The fact that AOC commented on and was know to have commented on Uvaldes's budget is a huge problem for Democrats. We are NOT a small, ideologically coherent party and candidates need to be able to appeal to the median voter of their districts. For the Republican candidate for Congress that represents Uvalde to be able to run against AOC [In fact he'll run against some Muslim Atheist Communist caricature that is even worse than AOC :)] instead of the local Democrat is a big advantage.
We do ourselves no favors by nationalizing issues unnecessarily.
And because of the warped incentives and geographic concentration of the national media, whatever AOC says about Uvalde will receive a ton more press coverage than what the Democratic candidate for Texas's 23rd District has to say.
I mean, Uvalde isn't that far from Henry Cuellar's district. Local Democrats like Cuellar should be able to be the national spokesperson for the area, not a Congresswoman from NYC.
It's not just the geographic coverage. The right wing media combs the MSM for gems that it can use to cause outrage the faithful and funny looks from the media voter.
I feel like the left & the right as asymmetric, and that simply isn't true. I think that (simplifying here) *everyone* on the left gets blamed by the broader public for *anything* anyone on the left does, but that that's just not the case on the right. I don't see a bit of evidence that voters hold any Republicans accountable for Greene or Boebert. Voters simply just don't make the connection in the same way they do for the left. This asymmetry (which rarely gets discussed) is a big key to understanding US politics
I think this is a function downstream of the left having a stranglehold over the larger media ecosystem.
Yeah, Fox News exists, but with that exception, basically everything of note is left of center.
So you get a lot more lefty journalists and the various high-profile Twits praising AOC and those like her, and that permeates out to the public at large.
For whatever reason, it seems to me that it's an axiom of politics that normies tend to agree more on policy with the left than with the right, but also tend to react with much more visceral revulsion toward the extreme left than toward the extreme right* (even toward fascists!). So both sides have an advantage and a disadvantage there, and their paths to victory depend on how they tailor their strategies to that playing field.
(*As Matt has noted, even among the far right, the most unpopular conservatives tend to be hardcore anti-spending fiscal hawks, not culture war wackos. But even taking that into account, people hate "hippies" more than either.)
I agree that this is not good, but I struggle to understand what we can do to avoid it. Instill better message discipline in The Squad? That seems like a heavy lift, but even if we're successful, to your point, won't Republicans just run against the same Muslim Atheist Communist caricature?
1. Encourage donors to try to be more strategic in how they allocate money. We have a tendency to donate a lot to lawmakers closest to us politically, rather than the highest VAR.
2. Do what you can to push campaign and policy staffers to be more pragmatic and "think of the Bailey's" as it were. Right now, it's too easy to fall in the trap of putting things out that get high engagement from people that are already in your corner, rather than moderates/swing voters.
3. Encourage the non-right wing media to look harder at how representative certain voices are. The Black Church and the CBC are more representative of African-American voters than a progressive Black activist is, but this is sometimes missed. (Of course, part of the problem is that the more ideological arguments can generate more clicks.)
They should also work harder to put things in the context of expert consensus, rather than "some activists say..."
What's important is not what the Republican media say about Democrats but what the median voter believes. Fox will always say the worst about the Democrats. We however have it in our power to create an alternative narrative for that persuadable voter.
AOC and "The Squad" receive disproportionate coverage not just in the conservative media but in the mainstream media as well. I feel like a lot of reporters have internalized the narrative that she represents "the future" of the Party and that she is the leader of a movement fighting for "control" of the party, so they give her a bigger microphone. While this coverage is technically neutral is does serve to help define the Party for the median voter.
What more mainstream Democrats need to do is find a way to crowd her out of the coverage without directly challenging her. If they were to directly take her on it would feed the "progressive vs. moderate" "Dem Civil War" narrative. They need to find an angle that rises about that narrative. And whichever Dem politician serves as the spokesperson for this effort likely needs to be from NYC, as the national media is so NYC-centric they give more weight to people from there. Look at how the election of Eric Adams was also treated by the media as some sort of sea change in the Democratic Party. We need a politician who generates Adams-like coverage but who can do media appearances like a Member of Congress (i.e. who isn't busy running the country's biggest city).
Part of me feels like AOC mouthing off gives the local Democrat the chance to say "Gee, that AOC sure is crazy, huh? Good thing I'm not like that!" But I recognize that actual candidates running in swing districts express the view that AOC mouthing off is is unhelpful, so I assume I'm at least partially wrong about that.
So what do we do? Try to force all Democrats to be moderate? This seems impossible, and I don't even think it would be unambiguously good.
Having identified the solution, I leave the implementation to the student.
Seriously, it's a tough one, mostly because we don't have strong party institutions, a rigorous party communication apparatus (like Fox News is for Republicans -- or the other way around, I get confused), and politicians are policy or fame entrepreneurs who operate almost entirely independently.
If we had stronger institutions, we might be able to promote the national profile of alternative Democrats who better represent the median voter -- like an Abigail Spanberger. (There was sort of what Nancy Pelosi was trying to do internally in the House with Katie Hill as a counter balance to AOC before the former unfortunately flamed out.)
So I'm not very hopeful. However, AOC strikes me as more of a cagey, pragmatic politician than people give her credit for (and much more so than the more ideological ones like Omar and Tlaib). It would be great if someone she trusts could take her aside and help her focus her efforts on helping the party overall. It's possible -- not certain, but possible -- that she would be amenable to that.
In Colombia we have a an expression "no dar papaya" which is sort of like "don't lead with your chin," make oneself unnecessarily vulnerable to attack So I just want AOC et. al. not to "dar payaya."
Well, it would help if people who are trying to influence opinion were aware of where the people they are trying to influence are coming from. This does of course imply that they want actually to affect opinion.
During the pandemic, we learned that teacher unions would happily outsource the entire education portion of their jobs to parents and the kids themselves if you let them. In SF, Chicago, and other big cities, the teacher unions were happy to have teachers on zoom pretending to teach, fighting against vaccine mandates, and otherwise abandoning their job.
Public school is de facto public daycare for kids 4-18, with actual education as a nice to have side effect. They are basically “cops for kids”. There are exceptions of course, usually outliers where a good PTA in a wealthier community demands better. But most schools are abysmal at their core functions.
Not unlike police who fight things like automated traffic enforcement because taking away that function would mean they have to do the actual job of solving crimes v handing out tickets.
Both are noble occupations that systemically drive out ambitious well meaning people, leaving behind mediocre rule followers who are willing to stay for a moderately well paying union gig.
The slow boring solution is a popular grand bargain: defund the teacher *and* police unions, on the premise that, like the military, those functions are too important to let a union fuck them up.
Nothing more cringeworthy than the “public schools are just daycare” line, whether spoken by teachers or anyone else.
Sure a big part of it is the social contract where parents can work, but we actually do expect our children to learn. And the grand social experiment of global COVID showed that kids do when in the classroom. It’s not daycare, it’s school.
Would be great if teacher unions even pretended to care about the school part. Here in SF, they spent the pandemic trying to cancel Abe Lincoln and has kids going into a classroom to watch a teacher on zoom because sone 20%+ refused to get vaccinated.
Of course, the unions had absolutely nothing to do with the Abe Lincoln renaming fiasco. The school board (elected officials) did. This kind of take belongs on Fox News.
I'll acknowledge that I don't know if any of the SF school board members were endorsed by the SF teachers union, but in many communities endorsements from the local teachers union pulls a lot of weight in school board elections.
Endorsing a politician prior to that politician embracing a embarrassingly absurd position is absolutely not the same as supporting the position. My father taught at Lincoln high in SF for 30? years and was a union officer. He (and undoubtably many other SF teacher union members) don't merely oppose this but find it to be ridiculous pandering to some imaginary subset of the electorate.
Odd comment. My kindergartner, who is admittedly very bright, went from not reading to reading at a 3rd grade level (challenged by his teacher and motivated by a few other good readers in his class), he learned basic mandarin, multi digit addition / subtraction, starting to get basic multiplication, and his SEL is so much better than the beginning of the year.
There's Heckman's famous study of the lifetime value of pre-k in TN. Setting aside everything else, is it really plausible that pre-k has so much value & k doesn't have any?
One is that this doesn’t measure the value of *learning* in kindergarten; it could just be that having a place where kids can spend the day with other kids outside the home is valuable both for the kids directly and for family finances.
The other is that at least some research here is conflicting and I would want a deeper meta analysis rather than just the work of one researcher.
Yes, but the point is that that's not true in teacher union world where measuring learning is actually racism. Unions push the daycare model because meritocratic compensation based on actual teaching would destroy their rent-seeking opportunities.
>>but the point is that that's not true in teacher union world where measuring learning is actually racism.<<
I suspect this is a case of amplifying the brayings of the most loudmouthed but tiny majority into representing the entirety. My guess is that this doesn't represent the whole, or even a significant part, of how teachers (including union teachers) think. Most teachers just aren't that ideological.
The "because racism" part is absolutely fringe stuff I include for amusement sake. The "Unions oppose thoroughly assessing the effectiveness of individual teachers to promote learning." part is totally serious.
It's worse, because the fringe ones use racism as the excuse when they know darn well the real reason is around avoiding accountability for bad results.
I genuinely do t understand the union hate. Like I teach in a charter sector of a weak union state so this isn’t coming from self interest.
Like we can look at the results of having weak to no unions and it’s not amazing. Likewise school choice I think is fine but it’s rife with bias effects and parents can’t really tell a good school from a mediocre one and end up just trying for best peer groups close to home. On top of that poor management means that unlike in unionized public schools where poor management can be waited out by good teachers at my school last year there was an army of people teaching out of field, classrooms with 4 adults supervising, long term subs, classes combined, and the kids suffer there in ways that seem as bad or worse than what unions are accused of.
I don’t know what the solution is but I’m not seeing any evidence that unions are anything more than a convenient villain. There are plenty of places where they aren’t strong and those places don’t have Ed results to sing about.
The general anti-public sector union point is that, unlike the private sector, if a truly incompetent/corrupt union gets established, it can't be weeded out when it kills its host company.
Instead, it is a permanent drain on that layer of government basically forever.
Also, public employees going on strike is a problem. FDR had a good speech on why that's unacceptable, if you want to look it up.
Also, unlike the private sector, if a public employer is mistreating their workers, those workers have a chance to organize through the ballot box, rather than a union being their only recourse.
I don't think this gets the priorities right for education. We got a new principal at my school just as the pandemic started and in the Summer afterwards we had to replace the entire kindergarten team, 3/4 of first grade, and one half of 2nd and fourth, and all of fifth.
You can't do that and not hire a bunch of whackadoo nut jobs. The lack of procedural safeguards led to us replacing excellent kindergarten teachers with one who literally lost a kid, twice before she was fired, and her class given over to barely qualified substitutes, then collapsed and split into larger classes.
The lack of procedural restraints left a lot of kids in the lurch and if they follow the logic of school choice they leave and have to really completely start over again and it's kind of a social trauma on the kids. School hoppers are predictably in poor circumstances. Many of the kids with the most trauma have been to 3-4-5 schools by second grade and they have very weird socialization patterns and aren't as habituated to school norms.
I'm actually a bit lost on where this relates to Teachers Unions. Is this a point in favor of public Teachers Unions or against? Are you part of a unionized workforce or not?
In any case, I'm sorry to hear it's going that badly for your school and everyone involved.
I'm not part of a union. At union schools typically what you hear is close the door in teach the bad administrator will be gone before too long and you can just focus on doing best for the kids.
Schools shouldn't be able to be dismantled for several school years by one bad administrator but here we are.
I don't think this is why commenters hate them. Commenters here don't hate the teachers union or police union for getting people to vote certain ways - they hate teachers unions and police unions for getting certain policies implemented through the union negotiating process. When voters got a say on police in Minneapolis and teachers in San Francisco, they didn't vote with the union on the controversial stuff.
That's not universally true. Our local school district teachers recently went on strike for 8 school days earlier in the spring and now our district is going to lose a bunch of state funding because they didn't provide the minimum required days of schooling for the students because no one wanted to tack on the extra days to the end of the year (the union wanted to add an hour a day for the remainder of the year to try and get to the required total but that caused all kinds of other logistical challenges -- easy to add an hour to elementary school but harder in middle and high school). But generally police are not allowed to strike and they get other labor protections in exchange.
"The leverage public employees have in striking is that actually, public service is hard and low paid and nobody wants to do it."
Public sector employees make more money than private sector employees, but when comparing comparable educational status make about 10% less in "total compensation."
Two points to address this:
1) The educational status is inflated because of the number of graduate ED degrees obtained by teachers which are mostly (entirely?) useless if not net negatives.
2) Public workers typically have significantly more worker protections than private employees. If I offered you a 10% raise, would you accept at will employment with no union or statutory protections outside of those offered to the non-union private sector employees?
One of the problems is that the truly talented teachers go private. Better pay, more autonomy.
Public schools and sadly, even sone charters get political pressure to drive agendas that have nothing to do with education. In left leaning areas, it’s cancellation of talented and gifted programs in the name of fairness. In right leaning areas, it’s funding the football team and banning books.
Unions are a problem because they put a straightjacket on innovation, prioritizing work rules over trying anything new. But they aren’t the only problem.
They also suffer, like police, from mission creep. Religious zealots, of both the Christian and Woke varieties, use school to drive agendas that have nothing to do with education, detracting from the core mission.
People where I live in SF go private because we want educators that focus on education. Not religion, social justice, or any other agenda.
Most privates pay less, like a lot less. Tens of thousands of dollars less to not have headaches or to do religious work.
But we have a huge experiment on what public schools look like with weak or no unions. It’s not more innovative, it’s not getting more with less it’s getting less with less and just settling for lower taxes.
Curious that teachers accept lower wages going private.
I have no doubt however that without a union, teachers get even more hamstrung by school boards that seem to care more about driving an agenda than teaching.
If I had to go to a product design board at my startup that decided they need to have an opinion on the button colors on my app, id likely just quit.
"Curious that teachers accept lower wages going private."
In many, if not most, states, certification requirements for private teachers are lower (sometimes much lower) than public school teachers, so the barrier to entry is lower in the first place and there's less of a treadmill of needing to constantly get updated training, etc.
This is generally wrong and the exact opposite take is correct. I can appreciate the frustration with the district in SF. And I won’t pretend that I know the ins and outs of your public district.
So do us a favor and don’t try to generalize given the ignorance displayed in most of your comments.
You really need to accept that schools in San Francisco (or New York, or LA) are just not at all similar to schools in the rest of the country. I’ve worked in public and charter schools in St Louis, Cincinnati, Denver, and now in another Midwest city, and some had strong unions, some didn’t, and I also have friends in coastal cities. You’re right that school is mostly daycare. You’re wrong that charters and private schools are less “abysmal at their core functions” than public ones. Most school districts never strike, charter or public or private. Most never try to fire all their teachers. Most do not use rabidly anti-racist curriculums. They just spend a ton of money on special education, a ton of money on administration, and leave their (mostly female) workforce to try to make ends meet. It’s like they haven’t really changed much since the turn of the century, when they were mostly used to end child labor...
I'm curious about this because I only have my own coworkers to go by but that I find teachers a lot more conservative on social/cultural issues than people think. I don't mean to say that it's Rod Dreher out here teaching but it's much, much more normie.
Like most people think there are two genders unless you really push them on it, most of them believe that racism is being mean to people and they're very moralistic about effort and work. I'm much more amenable to 'woke' ideas and structural explanations but I also get the message to keep that to myself to avoid an argument.
Most teachers teach in the suburbs, because most Americans live in the suburbs, and those teachers (I have found) are very much median voter moderates. The very loud, very woke teachers are in urban areas but what they say isn’t that big of a deal, or very representative. They are probably underfunded, because teaching poor students with lots of trauma is hard. The suburban schools are probably not underfunded, but they’re willing to say they are out of solidarity with the urban teachers, but their solidarity basically goes to funding and not much further. Most suburbs, at least in the center of the country, were fine forcing teachers to teach in fall 2020, for example.
Right, any one union can, and will, screw up, because unions are made up of fallible humans like any other group. But I still remain unconvinced that a complete absence of unionization is preferable.
Why do we have to choose between a Shit Sandwich and a Poop Popsicle here? You could have a non-union workforce, or even a union that acts in a more reasonable manner and cleans itself of bad apples, somewhat like they do in Germany with the Mitbestimmung model where cooperation between management and labor happens without having to assume both sides of the divide.
Unions are big players in a lot of local elections. I know in my local elections, whoever gets the police & fire union support has well over 50%+ chance of winning. If they can get the trifecta with the teacher's union, they are essentially untouchable.
Do you think that civil service protections would be an adequate measure to prevent the harms you fear because based on my experience with public schools, I would rather have due process protections for teachers who are threatened with being fired and a principal who is empowered to hire and fire (with credentials required) than what I experienced with my kids in a district with a strong teacher's union. I find it odd that most public sector employees in California have both levels of protection -- and since the unions are the primary source of funding for many elected officials campaign funds they are essentially bargaining with people who are already beholden to them in way that does not really exist with private sector unionized employees. I guess I fear that the dominance of public sector employees in big unions generally has led them to get a little complacent and I wish that there would be more energy put into organizing employees who really are in a difficult power dynamic without collective bargaining.
I was trying to suggest that the statutory protections are sufficient to protect against the harms that you are suggesting, and that there are downsides to the union bargaining and influence -- for example on the macro level, committing too many resources to defined benefit pension and retiree health benefits for public employees thereby depleting the resources available to fund other public priorities and at the more micro level, making seniority the sole factor considered when layoffs arise or in the case of my district, allowing any teacher based on seniority to take any teaching vacancy that they like without any ability for the school site administration to interview or select a teacher that meets the school's specific needs -- thus an experienced teacher who is resistant to say implement a curricular reform can just move from school to school rather than be responsive to the site leader. It seems like there can be similar dynamics in law enforcement where a chief is trying to apply analysis to improve practice, but the many levels of protection result in resistance to implement any reforms. In my experience teachers do not always know best, and may be resistant to changes that would, if implemented with fidelity, improve outcomes for students. Few of us like change, but most of us expect to be fired if we simply refuse to work in the manner that our supervisors direct us to do.
At the federal level, patronage (which in the 19th century played the role corporations and rich individuals play in campaign finance today) was largely eliminated by the Pendleton Act in 1883, after President Garfield was assassinated by a disappointed office-seeker. JFK legalized public sector unions for federal workers in 1962; NYC under Mayor Robert Wagner did the same for City employees in 1958. I have no idea if the police were more or less corrupt in the mid-20th century than today, and if collective bargaining has done anything to tamp down on it.
I think there's a range of how well "pretending to teach" or "pretending to work" functions. Teaching a lecture of intro calculus to 700 people over Zoom probably actually works even better than teaching a lecture of intro calculus to 700 people in a lecture hall. Teaching kindergarten over Zoom, or teaching a bio lab over Zoom, is really just pretending to teach. Jobs are more heterogeneous so there are some where they didn't even try going online (no one, as far as I know, attempted bartending over Zoom) but out of the ones that did go online, there's surely a range of how well they worked out. But I suspect that teaching kindergarten through third grade is one of the jobs that worked out worst.
The situation was different to the extent you had teachers unions publicly lobbying against going back to the school even after it was painfully apparent that remote teaching was a disaster. I know employees at a lot of private sector businesses also urged that remote work be allowed to continue for them too, but I'm not aware of there being anywhere near much evidence of a productivity collapse.
The situation with teaching was also distinguishable by the extent to which parents were being openly expected by the teachers unions to pick up the slack. When my law firm went to remote work, we didn't tell our clients that they were going to need to take care of more of their own legal services. (And actually, the situation is even worse when I think about it -- if I do less work for my clients and try to make them handle more things themselves, they at least pay less money to me because I bill on a hourly basis and thus I earn less money; so far as I can recall, teachers unions weren't volunteering to take a 30% pay cut or something like that to reflect their lower productivity and shifting work to parents.)
Productivity went up for nearly all private sector software engineering jobs. I can't speak for other white collar professions where the work product is primarily digital.
There is some need for occasional in person connection, but that's perhaps 1-2 weeks a quarter for ideation sessions.
Measured by cycle time (time from ticket pickup to closure) across a 20K developer population for the company I worked for at the time, there was a 4% increase in productivity for the first 6 months of the pandemic. The number of working hours increased (basically replacing the commute), the level of quality increased - fewer logged bugs or customer escalations, number of incidents went down.
Most people in tech have shown similar results, which is why most companies have taken a permissive approach for WFH. Even companies doing return to office almost always say it's not because of lost productivity, because they can't credibly say that. They always talk about it being something around loss of creativity from spontaneous interaction.
Even in Florida where school was open in 20-21 for all of it and was being highly encouraged there was still a significant number of students whose families response to come back was sort of over my dead body.
I personally was very successful teaching online and would love to see what the hell happened. My working theory is it was non-attenders and teachers who weren't very tech savvy where these losses are concentrated but no one seems to know anything about who did what.
I feel like online for families who wanted it, with a technically savvy teacher who wanted to do that worked okay. But maybe I was just unbelievably lucky.
It’s unfortunate that we really didn’t try to study remote learning to get an idea of what worked well and what was a disaster and which kids actually did better with remote learning. That said, it really does seem like remote learning was mostly a disaster. At least out here on the west coast it was.
I don’t disagree the data is pretty awful but it seems like it’s more of a cudgel to yell at people with than a sincere look at classrooms.
I mean just the fact that a significant number of people were just not really coming at all played a huge role. A lot of zeroes really fuck up averages. But you look on the internet and it’s people yelling lazy all over the place as if online school was easy to do well on literally the first time it had been tried.
Then we all sort of agreed to pretend it never happened but to yell at people who had a hard time grasping to sanity alone in their house.
I don’t know how how lawyer billing works. In my world we are billing far more for the same amount of work as things take so much longer with everyone remote.
But you had factory workers, cooks, nurses, sales clerks, maintenance people, delivery drivers all going to work. This, in my view, was the issue: teachers saw themselves as educated knowledge workers who should be able to work from home, same as those office workers in your view.
They didn't want to identify with the essential workers needed to keep food, electricity, gasoline and all the other essentials of life flowing.
Before the pandemic liberals said education had a huge daycare component. At the same time conservatives insisted, most emphatically, that public education wasn’t daycare. Then the pandemic happened and the positions totally flipped.
Teachers absolutely would not outsource that, and didn't. The problem is that a lot of municipalities and state governments are, let's say, not exactly pro-education and were happy to use teachers as cannon fodder just so they looked like they were tough on COVID-19 or some BS. So, there's just a touch of distrust there.
Your comment actually proves that they have a reason to be distrustful...
Up is a non-concept in teaching. The only way up is to spend your day supervising adults which is literally the opposite of what I went into this field for.
If you’re perceived as really good you get terrible situations. They move you to grade levels that are on fire and full of new hires, or they give you all the ese kids or the kids who don’t speak English in my case. I kind of think this is a problem but have no idea how you would fix it.
I'd never thought before on just how organizationally "flat" a school is, but it's a major contributor to the absence of a solution along the lines of up-or-out.
Wouldn't quitting effectively be the negotiation? One way or another districts are going to pay a salary that will allow themselves to hire teachers.
Teachers quitting until pay rises doesn't sound ground to me, but neither does the current status quo where unions negotiate for things that are sub-optimal for the students, like remote-Zoom classes or Michelle Rhee-style school reform.
I don’t think you phrased that right. You should just ask if he reads subscriber comments, or you could ask if his views change or evolve based on alternative takes and critiques generally, though he is almost certain to answer in the affirmative to the latter (and has in fact openly acknowledged doing so on other issues). Asking about “audience criticism” implies he should adjust his views based on whether his readers are happy with them (I.e. to appease us) rather than based on our substantive counterpoints which is of course not what you meant.
As a professor that moved from Norway to the USA because of the overwhelming higher quality in USA, I think it was a really good take so there's definitely no consensus on the comments
In terms of education funding levels and policy reforms to improve quality, I think Freddie deBoer has provided a fair amount of valuable critique over the years. His basic thesis is that out-of-school factors dominate (accepted by Yglesias [1]) and almost no education interventions are found to have long term effects on student performance and life outcomes.
> This point is both totally banal and yet potentially revelatory given our educational policy conversations: mobility of individual students in quantitative academic metrics relative to their peers over time is far lower than popularly believed. Students sort themselves into an ability hierarchy at a very early age and tend to stay in their position in that hierarchy for the remainder of their lives, to a remarkable degree. The children identified as the smart kids early in elementary school will, with surprising regularity, maintain that position throughout schooling.
> Most everybody stays in about the same place relative to peers over academic careers. The consequences of this are immense, as it is this relative position, not learning itself, which is rewarded with economic gain by our society.
> The persistence of relative academic performance is remarkable. Standardized test scores collected at the age of thirteen are strong predictors of not just future high school and college educational performance but adult outcomes like academic career milestones and economic position, even after adjusting for parental income.
I’ve never been particularly comfortable with this critique and its implications. Yet I think it is important when we put so much focus on K-12 education as a means of improving society, including decreasing social inequalities. deBoer’s critique suggests we should decrease the emphasis on education and focus more on income redistribution.
There’s a right wing version of this critique by Bryan Caplan too, and I actually think it has more merit than we want to let on. If I start looking for it I find evidence for it all over the school but I would only say that in extremely close groups of friends with the door shut.
I generally think most problems in schools would be better addressed by making sure parents have adequate financial resources to meet their child’s needs beyond a mere threadbare level and spend time with them. Almost all of our problems are caused by a small group of unfortunate kids with often times terrible parents. The kids who’ve assaulted me never were from great circumstances.
More money definitely could really improve some families and kids education. But it won't help all. Some households are bad because of messy divorces, drug and alcohol addictions, untreated mental illness, multiple kids having having different fathers, etc. In some cases more money could make circumstances like this worse, not better. More aggressive interventions are needed, like custody laws and judges which try to determine what is actually best for the children (and not automatically favor the mother), involuntary committment to rehab or psychiatric treatment, and better enforcement of child support laws and going after delinquent parents.
It seems to me that a lot of that though is the result of a lack of money and stem from how inequitable a basically capitalist framework is.
Like everyone recgonizes that with kids if you make them do boring shit all day they'll misbehave, and pretends it just goes away with adults. If everyone had the opportunity to work in large part for self actualization like many elites do I think we'd address those problems. Most of the UBI experiments I've read bear this out, people take the money and do good and well with it.
Then there is like a family law and addiction treatment piece to this but even many of the addiction studies I've seen tie it back to the environment not really being rewarding for them.
The main criticism of this theory that has any merit is that we still don’t find all the bright kids at all, that a lot of them are lost in the weeds of terrible life circumstances that mask their potential.
But regardless of how one considers the problem, the right answer is to ensure that “everyone who works eats”.
Obviously, the first order effect is that all the kids who aren’t academically inclined grow into adults who can live decent lives anyway.
But the second order effect deals with that oft-mooted criticism, by drastically reducing the number of talented kids who grow up in complete shit-show homes.
Pouring funds into schooling isn’t the answer here.
DeBoer specifically mentions this for the "RELATIVE" value of education. (How much does it do to reduce social inequality?)
There's still a lot to be said for the "ABSOLUTE" value of education. (and he acknowledges this)
So, to the extent you care about inequality, then focusing more on non-education factors makes sense. But if you also care about _teaching_ people things, then you kind of need education.
Scripted curricula are a thing. I could write a whole post on the ups and downs of the Zearn Math curriculum which fuses an online video with scripted small group lessons.
If you're not absolutely taciturn about it I think this works pretty well.
They're both good examples of places where we've long since stopped seeing meaningful returns from increasing funding. Public sector unions are far too capable of absorbing any new resources we might attempt to direct to outcomes at these institutions. No amount of funding, no matter where it's coming from, will escape the rent-seekers pockets so long as their stranglehold is unchallenged.
You're forgetting the obesity epidemic. Most ambulance calls include a fire truck these days as extra muscle is often needed to get patients into the ambulance.
I assume you mean for public safety or high-profile incidents like police shootings. Google tells me the non-union states are Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas.
I too had to have Google tell me if there were any stated that outright ban all public sector unionization, and I was told there were only three: the Carolinas and Virginia. I'm surprised there wasn't more, that seems like a total top priority for ALEC in GOP-controlled states.
My actual prediction would be that states without unions would see more success per spending than union states. And my incredibly rough proxy for that says that those 5 states spend $10,573 per pupil average, which would rank 34 among states. According to a couple of complicated rankings those same states would rate *26.4th or *28.2nd in quality of public education, which I'd call maybe evidence of a small effect? Probably inconclusive. I'm not clear how much or if those ranks are already adjusting for spending.
but didn't MY write that this increase in spending relates Baumol's cost disease (and the fact that teaching was in the past effectively subsidized by exclusion of women in other sectors). So maybe the trend shown here is just generally related to increases in labor costs. So if you held funding fixed over time, perhaps scores would drop because you could pay for less teaching per dollar?
Staff per student isn't a cost disease issue. It is a reflection of schools trying to take on roles that used to be done by parents. But now that 35% of all kids (and 65% of Black kids) aren't born to married parents, the schools are dealing with a more disruptive, less disciplined and ill-prepared population of students.
I was only speaking to the dotted line in the graph ̶y̶o̶u̶ (Dave Coffin) posted, which was labeled "staff per student", which I read as number of staff, rather than the solid line which is spending.
I think there's some truth to the notion that public education benefited from a subset of meritocratically undercompensated female teachers that have shifted to more lucrative career paths as they have become more accessible, but that's kind of directly the product of the lack of meritocratic compensation in the industry as dictated by the unions. If education costs had risen because schools were paying more to retain their top quality teachers over time I think we would be seeing actual return on investment. Instead we have a cost disease situation where quality teachers have moved on and we spend more and more money feeding relatively cheap entry level labor into an ever more diluted field of mediocre teachers coasting on seniority.
Agreed. I think nursing provides an interesting contrast, in that it also was a low-paid female dominated position. But when the job market opened up to women, nursing quality didn't go down, instead, salaries went up. Presumably because the clarity of the stakes meant shielding subpar nurses was a no-go.
Its a big shame that there's no political movement in the US to ban school districts from choosing students based on their address. It would've done wonders for equality in the US, as currently people are paying through the nose to live in a "good" school district, resulting in a big divide between the rich and the poor. If school spots were instead allocated by lottery alone, there would be much less incentive to cluster around "good" schools and the poorest family would have a fair chance to apply to whatever school they want.
School districts are always going to be "choosing students based on their address" for K-12 education unless you imagine boarding schools becoming wildly popular. There are very few parents who want their minor children to go a school multiple hours away from home.
Often times you could be living just a mile away from a “good” school but because your address is “wrong” your kids end up going to a “bad” school district.
Yes, that can happen. But at the end of the day, my point remains the same - K-12 education is always going to inherently be a "local" issue in that parents generally want to minimize commuting time for getting their kids to and from school. You proposed that school spots be allocated by lottery, but that obviously has to have a fairly heavy geographic constraint (i.e., within an hour's drive or so from the student's residence) to have any prayer of being politically acceptable.
To put it another way, there isn't a national market for K-12 schools except for super elite prep schools with boarding programs and even a lot of Top 1%-ers prefer their children live with them, especially during K-6, which is also the most influential period of education. Thus parents are almost always going to prioritize trying to live in an area with "good" schools to the extent their work obligations and income permit so that their children can attend the "good" schools with a shorter commute.
I think there's still a difference between families getting to decide which school they'd like to attend and which school you attend being correlated one-to-one with the district your home address is listed in. It's true that almost no one is going to choose the school three hours away from their home, but when you're in an urban or dense suburban area, and there are a bunch of schools within an hour of your home, there's going to be a big difference between a rule that defines each school's catchment area restrictively (so that homes on this side of the line have a qualitatively different feature than homes on that side of the line) and a rule that lets people choose and then enter a lottery if too many people choose one school.
We once had such a policy: "bussing" and it was hugely unpopular and not just becasue of racism. People really DO want to send their children to nearby schools.
Why not let people list the schools in their area in rank order of preference, and then do a lottery at schools listed as first preference by more students than they have spots? People who care about nearby schools can choose nearby schools, and people who care about sports programs can choose schools with good sports programs, and people who care about any other quality metric they like can choose schools with that.
Sounds good to me. Obviously the basic idea is to try to avoid some schools being "bad" and know for being bad, but that can be a counsel of perfection.
Left wingers often cite Milliken v. Bradley as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever, but due to the public sentiment you describe here, even if that case went the other way there highly likely would have ended up being a major backlash that would have have established a de facto Milliken-like regime.
The real disgraceful SCOTUS case in this regard that was far more worse and damaging was San Antonio ISD v. Rodriguez, which gave the green light for school districts to be funded inequitably. It doesn't get the attention that Milliken does due to the absence of how visceral busing is, but equitable funding is something that would have had a much better chance of succeeding, with better results.
AFAIK funding is not the reason for good vs bad school districts. If it was, you’d see numerous examples of districts rapidly turning around once enough funding is given to them.
"The real disgraceful SCOTUS case in this regard that was far more worse and damaging was San Antonio ISD v. Rodriguez."
This seems wild to me. If the court decided education was a "constitutional right" where is the limiting principle here? Should SCOTUS be deciding curriculum as well? And if that's a constitutional right, what isn't? Social Security? Disability Insurance? Employment and/or employment insurance?
Although the plaintiffs did argue for a fundamental right to education to try to bolster their case, even without it there's still an Equal Protection Clause argument to be had.
An equal protection result simply would lead to most localities dropping their mandated support to the lowest level, and then have "voluntary contributions" bring it back up.
I would also say that this should be something that is legislature driven, not court mandated.
I believe there was near universal backlash against busing policy. That backlash wasn’t limited to affluent whites; working class people and people of color also protested these policies. Chiefly because many had their children spending 1-2 hours a day on buses. Parents found that a horrible waste of time and it necessitated children waking up particularly early. Further, children's social relations were strained by the fact that their in-school friends might live an hour or more away.
But it made the really rich white parents (who could afford private schooling) feel better about themselves. Like all sorts of policies that try to tell the masses what should and should not be tolerated.
I think they care about both. And I agree that the gerrymandering you describe is a problem, but the usual, valid, issue is people having to move to get their children into good (on average not value added college admission criteria) schools.
What is the “dire” threat? Some kids from a “bad” school district ending up in the same school as yours? Or is it about being salty that someone who didn’t pay a huge real estate premium might end up sending their kids next to yours?
I would bet at least 30% of parents in “bad” school districts care enough about their kids to go through the process. What do you propose happens to kids who no longer have a spot in their local school because too many kids transferred there from other districts?
The way you go about this is by removing school funding from the local level. At the very least, run education through the county rather than lower levels. Running it through the state, at least on a funding level, would be even better.
In an ideal world Minnesota schools would not be allowed to discriminate based on address and forced to run a lottery any time the number of applicants exceeds the number of spots. This way good schools would not be exclusive to the richest in society.
On the story of Kerr County residents not living in any city, we notoriously have a group of these people here, too. They despise even having to write Boise on their address, as they cannot stand Boise and the allegedly outrageous taxes they charge, and prefer to be called the Southwest Ada County Alliance. They have long fought tooth and nail to resist any sort of annexation effort by Boise.
So it was quite ironically funny when they absolutely lost their shit over Boise wanting to turn a piece of farmland the city itself owns nearby this area into housing. They demanded it become a very large park instead, despite the fact that they very blatantly do not want to be Boise citizens.
I've been really struck lately about how rhetoric from the left and right on cops and teachers these days is almost a mirror-image. For instance, over the years we've often seen conservatives point to some failing in the public school system and argue "see, this just proves that this is all a waste of money, more parents should move their kids into private and parochial schools instead," while the liberal counterargument is, "no, public schools are necessary and irreplaceable and we need to put more resources into them." But on cops it's the reverse: so many progressives (not even far-left agitators but relatively mainstream voices who don't have two feet on the "defund" wagon but will make anti-anti-defund arguments) have been pointing to Uvalde, or to evidence of cops laying down on the job via "soft strikes", and arguing: "see this just proves that cops add no value at all."
Personally, I say the liberal argument on public schools is *mostly* right, and the exact same logic should apply to cops.
Looking at spending on a GDP basis is one good way to look at the spending, but a few questions. 1) For many of the other countries in your graphs are both police and education spending calculated the same way as spending in the USA? Are all the same hard costs included (like buildings and upkeep, do other countries include k-12 sport stadiums for football, basketball etc.)? Are the same soft costs included - where are the retirement costs for teachers and police for the different countries? 2. For other countries are both police and education all done on a national level? That is, are there no local taxation and variances in either category for most other countries as there are in the USA? So that in the USA there can be wide variances in spending from tax district to tax district, but in other countries little difference province to province? 3. How do different taxing districts in the USA stack up against the other countries on a per student or per policemen basis?
In regards to education spending, last I checked America actually spends dramatically less than other countries, if you were to exclude all the spending that we count as "educational" and other countries count as "community or other." Schools are designed in America to also handle after school activities, lunches for children, travel events, etc. In other countries, particularly in Europe, ALL of that is paid for through other means.
It’s also be interesting to know how much the US spends per student in a publicly funded school, compared to other developed countries. My guess is that we have a larger minority of students in private/parochial schools than many of the European countries (either because those schools don’t exist much in some countries or because they receive public funding), so the actual spending that a US public school student benefits from is higher.
And it’d be interesting to know how much we spend on major categories: teacher salary, overhead, capex, retiree pensions. If a third of our spending is going to administration and the underfunded pensions of Boomers, while only serving 85% of the school-age population, then our spending is not so great. But it’s hard to find good apples-to-apples data!
There are a handful of wildly mismanaged pension systems that are going to be a huge burden on those governments for the foreseeable future, but the overwhelming majority of governments are just not being hugely burdened by pensions. The most recent school district I worked with had $10 million in annual expenses and less than $600k was pension and other retirement related expenses vs $1.5 million special education funding, most of which is the result of unfunded mandates.
I think the US has the second highest murder rate in that list of countries after tiny Costa Rica. The Baltic countries are quite high but are much smaller than the USA in terms of population. A sensible move would be to greatly increase the spending on cops in the US - well above Hungary - with the extra cops targeted where they are especially needed.
I rarely see this put forward as a solution who want dramatically more k-12 funding but it seems to me that in the states that I'm familiar with their laws, school districts are treated like JV governments that basically have to get voter approval to raise any revenue greater than a bake sale. If we let school district's governing bodies make those decisions on their own and then let the board members face the voters in those decisions, I'm confident K-12 spending would be higher.
I'm guessing it depends on the state but this is definitely the case in Idaho. It's a great example of why I am extremely skeptical of any sort of state preemption.
Sorry if my comment was unclear, but that is essentially my point. In the current system, if the district wants to raise taxes three precent, they have to go to referendum and it's easy for the voters who aren't invested in the system to just vote no and prevent the tax increase. If the school board had the power to raise taxes on its own, then the impetus would be on those disconnected voters to do the research on did the school board raise taxes, did my member vote for it, is their opponent against it, etc. and many of those disconnected voters aren't going to put that effort in and therefore the district is able to raise more revenue.
Also referendums are all or nothing, so maybe there is a referendum where a four percent increase fails so the district gets nothing, but if the board can work it out amongst themselves they might successfully pass a two percent increase.
I think this ends up in a bad place. Imagine if you had separate boards for different districts all able to raise taxes independently. (School, water, hospital, police/safety etc.) Each of them could think that their issues were the most important and think that raising taxes just a little wouldn't be that big a deal. But they are thinking individually and not collectively. This is one reason why I think that MattY is correct in that we should consolidate political power into the Mayor/City Council or equivalent county government who can be THE politically responsible agency for balancing these issues/costs for the community.
The US/Japan comparison piqued my interest and I was struck by the big disparity in societal investments: for combined primary/secondary education, police and defense, the US spends 7.7% of GDP compared to only 4% for Japan.
I was wondering what Japan does with that windfall and still don't know, but I looked up healthcare spending and was awestruck again at the differences: 20% of GDP for the US versus 11% for Japan, dwarfing that other difference.
Now we're talking about a *huge* difference in societal investment. I hope some smart SB person can tell me where Japan makes the disproportionately large GDP investments compared to the US. I couldn't readily find it. (Apparently 22% of total Japanese spending goes for retirees but I couldn't find a comparable aggregate number for the US -- much smaller, I'd assume.)
P.S. Spielberg and Kushner did not "brilliantly" remake West Side Story but instead did a tired, cliched retread much inferior to the original. I'll take that stand to my dying day.
On the education front it is important to note that the US is also a much richer country than most of the OECD, so it spends FAR more per-pupil than many places. Per-pupil we spend 50% more than Germany or New Zealand.
Our median income is 2x Germany. (~33k vs ~16k) If we spent the same per pupil we'd be spending vastly less. (Taxes and other benefits might change things here for actual mean income, but our salaries are just higher)
(EDIT: Since my purpose for picking this wasn't clear - this median income should directly affect TEACHER income requirements, which affect the cost of education)
(EDIT: OTOH it looks like I accidentally mixed sources from 2 different gathering statistics. On further research our median income is _not_ 2x germany - only about 25% higher, so that undercuts my theory a lot.)
This is only relevant if you assume the US should have to spend more per-student on a price-adjusted basis. The US is poorer per capita than Norway yet outspends Norway on education per student by 50%.
Norway is a poor comparison for pretty much anything in the US. Norway is petrostate. I'm sure the US spends more per student than Saudi Arabia and the UAE too, even though they are richer than the US.
So Denmark - US GDP PPP per capita is 5-10% higher and it's education funding per student is ~44% higher. And Denmark is one of the most resource-poor countries on Earth.
But... I think I was using bad median income data (I didn't make sure they were from the exact same source so they differed by more than they should - I've edited my original post to comment on that)
What I meant was, if the median income is 2x here, then teachers will cost 2x here, and teacher salaries and benefits (maybe this includes administrators too?) are 81% of spending. (Source at bottom - the excerpt and link are long)
So if they're 81% of spending, then assuming we spend the same elsewhere, we spend 81 cents on salaries and 19 cents on other stuff, and Germany would spend only 40.5 cents on salaries + 19 cents = ~60, so we'd spend $1.00 for every $0.60 they spend - or about 50% more.
(Edit: This is basically the Baumol's Cost Disease Matt mentions - industries which can't/don't get more productive still see rising wages when the rest of the jobs get more productive (and get higher wages as a result of that productivity)
=======SOURCE=======
The United States spent almost $657.5 billion on K-12 public schools in 2018-19, with 81 percent of that money going toward education employee salaries and benefits, according to figures published this month by the National Center for Education Statistics.
The fact that AOC commented on and was know to have commented on Uvaldes's budget is a huge problem for Democrats. We are NOT a small, ideologically coherent party and candidates need to be able to appeal to the median voter of their districts. For the Republican candidate for Congress that represents Uvalde to be able to run against AOC [In fact he'll run against some Muslim Atheist Communist caricature that is even worse than AOC :)] instead of the local Democrat is a big advantage.
We do ourselves no favors by nationalizing issues unnecessarily.
And because of the warped incentives and geographic concentration of the national media, whatever AOC says about Uvalde will receive a ton more press coverage than what the Democratic candidate for Texas's 23rd District has to say.
I mean, Uvalde isn't that far from Henry Cuellar's district. Local Democrats like Cuellar should be able to be the national spokesperson for the area, not a Congresswoman from NYC.
It's not just the geographic coverage. The right wing media combs the MSM for gems that it can use to cause outrage the faithful and funny looks from the media voter.
This isn't just something the right wing media does. Democrats everywhere run against Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert too.
I feel like the left & the right as asymmetric, and that simply isn't true. I think that (simplifying here) *everyone* on the left gets blamed by the broader public for *anything* anyone on the left does, but that that's just not the case on the right. I don't see a bit of evidence that voters hold any Republicans accountable for Greene or Boebert. Voters simply just don't make the connection in the same way they do for the left. This asymmetry (which rarely gets discussed) is a big key to understanding US politics
It definitely feels that way to me, but I expect that I'm not an unbiased observer. I would like some sort of proper measure of that to be convinced.
I think this is a function downstream of the left having a stranglehold over the larger media ecosystem.
Yeah, Fox News exists, but with that exception, basically everything of note is left of center.
So you get a lot more lefty journalists and the various high-profile Twits praising AOC and those like her, and that permeates out to the public at large.
BOOM! Yes. Figure out why that is and you've got the key to everything.
This might be part of the answer.
For whatever reason, it seems to me that it's an axiom of politics that normies tend to agree more on policy with the left than with the right, but also tend to react with much more visceral revulsion toward the extreme left than toward the extreme right* (even toward fascists!). So both sides have an advantage and a disadvantage there, and their paths to victory depend on how they tailor their strategies to that playing field.
(*As Matt has noted, even among the far right, the most unpopular conservatives tend to be hardcore anti-spending fiscal hawks, not culture war wackos. But even taking that into account, people hate "hippies" more than either.)
Well, they raise money that way. Whether they do campaign that way is different (I hope).
I agree that this is not good, but I struggle to understand what we can do to avoid it. Instill better message discipline in The Squad? That seems like a heavy lift, but even if we're successful, to your point, won't Republicans just run against the same Muslim Atheist Communist caricature?
I would say focus on a few things --
1. Encourage donors to try to be more strategic in how they allocate money. We have a tendency to donate a lot to lawmakers closest to us politically, rather than the highest VAR.
2. Do what you can to push campaign and policy staffers to be more pragmatic and "think of the Bailey's" as it were. Right now, it's too easy to fall in the trap of putting things out that get high engagement from people that are already in your corner, rather than moderates/swing voters.
3. Encourage the non-right wing media to look harder at how representative certain voices are. The Black Church and the CBC are more representative of African-American voters than a progressive Black activist is, but this is sometimes missed. (Of course, part of the problem is that the more ideological arguments can generate more clicks.)
They should also work harder to put things in the context of expert consensus, rather than "some activists say..."
3a. Encourage people/institutions who are more representative to become more active on Twitter
What's important is not what the Republican media say about Democrats but what the median voter believes. Fox will always say the worst about the Democrats. We however have it in our power to create an alternative narrative for that persuadable voter.
AOC and "The Squad" receive disproportionate coverage not just in the conservative media but in the mainstream media as well. I feel like a lot of reporters have internalized the narrative that she represents "the future" of the Party and that she is the leader of a movement fighting for "control" of the party, so they give her a bigger microphone. While this coverage is technically neutral is does serve to help define the Party for the median voter.
What more mainstream Democrats need to do is find a way to crowd her out of the coverage without directly challenging her. If they were to directly take her on it would feed the "progressive vs. moderate" "Dem Civil War" narrative. They need to find an angle that rises about that narrative. And whichever Dem politician serves as the spokesperson for this effort likely needs to be from NYC, as the national media is so NYC-centric they give more weight to people from there. Look at how the election of Eric Adams was also treated by the media as some sort of sea change in the Democratic Party. We need a politician who generates Adams-like coverage but who can do media appearances like a Member of Congress (i.e. who isn't busy running the country's biggest city).
I agree with that. So what do we do?
Part of me feels like AOC mouthing off gives the local Democrat the chance to say "Gee, that AOC sure is crazy, huh? Good thing I'm not like that!" But I recognize that actual candidates running in swing districts express the view that AOC mouthing off is is unhelpful, so I assume I'm at least partially wrong about that.
So what do we do? Try to force all Democrats to be moderate? This seems impossible, and I don't even think it would be unambiguously good.
Having identified the solution, I leave the implementation to the student.
Seriously, it's a tough one, mostly because we don't have strong party institutions, a rigorous party communication apparatus (like Fox News is for Republicans -- or the other way around, I get confused), and politicians are policy or fame entrepreneurs who operate almost entirely independently.
If we had stronger institutions, we might be able to promote the national profile of alternative Democrats who better represent the median voter -- like an Abigail Spanberger. (There was sort of what Nancy Pelosi was trying to do internally in the House with Katie Hill as a counter balance to AOC before the former unfortunately flamed out.)
So I'm not very hopeful. However, AOC strikes me as more of a cagey, pragmatic politician than people give her credit for (and much more so than the more ideological ones like Omar and Tlaib). It would be great if someone she trusts could take her aside and help her focus her efforts on helping the party overall. It's possible -- not certain, but possible -- that she would be amenable to that.
In Colombia we have a an expression "no dar papaya" which is sort of like "don't lead with your chin," make oneself unnecessarily vulnerable to attack So I just want AOC et. al. not to "dar payaya."
Should the mainstream media quit being papagayos for the Squad :)?
Isn't it the other way around. NYT publishes an op ed that get's piked up by the Squad?
Well, it would help if people who are trying to influence opinion were aware of where the people they are trying to influence are coming from. This does of course imply that they want actually to affect opinion.
Democrats need to feel comfortable pushing back on The Squad and telling them they are wrong when they are, in fact, wrong.
During the pandemic, we learned that teacher unions would happily outsource the entire education portion of their jobs to parents and the kids themselves if you let them. In SF, Chicago, and other big cities, the teacher unions were happy to have teachers on zoom pretending to teach, fighting against vaccine mandates, and otherwise abandoning their job.
Public school is de facto public daycare for kids 4-18, with actual education as a nice to have side effect. They are basically “cops for kids”. There are exceptions of course, usually outliers where a good PTA in a wealthier community demands better. But most schools are abysmal at their core functions.
Not unlike police who fight things like automated traffic enforcement because taking away that function would mean they have to do the actual job of solving crimes v handing out tickets.
Both are noble occupations that systemically drive out ambitious well meaning people, leaving behind mediocre rule followers who are willing to stay for a moderately well paying union gig.
The slow boring solution is a popular grand bargain: defund the teacher *and* police unions, on the premise that, like the military, those functions are too important to let a union fuck them up.
Nothing more cringeworthy than the “public schools are just daycare” line, whether spoken by teachers or anyone else.
Sure a big part of it is the social contract where parents can work, but we actually do expect our children to learn. And the grand social experiment of global COVID showed that kids do when in the classroom. It’s not daycare, it’s school.
Would be great if teacher unions even pretended to care about the school part. Here in SF, they spent the pandemic trying to cancel Abe Lincoln and has kids going into a classroom to watch a teacher on zoom because sone 20%+ refused to get vaccinated.
Of course, the unions had absolutely nothing to do with the Abe Lincoln renaming fiasco. The school board (elected officials) did. This kind of take belongs on Fox News.
I'll acknowledge that I don't know if any of the SF school board members were endorsed by the SF teachers union, but in many communities endorsements from the local teachers union pulls a lot of weight in school board elections.
Endorsing a politician prior to that politician embracing a embarrassingly absurd position is absolutely not the same as supporting the position. My father taught at Lincoln high in SF for 30? years and was a union officer. He (and undoubtably many other SF teacher union members) don't merely oppose this but find it to be ridiculous pandering to some imaginary subset of the electorate.
At what age is that true? What are people really "learning" in kindergarten?
Odd comment. My kindergartner, who is admittedly very bright, went from not reading to reading at a 3rd grade level (challenged by his teacher and motivated by a few other good readers in his class), he learned basic mandarin, multi digit addition / subtraction, starting to get basic multiplication, and his SEL is so much better than the beginning of the year.
They learn a lot!
Apparently the most important things: https://cpco.on.ca/files/9214/0182/6527/NeedToKnow.pdf
There's Heckman's famous study of the lifetime value of pre-k in TN. Setting aside everything else, is it really plausible that pre-k has so much value & k doesn't have any?
Two issues:
One is that this doesn’t measure the value of *learning* in kindergarten; it could just be that having a place where kids can spend the day with other kids outside the home is valuable both for the kids directly and for family finances.
The other is that at least some research here is conflicting and I would want a deeper meta analysis rather than just the work of one researcher.
Reading, hopefully. Which is huge of course!
Test scores, reading comprehension and other markers of learning all dropped as a result of Zoom learning.
That strongly suggests in-person learning is more than de facto daycare.
Yes, but the point is that that's not true in teacher union world where measuring learning is actually racism. Unions push the daycare model because meritocratic compensation based on actual teaching would destroy their rent-seeking opportunities.
>>but the point is that that's not true in teacher union world where measuring learning is actually racism.<<
I suspect this is a case of amplifying the brayings of the most loudmouthed but tiny majority into representing the entirety. My guess is that this doesn't represent the whole, or even a significant part, of how teachers (including union teachers) think. Most teachers just aren't that ideological.
The "because racism" part is absolutely fringe stuff I include for amusement sake. The "Unions oppose thoroughly assessing the effectiveness of individual teachers to promote learning." part is totally serious.
It's worse, because the fringe ones use racism as the excuse when they know darn well the real reason is around avoiding accountability for bad results.
Totally agree.
I genuinely do t understand the union hate. Like I teach in a charter sector of a weak union state so this isn’t coming from self interest.
Like we can look at the results of having weak to no unions and it’s not amazing. Likewise school choice I think is fine but it’s rife with bias effects and parents can’t really tell a good school from a mediocre one and end up just trying for best peer groups close to home. On top of that poor management means that unlike in unionized public schools where poor management can be waited out by good teachers at my school last year there was an army of people teaching out of field, classrooms with 4 adults supervising, long term subs, classes combined, and the kids suffer there in ways that seem as bad or worse than what unions are accused of.
I don’t know what the solution is but I’m not seeing any evidence that unions are anything more than a convenient villain. There are plenty of places where they aren’t strong and those places don’t have Ed results to sing about.
The general anti-public sector union point is that, unlike the private sector, if a truly incompetent/corrupt union gets established, it can't be weeded out when it kills its host company.
Instead, it is a permanent drain on that layer of government basically forever.
Also, public employees going on strike is a problem. FDR had a good speech on why that's unacceptable, if you want to look it up.
Also, unlike the private sector, if a public employer is mistreating their workers, those workers have a chance to organize through the ballot box, rather than a union being their only recourse.
I don't think this gets the priorities right for education. We got a new principal at my school just as the pandemic started and in the Summer afterwards we had to replace the entire kindergarten team, 3/4 of first grade, and one half of 2nd and fourth, and all of fifth.
You can't do that and not hire a bunch of whackadoo nut jobs. The lack of procedural safeguards led to us replacing excellent kindergarten teachers with one who literally lost a kid, twice before she was fired, and her class given over to barely qualified substitutes, then collapsed and split into larger classes.
The lack of procedural restraints left a lot of kids in the lurch and if they follow the logic of school choice they leave and have to really completely start over again and it's kind of a social trauma on the kids. School hoppers are predictably in poor circumstances. Many of the kids with the most trauma have been to 3-4-5 schools by second grade and they have very weird socialization patterns and aren't as habituated to school norms.
I'm actually a bit lost on where this relates to Teachers Unions. Is this a point in favor of public Teachers Unions or against? Are you part of a unionized workforce or not?
In any case, I'm sorry to hear it's going that badly for your school and everyone involved.
I'm not part of a union. At union schools typically what you hear is close the door in teach the bad administrator will be gone before too long and you can just focus on doing best for the kids.
Schools shouldn't be able to be dismantled for several school years by one bad administrator but here we are.
I don't think this is why commenters hate them. Commenters here don't hate the teachers union or police union for getting people to vote certain ways - they hate teachers unions and police unions for getting certain policies implemented through the union negotiating process. When voters got a say on police in Minneapolis and teachers in San Francisco, they didn't vote with the union on the controversial stuff.
That's not universally true. Our local school district teachers recently went on strike for 8 school days earlier in the spring and now our district is going to lose a bunch of state funding because they didn't provide the minimum required days of schooling for the students because no one wanted to tack on the extra days to the end of the year (the union wanted to add an hour a day for the remainder of the year to try and get to the required total but that caused all kinds of other logistical challenges -- easy to add an hour to elementary school but harder in middle and high school). But generally police are not allowed to strike and they get other labor protections in exchange.
"The leverage public employees have in striking is that actually, public service is hard and low paid and nobody wants to do it."
Public sector employees make more money than private sector employees, but when comparing comparable educational status make about 10% less in "total compensation."
Two points to address this:
1) The educational status is inflated because of the number of graduate ED degrees obtained by teachers which are mostly (entirely?) useless if not net negatives.
2) Public workers typically have significantly more worker protections than private employees. If I offered you a 10% raise, would you accept at will employment with no union or statutory protections outside of those offered to the non-union private sector employees?
Federal public employees aren't allowed to strike, I believe.
Non-federal ones can. But states/cities can't really collapse and shed their unions either, so we still have to deal with it.
The air traffic controllers did it nonetheless during the Reagan administration, and paid the price.
Okay. Well a law that is basically never enforced might as well not exist.
And that just reinforces the fact that public sector unions are basically unaccountable.
Every time MY even obliquely gestures at public sector unions the comment section turns into a firing squad.
There seems to be a roughly equivalent number of people who defend them, though.
It's almost like there is a significant....disagreement...among SB readers on the subject! =)
One of the problems is that the truly talented teachers go private. Better pay, more autonomy.
Public schools and sadly, even sone charters get political pressure to drive agendas that have nothing to do with education. In left leaning areas, it’s cancellation of talented and gifted programs in the name of fairness. In right leaning areas, it’s funding the football team and banning books.
Unions are a problem because they put a straightjacket on innovation, prioritizing work rules over trying anything new. But they aren’t the only problem.
They also suffer, like police, from mission creep. Religious zealots, of both the Christian and Woke varieties, use school to drive agendas that have nothing to do with education, detracting from the core mission.
People where I live in SF go private because we want educators that focus on education. Not religion, social justice, or any other agenda.
Most privates pay less, like a lot less. Tens of thousands of dollars less to not have headaches or to do religious work.
But we have a huge experiment on what public schools look like with weak or no unions. It’s not more innovative, it’s not getting more with less it’s getting less with less and just settling for lower taxes.
Curious that teachers accept lower wages going private.
I have no doubt however that without a union, teachers get even more hamstrung by school boards that seem to care more about driving an agenda than teaching.
If I had to go to a product design board at my startup that decided they need to have an opinion on the button colors on my app, id likely just quit.
"Curious that teachers accept lower wages going private."
In many, if not most, states, certification requirements for private teachers are lower (sometimes much lower) than public school teachers, so the barrier to entry is lower in the first place and there's less of a treadmill of needing to constantly get updated training, etc.
Private schools pay less well than public schools
This is generally wrong and the exact opposite take is correct. I can appreciate the frustration with the district in SF. And I won’t pretend that I know the ins and outs of your public district.
So do us a favor and don’t try to generalize given the ignorance displayed in most of your comments.
You really need to accept that schools in San Francisco (or New York, or LA) are just not at all similar to schools in the rest of the country. I’ve worked in public and charter schools in St Louis, Cincinnati, Denver, and now in another Midwest city, and some had strong unions, some didn’t, and I also have friends in coastal cities. You’re right that school is mostly daycare. You’re wrong that charters and private schools are less “abysmal at their core functions” than public ones. Most school districts never strike, charter or public or private. Most never try to fire all their teachers. Most do not use rabidly anti-racist curriculums. They just spend a ton of money on special education, a ton of money on administration, and leave their (mostly female) workforce to try to make ends meet. It’s like they haven’t really changed much since the turn of the century, when they were mostly used to end child labor...
I'm curious about this because I only have my own coworkers to go by but that I find teachers a lot more conservative on social/cultural issues than people think. I don't mean to say that it's Rod Dreher out here teaching but it's much, much more normie.
Like most people think there are two genders unless you really push them on it, most of them believe that racism is being mean to people and they're very moralistic about effort and work. I'm much more amenable to 'woke' ideas and structural explanations but I also get the message to keep that to myself to avoid an argument.
Most teachers teach in the suburbs, because most Americans live in the suburbs, and those teachers (I have found) are very much median voter moderates. The very loud, very woke teachers are in urban areas but what they say isn’t that big of a deal, or very representative. They are probably underfunded, because teaching poor students with lots of trauma is hard. The suburban schools are probably not underfunded, but they’re willing to say they are out of solidarity with the urban teachers, but their solidarity basically goes to funding and not much further. Most suburbs, at least in the center of the country, were fine forcing teachers to teach in fall 2020, for example.
Right, any one union can, and will, screw up, because unions are made up of fallible humans like any other group. But I still remain unconvinced that a complete absence of unionization is preferable.
Why do we have to choose between a Shit Sandwich and a Poop Popsicle here? You could have a non-union workforce, or even a union that acts in a more reasonable manner and cleans itself of bad apples, somewhat like they do in Germany with the Mitbestimmung model where cooperation between management and labor happens without having to assume both sides of the divide.
Unions are big players in a lot of local elections. I know in my local elections, whoever gets the police & fire union support has well over 50%+ chance of winning. If they can get the trifecta with the teacher's union, they are essentially untouchable.
Do you think that civil service protections would be an adequate measure to prevent the harms you fear because based on my experience with public schools, I would rather have due process protections for teachers who are threatened with being fired and a principal who is empowered to hire and fire (with credentials required) than what I experienced with my kids in a district with a strong teacher's union. I find it odd that most public sector employees in California have both levels of protection -- and since the unions are the primary source of funding for many elected officials campaign funds they are essentially bargaining with people who are already beholden to them in way that does not really exist with private sector unionized employees. I guess I fear that the dominance of public sector employees in big unions generally has led them to get a little complacent and I wish that there would be more energy put into organizing employees who really are in a difficult power dynamic without collective bargaining.
I was trying to suggest that the statutory protections are sufficient to protect against the harms that you are suggesting, and that there are downsides to the union bargaining and influence -- for example on the macro level, committing too many resources to defined benefit pension and retiree health benefits for public employees thereby depleting the resources available to fund other public priorities and at the more micro level, making seniority the sole factor considered when layoffs arise or in the case of my district, allowing any teacher based on seniority to take any teaching vacancy that they like without any ability for the school site administration to interview or select a teacher that meets the school's specific needs -- thus an experienced teacher who is resistant to say implement a curricular reform can just move from school to school rather than be responsive to the site leader. It seems like there can be similar dynamics in law enforcement where a chief is trying to apply analysis to improve practice, but the many levels of protection result in resistance to implement any reforms. In my experience teachers do not always know best, and may be resistant to changes that would, if implemented with fidelity, improve outcomes for students. Few of us like change, but most of us expect to be fired if we simply refuse to work in the manner that our supervisors direct us to do.
At the federal level, patronage (which in the 19th century played the role corporations and rich individuals play in campaign finance today) was largely eliminated by the Pendleton Act in 1883, after President Garfield was assassinated by a disappointed office-seeker. JFK legalized public sector unions for federal workers in 1962; NYC under Mayor Robert Wagner did the same for City employees in 1958. I have no idea if the police were more or less corrupt in the mid-20th century than today, and if collective bargaining has done anything to tamp down on it.
"the teacher unions were happy to have teachers on zoom pretending to teach"
And you had office workers at home pretending to work. I don't think teachers were unusual in that regard.
I think there's a range of how well "pretending to teach" or "pretending to work" functions. Teaching a lecture of intro calculus to 700 people over Zoom probably actually works even better than teaching a lecture of intro calculus to 700 people in a lecture hall. Teaching kindergarten over Zoom, or teaching a bio lab over Zoom, is really just pretending to teach. Jobs are more heterogeneous so there are some where they didn't even try going online (no one, as far as I know, attempted bartending over Zoom) but out of the ones that did go online, there's surely a range of how well they worked out. But I suspect that teaching kindergarten through third grade is one of the jobs that worked out worst.
The situation was different to the extent you had teachers unions publicly lobbying against going back to the school even after it was painfully apparent that remote teaching was a disaster. I know employees at a lot of private sector businesses also urged that remote work be allowed to continue for them too, but I'm not aware of there being anywhere near much evidence of a productivity collapse.
The situation with teaching was also distinguishable by the extent to which parents were being openly expected by the teachers unions to pick up the slack. When my law firm went to remote work, we didn't tell our clients that they were going to need to take care of more of their own legal services. (And actually, the situation is even worse when I think about it -- if I do less work for my clients and try to make them handle more things themselves, they at least pay less money to me because I bill on a hourly basis and thus I earn less money; so far as I can recall, teachers unions weren't volunteering to take a 30% pay cut or something like that to reflect their lower productivity and shifting work to parents.)
Productivity went up for nearly all private sector software engineering jobs. I can't speak for other white collar professions where the work product is primarily digital.
There is some need for occasional in person connection, but that's perhaps 1-2 weeks a quarter for ideation sessions.
“ Productivity went up for nearly all private sector software engineering jobs.”
Ahahhahahah now that’s funny.
I have the receipts dude.
Measured by cycle time (time from ticket pickup to closure) across a 20K developer population for the company I worked for at the time, there was a 4% increase in productivity for the first 6 months of the pandemic. The number of working hours increased (basically replacing the commute), the level of quality increased - fewer logged bugs or customer escalations, number of incidents went down.
Most people in tech have shown similar results, which is why most companies have taken a permissive approach for WFH. Even companies doing return to office almost always say it's not because of lost productivity, because they can't credibly say that. They always talk about it being something around loss of creativity from spontaneous interaction.
“ time from ticket pickup to closure”
“Called, emailed and IMd no response closing ticket per policy. “
Ticket closing times have improved!
Even in Florida where school was open in 20-21 for all of it and was being highly encouraged there was still a significant number of students whose families response to come back was sort of over my dead body.
I personally was very successful teaching online and would love to see what the hell happened. My working theory is it was non-attenders and teachers who weren't very tech savvy where these losses are concentrated but no one seems to know anything about who did what.
I feel like online for families who wanted it, with a technically savvy teacher who wanted to do that worked okay. But maybe I was just unbelievably lucky.
It’s unfortunate that we really didn’t try to study remote learning to get an idea of what worked well and what was a disaster and which kids actually did better with remote learning. That said, it really does seem like remote learning was mostly a disaster. At least out here on the west coast it was.
I don’t disagree the data is pretty awful but it seems like it’s more of a cudgel to yell at people with than a sincere look at classrooms.
I mean just the fact that a significant number of people were just not really coming at all played a huge role. A lot of zeroes really fuck up averages. But you look on the internet and it’s people yelling lazy all over the place as if online school was easy to do well on literally the first time it had been tried.
Then we all sort of agreed to pretend it never happened but to yell at people who had a hard time grasping to sanity alone in their house.
I don’t know how how lawyer billing works. In my world we are billing far more for the same amount of work as things take so much longer with everyone remote.
But you had factory workers, cooks, nurses, sales clerks, maintenance people, delivery drivers all going to work. This, in my view, was the issue: teachers saw themselves as educated knowledge workers who should be able to work from home, same as those office workers in your view.
They didn't want to identify with the essential workers needed to keep food, electricity, gasoline and all the other essentials of life flowing.
Before the pandemic liberals said education had a huge daycare component. At the same time conservatives insisted, most emphatically, that public education wasn’t daycare. Then the pandemic happened and the positions totally flipped.
My man, no. No no no no.
Teachers absolutely would not outsource that, and didn't. The problem is that a lot of municipalities and state governments are, let's say, not exactly pro-education and were happy to use teachers as cannon fodder just so they looked like they were tough on COVID-19 or some BS. So, there's just a touch of distrust there.
Your comment actually proves that they have a reason to be distrustful...
Up or out is the military “thing’ you might mention here. I wonder how that could be implemented in the context of the teaching profession.
Up is a non-concept in teaching. The only way up is to spend your day supervising adults which is literally the opposite of what I went into this field for.
If you’re perceived as really good you get terrible situations. They move you to grade levels that are on fire and full of new hires, or they give you all the ese kids or the kids who don’t speak English in my case. I kind of think this is a problem but have no idea how you would fix it.
I'd never thought before on just how organizationally "flat" a school is, but it's a major contributor to the absence of a solution along the lines of up-or-out.
At the high school level, one "up" is getting to teach an elective you enjoy (school paper, etc) or an AP class
Wouldn't quitting effectively be the negotiation? One way or another districts are going to pay a salary that will allow themselves to hire teachers.
Teachers quitting until pay rises doesn't sound ground to me, but neither does the current status quo where unions negotiate for things that are sub-optimal for the students, like remote-Zoom classes or Michelle Rhee-style school reform.
“ I’m a defender of our higher education finance setup”
Future mailbag question perhaps, but do you ever change your mind in response to audience criticism?
That was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad take and remains one.
I don’t think you phrased that right. You should just ask if he reads subscriber comments, or you could ask if his views change or evolve based on alternative takes and critiques generally, though he is almost certain to answer in the affirmative to the latter (and has in fact openly acknowledged doing so on other issues). Asking about “audience criticism” implies he should adjust his views based on whether his readers are happy with them (I.e. to appease us) rather than based on our substantive counterpoints which is of course not what you meant.
As a professor that moved from Norway to the USA because of the overwhelming higher quality in USA, I think it was a really good take so there's definitely no consensus on the comments
I mostly agreed with that post. I disagreed with the prior post that argued that competition would fix higher ed. I teach college, fwiw.
In terms of education funding levels and policy reforms to improve quality, I think Freddie deBoer has provided a fair amount of valuable critique over the years. His basic thesis is that out-of-school factors dominate (accepted by Yglesias [1]) and almost no education interventions are found to have long term effects on student performance and life outcomes.
I believe this is best summarized in deBoer’s article “Education Doesn't Work”, https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work?s=r
> This point is both totally banal and yet potentially revelatory given our educational policy conversations: mobility of individual students in quantitative academic metrics relative to their peers over time is far lower than popularly believed. Students sort themselves into an ability hierarchy at a very early age and tend to stay in their position in that hierarchy for the remainder of their lives, to a remarkable degree. The children identified as the smart kids early in elementary school will, with surprising regularity, maintain that position throughout schooling.
> Most everybody stays in about the same place relative to peers over academic careers. The consequences of this are immense, as it is this relative position, not learning itself, which is rewarded with economic gain by our society.
> The persistence of relative academic performance is remarkable. Standardized test scores collected at the age of thirteen are strong predictors of not just future high school and college educational performance but adult outcomes like academic career milestones and economic position, even after adjusting for parental income.
I’ve never been particularly comfortable with this critique and its implications. Yet I think it is important when we put so much focus on K-12 education as a means of improving society, including decreasing social inequalities. deBoer’s critique suggests we should decrease the emphasis on education and focus more on income redistribution.
[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/more-good-news-about-dcs-teacher?s=r, “school performance is dominated by out-of-school factors.”
There’s a right wing version of this critique by Bryan Caplan too, and I actually think it has more merit than we want to let on. If I start looking for it I find evidence for it all over the school but I would only say that in extremely close groups of friends with the door shut.
I generally think most problems in schools would be better addressed by making sure parents have adequate financial resources to meet their child’s needs beyond a mere threadbare level and spend time with them. Almost all of our problems are caused by a small group of unfortunate kids with often times terrible parents. The kids who’ve assaulted me never were from great circumstances.
More money definitely could really improve some families and kids education. But it won't help all. Some households are bad because of messy divorces, drug and alcohol addictions, untreated mental illness, multiple kids having having different fathers, etc. In some cases more money could make circumstances like this worse, not better. More aggressive interventions are needed, like custody laws and judges which try to determine what is actually best for the children (and not automatically favor the mother), involuntary committment to rehab or psychiatric treatment, and better enforcement of child support laws and going after delinquent parents.
It seems to me that a lot of that though is the result of a lack of money and stem from how inequitable a basically capitalist framework is.
Like everyone recgonizes that with kids if you make them do boring shit all day they'll misbehave, and pretends it just goes away with adults. If everyone had the opportunity to work in large part for self actualization like many elites do I think we'd address those problems. Most of the UBI experiments I've read bear this out, people take the money and do good and well with it.
Then there is like a family law and addiction treatment piece to this but even many of the addiction studies I've seen tie it back to the environment not really being rewarding for them.
The main criticism of this theory that has any merit is that we still don’t find all the bright kids at all, that a lot of them are lost in the weeds of terrible life circumstances that mask their potential.
But regardless of how one considers the problem, the right answer is to ensure that “everyone who works eats”.
Obviously, the first order effect is that all the kids who aren’t academically inclined grow into adults who can live decent lives anyway.
But the second order effect deals with that oft-mooted criticism, by drastically reducing the number of talented kids who grow up in complete shit-show homes.
Pouring funds into schooling isn’t the answer here.
DeBoer specifically mentions this for the "RELATIVE" value of education. (How much does it do to reduce social inequality?)
There's still a lot to be said for the "ABSOLUTE" value of education. (and he acknowledges this)
So, to the extent you care about inequality, then focusing more on non-education factors makes sense. But if you also care about _teaching_ people things, then you kind of need education.
True - but funding at the margin isn't going to provide much in the way increased benefit. At least not for any method that has discovered to date.
This is interesting: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/2022-68/
You don't find a lot of evidence of scalable education programs that are effective. Big open question on if it is transferable to wealthy countries.
Scripted curricula are a thing. I could write a whole post on the ups and downs of the Zearn Math curriculum which fuses an online video with scripted small group lessons.
If you're not absolutely taciturn about it I think this works pretty well.
They're both good examples of places where we've long since stopped seeing meaningful returns from increasing funding. Public sector unions are far too capable of absorbing any new resources we might attempt to direct to outcomes at these institutions. No amount of funding, no matter where it's coming from, will escape the rent-seekers pockets so long as their stranglehold is unchallenged.
Who absorbs those resources in states and districts that don’t have teachers unions?
Police and Fire unions.
Fire unions the real racket no one talks about. Glorified EMTs getting a sweet pension deal.
You could literally cut the fire dept budget by 80% in most cities and outside of a pissed off bunch of ex firemen, nobody would notice.
Cue backdraft plot.
You're forgetting the obesity epidemic. Most ambulance calls include a fire truck these days as extra muscle is often needed to get patients into the ambulance.
EMTs? At least where I live, tax dollars don't fund any EMT or ambulatory services. Taxes go toward fire response and prevention only.
I don't think he's suggesting tax dollars go to the EMTs, just that firefighters these days mostly operate as more capital-intensive EMTs.
The states that ban teachers unions also ban police and fire unions.
Didn’t know that. Interesting. Would love to see how outcomes differ between unionized cops v not.
I assume you mean for public safety or high-profile incidents like police shootings. Google tells me the non-union states are Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas.
I too had to have Google tell me if there were any stated that outright ban all public sector unionization, and I was told there were only three: the Carolinas and Virginia. I'm surprised there wasn't more, that seems like a total top priority for ALEC in GOP-controlled states.
My actual prediction would be that states without unions would see more success per spending than union states. And my incredibly rough proxy for that says that those 5 states spend $10,573 per pupil average, which would rank 34 among states. According to a couple of complicated rankings those same states would rate *26.4th or *28.2nd in quality of public education, which I'd call maybe evidence of a small effect? Probably inconclusive. I'm not clear how much or if those ranks are already adjusting for spending.
* https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education
* https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/public-school-rankings-by-state
The real outlier in the group is Virginia, which seems to be killing it and we should probably be looking to emulate.
I strongly suspect that results are more indicative of selection effects than impact from spending/curriculum.
What's your evidence?
https://miro.medium.com/max/1120/1*joTvQ0TkRqJkW9TUY4rxkA.jpeg
but didn't MY write that this increase in spending relates Baumol's cost disease (and the fact that teaching was in the past effectively subsidized by exclusion of women in other sectors). So maybe the trend shown here is just generally related to increases in labor costs. So if you held funding fixed over time, perhaps scores would drop because you could pay for less teaching per dollar?
Staff per student isn't a cost disease issue. It is a reflection of schools trying to take on roles that used to be done by parents. But now that 35% of all kids (and 65% of Black kids) aren't born to married parents, the schools are dealing with a more disruptive, less disciplined and ill-prepared population of students.
Hmmm...not convinced that that is the main driver of cost increase. Would love to see evidence.
I was only speaking to the dotted line in the graph ̶y̶o̶u̶ (Dave Coffin) posted, which was labeled "staff per student", which I read as number of staff, rather than the solid line which is spending.
I'm trembling with anticipation waiting to find out what in one sense we expect them to! ;-)
I think there's some truth to the notion that public education benefited from a subset of meritocratically undercompensated female teachers that have shifted to more lucrative career paths as they have become more accessible, but that's kind of directly the product of the lack of meritocratic compensation in the industry as dictated by the unions. If education costs had risen because schools were paying more to retain their top quality teachers over time I think we would be seeing actual return on investment. Instead we have a cost disease situation where quality teachers have moved on and we spend more and more money feeding relatively cheap entry level labor into an ever more diluted field of mediocre teachers coasting on seniority.
Agreed. I think nursing provides an interesting contrast, in that it also was a low-paid female dominated position. But when the job market opened up to women, nursing quality didn't go down, instead, salaries went up. Presumably because the clarity of the stakes meant shielding subpar nurses was a no-go.
Its a big shame that there's no political movement in the US to ban school districts from choosing students based on their address. It would've done wonders for equality in the US, as currently people are paying through the nose to live in a "good" school district, resulting in a big divide between the rich and the poor. If school spots were instead allocated by lottery alone, there would be much less incentive to cluster around "good" schools and the poorest family would have a fair chance to apply to whatever school they want.
School districts are always going to be "choosing students based on their address" for K-12 education unless you imagine boarding schools becoming wildly popular. There are very few parents who want their minor children to go a school multiple hours away from home.
Often times you could be living just a mile away from a “good” school but because your address is “wrong” your kids end up going to a “bad” school district.
Yes, that can happen. But at the end of the day, my point remains the same - K-12 education is always going to inherently be a "local" issue in that parents generally want to minimize commuting time for getting their kids to and from school. You proposed that school spots be allocated by lottery, but that obviously has to have a fairly heavy geographic constraint (i.e., within an hour's drive or so from the student's residence) to have any prayer of being politically acceptable.
To put it another way, there isn't a national market for K-12 schools except for super elite prep schools with boarding programs and even a lot of Top 1%-ers prefer their children live with them, especially during K-6, which is also the most influential period of education. Thus parents are almost always going to prioritize trying to live in an area with "good" schools to the extent their work obligations and income permit so that their children can attend the "good" schools with a shorter commute.
I think there's still a difference between families getting to decide which school they'd like to attend and which school you attend being correlated one-to-one with the district your home address is listed in. It's true that almost no one is going to choose the school three hours away from their home, but when you're in an urban or dense suburban area, and there are a bunch of schools within an hour of your home, there's going to be a big difference between a rule that defines each school's catchment area restrictively (so that homes on this side of the line have a qualitatively different feature than homes on that side of the line) and a rule that lets people choose and then enter a lottery if too many people choose one school.
We once had such a policy: "bussing" and it was hugely unpopular and not just becasue of racism. People really DO want to send their children to nearby schools.
Why not let people list the schools in their area in rank order of preference, and then do a lottery at schools listed as first preference by more students than they have spots? People who care about nearby schools can choose nearby schools, and people who care about sports programs can choose schools with good sports programs, and people who care about any other quality metric they like can choose schools with that.
This is basically how Boston does things: https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/Page/6544
Sounds good to me. Obviously the basic idea is to try to avoid some schools being "bad" and know for being bad, but that can be a counsel of perfection.
Left wingers often cite Milliken v. Bradley as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever, but due to the public sentiment you describe here, even if that case went the other way there highly likely would have ended up being a major backlash that would have have established a de facto Milliken-like regime.
The real disgraceful SCOTUS case in this regard that was far more worse and damaging was San Antonio ISD v. Rodriguez, which gave the green light for school districts to be funded inequitably. It doesn't get the attention that Milliken does due to the absence of how visceral busing is, but equitable funding is something that would have had a much better chance of succeeding, with better results.
I agree. Heck, we could probably have gotten desegregation if SCOTUS had just really enforced Plessy. :)
That said, equal per pupil funding is not really enough even if evened out over the whole State.
AFAIK funding is not the reason for good vs bad school districts. If it was, you’d see numerous examples of districts rapidly turning around once enough funding is given to them.
"The real disgraceful SCOTUS case in this regard that was far more worse and damaging was San Antonio ISD v. Rodriguez."
This seems wild to me. If the court decided education was a "constitutional right" where is the limiting principle here? Should SCOTUS be deciding curriculum as well? And if that's a constitutional right, what isn't? Social Security? Disability Insurance? Employment and/or employment insurance?
Although the plaintiffs did argue for a fundamental right to education to try to bolster their case, even without it there's still an Equal Protection Clause argument to be had.
An equal protection result simply would lead to most localities dropping their mandated support to the lowest level, and then have "voluntary contributions" bring it back up.
I would also say that this should be something that is legislature driven, not court mandated.
Rich people will always want to exclude the poor from their circles. Doesn’t mean it should be tolerated.
I believe there was near universal backlash against busing policy. That backlash wasn’t limited to affluent whites; working class people and people of color also protested these policies. Chiefly because many had their children spending 1-2 hours a day on buses. Parents found that a horrible waste of time and it necessitated children waking up particularly early. Further, children's social relations were strained by the fact that their in-school friends might live an hour or more away.
But it made the really rich white parents (who could afford private schooling) feel better about themselves. Like all sorts of policies that try to tell the masses what should and should not be tolerated.
Long commutes delenda est.
I don't disagree, but people do want to have nearby schools for their children.
I think they care about both. And I agree that the gerrymandering you describe is a problem, but the usual, valid, issue is people having to move to get their children into good (on average not value added college admission criteria) schools.
Do you have children?
I'm generally a proponent of more/better education, but I would basically go (politically) berserk if they tried to do that in my city.
Ideals tend to go out the door when they result in a dire threat to one's children.
What is the “dire” threat? Some kids from a “bad” school district ending up in the same school as yours? Or is it about being salty that someone who didn’t pay a huge real estate premium might end up sending their kids next to yours?
The former.
Especially considering the high levels of violence among the students of the bad schools.
But also the general disinterest in education. I'm not going to risk the social contagion spreading to my kids.
What is your solution for parents who live in “bad” school districts but want their kids to get a good education?
A mildly cumbersome transfer process.
The parents who care are also likely raising their children well enough that they aren't going to cause problems.
But you need the process to be at least somewhat time-consuming/cumbersome as a filter.
I would bet at least 30% of parents in “bad” school districts care enough about their kids to go through the process. What do you propose happens to kids who no longer have a spot in their local school because too many kids transferred there from other districts?
The way you go about this is by removing school funding from the local level. At the very least, run education through the county rather than lower levels. Running it through the state, at least on a funding level, would be even better.
This could end up backfiring big time if the state wants to fund education at a rock bottom level.
Can’t be done. The parents in the good school districts will find a way to fund their schools.
In an ideal world Minnesota schools would not be allowed to discriminate based on address and forced to run a lottery any time the number of applicants exceeds the number of spots. This way good schools would not be exclusive to the richest in society.
On the story of Kerr County residents not living in any city, we notoriously have a group of these people here, too. They despise even having to write Boise on their address, as they cannot stand Boise and the allegedly outrageous taxes they charge, and prefer to be called the Southwest Ada County Alliance. They have long fought tooth and nail to resist any sort of annexation effort by Boise.
So it was quite ironically funny when they absolutely lost their shit over Boise wanting to turn a piece of farmland the city itself owns nearby this area into housing. They demanded it become a very large park instead, despite the fact that they very blatantly do not want to be Boise citizens.
I've been really struck lately about how rhetoric from the left and right on cops and teachers these days is almost a mirror-image. For instance, over the years we've often seen conservatives point to some failing in the public school system and argue "see, this just proves that this is all a waste of money, more parents should move their kids into private and parochial schools instead," while the liberal counterargument is, "no, public schools are necessary and irreplaceable and we need to put more resources into them." But on cops it's the reverse: so many progressives (not even far-left agitators but relatively mainstream voices who don't have two feet on the "defund" wagon but will make anti-anti-defund arguments) have been pointing to Uvalde, or to evidence of cops laying down on the job via "soft strikes", and arguing: "see this just proves that cops add no value at all."
Personally, I say the liberal argument on public schools is *mostly* right, and the exact same logic should apply to cops.
Looking at spending on a GDP basis is one good way to look at the spending, but a few questions. 1) For many of the other countries in your graphs are both police and education spending calculated the same way as spending in the USA? Are all the same hard costs included (like buildings and upkeep, do other countries include k-12 sport stadiums for football, basketball etc.)? Are the same soft costs included - where are the retirement costs for teachers and police for the different countries? 2. For other countries are both police and education all done on a national level? That is, are there no local taxation and variances in either category for most other countries as there are in the USA? So that in the USA there can be wide variances in spending from tax district to tax district, but in other countries little difference province to province? 3. How do different taxing districts in the USA stack up against the other countries on a per student or per policemen basis?
In regards to education spending, last I checked America actually spends dramatically less than other countries, if you were to exclude all the spending that we count as "educational" and other countries count as "community or other." Schools are designed in America to also handle after school activities, lunches for children, travel events, etc. In other countries, particularly in Europe, ALL of that is paid for through other means.
"inaccurate facts"
What's that, the progressive version of "alternative facts"?
"fights are conducted with guns versus knives and bludgeons."
Never bring a bludgeon to a gun fight.
It’s also be interesting to know how much the US spends per student in a publicly funded school, compared to other developed countries. My guess is that we have a larger minority of students in private/parochial schools than many of the European countries (either because those schools don’t exist much in some countries or because they receive public funding), so the actual spending that a US public school student benefits from is higher.
And it’d be interesting to know how much we spend on major categories: teacher salary, overhead, capex, retiree pensions. If a third of our spending is going to administration and the underfunded pensions of Boomers, while only serving 85% of the school-age population, then our spending is not so great. But it’s hard to find good apples-to-apples data!
There are a handful of wildly mismanaged pension systems that are going to be a huge burden on those governments for the foreseeable future, but the overwhelming majority of governments are just not being hugely burdened by pensions. The most recent school district I worked with had $10 million in annual expenses and less than $600k was pension and other retirement related expenses vs $1.5 million special education funding, most of which is the result of unfunded mandates.
I think the US has the second highest murder rate in that list of countries after tiny Costa Rica. The Baltic countries are quite high but are much smaller than the USA in terms of population. A sensible move would be to greatly increase the spending on cops in the US - well above Hungary - with the extra cops targeted where they are especially needed.
But that won't happen.
I rarely see this put forward as a solution who want dramatically more k-12 funding but it seems to me that in the states that I'm familiar with their laws, school districts are treated like JV governments that basically have to get voter approval to raise any revenue greater than a bake sale. If we let school district's governing bodies make those decisions on their own and then let the board members face the voters in those decisions, I'm confident K-12 spending would be higher.
I'm guessing it depends on the state but this is definitely the case in Idaho. It's a great example of why I am extremely skeptical of any sort of state preemption.
Sorry if my comment was unclear, but that is essentially my point. In the current system, if the district wants to raise taxes three precent, they have to go to referendum and it's easy for the voters who aren't invested in the system to just vote no and prevent the tax increase. If the school board had the power to raise taxes on its own, then the impetus would be on those disconnected voters to do the research on did the school board raise taxes, did my member vote for it, is their opponent against it, etc. and many of those disconnected voters aren't going to put that effort in and therefore the district is able to raise more revenue.
Also referendums are all or nothing, so maybe there is a referendum where a four percent increase fails so the district gets nothing, but if the board can work it out amongst themselves they might successfully pass a two percent increase.
I think this ends up in a bad place. Imagine if you had separate boards for different districts all able to raise taxes independently. (School, water, hospital, police/safety etc.) Each of them could think that their issues were the most important and think that raising taxes just a little wouldn't be that big a deal. But they are thinking individually and not collectively. This is one reason why I think that MattY is correct in that we should consolidate political power into the Mayor/City Council or equivalent county government who can be THE politically responsible agency for balancing these issues/costs for the community.
The US/Japan comparison piqued my interest and I was struck by the big disparity in societal investments: for combined primary/secondary education, police and defense, the US spends 7.7% of GDP compared to only 4% for Japan.
I was wondering what Japan does with that windfall and still don't know, but I looked up healthcare spending and was awestruck again at the differences: 20% of GDP for the US versus 11% for Japan, dwarfing that other difference.
Now we're talking about a *huge* difference in societal investment. I hope some smart SB person can tell me where Japan makes the disproportionately large GDP investments compared to the US. I couldn't readily find it. (Apparently 22% of total Japanese spending goes for retirees but I couldn't find a comparable aggregate number for the US -- much smaller, I'd assume.)
P.S. Spielberg and Kushner did not "brilliantly" remake West Side Story but instead did a tired, cliched retread much inferior to the original. I'll take that stand to my dying day.
On the education front it is important to note that the US is also a much richer country than most of the OECD, so it spends FAR more per-pupil than many places. Per-pupil we spend 50% more than Germany or New Zealand.
Our median income is 2x Germany. (~33k vs ~16k) If we spent the same per pupil we'd be spending vastly less. (Taxes and other benefits might change things here for actual mean income, but our salaries are just higher)
(EDIT: Since my purpose for picking this wasn't clear - this median income should directly affect TEACHER income requirements, which affect the cost of education)
(EDIT: OTOH it looks like I accidentally mixed sources from 2 different gathering statistics. On further research our median income is _not_ 2x germany - only about 25% higher, so that undercuts my theory a lot.)
This is only relevant if you assume the US should have to spend more per-student on a price-adjusted basis. The US is poorer per capita than Norway yet outspends Norway on education per student by 50%.
I wasn't clear enough I guess - I mean that median incomes directly correlate with required teacher salaries.
Norway is a poor comparison for pretty much anything in the US. Norway is petrostate. I'm sure the US spends more per student than Saudi Arabia and the UAE too, even though they are richer than the US.
Or you could go the other direction and look at Luxembourg - GDP PPP ~100% larger than USAs but ed spending only ~33% higher.
So Denmark - US GDP PPP per capita is 5-10% higher and it's education funding per student is ~44% higher. And Denmark is one of the most resource-poor countries on Earth.
Why are you using median income and not GDP per capita?
Because you have to pay teachers relative to the median income.
But... I think I was using bad median income data (I didn't make sure they were from the exact same source so they differed by more than they should - I've edited my original post to comment on that)
What I meant was, if the median income is 2x here, then teachers will cost 2x here, and teacher salaries and benefits (maybe this includes administrators too?) are 81% of spending. (Source at bottom - the excerpt and link are long)
So if they're 81% of spending, then assuming we spend the same elsewhere, we spend 81 cents on salaries and 19 cents on other stuff, and Germany would spend only 40.5 cents on salaries + 19 cents = ~60, so we'd spend $1.00 for every $0.60 they spend - or about 50% more.
(Edit: This is basically the Baumol's Cost Disease Matt mentions - industries which can't/don't get more productive still see rising wages when the rest of the jobs get more productive (and get higher wages as a result of that productivity)
=======SOURCE=======
The United States spent almost $657.5 billion on K-12 public schools in 2018-19, with 81 percent of that money going toward education employee salaries and benefits, according to figures published this month by the National Center for Education Statistics.
(Long link:
https://www.the74million.org/article/analysis-how-much-school-funding-goes-to-salaries-benefits-does-urban-vs-rural-make-a-difference-red-state-vs-blue-strong-union-vs-weak-some-surprising-answers/#:~:text=The%20United%20States%20spent%20almost,National%20Center%20for%20Education%20Statistics.)