers with 12 different children to more than five different fathers. It really does happen. My wife is facing one situation in which a woman has had 12 mentally retarded children (presumably alcohol or drugs). The first 11 were all put in special-ed. But she refuses to sign off on number 12, which is leaving him mainstreamed despite having an IQ in the upper 60s.
Here is another harsh fact: many teenage girls in the inner city *want* to get pregnant. It is the fast track to the adult world. At least in Rhode Island, welfare reform is not well enforced. You get section 8 housing (your own place), food stamps, Medicaid, and money is automatically deposited into your EBT card every friday.
I remember chaperoning a dance at my wife's school in the inner city. They played rap music the whole time and the children danced as if it were the raunchiest booty video on BET. You had teenage girls getting on their hands and knees and shaking their rear ends while boys pantomimed spanking them and they pantomimed perfoming oral sex on other boys. Once when my wife separated two dancers were bumping and grinding with two much enthusiasm, the boy had to buckle up his belt.
My wife is a token Republican at her school, and there is one argument that will always shut up the liberals that she argues with: "If you could double the funding for the school (which is already the highest funded per capita in the state), or give these children married parents, which would you choose?"
I don't know how to say this strongly enough: it's not the money. It's the culture.
Posted by: justin on March 21, 2007 9:24 AMJustin: it seems to me your argument leads not to the conclusion that we oughtn't spend money on the education of poor children, but rather, that we should demand custody of kids living in such circumstances. Surely you don't think it's the fault of the kids themselves that their lives are so disadvantaged?
Of course not. But if we are going to help we have to identify the problem. That problem is that a lot of children simply do not want to learn, and are creating a toxic learning environment for those who do. Here's another fact that *any* teacher in an inner city high school can tell you: freshman and sophomore year are rough, but junior and senior year are wonderful. The kids who don't want to be there have dropped out and those that remain are as good as in any suburban school.
If I were in Education Czar I would do the following:
1. Kids who fail more than one year should be separated from kids who are on the correct track. That includes being put in a separate building so that they do not have a chance to form friendships with the children that want to learn.
2. Corporal punishment. This can be videotaped to ensure that it is not being used. The fact is that there is no effective form of discipline because children do not care about detentions or suspensions. And neither do the parents (or they blame the schools).
Ideally, everyone would have a high degree of intrinsic motivation, but a harsh fact of life that the left will never accept is that they do not. Given that, the *only* compassionate thing to do is provide enough extrinsic motivation to make sure that classroom order can be maintained.
Posted by: justin on March 21, 2007 9:32 AMJustin, I really do suspect that ending compulsory schooling would be preferable. If we are going to make schools prisons for anti-social kids, we would be better off to wait until they have actually commmitted a violent crime, and then put them in a real prison. Anything, however, is preferable to allowing the anti-social to ruin the environment for those who have a desire to learn.
Posted by: Will Allen on March 21, 2007 10:14 AMJustin, as a liberal, my first instinct is to assume your stories of teenagers wanting to get pregnant, etc., are republican anti-welfare exaggerations. In fact, I'm going to stick with my instinct and dismiss your comments, as the thought of a woman with 12 mentally retarded children from 5 fathers makes me want to vomit and cry at the same time.
Your point, in general, is spot on, however. The problem with certain public schools is the poor quality of a portion of the student body, and this poor quality is 99% the result of poor parenting. The pro-voucher side doesn't understand that these parents are going to remain problems and their children are going to undermine whatever school they are enrolled. The quality seen in private schools today is due to the fact that the most disruptive and motivationless students are not let in the front door.
Posted by: wallster on March 21, 2007 10:51 AMCan't you just accept that you're a conservative, and be done with it?
Posted by: Chris on March 21, 2007 11:02 AMChris, why are people so obsessed with political labeling?
Posted by: Will Allen on March 21, 2007 11:10 AMJustin, as a liberal, my first instinct is to assume your stories of teenagers wanting to get pregnant, etc., are republican anti-welfare exaggerations. In fact, I'm going to stick with my instinct and dismiss your comments, as the thought of a woman with 12 mentally retarded children from 5 fathers makes me want to vomit and cry at the same time.
Your point, in general, is spot on, however. The problem with certain public schools is the poor quality of a portion of the student body, and this poor quality is 99% the result of poor parenting. The pro-voucher side doesn't understand that these parents are going to remain problems and their children are going to undermine whatever school they are enrolled. The quality seen in private schools today is due to the fact that the most disruptive and motivationless students are not let in the front door.
Thank you for the post. I think some healthy skepticism is more than appropriate given that this is an anonymous internet forum. And we do have substantial agreement about the real problems with some inner city schools, so we can easily proceed from that point. I think it is interesting about how our intuitions differ about solutions. I favor vouchers for two reasons:
(1) Allow the majority of children who do want to learn to get away from the bad apples who ruin it for everyone. With vouchers they can attend their local Catholic school or the equivalent.
(2) Housing is the single biggest cost of living expense. I support vouchers for the same reasons that many middle class home owners oppose them, which is that they will lower housing costs. I also suspect they will result in an increased supply of housing if local neighborhoods are no longer on the hook for building more schools.
Posted by: Justin on March 21, 2007 11:11 AMHmmm. A formatting error occurred in the post above. The second paragraph should also be italicized.
Posted by: Justin on March 21, 2007 11:12 AMJustin: it seems to me your argument leads not to the conclusion that we oughtn't spend money on the education of poor children, but rather, that we should demand custody of kids living in such circumstances.I’d almost prefer that alternative – make it the law in every State that anyone who has more than one a child out of wedlock with more than one partner or was found to have abused or neglected their children loses both custody of their children and the “right” to have any more (mother and father alike) with mandatory sterilization. Makes a lot more sense than leaving the child in that situation where they can emulate their gamete-donors behavior..
It seems to me that vouchers are a nice way to help parents who care about education and culture and such afford a good education for their kids. We're sending our school-aged child to a private school, but if we had 3/4 of our current income, we wouldn't be able to do that. We'd still want to, and vouchers would help with that. There's some real value to that.
But I think they're not going to help people so much at the very bottom. Kids whose parents are poor, but care a lot about education, will get a benefit--they'll be able to get their kids out of lousy schools. But kids whose parents don't care much, or can't read themselves and have no idea how to judge the quality of their kids' school, will not get much benefit. Kids who are disruptive but salvageable will probably be hard to get into a good voucher-accepting school, since those kids cause problems for whatever school they're in.
I think this is a great solution for a small problem--the fact that public schools are often not all that great for middle-class kids, often teach values that offend the parents, etc. I think it's not a solution at all for the much bigger problem--the fact that schools that service very poor kids from single moms on welfare are disasterous. Solving that problem looks much harder. You can imagine market mechanisms for it, but they're hard to get right, because we can't assume an informed, caring customer (the parents) who will agonize over getting their kids into a good school, will insist on good behavior and finishing homework, etc. Instead, we probably end up with some institution trying to do that job, and it just can't do it well.
Posted by: albatross on March 21, 2007 11:32 AMThorley Winston, such a proposal would be deemed racist & declared DOA in any legislature. Whomever proposed it would be tarred as a racist for decades to come. There isn't going to be any forced sterilization in a country where the term "Mississippi appendectomy" still packs a big emotional punch. Taking children away from their parents is a legal process, and it isn't supposed to be done lightly.
But you know, within living memory we were able to make schools function reasonably well, and graduate a majority of those that entered high school. Maybe we should look at the various "innovations" that have been put in place over the last 30+ years and see if some of them had unintended consequences? For example, we could look at how disciplinary infractions are handled.
Does anyone here besides Justin actually know any public school teachers? I wonder, because there's an air of unreality about this thread, in terms of what a real classroom is really like circa 2007, or even 1997 for that matter. Since students now essentially have full due-process rights in most disciplinary situations, it's a major project for a teacher to weed one troublemaker out of a class. It requires extensive documentation, and takes a lot of time, time that could be spent trying to salvage those students that do want to learn something. Yet removing a troublemaker can be worth it, because one bad actor can make it pretty much impossible for anyone else to get anything useful done in a classroom. So what's a teacher to do?
I know a few teachers. Some of them are grossly underpaid, and some are not. But many of them are extremely frustrated with the disciplinary system, a system that gives punks and thugs lots of rights, sometimes more rights than the normal students or the teachers in practice.
Of course, not all the teachers I know are so frustrated. Some of them teach in Christian schools, and their complaints are more like those of public school teachers in the mid 1960's to early 1970's...
Posted by: ellipsis on March 21, 2007 11:36 AM" . . as a liberal, my first instinct is to assume your stories of teenagers wanting to get pregnant, etc., are republican anti-welfare exaggerations"
While teen pregnancy rates are down, this is not an exaggeration. Really, why not? It's not really the welfare aspect. They generally, according to some studies, don't perceive any other realistic options. How else are they going to become an adult - that is, what other forms of accomplishment-of-self would appear to be open to them, as teenagers? Are they going to go to college? Get a good career? Save up for a nice place to live? What else would they seem to look forward to?
That's one of the things we have to do (through whatever means are ideologically acceptable) - give poor young men and women something to look forward to.
"My wife is a token Republican at her school, and there is one argument that will always shut up the liberals that she argues with: "If you could double the funding for the school (which is already the highest funded per capita in the state), or give these children married parents, which would you choose?""
No offense to your wife, but given (as you probably know) that teachers tend to be very practically-oriented, are they being shut up, or perhaps disengaging? After all, not only is the second choice not actually realistically possible (Would you rather have single-payer healthcare or not have anyone get sick? Well?) it's rather incomplete. Quantity (two married parents) isn't everything - quality counts too.
Hmm. I know. We'll give unwed moms marriage vouchers. Of course, to avoid just reinforcing inequality, they could be used anywhere, and would have to be accepted. Choice, y'know. That way they could marry men who would be good fathers and good providers, and no doubt competition would work wonders . ..
Posted by: Dan S. on March 21, 2007 11:39 AM"Thorley Winston, such a proposal would be deemed racist & declared DOA in any legislature"
Myself, I'm in favor of a policy where anyone who suggests mandatory sterilization would be mandatorily sterilized.
ellipsis - in some ways, a lot of issues come down to this: are we trying for a triage model or a no man left behind model? One thing about the triage model is that we have imperfect knowledge and judgment, and a society that is very much not free of prejudice.
"But you know, within living memory we were able to make schools function reasonably well, and graduate a majority of those that entered high school."
Sigh. Most schools function reasonably well, and graduate a majority of those who enter high school. Poor rural and esp. urban schools serving largely impoverished, socially and culturally isolated populations don't function well and have extremely bad graduation rates. To some extent, we're asking schools to fix problems that they simply can't, and do it (relatively) on the cheap. (More accurately, that they can't fix alone, at least.)
Posted by: Dan S. on March 21, 2007 11:55 AM
Just to stir the pot some more, given the number of functional illiterates that were born here, can open-borders supporters explain why a knowledge-based, service-oriented 21st century economy needs to import tens of millions more illiterates? Is there a shortage of high-school dropouts that needs to be made up? Do we have an insufficient number of people who can't do any job more complex than stoop labor?
Of course, both the Business Roundtable and that loose coalition of groups known as the "Democrat party" have lots and lots of handwavy explanations. But the bottom line is this: high school dropout rates are up in every city I know of with a substantial illegal alien population.
Who here would run for office on a platform of "Vote for me, and I pledge to increase the number of high school dropouts every year, increase the number of poor illiterates every year, increase the number of single mothers on welfare every year..." and so forth? Yet the practical effects of the de facto open border are exactly those.
Dan S. wants to give young people something to look forward to; if the only jobs open to high school graduates are subminimum wage because of competition from people who are willing to work for cash "off the books", what are they to look forward to, exactly?
Ok, enough threadjacking...
Posted by: ellipsis on March 21, 2007 11:59 AMare we trying for a triage model or a no man left behind model?
That is the heart of the problem; the public wants the latter, but it's impossible to achieve. Triage is all that is really possible, but nobody wants to admit that.
I note that the enviornment that made "no man left behind" a household phrase has the advandage of weeding out the worst losers and malcontents at the boot camp stage. The environment that invented triage is a take-all-comers sort of place.
Posted by: Rob Lyman on March 21, 2007 12:10 PMNo offense to your wife, but given (as you probably know) that teachers tend to be very practically-oriented, are they being shut up, or perhaps disengaging?
I didn't want to bore people by getting into an extended anecdote, but there are countless Bush-bashing sessions about how there has been less grant money since Bush took office. That is when my wife will bring in the "marriage versus more money" card.
Hmm. I know. We'll give unwed moms marriage vouchers. Of course, to avoid just reinforcing inequality, they could be used anywhere, and would have to be accepted. Choice, y'know. That way they could marry men who would be good fathers and good providers, and no doubt competition would work wonders . ..
How about a serious answer? How about "changing culture is difficult, but if we are all unified, we can do it."
Posted by: Justin on March 21, 2007 12:13 PMDan S. wrote:
ellipsis - in some ways, a lot of issues come down to this: are we trying for a triage model or a no man left behind model? One thing about the triage model is that we have imperfect knowledge and judgment, and a society that is very much not free of prejudice.
One thing about the no child left behind model is that it isn't working very well, not for anyone. Have you been in a high school lately? Do you have any idea how trivially easy it is for a single jerk to make it impossible for a classroom to function? When I was in high school, all discipline was handled by the staff, the police were never called for anything, not even a fight. Now some cities have dedicated police forces just for public schools, and even those that don't have such a force do detail a uniformed officer to be "school officer" at the high schools all day, every day. That's not inexpensive, it costs money that could be spent on other things more directly useful to the student body. Was it really worth it to keep every thug mainstreamed?
I wrote:
"But you know, within living memory we were able to make schools function reasonably well, and graduate a majority of those that entered high school."
Dan S.
Sigh. Most schools function reasonably well, and graduate a majority of those who enter high school.
Ok, I suppose that as long as the dropout rate remains below 50% you can make the above statement. From what I can tell, though, some school systems have dropout rates that are approaching that number. For example, I consider the dropout rate for Denver schools, which I am told is currently 40%, to be alarmingly high. When I work with college students, and note how many of them have or had to take remedial coursework in mathematics, science and even english composition upon entering college, I wonder what they heck they were doing for the 4 years of high school.
Recently I found out that some number of states abandoned the idea of two-track high school (college prep & general ed.) years, even decades ago. Perhaps that explains why so many entering college are ill prepared; no one told them what to take in high school, so they entertained themselves with "history of cinema", etc. Perhaps the above explains why all the growth in higher education is at the community college / branch college level? That's good news and bad news. The good news being that this civilization is still adaptable enough to fix the damage via the community college system. The bad news being that we have to expend the resources on a nationwide system of remedial schools, just to make up for what didn't happen in grades K - 12.
Also let me point out the very good job that the military does. True, they don't take people with IQ's much lower than 100, and they don't knowingly take too many criminals, but the military is stunningly good at training people to do tasks they probably would never even dream of attempting otherwise. I don't refer to the combat MOS's, but the technical, support, logistical sides. They do something very, very right. Of course, their instructors and teachers don't have a union...
Poor rural and esp. urban schools serving largely impoverished, socially and culturally isolated populations don't function well and have extremely bad graduation rates.
This is a true statement. But there are still things that in theory could be done, that are not done because they would upset certain ideological applecarts.
To some extent, we're asking schools to fix problems that they simply can't, and do it (relatively) on the cheap. (More accurately, that they can't fix alone, at least.)
It's worse than that, really. Thanks to cultural balkanization, "we" don't really agree on what "we" want schools to do.
Posted by: ellipsis on March 21, 2007 12:20 PMI'm on a budget committee for a small town. One the budget line items is paying for a police officer to be on the premises of the high school at all times.
I asked my mother, a special education teacher in a different state, why this is so. She said you can't sue a police officer. If a kid is acting out, in the back of teacher's mind is the contant fear his or her actions will saddle the school district with a lawsuit.
Another note, they've gotten rid of time out rooms. In the event a child goes ballistic, the teacher is to quickly remove all other children and herself from the classroom and shut the door. (Uhmmm, so you just have a larger time out room?)
A question a state legislator recently posed on special education, do we have to provide them with the "Cadillac" of services or will a "Ford" do.
We also need to be honest that in "teaching children to behave", you need to reach them before the age of 10, no later than 12, and it may mean infringing on their parent's civil liberties. (Do we mandate boarding schools to provide children a secure, safe environment where they are properly fed and given the space and silence required to study? It's something short of termination of parental. "Give me a child until 7, I'll give you a man.")
1.) Every parent or legal guardian of every child between the ages of, say 5 and 15, gets a no-strings check from the Federal government for, say, $5000 per year, along with a letter that says, in effect, "you can use this money any way that you want, but if we come back and find that your child is not getting a basic education, we *WILL* string you up by your thumbs and perform various kinds of surgery on you with a dull knife & no anesthesia."
2.) There is a constitutional amendment saying that the Federal government has no voice whatsoever in accrediting schools or running schools or evaluating schools.
Notice the contradiction there? If the feds are going to give you money for education and check on whether your kids got educated, they're going to have to define "educated". However, I suspect that the least harmful way the feds could get involved in education would be by creating and administering annual tests to assess individual educational progress - provided they didn't do this stupidly...
And, as someone pointed out, the neighborhoods with the really bad schools are also full of people that can't look ahead 24 hours, let alone a year. They'll blow the money immediately and (assuming they didn't overdose to death) put off worrying about that "string up by the thumbs" thing until about the day before you're due to check up on them.
So, my proposal is that:
a) the states, not the feds, mail out the vouchers and evaluate results.
b) The vouchers come with monthly coupons (or the electronic equivalent). If you send your kid to an accredited (spelling?) school, you hand over the voucher and the school collects the monthly coupons.
c) At the end of the year, the gov't agency comes into the school for a testing day (school personnel not allowed in the room so at least adults won't be aiding and abetting cheating). Test results are individually compared to last year's, and the average individual improvement is used to determine whether the school keeps it's accreditation. Schools may also have to return the voucher money for kids whose improvement was far below standard.
d) Stats from the raw scores and improvements are posted on the web, for parents to use in choosing schools. This should not just show that the school is teaching, but also whether it's an especially good place for a young genius to surge ahead, or a kid that's lagging to catch up.
e) If you homeschool or use a school that the gov't hasn't approved in advance, you hang onto that voucher and pay whatever's necessary out of your own resources. Then at the end of the year, the gov't tests the kids and, if they've shown the proper improvement, passes out the money.
f) Vouchers can be increased in two ways. One is to show an objective medical condition that requires more school resources. The other is if the kid has fallen far behind without a proven objective medical condition to explain it; in this case, the increased voucher can't be spent at any branch of the school(s) that failed to teach him before.
g) Parents can pay more money on top of the vouchers, if they desire.
3.) Child labor laws are rolled back to age 14 so that anybody who wants to, is free to leave high-school and get a job.
Instead of age 14, make that passing an 8th grade exit examination, or reaching age 16. That examination must include basic literacy, arithmetic, American History and Geography, and knowledge of bank accounts, checks, credit cards, and contracts. The two-room school my dad went to for grades 1-8 taught all that and more; graduates knew enough to run a farm or other small business and vote intelligently. Not that everyone graduated, even if they kept coming back until they were 21. High school was for people that aimed higher...
Posted by: markm on March 21, 2007 12:40 PMdan s.,
You're quite right that kindergarten is the new first grade. I've got a child in pre-K in one of the top DC public schools, and I'd go further: pre-K is the new first grade. The kids are supposed to be writing, and my daughter does things like spontaneously writing "happy first spring" today, in honor of the first day of spring. I didn't do anything like that at home as 4-year-old, or in kindergarten, either, where we just practiced our letters. It's really hard, though to figure out where school learning stops and where home learning begins, since I made a point of working her through well over a hundred little phonics booklets starting in the fall with the help of periodic bribes. We're also working our way through Singapore Math's "Earlybird Kindergarten" Mathematics series, which is fun, brightly illustrated, and very, very rigorous and systematic. One day recently, we did about 40 pages of it on my daughter's insistence. And I don't have an incentive system running for the Singapore Math. She just wants to do it because it's fun.
I would question whether current elementary school reading and math methods are such a blazing success with children without very involved, very attentive middle-class parents there to fill in any gaps caused by sloppy curriculum. I am thinking about an unwittingly revealing article on a Madison, Wisconsin reading program that ran recently in the NYT, on how brave Madison is standing up to the NCLB death star and refusing to use Reading First for children in at-risk schools, relying instead on their home-brewed "balanced literacy" curriculum. In the first paragraph you get to see an unfortunate child seeing the word "pea" and reading "pumpkin" instead, probably because he'd been taught to guess the word based on the initial letter, rather than sounding it out, or maybe because he was reading the illustrations rather than the text. For an exhaustive treatment of that NYT story, see multiple posts at d-edreckoning.blogspot.com. Reform math is yet another subject, too big to discuss here. For more informed commentary, see Linda Moran's "Teens and Tweens" blog, kitchentablemath.blogspot.com, and wheresthemath.com, which is a website for the anti-reform math parent insurgency in Washington state. They've got some excellent video clips up explaining their grievances with the prevalent math methodology.
Reform math seems just about universal in the DC area. I was dismayed to read the Arlington, VA archdiocese math curriculum and to realize that starting in K, kids were supposed to cover dozens and dozens of math themes every year, with the number increasing in each grade. There's no way to properly teach that amount of material, given that there's only a few days available for each. With so many balls in the air, it's inevitable that a lot of them are going to drop, for instance the ones that help you transition successfully into algebra, like fractions.
Posted by: Amy P on March 21, 2007 12:56 PMMs. McArdle:
It is with the deepest regret that I have read your latest post. Having followed your blog for only a short while, I had been following erroneous assumptions that an economist with even a slight modicum of lassez-faire capitalism education and a nom-de-blog of "Jane Galt" would have at least a small interest in free markets, and objectivist philosophy. Imagine my surprise when I find that neither of these assumptions were correct.
The "taxation is theft crowd" appellation is unfair to the vast majority of libertarians. With objectivist philosophy in mind, we clearly believe that there are functions of government, devoted to the PROTECTION OF THE RIGHTS OF INDIVIDUALS, which are properly funded by taxation. These functions are limited to:
- A functioning police force
- A functioning judiciary
- A functioning national defense
These functions protect the rights of all individuals, regardless of race, creed, socio-economic status, etc. To a much lesser extent, a case may be made for involuntary taxation for the purposes of some degrees of infrastructure to which all are entitled usage. Post roads (now read as "interstate highway systems", but primarily for national defense), bridges, park systems, even public libraries have some justification for the usage of involuntary tax money, since all people may avail themselves of their usage.
But you have abandoned a very basic principle of objectivist philosophy when you advocate stealing from Peter to pay for Paul's children's education. While this may happen to be your particular sacred cow ("It's for the CHILDREN!!!"), you are joined in this chorus by every collectivist in it's basic principle. Why limit it to education for children? Why not add the sacred cows of others, including (but most certainly not limited to) things like:
- Food
- Housing
- Clothing
- Medical care
And the rest of the collectivist litany of invented "rights" that you espouse as "positive rights". Oh, excuse me, you've already DONE that.
But why limit it to children? Why not expand this slightly to include those who are, through no fault of their own, somewhat "down on their luck". Or those who are "temporarily" unemployed? Or homeless? OR TO ANY OTHER EXPANSION OF THE SOCIALIST/WELFARE SYSTEM we're currently using? There is no difference.
Here is a slightly different phrasing:
------------------------From: http://www.qando.net/Default.aspx?tabid=38
"...the state is shifting from the obligation to protect our inherent rights to that of delivering entitlements which are being redefined as "rights". Health care. Retirement. You name it. It is nothing more than radical egalitarianism, a form of Marxism, which is finally winning out."
------------------------
By what right do you propose to steal the money from those who have, by dint of their own honest effort, EARNED it, and give it to those who have nothing but perceived "needs", whose only accomplishment is that they HAVEN'T done anything productive? I guess that someone who has called themselves a "libertarian" who believes in the credo of "FROM those according to their ability, TO those according to their NEED" has somewhat of a contradiction in place.
I can hear the rebuttal now, "Oh, but you libertarians are so heartless". Let me posit one question: Which is more heartless, to condemn millions of children to failed government school systems, or to allow all children an equal opportunity to excel in a truly free market for education? One in which the government plays no role but that of enforcing laws against force, fraud, and the threats thereof?
The encroachment of government (state, and federal) into what used to be very localized school districts spelled the end to "public" education as it had been known. The natural outcome of the gross federalization of our educational systems is a bloated bureacracy and a strongly negative outcome. To attempt to slather a veneer of "market" on a government-controlled system like that of education is like treating someone dying of a gangrene infection by spraying perfumed water into the air to cover the stench of the decaying flesh. Trivia like teacher compensation or specific programs ignore the basic, fundamental, underlying problem: the government has caused this "crisis" in education, while you propose to use more of what caused the problem to solve it.
With regard to your lifeboat comment, I would strongly suggest that you re-read (if you have in fact read at all) Rand's "The Virtue of Selfishness", which addresses directly the fact that we are NOT in lifeboats. Ordinary life is NOT an emergency situation, in which somewhat different rules apply. In an emergency, rational people simply assume that all people are likewise rational, and extraordinary efforts may be made on behalf of complete strangers, based on the assumption that they are good, productive human beings rather than irrational parasitic moochers.
I personally would not want to share a lifeboat with a person of the collectivist mentality which you are currently displaying. I have no doubt that you would gang up with the other occupants (excuse me, in PC-speak, that would be "to form a democratic majority"), hand me a knife, and ask that I cut off my leg in order to feed the others. "It's for the CHILDREN", after all. And should I refuse, you would use the exact same justification that you're using to steal my resources to educate someone else's children to forcibly cut off my leg and feed someone else's children.
------------------------------------
And so it is with regret that I will be removing "Asymmetrical Information" from my bookmarks. I had originally contemplated moving it from the folder "Independents and Libertarians" to either "Moonbats and Left-Wing Collectivists" (given your socialist philosophies), or perhaps the "RightWingNuts and Fascists" (given your statist approach to government-induced problems). But I find that both of those folders are well-occupied with socialists or fascists with much more definitive views than your vaguely socialist/statist viewpoint, and find that I will no longer be visiting your site.
-------------------------------------
P.S.:
I would also suggest changing your "nom-de-blog" from "Jane Galt" to something which more accurately reflects your collectivist viewpoint. Looking at the various characters from "Atlas Shrugged", may I suggest "Jane Mouch", perhaps?
Tangential to some of the comments above, I remember reading an interesting study (10+ years ago??) that found the best correlation with a child's success was the parent's *future* income. In other words, parents with successful planning and work habits raised good students. I've lost the link - does it ring any bells here?
----------------
"Having followed your blog for only a short while,"
Yes. That much is obvious.
Remind me not to annoy Blackwing1. It would take ages to download an email, what with the dial-up and all.
Posted by: RGT on March 21, 2007 1:16 PMGosh, I can almost hear Megan's grief-racked sobs, at the prospect of Blackwing1 changing his bookmarks.
Endeavor to persevere, Jane Galt, endeavor to persevere.....
Posted by: Will Allen on March 21, 2007 1:20 PMI cant believe a self professed libertarian would use the old 'If you oppose the government doing something you oppose to it being done at all' canard.
Posted by: the invisible pimp hand on March 21, 2007 1:49 PMDan S,
I'm going to have to disagree with you, and continue to argue the importance of making sure little kids learn a lot of systematically-presented academics in their first years of school. For one, those basic academics don't need to take up huge amounts of time--Direct Instruction advocates say that the program only takes up the morning, leaving plenty of time in the afternoon for anything you like. Secondly, while we may sentimentalize childhood and want to keep it a sacred preserve free from academic pressures, we have to think about how the third or fourth grader feels who can't read at grade level and is falling further and further behind his class every day. That's a way to lose your childhood, too, as are (later on) addiction, jail, early single parenthood, and an untimely death. A substantive and effective early elementary program is a small price to pay for avoiding those events.
I've got an application in to a multidenominational Christian classical school in Texas that I'm very excited about. They do Singapore Math (Singapore--Singapore is the world leader in school math performance), start Spanish in kindergarten, start Latin in 4th grade or so, do a chronologically based history program, and do art history and music appreciation starting at an early age. I'm very excited about the school, and am pretty sure that I'm not going to be stealing my daughter's childhood by making her learn Spanish at 5. Did I mention that I'm very excited about the school? Here in DC, you would pay four times the tuition for anything like it.
Posted by: Amy P on March 21, 2007 1:50 PMI have a question for those who consider taxation for the purposes of educating children to be immoral theft:
Do you believe that the government (all governments, federal, state, local) should be entirely uninvolved in the education of children? Do you believe that parents should choose and pay for whatever education they choose for their children?
I am uncomfortable with the intrusion of the federal government into education... I'd much rather see it handled at the state or local level. On the other hand, I believe very strongly that having an educated populace is very important and I do not trust parents to sufficiently educate their children if left entirely on their own. Perhaps if our population was already better educated, it would be more likely to educate children.
EI
Posted by: Earnest Iconoclast on March 21, 2007 1:59 PMEducation is a public good. The more educated our society is the better off we all are. That is why society needs to be willing to fund that effort to educate all children, whether or not you have any or whether or not you just have 1 and the neighbor has 5.
To make the slippery slope argument that because we fund one type of public good we must fund them all, is ridiculous and only necessary if you think humans are robots incapable of differentiating, prioritizing and making judgements. Because we fund one thing, is precisely the reason why we can't fund another. Just because you have money for 1 cheeseburger, doesn't mean you have to have money for a slice of pizza too.
I have no problem paying for the school system so that other people's kids may be educated, so long as they are also paying taxes as much as they are able to.
Posted by: cdub on March 21, 2007 2:06 PMEarnest: the answer to both of your questions is yes. No government level should be involved in education. Just as they are not involved in religion, and for the same reasons. Some things are too important to be subjects of democratic decisionmaking.
That said, there's a pretty good compromise available: federalism. Get the Federal government out of education, and we can have experimentation in the laboratory of the states. The Feds never had any business in education in the first place. Still don't, without a Constitutional amendment, IMO.
My attitude on education in, say, Alabama is about the same as my attitude towards it in France. Although I have the liberty-correct opinion in both cases that they ought to do it privately, in neither do I really care, since I don't live there, and have no desire to live there. I am tolerant, in other words.
Posted by: Leonard on March 21, 2007 2:20 PM"...[Can we overcome] handicaps that disadvantaged kids are born with?"
Sure, and we can use schools, public and private, to do it. The handicaps of which you speak are family handicaps. The school is the largest collective institution the kids and their families have in the community. Use the school institution and expand its involvement with the extended families and guardians.
1. a smart, healthy society is stronger than a sick, stupid one. So free health care and education through trade or college.
2. as a sophomore in HS the student picks liberal arts or trade/tech as their focus.
3. last 2 years of HS spent in charter facility on chosen specialty
all teachers merit based pay equal to superintendents at senior scale. all teachers will be rewarded and respected with each individual success. measured.
Posted by: judson on March 21, 2007 3:42 PM" ... the neighborhoods with the really bad schools are also full of people that can't look ahead 24 hours, let alone a year. ..."
I don't know if I'm cynical or if I'm naive, but I'd bet that in the majority of cases it's a question of 'have no incentive to look ahead' rather than 'can't look ahead.' If we *TOTALLY* did away with the Welfare State, and put those people in a 'sink or swim' situation, most of them would learn to swim -- real fast.
John: Maybe. I don't know. If you read accounts of pre-industrial England and Scandinavia, two things quickly become obvious:
- Unless someone looked ahead a year and put away enough food for the winter and spring, whole families or villages would starve to death. You couldn't go to the store and buy food shipped in from across the country, because no one could haul enough food to matter through winter snows or spring mud.
- Less than 10% of the people were making these decisions for all of them. For manors (villages belonging to a noble family in a nearby castle), food stores were mainly kept in the castle, with the chatelaine (the Lord's wife, unless for some reason he picked another female relative) in charge of ensuring there was enough for the entire population, etc. In the case of isolated farmsteads, one senior married couple was usually managing the affairs of a large extended family, plus hired or slave laborers. Most of the family members might someday be in line to take over the management role, but not if their relatives considered them stupid, impulsive, or lacking foresight. And of course, the hired hands likely became hired hands because no one in their family was a good enough manager in the long run, while slaves aren't allowed to think too much...
So basically, it used to be quite OK if 1/2 or more of the people didn't have enough sense to put up enough food to survive the winter, because they'd leave it up to their superiors to ensure the storage bins were full. Now, the trouble is most of these dolts are on their own. Since there's a grocery store nearby, they won't starve to death because they didn't look ahead, but they can keep getting into trouble with their bills, spending all their food money before the end of the month, etc., and someone will keep bailing them out - and we get to pay for those continuous bailouts in the form of taxes, because we won't let them starve in the streets, and don't leave rescuing them up to private charities that might do a lot more to motivate them to handle things better next time.
Posted by: markm on March 21, 2007 5:39 PMhttp://www.choicetrust.org/Home.asp
If you actually support helping children
then contribute your OWN money to a voucher.
Have ANY of you touting vouchers EVER done that?
Just sounds like political grandstanding to me.
Posted by: roversaurus on March 21, 2007 6:27 PM"If you actually support helping children
then contribute your OWN money to a voucher."
May I point out that an educated populace produces a positive externality. Everyone benefits from it. To not help to pay for the amount that one benefits is akin to stealing.
Posted by: golddog on March 21, 2007 6:47 PMGolddog, is this ironic? Because I assume you saw the free ad I donate to the Children's Scholarship Fund in my adstrip . . . it runs there all the time. This is, in fact, the issue I feel strongest about, and I do encouratge all my readers to donate to CSF and other similar causes.
Posted by: Jane Galt on March 21, 2007 6:52 PMLeonard,
You didn't read my questions carefully... I asked if you were against ANY government intrusion into education, be it Federal, State, or Local. The "taxation is stealing" crowd shouldn't care WHO is doing the taxing. My question is really for them.
I agree that the Federal government has no business meddling in education. I do not, however, want State and Local governments to abdicate all efforts at educating children and just let everyone do whatever they feel like. An educated populace is too important to let people choose not to educate their children.
The government is not involved in religion because of the 1st Amendment... it mentions nothing about education.
EI
Posted by: Earnest Iconoclast on March 21, 2007 7:02 PMEllipsis, you said: "Please be so kind as to tell us all what you would do to improve public schools besides..." Even if I had nothing constructive to suggest, it still woulnd't make sense to do something that makes a bad situation worse. The presumption on this thread seems to be that it can't get worse, but it can get much worse. Somebody said that 36% of kids in DC schools are functionally illiterate. I don't know if that's true, but I'm sure that 36% is less than 50%, 75%, or 100%. That said, I would suggest paying teachers in schools with more disadvantaged children more relative to the teachers in other schools, even if the overall money spent on teacher pay is the same. I would also suggest universal preschool and deconcentrating poverty. The suggestion about housing vouchers is an excellent one.
David Walser, about the evidence on cities that now have voucher programs, you said, "Note, I'm looking for an example where the market approach was not "helped" by 50 pounds of well meaning regulations and other market interventions." Is it really true that vouchers will only start to work when we remove every single regulation? Are you saying its all or nothing? Is there really an economic model that supports that kind of reasoning? If the effects of voucher reform will be as great as voucher proponents say, it should have been measurable in the cities that have experimented with voucher reform already.
Jasper, you said, "Norm, what about that "scheme" called American post secondary education?" How well does this scheme serve disadvantaged students? How about the drop out rate? I think post-secondary education is an excellent example of why market based education systems will not fix troubled schools. Markets are almost always very ineffective at achieving universality. That may be fine for post-secondary schools, but do we really want a public school system where most kids from disadvantaged neighborhoods don't go to school at all, and even if they do, hardly any graduate? And all for a much higher cost?
Posted by: norm on March 21, 2007 8:13 PM
The government is not involved in religion because of the 1st Amendment... it mentions nothing about education.
EI, the federal government shouldn't be involved in education because of the 10th amendment.
Of course the federal government, through its judicial arm, has long since decided that the 10th amendment doesn't actually mean anything (or the 9th amendment, for that matter). The federal government has also decided that the power to regulate interstate commerce contained in Article I, Section 8 pretty much justifies anything it wants to do that isn't specifically prohibited by the Bill of Rights.
So I guess I can understand why you made the comment you did, even though I want to weep when I consider that most people in the US think exactly the way you do. That is, they think that if it isn't prohibited by the Constitution, the federal government can do it. What a shame.
Posted by: DRB on March 21, 2007 8:27 PMNorm, the report claimed that 36% of all residents were functional illiterates, not all school children. I do not know what the distribution across age groupings is, but the report suggested that persons older than 60 were overrepresented, and hinted that Hispanic immigrants and those from Ethiopia(!?) were heavily represented. But was a news story reporting on a study, not the study itself.
How do you suggest that this "deconcentrating poverty" be done? Bear in mind the last 40 to 50 years of experiments in that area as well...
Posted by: ellipsis on March 21, 2007 9:03 PMMarkets are almost always very ineffective at achieving universality.-- norm
We must be using a different definition of the word "market". The wheat and bread markets seems to be very effective at achieving universality. Yes, there is some government intervention in these markets, but not nearly to the extent of the government intervention in the education market.
Is it really true that vouchers will only start to work when we remove every single regulation? Are you saying its all or nothing? Is there really an economic model that supports that kind of reasoning? If the effects of voucher reform will be as great as voucher proponents say, it should have been measurable in the cities that have experimented with voucher reform already.
No, it's not all or nothing. However, for vouchers to move the market for education, they have to be a viable threat to the existing monopoly. Having 2,000 vouchers available in a school district of 200,000 children is not much of a threat -- particularly when the district gets to keep half of the state's per-student-allocation of funds for each student lost to the vouchers. Requiring "voucher schools" to use the same books and use union teachers, prevents the schools from threatening the local school district. The point of vouchers is to introduce the virtue of competition into K-12 education. Give enough parents the ability to move their kids to a school of their choice and the local school district is going to do its best to be the school of choice for as many parents as it can. Yes, some parents will be too lazy or uncaring to become informed enough to make an intelligent choice of their kids' schools. Even those kids will benefit from competition because all schools will improve as a result of the competition.
For this to work, the competition has to be real. Recall the domestic car industry in the 1960s. Ford, GM, and Chrysler could sell all the cars they had the capacity to make. They only competed with each other on a limited basis. Only VW had a material presence in the US, and VW was not viewed as a real competitor. The US producers could get away with poor quality because US consumers had no real alternative -- buy a Ford that would last two years or a Chevy that would last about the same? What a choice. Then came Toyota, Datsun, and Honda. Today, the worst US product is miles better -- literally -- in terms of quality than the best made US car made in the 1970s. Today's cars, properly maintained, will last a decade on the road and may see 150,000 miles or more before needing major engine work. The best cars from before the Japanese invasion would have required an engine overhaul at 60,000 miles (or so). Some of the increased longevity is do to better technology, but most is due to better quality. All consumers have benefited from this competition, not just those who read Consumer Reports.
Want better schools? Make schools compete.
Ms. McArdle:
My comment at 6:47 PM was directed at the "tax is theft" crowd.
I applaud your efforts at making your ideological kin see reason.
Posted by: golddog on March 21, 2007 11:02 PMDavid, there are several very important differences between wheat/bread and education. One is that bread is exceptionally easy to measure, while wheat is very difficult to measure. This is in fact a very important factor when deciding whether a voucher approach would be effective. But even setting aside that factor, the bread market doesn't doesn't do a great job at universality. Prior to government intervention in the form of welfare and food stamps and philanthropic intervention in the form of food banks and such, hunger was a serious problem in this country.
I don't see the relevance of the size of the voucher experiments. For the schools that are participating, some of these programs are large enough that they should be showing a difference. Perhaps they wouldn't show a city-wide effect, but these programs aren't showing an effect for the students or the schools where they are concentrated. Also, what's happened with the voucher experiments so far is that parents are taking their children out of a school, usi