Noah Millman has a really smart post up at The American Scene on the growing inequality gap for basic needs like housing, health care, and education. I think he’s right on the money, but one thing I want to quibble with is his use of the concept of productivity. Perhaps I’m reading this too literally, but I think that at least in terms of public education, productivity is not only impossible to gauge without surrendering to a regime of test-taking, but it’s also not necessarily going to lead to lower costs. Likewise, the problems with the housing market and the fact that it crowded many people out of traditionally middle class neighborhoods and the good schools is also not really because of some missing productivity in the housing sector. It’s the result of a bubble.
The increased costs at public universities are a pretty complex problem due in part to increased investment in administration, infrastructure, and technology – all productivity-boosting investments – and a cultural unwillingness to actually raise the revenue needed to support a growing public higher education sector. There is also something a bit troubling to me about the notion of super-productive universities. Higher productivity suggests to me more streamlined, less experience-based higher education (and public education generally). This worries me, because I think there’s a lot of intangible value in a traditional liberal arts education and the college experience generally. Of course, making the administration of these universities more productive makes sense, but I think it often requires big upfront investments in capital or staff in order to actually work.
In secondary and elementary public education, I would rather see efforts to bring down student-teacher ratios and pay teachers better, coupled with a less corporatized vision of American education. Fewer tests, fewer standards. More creative learning, more ‘non-essential’ classes like art and theatre and music and dance. In other words, I want education to be less productive and more creative. And if that’s something that you can’t put a price tag on – and you probably can’t – then it’s going to require more public investment. No, you can’t just throw money at a problem, but I think you use money to create the basic framework you want: small class sizes, well paid and well trained enthusiastic educators.
Unlike the health sector, the education sector is really not a crazy byzantine system of cartels and monopolies – though critics of public education often describe it as a monopoly. Rather, it’s a massively decentralized system that has yet to harness the full usefulness of that decentralization. Perhaps the open-source movement will help change this.
Also unlike the health sector, which I think could be reformed* by breaking up cartels and making the entire system more competitive and transparent, there is neither a simple or a complex fix for public education. Full stop. Keeping class sizes small, teachers autonomous, and kids active and curious is the best we can hope for. Productivity is nearly impossible to measure without sacrificing some of the most important features of our public education system.
All that aside, I think Noah is absolutely correct that these goods – health care, housing, education – have no substitutes. They’re not like the consumer goods that have become cheaper in the last few decades, largely due to advances in productivity. But they are far more important to most Americans in the big scheme of things.
*These are obviously not the only fixes needed in healthcare reform, but I suspect changing them, doing away with the employer tax break, etc. would have massively beneficial effects on the health care industry.
James E. Powell
In secondary and elementary public education, I would rather see efforts to bring down student-teacher ratios and pay teachers better, coupled with a less corporatized vision of American education. Fewer tests, fewer standards. More creative learning, more ‘non-essential’ classes like art and theatre and music and dance.
The research, both in education and in neuroscience, supports what you are saying. But the people who want to turn the states’ education budgets over to corporations, including our “liberal” president, have no interest in any ideas or research that does not support their goals.
And in a lifetime of following politics, I have learned that the word “productivity” is an alarm bell. Like “accountability,” it sounds like a good idea, but the devil is in the details.
El Cruzado
America, where everything you want is cheap, and everything you need is expensive.
Earl Butz
As the husband of a high-school teacher in one of the wealthiest school districts in America, you’ve missed a biggie.
A lot of districts, whether here in liberal California or in the midwest, get plenty of funding…and then spend it on crap. And by crap, I mean football. High school football is big business in this country, and billions of education dollars that, I don’t know, would pay for my wife’s classroom to be cleaned by a janitor every now and then (she has to do it herself or it just doesn’t get done) instead are getting pissed away on stadiums, team equipment, bus rides and alumni perks. My wife’s school needs (especially in the gym) janitorial service, textbooks (one for every two kids in English classes), reduced class sizes (her smallest class in 45 students!) – but this year, instead of any of that, the school is spending 10 million dollars on a workout facility for the football team.
And the parents – in this district, wealthy, white, well-educated and involved – far being being outraged, are generally all for it.
I don’t know how you fix that.
But yeah, I agree with most of your post and suspect the wife would as well.
aimai
I haven’t read the article yet but I want to challenge the use of the word “productivity” when used with reference to education, especially with reference to early childhood education. Efficiency, I get. But productivity?
Here’s the thing: good education will always be expensive. Really expensive. It requires small classes, close attention to each child’s needs, up to date materials, materials that are always going out of date or being degraded to the point of needing to be repurchased, buildings and grounds, food, clothing, and medical care. All of these are consumed over and over again. All of them, except the teachers, probably depreciate in value and need to be replaced constantly. Its just going to cost a lot.
The entire thrust of the modern education movement is to try to do more, with less, and get a better outcome. It simply can’t be done. The wealthy don’t throw tons of money at their children’s schooling just for the status implications (though there’s plenty of that to go around.) They throw money at their children’s schools, teachers, sports, dance, music, drama, etc… because those things are necessary to helping a child become a fully educated, well rounded, successful citizen and person. They especially throw money at the situation because limiting their child’s contact with poverty, illness, and the lower class makes the teaching process easier and the only way to “protect” your child from being swamped by the needs of other kids is to spend a ton of money putting them in an educational enclave.
I’m not advocating that. I’m just observing that any public school program, or poor inner city program, or program that serves poor or middle class kids ought to have more money than our government can possibly put into it in order to make up the difference. Productivity isn’t even the issue: children have to have been fed, housed, clothed, and cared for before they can be ready to sit in a classroom *of any size* and learn. Their teachers need massive amounts of social service and medical support to take up the slack for what poverty makes inevitable in these kids lives.
My cousin is a highschool principle in NY city. Not surprisingly many of her kids have literally no safe place to sleep at night, let alone in which to do homework. We can be more efficient in the way we deliver services and education to every new generation of our children, but if we focus on some notion of productivity I think we are deluding ourselves. Each child has a unique set of problems and issues if they are to learn to the top of their ability. We haven’t even got our foot on the bottom run of that ladder.
aimai
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
No, we can never get rid of these things until we are genetically engineered to grow hard drives in our heads and teflon skin.
As for education, the only way I know to improve it is to set teacher starting salaries at $120K-Texas level (so adjust for your income difference. That would be about 3-4 times what teachers start at here. Do that, you make it attractive to the people who should be teaching, and you would no longer need tenure as a feature.
geg6
I have no idea how to measure “productivity” in my field. I mean, how does one even define it? I find the whole idea bizarre.
I can tell you exactly why an education my large, land grant, research (ostensibly) public university now costs so much. We went from being a state university that received the vast majority of its funding from the state and federal government that allowed tuition costs to stay low enough that most of the state’s residents could afford to send their kids one of our 24 campuses to a “state-related” university that now receives less than 8% of our budget from the state. We are essentially a private university that is expected to be the flagship public university for the state and maintain 24 campuses so residents of my state will have “access.” And I won’t even go into how much we do for state agriculture that is rightfully the job of the state’s Department of Agriculture.
Keith G
Amen
Look, the problem with public education is that there are multiple problems, each with their own genesis and each not necessarily reachable with the solutions of the others. Although, there is a large cluster of problems that are related, but lay outside the magic of the classroom:
What happens to 0-4 years old born into the morass of poverty combined with unable (or apathetic) parenting.
School policy is a lot like crime fighting policy. The tough talkers get all the mojo so we get more test and more jail cells without any unified theory of how to deal with what comes before.
Finally, while it is fairly easy to ID good teachers and remove the bad, except in a couple of well know locals, teacher accountability has become the central pillar of reform only because it is the easiest and cheapest issue to tackle. A lack of accountability is not the systemic boogey man politicians and bureaucrats say it is.
Martin
One of the bigger unspoken obstacles to efficiency in education is that K-12 serves as the daycare system for most working Americans. So long as two income households are necessary to stay above the poverty line in many parts of the country, there’s very little that education systems can do to really focus on efficiency. Ultimately, parents want their kids to be in school as close to 8-5 as possible, for as much of the year as possible, and no matter what that’s going to cost money.
But the most pernicious problem to deal with is this make-the-grade mindset that has really penetrated the country. Efficiency in education, when you really press many policymakers on the right, and a surprising number of parents, means to them to abandon the kids that aren’t making the grade. They say that they want more effective teachers (that also work less to be easier on the tax base) but when you really press them on what should happen in a classroom of 30 kids when 5 of them simply aren’t mastering the material – they’ll ultimately declare that those 5 kids need to be cut loose, that they’re holding back the other 25, that they’re a drain on taxpayers, and so on.
Now, many years ago, that used to actually happen. Those kids would simply fall further behind until they dropped out and went off to get jobs shining shoes and digging ditches. Well, we don’t have that kind of an economy any more and that kind of attitude will only lead to a permanent welfare class. It’s in the nations best interest to prevent that – and you would think even conservatives would want to work harder to prevent that. The cost of educating a child, even one who struggles is *nothing* compared to the cost of carrying them through their entire adulthood on food stamps, medicaid, and public housing. It’s a really cheap investment. Astoundingly cheap. But it’s also highly inefficient.
The focus on productivity isn’t really productivity. Productivity at least allows you to expand costs if it yields better results. That’s not what is being debated, as that’s a political non-starter. What’s being debated is efficiency – how to get the most out of the teachers we have, with no external outcome that is trying to be met. In other words, the debate isn’t really about what’s needed to turn out better educated students, it’s about how to turn out the most educated students with the resources we’ve already committed, and how can we reduce those resources faster than the decline in educational results. This is applying the efficiencies of PC making to children.
If we wanted to focus on outcomes, we’d be having a vastly different debate. The problem isn’t in the schools or with teachers. Sure, there are problems there, but they’re minor. The problems are outside of the classroom. Parents working two jobs don’t have the time to help their children, to meet with teachers, and so on. Two income households struggle with these things as well as employers are all too eager to terminate an employee who needs to leave the assembly line for 2 hours for a parent-teacher meeting. Educational attainment is very strongly correlated to household income, even moreso than to parental education. SATs have always correlated most strongly to household income – more than any other external measure.
If we really care about education, the most important conversation to have is about income disparity. Lift up the lower and middle class and teachers will instantly become more effective and more productive, and what’s more, you’ll have people paying more into the tax base and a number of those other problems will go away as well.
Don Elliott
I agree in principle with your premise, and I will read the Millman post for more context. But i want to echo your commentary about the “messiness” of real educational experience, especially in higher education. While I was teaching in a College/University context, I witnessed firsthand the transition from standup-interactive discussion-driven presentations of my most technical of subjects (physics) toward the “PowerPointization” of the classroom. I contend that if the instructor is alert to the whites of the students’ eyes, real teaching begins when those eyes start to glaze over or wander off. Hewing to the lovely image on the screen in a darkened room is not teaching, it is entertaining.
Oh, well. I am just an old geezer, so what do I know?
Martin
@Earl Butz: Glee really does capture the whole breadth of the educational experience, doesn’t it?
Martin
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Salaries don’t need to be that high. Set them around the median income for the area with decent benefits and you’re fine. Teachers don’t expect to get rich, and you don’t want to attract the bond trader mentality into the discipline anyway. Teachers expect to not need to carry a 2nd job, that’s pretty much it.
IMO, salaries in most places are right around where they should be. In some states they’re clearly too low, in some perhaps a touch too high.
Now, what I would like to see are 9 month and year-round salaries for K-12 teachers. Here in CA we’ve got an open textbook initiative and I’d love to see teachers have the option to get paid a salary in summer to write and revise textbooks for the state. They wouldn’t get a royalty, but they could draw a salary instead and participation in the effort could be used toward their merit and promotion. The state would get better textbooks, the teachers would be more invested in them having participated in their creation, and we’d still save money because being open, we’re no longer paying a publisher.
Earl Butz
@Martin: Funny you should mention that. My wife quite literally screamed at the line from last weeks episode “when football does well, everyone’s doing well”, as she got the same comment word for word from her higher-ups last year.
She is half-convinced that someone from the show just follows her around and that’s where the scripts are coming from. I am starting to think that is not the most implausible idea I’ve ever heard.
At any rate, someone on the writing team for that show has not only worked for a school, but has done so within the last couple of years.
Shit, which one? Don’t recall seeing that on the latest ballot.
Stillwater
there is neither a simple or a complex fix for public education
Maybe I’m just completely out of the loop on this, but I don’t recall there being a ‘problem’ with public education until the Reagan Revolation inspired wealthy, older and single people to get on the ‘me first’ train and run down school related taxes. Then the voucher crowd came in on the ‘don’t fence my child in’ train, and told us that the private sector was always more efficient in allocating resources than the government could ever hope to be. Bush kinda drove the public education train off the tracks when he passed ‘no wealthy white child left behind’.
The ‘fix’ that public education appears to need is a direct result of the conservative ‘me first’ ideology. (I mean, why the fuck should I pay for someone else’s kid to go to school and lounge on his ass all day? Amirite!? What the fuck happened to bootstraps!?) And the problems people assume exist with public education are not internal to the institution (unless your a young earth creationist), but the result of external factors . If we cared more about it, we’d pay the taxes. As a country we don’t care, so we don’t pay. Yet another way in which we’ve lost our moral bearings as a nation.
Martin
@Earl Butz: Oh, not on the ballot, it’s already a done deal. One of Arnold’s actual good ideas. Got started last year and is steadily working its way forward.
A bound textbook only costs about $4 to print – with a bit to add to that for distribution, etc. The average cost to the state to buy one from a publisher is $45. If the state started printing its own books and dumped the $40 savings back into teachers and does nothing more than break-even on the whole arrangement, the state would come out well ahead simply by having vastly greater control over the textbook content and by putting that support back into the educator base rather than sending it off to who knows where.
Stillwater
@geg6: We went from being a state university that received the vast majority of its funding from the state and federal government that allowed tuition costs to stay low
Also, this.
geg6
@geg6:
Oh, and I forgot to mention the costs associated with bringing at least 40% of each freshman class up to college entrance level abilities in writing, reasoning, and math before we can even begin to impart any actual college curriculum.
When we have to start by having a re-do of the junior and senior years of high school, it gets pretty expensive, pretty fast.
And before anyone gets up in arms that this is a slam against secondary teachers, don’t. I respect what they attempt to do what with the little support they get from both parents and administration. And don’t get me started on what a joke any and all standardized tests are. Worst.idea.ever. Every single one of them.
Loneoak
LGRooney
@Martin:
Amen to lack of parental involvement but parents make choices, too. It isn’t always a matter of needing two incomes or employer inflexibility (not that you are saying this, of course).
I would ask, on your last point excerpted above, which I will assume would usher in discussion of professional attainment, how much of that is bias inherent in the system. In other words, do we professionals and employers place too much meaning into that educational achievement? Yes, it is a way to weed out seemingly competitive applicants but perhaps there is a better way to measure fit especially given the extreme variability in intelligence, interests, capabilities, and personalities
among individuals.
Not everyone is fit for school and trying to make schools fit the amount of variability in humanity is certainly going to be an expensive venture.
James E. Powell
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I have made this exact argument to people inside and outside of education for the last few years without ever convincing anyone. For some reason, they will accept the major premises in a general way, but believe that they apply to nearly every career/industry except for public education.
I began my public high school teaching career, at the age of 50, after 20 years practicing law. And without meaning to disparage anyone I have met in the education business, I have not been impressed with the intellect, energy or ambition of the people when compared with other careers/industries.
Earl Butz
@Martin: Damn. Thanks for that, didn’t know it. Good idea on many levels, keeps that Texas BOE shit out of our classrooms for starters, not to mention the money savings.
ts
Aaaaand you lost me.
geg6
@Stillwater:
Yup. When my younger sister graduated from this very university back in 1986, her tuition, books (an English major!), and room/board were $7000/year, completely covered by a little cash from mom and dad, federal and state grants and a small federal loan. The state (and through the state, the feds) funded 65% of the university’s budget.
Today, an in-state freshman resident student pays $14,000 for tuition and $9000 in room/board, with another $1900 on books. That’s $25,000 for a year. The state pays less than 8% of our budget. We are the most expensive “public” university in the nation. And our presumptive new governor plans to cut state expenditure on it even more.
It’s a joke.
Stillwater
@James E. Powell: And without meaning to disparage anyone I have met in the education business, I have not been impressed with the intellect, energy or ambition of the people when compared with other careers/industries.
Other careers or industries like the building trades? Manufacturing? Oil and gas industry? Food service? Hospital administration? Government agencies? Real estate? Golf course maintenance? Web design?
Weird that educators are so much dumber and less ambitious than everybody else.
Davis X. Machina
@Martin:
I’ll trade not-getting-rich for being respected as a professional, not treated as a highly-paid civil-service drone, nor as an axe murderer, for being the first person ever in a 14-year-old’s life who said ‘No. That’s wrong.’
That’s all I want.
Martin
@LGRooney:
I agree that there is too much bias in the system. The entire public education system from grade 7 upward is designed primarily to turn out armies of liberal arts BAs. Vocational training has collapsed in this country, which is a real shame. The average high-schooler is more likely to get a stable income from being a plumber than from a BA in History. And employers are simply doing what in their best interest (as they always do, and should do) which is to ask for the most that they can afford to ask for. At least ⅓ of the students hitting the university systems – even top rated universities – have little real interest or motivation in a specific subject area. They want a degree because they’re supposed to want a degree and they know they need a degree to get a job. They pick the most interesting/least difficult thing for them to study, regardless of whether it will really lead to anything. The faculty teach them as though every one will get a PhD in the field some day. When they graduate, many have few marketable skills beyond a greater ability to operate independently of their parents, a stronger work ethic, and a greater ability to focus. These are all good things, but hardly worth $100,000 and 4 years of your life to attain. Fuck, the military gets that out of their recruits in the first week.
We do need a much more diverse educational system – one which doesn’t stigmatize vocational education and which gives trades and others skills training the same kinds of opportunities as traditional higher ed, without having to turn the entire system over to the for-profits.
Poopyman
Not having kids of my own, I can only rely on my own experiences 40 years ago, the experiences of my friends with kids, and what I see in my community.
So firstly, what the hell is the goal of education now? Seriously. In the 20th century it was to prepare a workforce for mostly factory jobs, as the number of farmers was decreasing. Well, the majority of the workforce (myself included) have not nor will not work in a factory. It seems to me that there is no coherent target anymore. Even less so since NCLB. (I am correct in assuming NCLB has been a miserable failure, yes?)
Secondly, it seems to me that how kids are introduced to the world in their first few years has a much greater impact on how they learn than anything that comes after. Whether their natural curiosity is nurtured or crushed seems paramount. And the deck seems stacked these days against a child’s curiosity. Economic status plays a big part, obviously, as does a parent’s attitude.
So how the hell does one measure “productivity” when there’s not a clear goal, and the “subjects” you’re measuring come with there own unique set of characteristics? The urge to treat education as an assembly line has been around for decades, and lives on today despite no obvious sign of success. I don’t get it.
Roger Moore
“You can’t just throw money at a problem” is one of those lines like “life is unfair” that’s most often used as a lame excuse for doing nothing about a problem. Correctly interpreted, it means you need to have a plan for what you’re going to do with your money, not that you should never spend money as one part of solving a problem. Since you actually have a plan for what the money is supposed to do, you should feel free to ignore complaints of money throwing.
Martin
@Loneoak: But you aren’t classifying those positions. A huge number of those positions are hospital administrators or are involved in supporting the research operations of the system, which let’s be honest are massive. And none of those people are getting paid out of tuition or out of the state education subsidies.
The educational administrator to faculty ratio, at least where I am, is around 1:4. That’s much higher than we would like it, but only because we have a student to faculty ratio of nearly 40:1 and many of the staff are providing student rather than faculty support. Not sure what UC you’re looking at, but it doesn’t resemble mine at all.
Poopyman
@geg6: When I graduated from that very same institution in 1976, the cost was less than half of what it cost your sister. The problem has always been that the PA legislature has been anti-education for at least as long as I have been around, whether controlled by Dems or Pubs. And no governor that I can remember has been very helpful in increasing the funding.
I’m afraid it has a lot to do with the “Alabama in between” that sends yokels to Harrisburg.
I suspect there are many many states in the same boat.
Davis X. Machina
@Poopyman:
There is a clear goal. The lowest possible mill rate on the property tax bill still consistent with overall property values staying level or increasing ,just so long as the schools are considered an ornament to the town as a real-estate market.
That’s the goal of public education. The moment someone finds a way it can be dispensed with altogether, and the mill rate further reduced, it will be. One approach — a town with no or next to no children — is already out there.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Earl Butz:
Yeah, even affluent, well educated parents fall into the quicksand of high school sports. Seriously, PE and sports seem to be one of those sacred cows that, well, you just never cut (or grudgingly).
Of course I was just one of those shy, geeky outcasts who didn’t much care for school sports and shit, and I know some people outgrow that, but I’m one of those people who thinks 99.9 % of the people I went to high school with can go fuck themselves.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
You can also start thinking about radical changes like giving the textbooks to the students rather than loaning them. There are real costs associated with getting all the books back, checking their condition, storing them for the summer, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if doing all that cost almost as much as the $4 you give as the printing cost.
Plus, if you start thinking about books as lasting one year for one student, you can think about all kinds of other changes- cost savings from cheaper printing and binding, including worksheets, making annual revisions, etc. And in a few years, you may want to think about giving up on printed books in favor of electronic ones anyway. Then the cost savings from writing your own are huge; you pay once to write the thing and the copies are essentially free.
Davis X. Machina
As to what we’re educating them for, I have a theory that there needs to be more avocational education, side by side with the rest. The average HS senior, even if he does go on to college, doesn’t have any idea what to do with his time — and if he’s unemployed, he’s going to have lots of that.
In a country where you are what you do, if what you do is your job, and you don’t have a job, then you’re in trouble — you cease to exist.
Yeah, there are sports, but by 30, no one’s playing any of the top-line HS sports unless they’re the one-in-ten-thousand doing it for a living.
Going home, drinking coffee brandy, watching basic cable, playing a little HALO 3 and kicking the dog isn’t going to carry you for a lifetime. The arts aren’t an ornament to life — they are life.
The rising generation had better learn to become very good company for themselves.
Stillwater
@geg6:
Here’s what’s happening at my alma mater:
Anecdotally, I’d have to say that the increase in expenses has been even higher: fees have gone up almost every year, and other costs which were part of tuition and fees have now been shifted to the student. Also, when I first went to CU, enrollment requirements stipulated that 65% of new students came from within the state. That has also been revised to permit higher-paying out-of-state students to be disproportionately accepted.
To borrow a useful quote: it’s a joke.
Stillwater
@Stillwater:
Tried to edit the above comment to include that part of the tuition increase is directly attributable to TaBOR (which has been wildly successful at dismantling our state government), but there is also a lot of hostility to higher ed. in some of the redder districts in this otherwise beautiful state.
jacy
@Martin:
I have to agree with that. In my experience, children that do well and public schools that do well almost always related to parent involvement, and parent involvement is often positively correlated to higher income.
A lot of attention is put on the lack of extracurricular activities like art, music, etcetera. When I was in school, there were probably 15 extracurricular clubs or groups sponsored by the our public school. My kids in private school now have three (choir, drama, game club) plus spirit and two sports (soccer and baseball). But they also have in school enrichment with language, piano, band, tennis. Problem is we’re working 2 full-time jobs to pay for this. Luckily I’m self-employed and my S/O works for his family company, so we can take off any time we need. Almost no one else is that fortunate.
But my brother and my best friend in Colorado have kids who go to the same public school, and there are 26 extracurricular activities offered there. Why? A lot of parents have the time to help staff and pay expenses for those activities. Neither my sister-in-law nor my best friend work, and both husbands have tech/high skill jobs that give them maximum flexibility.
I have no idea how you can translate the success you get with involved parents who have tons of time and disposable income into success for kids in poorer schools/areas. Money alone is not the key, but what else is there?
Hawes
@aimai:
I teach at a “prestigious” boarding school that wealthy parents spend a ton of money on to send their kids for presumably a top notch education. And you’re right about them wanting a premier education (my largest class size is 15 students) because of what it will mean for their children throughout their life.
But I disagree that they do it to insulate their children from poverty. Frankly, their children will be insulated from poverty at the New Canaan or Greenwich public schools, too.
One of the things my school – and most like mine – sells is service learning. Tutoring in Waterbury, CT. Working in soup kitchens. Habitat for Humanity spring break trips to New Orleans and the Dominican.
I think you slipped into an easy cliche there.
sven
@Keith G:
My working group just received a grant to look at several teacher quality issues. The project won’t begin for 6 months but I am starting the process of lit. review and so far I’m not impressed by the metrics. When people say they have a sense of which teachers are doing a good job and which aren’t it is almost entirely based on subjective impressions. We don’t have much in the way of operational definitions for ‘good teacher’ let alone a valid and reliable measure of quality. If we polled just the highly involved readers of BJ I doubt we’d reach consensus on how to properly evaluate teachers. As a result, changing teacher quality isn’t as easy as many people imagine.
I think you actually hit it on the head when you said this:
Look, the problem with public education is that there are multiple problems, each with their own genesis and each not necessarily reachable with the solutions of the others.
georgia pig
@Martin:
Yeah, but that would mean a society that values trades and skills other than those in the current college-based ticket punching game. When international labor arbitrage is an accepted practice, the rest falls in line. Part of the problem is that we expect kids to make long-term investments in education with an economy that may cut them off at the knees once someone figures out how to offshore their vocation. To have an national education system that works requires a nation that gives a shit what happens to its individual citizens, rather than just GDP. Education in the US has largely evolved toward a lottery for rentier positions, not vocations.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Hawes:
I guess…being one of those stereotypical geeky outcasts to whom high school was fucking torture, being forced to do anything extracurricular seems like a good way to really piss people off.
I mean, the moment you graduate from high school, nothing you’ve done really matters. I know the person I am now at 31-the lifestyle I lead, the beliefs I hold, the hobbies and interests I have-none of that has been impacted by what happened in high school. Shit, everyone who goes to college right after high school knows that none of that matters, that you are starting off with a blank slate.
Maybe I’m an outlier, but high school is one of those things that is supposed to be endured as fast as possible before you get to things that matter; sugarcoating it with mandatory service projects/after school clubs just makes it more ridiculous in my mind. College and thereafter is where people really mature and come into their own, not in fucking high school.
*Can you tell I’m still bitter and pissed off at my own hs experiences, 13 years after graduating?
aimai
@Hawes:
Well, every wealthy upper class person doesn’t live in New Canaan. Furthermore while truly wealthy people don’t have to worry about meritocracy (actual competition) or being dragged down by the eduactional needs/issues of the lower classes the middle class and nouveau riche do. People in NY City, or Boston, who send their children to private school are definitely doing it to protect their children from having to deal with the poverty of their potential classmates. I have news for you. My kids go to an independent school in the Boston Area. The other kids are uniformly either the children of extremely wealthy people or middle class people. Scholarship/diversity children are specifically brought in to leaven the mix as a kind of social tax. But the vast majority of middle class parents do it either because they are willing to sacrifice to put their kid in a particularly desirable/faddish educational program or to avoid having to watch their child’s education triaged in an overwhelmed public school.
I’m not arguing that rich people, or upper class white people, are mean for not wanting to have their kids dealing with poverty, the working class, or even the lower middle class. I’m just observing that status transmission and wealth transmission are different things and both come into play in the rejection of public schooling and funding for public schooling by the more monied elements in our society.
aimai
Poopyman
@Stillwater:
Stillwater, I think that applies everywhere. The greater the red, the worse the ed. Facts, after all, really do have a liberal bias.
DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.
I agree with your vision of secondary education. The thing that frightens me the most is increasing use of standardized tests.
aimai
@Roger Moore:
This. A Thousand times This.
Someone upthread asked how we could “replace” or supplement the time/energy/effect of committed parents for the children in areas where the parents aren’t upper class, or committed, or have high SAT scores, or tons of free time or whatever else we determine makes the difference. But they asserted clearly that it wouldn’t be merely money.
Of course it can and will be merely money! That’s what money does best! I’m a full time, at home, mother. Could I be replaced in my children’s lives by money? Sure I could. Not entirely, not emotionally, but certainly in terms of the issues that affect my children’s school performance. I think its important that my children have a healthy diet? Every school should have a full and complete nutrition program. I think its important that my children have excercise after school? Wouldn’t I love it if their school could offer them a full range of dance and exercise programs after school! I think my children can’t learn effectively if they have the toothache? Why shouldn’t the school offer dental care on site? I think my kids need afterschool homework help? Why no on site, one on one, tutoring? Field trips that I and other stay at home mothers organize and chaperone? Why not have indpendent groups organize these for all the schools locally?
My kids school used to have a not very good program in theater. All the seventh and eighth graders used to do a Shakespear play and the English teacher taught that class and ran the play. It was awful. I mean, truly awful. Because actually certain things you really need to know how to do at a professional level. About five years ago they hired a dynamic actor/director who had created her own stand alone company to go into grade schools and work with the kids on a play for three or four months. The quality of the drama teaching and the performances just shot up.
My point is that when we are talking about schools and parental involvment there is a tendency to look at parental inputs as some kind of magical, on monetary panacea. Something ineffable that happens that makes a kid ready to learn, and makes the whole school better. That’s the logic behind busing and integration, btw, that keeping middle class families in public schools will miraculously raise scores. But if you look at what is actually going on that makes middle class kids “ready to learn” and “easy to teach” compared to other kinds of kids its really fairly straightforward. They already speak English because they aren’t recent immigrants. They don’t have health problems or their health problems are taken care of. They have a safe place to sleep so they get enough rest. They have food and clothing so they aren’t hungry and embarrassed in class. They get read to at night so they are familiar with books. Etc…Etc..Etc…
All of these things can be added back into the schooling experience for every kid. Its just going to cost money. A lot of money. But most of it is actually something *money can buy.*
aimai
Cat
The problem with public education is that its full of the public.
Most of them don’t want, need, or benefit from most of what is taught in public schools.
Trying to teach the general public trig or 18th century english lit is a waste of time, let alone calc or any of the hard sciences.
We should stop pretending all the little Johnnys and Janes can grow up and goto college and become the next Einstein or Twain and let the teachers off the hook if they just had a good public school education.
Even if your dreams come true you aren’t going start turning out whole schools of future upper middle class workers.
Society would be better off spending the time and effort elevating the bright, but poor, students at the cost of their average peers.
They need more then just a good education, they need safe housing, support groups including 1on1 therapy, and guaranteed spot in college with stipend during and after college to aid in getting a start on life.
I.E. they need to rich ‘parents’. If the aren’t lucky enough to be born to them, Uncle Sam should adpot them.
The US is suffering from the ruling class being made up of mostly rich white people who were born into it. Bringing diversity to the upper class will hopefully start bringing diversity to the ruling class.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
All of these discussions about Public schools, combined with the upcoming “Waiting for Superman” film, will lead to a major bill written by the Republicans that will be “fiscal education reform”. This will be due to their need for a “platform” to stand on, cutting budgets, and fiscal responsibility.
We will end up with a back-door voucher system (not an outright one, as not to be noticed by anyone watching Glee and American Idol). The vouchers will pull xxx amount of money out of the system, give it to the parents, and allow them to supplement their private/charter school costs. The minimum operating overhead cost margin will be reduced even further.
It’s gonna be a tough future.
Cat
@jacy:
Probably being treated like something other then human detritus is a start. Human’s have an innate sense of whats fair. You’d be hard pressed to find a poor inner city kid who doesn’t think the rest of society thinks they’re a liability and would rather the poor would just disappear.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
@Cat:
Sarcasm? I hope?
Martin
@jacy:
That’s the whole point – make those areas less poor. That’s what was so awesome about the 50s that the tea partiers keep looking back on with doe-eyed nostalgia. It’s not that government was smaller or we were more Christian or whatever, it’s that the poor weren’t so poor relative to the rest of white society. Blacks were, but none of these people are looking back from the perspective of growing up black in the 50s. They only have fond recollections of a fair society from the good side of the segregation line.
The number of problems that get solved simply by decreasing income disparity is enormous. There’s almost no point even trying the other things until you tackle that one.
MarkJ
I don’t really have much to add on the education front, but as far a productivity being a problem WRT housing – clearly it’s not that productivity associated with actually building a building that is the limiting factor. Land, especially land in areas where there are jobs, is something they’re just not making more of at any price. That is a serious limit on productivity/affordability.
Related to this is that zoning laws (minimum lot sizes) are used to artificially inflate the cost of housing in many affluent areas. We *could* build more housing in those communities, and with more housing, housing would become more affordable (supply and demand). But that would mean people living in Beverly Hills, or Potomac Maryland, or New Caanan, or Gross Pointe MI, or wherever, might have less-well-off people living near them, and those people’s kids would be going to the same schools as their kids, and that just won’t do. The worst part is that those zoning laws actually make it cheaper than it would otherwise be to build on large lots so in a way they are a hidden subsidy for folks who can afford a large lot and the large house that goes with it.
Martin
@Hawes: Waterbury? Sorry, you’re not selling service learning. You’re selling social networking. The education you provide is top-notch, don’t get me wrong, and the service learning is awesome, but that’s not why the parents are paying what they are. They pay because when their kids get out of college way down the line, they know that their old roomates dad is a senior VP for Goldman and will give them a job, or they’ll be spotted by Harvard’s admissions committee, etc.
Snarki, child of Loki
@geg6: increase administrators to increase “efficiency” or “productivity” in higher education? Sorry, you’ve just blown your credibility.
Randomly select half of the administrators at any US college or university. Drop them in the ocean, far from land. The efficiency, productivity, and general well-being of that college or university will go up.
Or just put them in the “B” ship, with the telephone sanitizers.
chopper
i love it when people mistakenly make that analogy to demonstrate the lack of worth of people, when everybody else in the story then died from a disease picked up from an unsanitary telephone.
Cat
@Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac:
The current system screws them all equally, trying to screw them all less is going to just end up with them all still screwed.
Pick some, rather then screw them less, actually reward them. You could spend 10k a student rather then 2k and still you’d have abysmal successes ratio because being poor in no way prepares you to succeed for today’s middle class lifestyle, I speak from personal experience.
Keep spending 2k on students like you were doing before, but then spend 30k on that 1 in 10 student and actually increase your chances of making a successful person.
Most schools with success stories with poor and underprivileged kids found a way to cherry pick the kids in their programs. You should never believe anyone who says then can make all the Johnnys and Janes into high achievers.
Cat
@Snarki, child of Loki:
You realize the society that did that collapsed and died off, right? Terrible analogy.
Cat
@chopper: Damn, beat me to it.
jacy
@Martin:
@Cat:
I agree totally, I just have a hard time envisioning how we change it, other than working politically for candidates who share that thought, and volunteering. Out here in the sticks, I’ve made it my once-a-year job to help poor kids complete their college applications and fill out their FAFSAs, because ultimately education is going to lift people out the cycle of poverty.
But I just feel hopeless a lot of the time. Living in the South, it seems like nobody is interested in education, from politicians on down. It just kills me to think how many kids out there not only don’t get any good educational opportunities, but don’t even know what they’re missing. And a lot of their parents are doing the best they can, but they’re working so hard they don’t have the time, the resources, or often the education about possibilities to be effective advocates.
I’m poor, but I’m lucky enough to be very well-educated. It’s terrible for people who haven’t had any opportunities or any help at all.
geg6
@Snarki, child of Loki:
Where the fuck did I ever say that? Please, I’d love for you to blockquote it for me.
I never even mentioned administrators. You’re crazy and your analogy is completely off the mark besides.
Earl Butz
@Snarki, child of Loki: God, I’m glad I came back to this thread. You just failed the internet like I haven’t seen in a long time.
Snarki, child of Loki
@geg6:
sorry, problems with comment system. I meant that I agree with you, disagree with the original post.
geg6
@Snarki, child of Loki:
Oh, well, sorry for the f-bomb then.
James E. Powell
@Stillwater:
America’s public education system began to die as soon as white people found out that their children would have to go to school with black children.
It seems that everyone discussing the Reagan era forgets, or in some cases never knew, how big an issue court-ordered busing was during the 70s. It was almost all anyone talked about in the ’78 mid-terms in Ohio. Candidates who had nothing directly to do with schools, or state legislators whose districts did not include any school systems subject to desegregation orders, were required to loudly and publicly denounce busing. They were expected to oppose any state budget that provided funding to school districts who were ordered to desegregate.
In the 1980 Ohio Senate races, the Republicans ran the same TV ad against every Democratic incumbent claiming that he or she had “voted in favor of busing” simply because he or she had voted “yes” on the education budget. The Republicans did very well in Ohio that year.
It was open racism and bigotry on a scale and with an intensity that dwarfs the Tea Party. And Reagan came along and said, “Hey, you guys are right and I am going to put an end to this.” Reagan did very well that year also.
“Government Spending” was never a big issue until it became code for “Government Taking Your Money and Giving It to Black People.” I did a fair amount of door to door work in blue collar, union, suburbs in 1980. The overwhelming message I got was not about Iranian hostages, it was “somebody’s got to put these n——s back where they belong.”
This was the Northern part of the Southern Strategy. It is still working today because the Democratic Party never took it head on and exposed it for what it was.
gene108
The problem with American education is giving every moron and his mother’s-brother’s-third wife’s-second cousin an infinite number of chances to go back to school.
In damn near every other country on the planet, you only have one chance to go to college, once chance to graduate from high school, and one chance to pick a major.
People in India, for example, are under tremendous pressure at the end of the 10th grade, because that’s when compulsory schooling stops. People who want to continue to college need to score high enough to get into a good pre-college program for the 11th and 12th grades. At the end of the 12th grade they are back under pressure to write their university entrance exams. These exams determine where you go to college. Period.
Once in college you pick a major and finish with it. No switching around.
As long as Americans keep giving infinite chances to students to finish high school or equivalent (see right there is a recognition of more chances), finish college, change majors while in college, etc. American students will not be under the same pressure to excel in academics during the years they are tested.
If you want to close the education gap with the rest of the world, you need to scrap all the chances people have to get more education and instill a finality to the decisions people make as late teens.
Jack
@gene108:
I think that’s a pretty terrible idea. Across the pond we specialize and go down from 11 to three or four subjects at 16, and our degree at university is fixed from the start. I’m at uni now and found out about a year ago that I’m really interested in economics and business. Because I didn’t pick econ 101 for the first term of the first year, I don’t get to pick any econ modules for further terms (same for virtually other subject, if you’re going to diversify you’ve got to do it before you even get to uni). I would LOVE the chance to get a more varied education like US undergrads do. It would be great to get this ‘education up to freshman standard’ thing that you get in the states, since I dropped maths after years of hating my maths teaching. I do enjoy my degree, but I wouldn’t half love the chance to round out my education more than I am already.
“More finality to the decisions made as teens”? Are you high? Teenagers make awful decisions. You want as little weight on them as possible.
Chris
I agree with most of what you say here, but I disagree with your characterization of our education system as “massively decentralized.” In fact, federal policy drives much of what happens in our local public schools. If you complain to the principal or school board about the educational approach of your kids’ school, the likely response will be some variation on, “Write your Congressperson.” All the choices are driven by NCLB’s emphasis on assessment through standardized tests.
I think the first step to a better system is real decentralization — not of funding, but of policymaking. If the people in my elementary school’s district want to follow an educational approach, philosophy, or set of goals that differs from the prevailing one, what is the justification for preventing them?
A school system that was more responsive to the local community’s desires would, I think, likely end up instituting more humane, less authoritarian approaches to education, if only because the people most likely to take the kids’ interests into account — the parents — would have more say in what the policies are.
Extended rant here.
Stillwater
@James E. Powell: America’s public education system began to die as soon as white people found out that their children would have to go to school with black children.
This. I not only agree, but I’m a bit shocked at how much I agree. Racism is just a fucker, isn’t it?
Norwegian Shooter
Love education talk and you’re on the right track, but this statement is wack – as the kids say. There is no usefulness in educational decentralization. There is only increased costs. Plus decentralized funding through property taxes is the number one cause of stratified educational outcomes – which in turn causes stratified income outcomes.
Open-source movement?!? WTF?
Norwegian Shooter
@Chris:
Have you ever talked to a principal or school board member? Just to start off, educational standards and funding mechanisms are set at the state level. There is no prevailing “educational approach, philosophy, or set of goals”. Your local school board has an enormous amount of leeway in their answers to these issues. I’ll read your extended rant and comment if necessary.
henqiguai
@Norwegian Shooter (#68):
And in further support of your dissent with Chris’ comment at #65, any school system is more than free to go its own way, they just have to give up that (on average from a few years ago) 6% – 8% of funding from the Feds. That’s just about the only thing causing most districts to go along with Federal mandates, if I recall. That’s why private schools have such leeway; all the money is theirs, the government has no control.
Ted
@Amanda in the South Bay: We must have gone to the same high school.