> Unless the supply of homes can increase in line with demand
There exists the technology to vertically stack homes in DC. But luckily we have sensible federal legislation preventing it from destroying DCs character.
An intangible asset so valuable it's more important than any measurable indicator of quality of life for median income folk.
Every single instance of that word being used in housing debates, it's been clear that it is a dog whistle for "the patch of shade a mid-rise building three blocks over would inflict on my skyline is more important to me than affordable housing for five dozen working-class families."
In my area NIMBYs are fighting developers who want to replace junky strip malls with apartment buildings. Apparently liquor stores and tattoo parlors define the neighborhood “character” that needs preserving.
I think your point saying that performance assessments are nobody's favorite thing about work is fairly dead on. To me the reason for this is that for most people in the middle of the pack performance-wise the assessments are fairly arbitrary and somewhat pointless. Most employees have a lot of good qualities, want to do a good job, and a few areas they need to work on but are overall big contributors and you wouldn't want to lose them.
The purpose of performance assessments is to identify the top 10-20% of talent that can rise up or is underutilized, and the bottom 5-10% who need to go. For the middle ~60% evaluations create a lot of stress without much relevance.
Additionally, even if you don't have very clear metrics-based criteria, the top talent and people who need to move on become pretty clear over the course of a few eval cycles.
One problem with teaching from this perspective is that the structure of the occupation sort of precludes an "up or out" mentality, even a soft one. In most occupations people want to acquire more responsibility or a new role throughout time. If they are unable to secure a better job, they'll eventually move on.
But classroom teachers can basically do the same job from age 23-retirement... so the evaluation process does not serve its function of identifying top talent for promotion and also serves as the only mechanism for getting rid of low performers since it is less likely a low performer will become disenchanted with their lack of opportunity. I would imagine this makes perceptions of the eval system much worse for the workforce.
Plus, you want the best teachers to work with the weakest students, because they would benefit more from a really good teacher. But a lot of teachers would want to work with the strongest students either because they think they'll be less difficult in the classroom or because they'd get higher scores on standardized tests. In my high school, they rewarded the teachers who were considered the best by assigning them to the honors classes. We would have done fine with mediocre teachers.
The only distinction I would make is if the targeted turnover rate is just 5-10% ... that's really more of a "perform or go" culture. I think a true "up or out" culture is targeting more like a 20-25% annual turnover rate to meet the cohort promotion targets. For example, McKinsey's average tenure is just 2 years from a mix of both voluntary and involuntary turnover.
It's not clear to me that performance evaluations in "perform or go" cultures - with low involuntary turnover targets - induce the same stress. Or if they do that stress is shared equally across the employees.
The Big Four are widely known to be a ticket-punching sweatshop at the lower tiers.
But your point overall is well taken; no public sector entity except for the military is running an "up or out" culture, so we need some means of ensuring that there is accountability when promotions aren't really a main consideration.
Yes. I was not familiar with the term "perform or go" specifically but that makes a lot of sense. Hardcore up or out programs are pretty stressful but only seem to be implemented at very prestigious firms where people will generally have a lot of options when they leave.
On a quasi related note I feel like there is a very negative perception of job separations in all media coverage of this based on the fact that the economy sucked from 2008-2016, and also that media is in terminal decline so no job turnover in the industry is good for journalists.
I also think the biggest reason people hate evaluations is that most of the time managers don't really do a good job of measuring performance. The system they have in DC sounds like it's better than most places.
School *clap* performance *clap* is *clap* dominated *clap* by *clap* out *clap* of *clap* school *clap* factors.
While your point is taken that improving public schools, even marginally, is a good thing for local government to do, I really wish the above idea had a larger role in the debate.
I wonder, though, if there's a large subgroup of students who find a larger effect from school quality.
Conceptually, it seems like, okay, there are some kids who aren't even trying to get anything out of school. They see their future as one in which school is irrelevant. They're at school because they have to be, or to hang out with friends, whatever. They're marking time.
And then there's a (probably smaller) group of kids who, on the other end, are going to compensate for any deficiencies in the school with out of school resources. Maybe they're autodidacts, more likely their parents lean in and send them to Kumon or some other supplemental program, or invest in teaching them directly.
So those two groups are extremely insensitive to school quality, and if you look at the scores of a whole student population in aggregate, they depress the overall sensitivity of the population. But if you could exclude them, you might see responses to school quality among the remainder that are more in line with people's intuitions about the effects of school quality.
I don't know, perhaps it's not a big enough effect.
one of the best things a good school system can do is cream off the smart working class kids for intensive instruction. this can work, but only for a limited number of students. intelligence is partly heritable, but there’s also a lot of meiotic randomness
When I was in high school in Farmington, CT, back in the late 60s early 70s, we had Honors classes in English, Math, Science, and History. Most of us, myself included, could not qualify for the Honors programs. It didn't matter what SES you were from. If you could cut the mustard, you got into the Honors classes. The majority of us could not. We didn't take a coloring book and a puppy into a crying closet, because we didn't get into a Honors class. When you start lowering the standards for excellence, all the other standards go down as well. That smart working class kid just might be the next doctor who finds a cure for cancer. We need an education system that doesn't stand in his or her way.
You might even find that some of the high-performing kids perform inversely correlated to at least some increases in school performance.
Like, say we look at math scores. My kid gets a score of X, and I think, "X is too low. I'm going to send him to Kumon math." Kumon math is successful in raising his score to X+10.
Next year, the school improves a bit and some family exactly like me has a kid who gets a score of X+2, and they think, "Wellllll... X+2 isn't where I'd like it to be, but it's not so bad that I'm gonna shell out for Kumon." That year, aggregate statistics are dragged down compared to prior because instead of the kid like mine getting X+10, they get X+2. Even though a bunch of other kids also got +2 on their scores.
So if we have a class of 30 students, and of them 5 are just marking time and have no effect from teacher, and 2 are people whose scores are actually reduced by 8 points each by a +2 teacher, and the other 23 get +2 each, then the "+2 teacher" increases aggregate scores by only +1 total. Obviously, all of these numbers are bullshit, but it seems like a case where aggregates might significantly underrate the modal results.
Conveniently, housing policy is ALSO the controlling variable for the out of school factors as well. Any city in America can improve basically every metric related to quality of life just by building denser housing
Though true, its very hard to get low and middle SES people to admit this because it suggests “my kids are unlikely to achieve great outcomes and it’s mostly my fault.”. It’s much more hopeful to look for silver bullets.
I don't think it suggests it's the parents' fault! The time burdens of poverty give low-SES parents less time to spend on enrichment activities with their kids and less energy for patient, non-disciplinarian parenting. To say nothing of lead in homes, lack of access to pediatric care, long and sometimes dangerous commutes to school, childhood malnutrition, and residential air/water pollution, all of which is heavily determined by socioeconomics.
what you are describing is low SES kids being likely to get bad outcomes because their parents can’t afford things that would give them a higher chance of good outcomes. Most people who couldn’t afford those things for their kids would feel it was their “fault”. I agree that in a deterministic sense fault is an incoherent idea, I was trying to write in plain English.
I think this train of thought lets far too many low-SES off the hook for less-good parenting. All these factors impact Asian immigrant families that often start out in low-SES environments yet they seem to overcome. Everything you point out is true in a statistical sense, but it's also probabilistically true that low-SES parents tend to value education less. That's certainly what I witnessed growing up in a within my own family and neighborhood growing up in a blue collar environment.
It would be great to fix every problem and inequality in society, but even if that goal is achieved, you're still going to have some parents with really poor parenting skills in the area of education. In a perfectly equitable society, differences in parenting skills might even be more determinative than they are now.
> All these factors impact Asian immigrant families that often start out in low-SES environments yet they seem to overcome.
Isn't a lot of this based on class in the old country? IE, people whose parents were doctors in China and grocery clerks in the US get back into the doctor game, while the children of Hmong farmers don't really do that. Something something measuring from the wrong baseline.
That might largely be true, but I guess I don't know. Go back not that many generations and almost everybody was a farmer, so I'm sure rising up the SES ladder happens sometimes, too.
In any case, if the issues holding people back are lead in the soil, long and dangerous commutes or pollution than the immigrants are subject to those same factors, so something else explains the difference in outcomes.
To the extent possible, rather than plowing money into equipment and whatnot, perhaps federal education policy should do some serious research into how to ameliorate the effects of parents on their kids' education.
Yes, I'm aware that doing so in full is an impossible pipedream, but it's worth seeing if there are low-to-medium cost interventions that have a higher return on spending than equipment and other current focus areas.
I actually tend to lean towards education specifically being over funded relative to the value that could be realized using those funds in a way that more broadly disincentivizes childhood poverty. Of course I feel like I start offending almost everyone when I start saying that child care/Ed/raising/etc. spending should be structured to BOTH fund effective childhood programs AND discourage people from having children they can't afford to provide reasonable opportunities.
Luckily, there's a bunch of other, more approachable concerns in Criminal Justice and Housing that can have large impacts on these outcomes.
otoh, if only affluent families had children, who would make up tomorrow's working class? the risk of downward mobility would become great if working class people had far fewer kids. someone has to do the blue-collar work.
Right, you certainly can't just tank the birthrate in the quest to not have poor kids. Whatever disincentive you might create to having a child in a time of financial insecurity would need to be offset by assistance you gain by planning parenthood more judiciously.
Between reading your post last week and this one, I read Freddie deBoer's post on "Is the Conventional Wisdom on Educational Spending All Wrong?"
In that post, he has a chart that compares state spending vs educational achievement and it shows DC as an extreme outlier of high spending and terrible performance. The chart was using data from 2003-2005, so I thought maybe something had changed, but comparing the data again, DC continues to have a top 3 spending per student while having a bottom 5 results.
Matt mentioned in a recent podcast that DC is able to make these very high investments in teacher pay that other districts aren't able to make because of the small size and wealth of DC relative to the US as a whole. However, I'm not sure that this extreme investment is actually doing anything other than make people feel like they are doing something.
It’s fair to say that a huge plank of the left, liberal, progressive thinking people is that one of the primary causes of American public school underperformance is property tax delineated school underperformance. And they don’t seem particularly interested in statistics or jurisdictions that don’t fit those numbers.
I do think that separating housing values from school funding would create a more equitable education system, but that's different than claiming that funding equity will solve all our problems.
Actually that observation applies to public education as a whole. Per capita real spending (ie after inflation) has trippled over the last 50 years, but no increases in learning.
"Over the past half-century, America’s per-pupil spending on K–12 education has nearly tripled, and, despite a dip from decreased tax revenues during the Great Recession, it now stands at an all-time high in most states. The U.S. spends more money per pupil on primary and secondary schools than any other major developed nation, and American teachers earn substantially more than their peers in the private sector. Although local school spending relies heavily on property-tax revenue, state and federal spending ensure that a state’s per-pupil spending is comparable across race and socioeconomic status. Spending varies widely between states, but that variation shows little correlation with academic achievement. The challenge for American K–12 education is to provide students with equal opportunity despite significant inequalities of circumstance. Achievement gaps by race, class, and zip code still persist, but inadequate and inequitable school spending are not among the causes."
Yeah, sometimes when you suggest to people that they might not want to make such a public display of their illiteracy, they respond by declaring that you are not the boss of them.
It's okay. Sixty years from now, English may have evolved so that "flywheel" means something new, and then it will find some new word for flywheels. I'll be dead.
Best rationale I can think of for using flywheel this way is that a flywheel is something that takes a lot of effort to get it started, and takes a lot of effort to suddenly stop it. Maybe that's close enough to give the expression superficial plausibility until the original meaning of flywheel is lost to time.
I'm extremely skeptical, from a kind of effective altruism point of view, that our public K-12 funding isn't aggressively wasteful. This seems like a highly compelling case that DC is really doing everything you possibly can to put the most elite, well payed, well vetted, well resourced teachers you can possibly identify into classrooms and just get... not much to show for it at all. The marginal impacts of this massive level of funding just seems almost completely negligible next to the conditions in kids homes. And I don't see how you could possibly be doing it much better than DC is doing it.
It just seems overwhelmingly like childhood poverty is the real issue a lot of this funding should be targeting.
Well, I guess there's a simple experiment to test that theory. Randomly give some families extra cash. See if that improves test scores for their kids.
I don't blame the people who live in those communities to be concerned about the gentrification effects of improvements. They are barely hanging on to housing as it is. A world where a Starbucks moving in is likely to be a harbinger of rent going up and you losing your place is one where you probably don't have the luxury of voting on a principle.
I don't blame them. I blame the people in the surrounding affluent neighborhoods and their exclusionary zoning policies, often filled with people like Dean Preston (SF District 5 Supervisor) who, from his 3M mansion, uses California environmental law (CEQA) and any other tool at this and his constituents disposal to shut down any affordable housing project - even ones where 100% of the units are Below Market Rate. I keep waiting, in their attempts to goalpost shift, to hear a demand for 120% of the units to be BMR.
The utter failure of urban NIMBYism (meaning, rich faux-left NIMBYs like we have in spades in SF) is reflected in the fact that the mere act of improving a school, park, or other amenity is shunned because it will raise property values.
In the DC area there are a lot more nearby cheap options - anywhere outside of the DC metro is shockingly cheap compared to California. So I feel like the low-income NIMBY's deserve more of the blame outside of California than they do within it for the reasons you're saying.
Obviously it's no one's preference to be priced out of their neighborhood, but the housing situation isn't nearly as dire as it is in California. California NIMBY's strike me as an especially terrible breed.
>>Anywhere outside of the DC metro is shockingly cheap compared to California.
This is an aggressive/impossible standard to evaluate against. For one, saying "it's not as expensive as CA" isn't really useful for anyone who is trying to find housing within a specific metro area with a certain expectation about income and cost of living relative to that metro. Also, I'm not exactly sure how you're defining "outside the DC metro" (which is pretty big) but the acknowledgment that cheap housing is only available outside the metro undermines your point. If someone working a service job in DC has to commute 3 hours round trip from Fredericksburg (or wherever) to get to a job in the city because they can't find a closer affordable option, that's a failure of housing policy and urban planning.
I don't think I'm making those kinds of arguments. I was responding in the spirit of "Which type of NIMBYs do I personally feel sympathy for or feel deserve the most blame?" That's necessarily a fuzzy kind of argument. I have relatively more sympathy for low income NIMBYs in California where housing is incredibly expensive over the entire state than I do for low income DC NIMBY's who don't need to go nearly as far for more affordable housing. It's hard to feel sorry at all for high income NIMBY's in most cases.
I'm sure there are sympathetic individuals in all these groups. There are even people with tough stories being priced out of their preferred neighborhoods in the incredibly cheap metro I live in, but as a group I feel most sorry for Californians trying to stay in their state because they have the most challenging situation. And I guess my point was that I think the SF area NIMBY's Aaron brought up are just a special kind of bad in the amount of harm they inflict on fellow citizens.
An addendum to a previous post on DC teacher policies, relating results from previously unreported research. Yes, of course, this is one of the posts that are free to the public, meant to attract new subscribers.
Tomorrow's post on the economics of OnlyFans (*) will only be for subscribers, of course.
(*) And needless to say, its impact on housing density. SFH-only zoning delenda est.
I don't know who the American professors were with their 46 interviews, but a sample "of convenience", which is all it was, cannot be the basis for any generalized statement on the teacher reforms.
Imagine how it would complicate and worsen things if each neighborhood in DC had its own independent school district, dependent on the revenues it could raise from its own tax base, with its own teacher salary negotiations and hiring, etc., and where districts in the richest neighborhoods in DC spend twice as much or more per student as the poorer neighborhoods.
That's the situation in most States. Philadelphia and its suburbs are a good example. It's true that neighborhood effects matter a lot and can swamp resource differences -even within the unified school district of Philadelphia schools in the most expensive neighborhoods are most highly regarded. But they don't even compare resource-wise to neighboring suburban school districts, such as Lower Merion. And that has a feedback into the housing market that creates islands of artificial scarcity -- there's more demand for housing in suburbs that want to remain low density suburbs than there would be if the urban neighborhoods next door had better schools. (Notice that's a feedback loop not a flywheel).
No dispute that neighborhood and other out-of-school effects swamp resource differences, at least at the aggregate level though not necessarily for individual students with needs that aren't met in poorer districts. The differences between schools that track neighborhood differences even within large, unified SDs - Philadelphia, Minneapolis, DC, etc. - support the idea that per-student funding isn't the main thing.
But it's also just a fact that there are very large disparities in resources across districts even within single States -- look at Pennsylvania, for example, where some districts spend more than twice as much as others (https://www.education.pa.gov/Teachers%20-%20Administrators/School%20Finances/Finances/AFR%20Data%20Summary/Pages/AFR-Data-Summary-Level.aspx). There are also large, arbitrary differences in teacher salaries. Maybe the districts that spend a lot are wasting money, but even if the overall effect is only small there's no good justification for such disparities in a public service provided by a single State.
Real or perceived differences in local school district quality also feed back into the housing market, and so further a self-perpetuating dynamic of inequality. It's not possible to legislate where people live or what neighborhoods are considered desirable, but it is possible by legislation to equalize resources across school districts, so it just seems like a no-brainer. It's interesting that often the same people who say resource differences aren't a significant factor to student outcomes then turn around and oppose equalizing them - either it matters, so should be addressed, or it doesn't matter much, so why oppose it?
That the paper you linked goes to the trouble of highlighting that per-pupil funding is lower for poorer and blacker students when their own data shows that the mean difference is 230 but the standard deviation is 765, really calls into question the bias of the authors. It may be factually true but pretty meaningless in light of the variability. So why bother to call it out???
This is the kind of numerical distortion that might occur because a few cities have particularly high costs and a larger percentage of black students. Their calling-out of statistical anomalies leads me to doubt the veracity of their data entirely.
I think it's sufficient evidence to bring the widely held thesis that "lower performing schools are lower performing because they're underfunded" into serious question, that's all.
I agree that the "underfunding" narrative is weak, although it's important to recognize funding disparities are also created by the fact that wealthier schools have wealthier parents who funnel money through PTAs, fundraisers, etc. So the total "funding" is probably higher at "better" schools for that reason, even if the state contribution is the same.
I don't know if there's a fix for that or if it's the kind of thing we should try to fix, but that factor does probably contribute to the virtuous/vicious cycle (flywheel?) wherein good schools accumulate reputation and resources while the opposite happens at bad schools.
Interestingly the linked article calls out poor and black schools as having lower spending on infrastructure("all new everything") but more on instruction, administration and social services.
I would just like to ask about a tweet of yours where you were mocking Afghanistan hawks, by comparing them to the Padish Emperor, our Cher Cousin, for wanting to leave Sardaukar on Arrakis to continue pogrom against the Fremen…. All comparisons and metaphor or simile aside…. Shouldn’t the Emperor, and Baron Harokonnen have accepted that Sardaukar on Arrakis to fight the Fremen?
SPOILERS FOR DUNE AHEAD;
It is always the weirdest pat of the book for me; after his ultimate victory over Leto Atreides, Barron Harkonnen starts making some straight stupid decisions.
He asks the right questions of his guard captain about how nobody can confirm that Paul and Jessica are dead, but right away he says that he’s just doing this to scare his Captain, and that of course they are dead. There are at least two instances where Count Fenring and the Beast Rabban tell the Baron “Hey, these Fremen are actually a huge problem, and they’re beginning to follow this weird religion…” and he continues to just be like “Either those are survivors of the Duke’s men, or they are just rabble.”
He specifically denies the continued use of Sardaukar in Harkonnen livery on Arrakis after the conquest.
Wouldn’t a garrison of Sardaukar permanently stationed on Arrakis have hindered Maud’Dib’s plans? Couldn’t it have forestalled the Jihad?
"And since people who don’t like the system are raising spurious racial equity complaints, it’s worth noting that retention of Black and Latino teachers is better than retention of white teachers."
So its racist against white people, just like the style guide you're following?
I have no doubt that if you pay more money the possibility exists that you will be able to hire more able teachers. Maybe. But raising salaries on your existing teachers seems rather suspect if you expect that alone to raise performance. It shouldn't unless teachers are considerably less noble than is currently thought. It would allow you to replace the more poorly performing teachers.
Generally speaking though, unless you are robbing other school systems of their better teachers, then most of your new hires are going to be shiny new teachers or teachers with only a few years experience. They generally are lower down the pay scale. Which, as you rightly point out, brings us circling back to affordable housing to make relocating inviting. Funny how that always works that way.
For many of the reasons you mention the impact of one district raising salaries is probably a lot smaller than all districts raising salary. But even one district changing pay will have some marginal impact. Maybe the most important will be long-term retention of the best teachers who you might expect to have more options outside of public school teaching.
"If the school got better, that would be great for the whole community, including the low-income families who rely on it. But the price of housing would also go up, which is great for incumbent homeowners but bad for renters — especially low-income renters."
This statement would only be true if rental rates > income growth rates. That could happen but won't necessarily happen and more likely would only be true for a subset of the existing low-income renters.
But isn't that a compositional effect in aggregate of new Class A apartments pushing the top higher? I thought when you hold the analysis at the rental property level for Class C it was below income growth rates.
Said differently ... my understanding of the Class C apartment market is precisely because they don't have pricing power to raise rents and general deferred maintenance investment returns have been depressed. I could be wrong.
I've never seen data indicating this. I can say that my anecdotal experience in a second-tier market says "no, not at all."
I have rental properties that fall into classes B and C, none of which rent for less than double what they would have in 2011. I did not own them then, of course, but I know what their market rents would have been as I'm from the area.
In other words, improving the quality of urban life is just like improving labor productivity (through automation, less overstaffing, etc). People won't support it unless the background conditions--full employment, housing abundance--assure that everyone will benefit
Since lower housing prices are MY’s panacea, I’d love some rigorous data on how much de-zoning would help. I suspect that, just as out of school factors dominate school performance, the attractiveness and economy of different cities dominates housing prices.
Glaeser and Gyourko studied this question. Their hypothesis is house prices should approximate the cost of producing a new unit. They found this hypothesis is generally true except in supply-constrained housing markets.
I don't think that's right. The "constraints" (i.e. the zoning laws themselves) actually exist almost everywhere but they're only binding in a few high cost areas.
To provide a concrete example illustrating my point, I'm sure [insert decaying city like Detroit] has a zoning code but it's just not the case that there's enough demand to make the zoning a binding constraint on new supply of housing units.
> Unless the supply of homes can increase in line with demand
There exists the technology to vertically stack homes in DC. But luckily we have sensible federal legislation preventing it from destroying DCs character.
Ahh, "character."
An intangible asset so valuable it's more important than any measurable indicator of quality of life for median income folk.
Every single instance of that word being used in housing debates, it's been clear that it is a dog whistle for "the patch of shade a mid-rise building three blocks over would inflict on my skyline is more important to me than affordable housing for five dozen working-class families."
In my area NIMBYs are fighting developers who want to replace junky strip malls with apartment buildings. Apparently liquor stores and tattoo parlors define the neighborhood “character” that needs preserving.
Let’s not forget that rather run-down garage in San Francisco…
I think your point saying that performance assessments are nobody's favorite thing about work is fairly dead on. To me the reason for this is that for most people in the middle of the pack performance-wise the assessments are fairly arbitrary and somewhat pointless. Most employees have a lot of good qualities, want to do a good job, and a few areas they need to work on but are overall big contributors and you wouldn't want to lose them.
The purpose of performance assessments is to identify the top 10-20% of talent that can rise up or is underutilized, and the bottom 5-10% who need to go. For the middle ~60% evaluations create a lot of stress without much relevance.
Additionally, even if you don't have very clear metrics-based criteria, the top talent and people who need to move on become pretty clear over the course of a few eval cycles.
One problem with teaching from this perspective is that the structure of the occupation sort of precludes an "up or out" mentality, even a soft one. In most occupations people want to acquire more responsibility or a new role throughout time. If they are unable to secure a better job, they'll eventually move on.
But classroom teachers can basically do the same job from age 23-retirement... so the evaluation process does not serve its function of identifying top talent for promotion and also serves as the only mechanism for getting rid of low performers since it is less likely a low performer will become disenchanted with their lack of opportunity. I would imagine this makes perceptions of the eval system much worse for the workforce.
Plus, you want the best teachers to work with the weakest students, because they would benefit more from a really good teacher. But a lot of teachers would want to work with the strongest students either because they think they'll be less difficult in the classroom or because they'd get higher scores on standardized tests. In my high school, they rewarded the teachers who were considered the best by assigning them to the honors classes. We would have done fine with mediocre teachers.
The only distinction I would make is if the targeted turnover rate is just 5-10% ... that's really more of a "perform or go" culture. I think a true "up or out" culture is targeting more like a 20-25% annual turnover rate to meet the cohort promotion targets. For example, McKinsey's average tenure is just 2 years from a mix of both voluntary and involuntary turnover.
It's not clear to me that performance evaluations in "perform or go" cultures - with low involuntary turnover targets - induce the same stress. Or if they do that stress is shared equally across the employees.
The Big Four are widely known to be a ticket-punching sweatshop at the lower tiers.
But your point overall is well taken; no public sector entity except for the military is running an "up or out" culture, so we need some means of ensuring that there is accountability when promotions aren't really a main consideration.
Yes. I was not familiar with the term "perform or go" specifically but that makes a lot of sense. Hardcore up or out programs are pretty stressful but only seem to be implemented at very prestigious firms where people will generally have a lot of options when they leave.
On a quasi related note I feel like there is a very negative perception of job separations in all media coverage of this based on the fact that the economy sucked from 2008-2016, and also that media is in terminal decline so no job turnover in the industry is good for journalists.
I also think the biggest reason people hate evaluations is that most of the time managers don't really do a good job of measuring performance. The system they have in DC sounds like it's better than most places.
School *clap* performance *clap* is *clap* dominated *clap* by *clap* out *clap* of *clap* school *clap* factors.
While your point is taken that improving public schools, even marginally, is a good thing for local government to do, I really wish the above idea had a larger role in the debate.
I wonder, though, if there's a large subgroup of students who find a larger effect from school quality.
Conceptually, it seems like, okay, there are some kids who aren't even trying to get anything out of school. They see their future as one in which school is irrelevant. They're at school because they have to be, or to hang out with friends, whatever. They're marking time.
And then there's a (probably smaller) group of kids who, on the other end, are going to compensate for any deficiencies in the school with out of school resources. Maybe they're autodidacts, more likely their parents lean in and send them to Kumon or some other supplemental program, or invest in teaching them directly.
So those two groups are extremely insensitive to school quality, and if you look at the scores of a whole student population in aggregate, they depress the overall sensitivity of the population. But if you could exclude them, you might see responses to school quality among the remainder that are more in line with people's intuitions about the effects of school quality.
I don't know, perhaps it's not a big enough effect.
one of the best things a good school system can do is cream off the smart working class kids for intensive instruction. this can work, but only for a limited number of students. intelligence is partly heritable, but there’s also a lot of meiotic randomness
When I was in high school in Farmington, CT, back in the late 60s early 70s, we had Honors classes in English, Math, Science, and History. Most of us, myself included, could not qualify for the Honors programs. It didn't matter what SES you were from. If you could cut the mustard, you got into the Honors classes. The majority of us could not. We didn't take a coloring book and a puppy into a crying closet, because we didn't get into a Honors class. When you start lowering the standards for excellence, all the other standards go down as well. That smart working class kid just might be the next doctor who finds a cure for cancer. We need an education system that doesn't stand in his or her way.
You might even find that some of the high-performing kids perform inversely correlated to at least some increases in school performance.
Like, say we look at math scores. My kid gets a score of X, and I think, "X is too low. I'm going to send him to Kumon math." Kumon math is successful in raising his score to X+10.
Next year, the school improves a bit and some family exactly like me has a kid who gets a score of X+2, and they think, "Wellllll... X+2 isn't where I'd like it to be, but it's not so bad that I'm gonna shell out for Kumon." That year, aggregate statistics are dragged down compared to prior because instead of the kid like mine getting X+10, they get X+2. Even though a bunch of other kids also got +2 on their scores.
So if we have a class of 30 students, and of them 5 are just marking time and have no effect from teacher, and 2 are people whose scores are actually reduced by 8 points each by a +2 teacher, and the other 23 get +2 each, then the "+2 teacher" increases aggregate scores by only +1 total. Obviously, all of these numbers are bullshit, but it seems like a case where aggregates might significantly underrate the modal results.
Conveniently, housing policy is ALSO the controlling variable for the out of school factors as well. Any city in America can improve basically every metric related to quality of life just by building denser housing
Though true, its very hard to get low and middle SES people to admit this because it suggests “my kids are unlikely to achieve great outcomes and it’s mostly my fault.”. It’s much more hopeful to look for silver bullets.
I don't think it suggests it's the parents' fault! The time burdens of poverty give low-SES parents less time to spend on enrichment activities with their kids and less energy for patient, non-disciplinarian parenting. To say nothing of lead in homes, lack of access to pediatric care, long and sometimes dangerous commutes to school, childhood malnutrition, and residential air/water pollution, all of which is heavily determined by socioeconomics.
what you are describing is low SES kids being likely to get bad outcomes because their parents can’t afford things that would give them a higher chance of good outcomes. Most people who couldn’t afford those things for their kids would feel it was their “fault”. I agree that in a deterministic sense fault is an incoherent idea, I was trying to write in plain English.
I think this train of thought lets far too many low-SES off the hook for less-good parenting. All these factors impact Asian immigrant families that often start out in low-SES environments yet they seem to overcome. Everything you point out is true in a statistical sense, but it's also probabilistically true that low-SES parents tend to value education less. That's certainly what I witnessed growing up in a within my own family and neighborhood growing up in a blue collar environment.
It would be great to fix every problem and inequality in society, but even if that goal is achieved, you're still going to have some parents with really poor parenting skills in the area of education. In a perfectly equitable society, differences in parenting skills might even be more determinative than they are now.
> All these factors impact Asian immigrant families that often start out in low-SES environments yet they seem to overcome.
Isn't a lot of this based on class in the old country? IE, people whose parents were doctors in China and grocery clerks in the US get back into the doctor game, while the children of Hmong farmers don't really do that. Something something measuring from the wrong baseline.
That might largely be true, but I guess I don't know. Go back not that many generations and almost everybody was a farmer, so I'm sure rising up the SES ladder happens sometimes, too.
In any case, if the issues holding people back are lead in the soil, long and dangerous commutes or pollution than the immigrants are subject to those same factors, so something else explains the difference in outcomes.
To the extent possible, rather than plowing money into equipment and whatnot, perhaps federal education policy should do some serious research into how to ameliorate the effects of parents on their kids' education.
Yes, I'm aware that doing so in full is an impossible pipedream, but it's worth seeing if there are low-to-medium cost interventions that have a higher return on spending than equipment and other current focus areas.
do people in poverty have less leisure time than high SES people, generally?
yeah it's uncomfortable to talk about but so much of academic performance seems to come down to innate differences in ability.
parents who were good at school model behaviors that help their children be good at school too...
My wife had a student who had lots of problems at school after watching her dad get shot and killed. Life is pretty rough out there.
This is why poor children should be excluded from public school, so we can finally beat China in international assessments.
I actually tend to lean towards education specifically being over funded relative to the value that could be realized using those funds in a way that more broadly disincentivizes childhood poverty. Of course I feel like I start offending almost everyone when I start saying that child care/Ed/raising/etc. spending should be structured to BOTH fund effective childhood programs AND discourage people from having children they can't afford to provide reasonable opportunities.
Luckily, there's a bunch of other, more approachable concerns in Criminal Justice and Housing that can have large impacts on these outcomes.
otoh, if only affluent families had children, who would make up tomorrow's working class? the risk of downward mobility would become great if working class people had far fewer kids. someone has to do the blue-collar work.
Right, you certainly can't just tank the birthrate in the quest to not have poor kids. Whatever disincentive you might create to having a child in a time of financial insecurity would need to be offset by assistance you gain by planning parenthood more judiciously.
Between reading your post last week and this one, I read Freddie deBoer's post on "Is the Conventional Wisdom on Educational Spending All Wrong?"
In that post, he has a chart that compares state spending vs educational achievement and it shows DC as an extreme outlier of high spending and terrible performance. The chart was using data from 2003-2005, so I thought maybe something had changed, but comparing the data again, DC continues to have a top 3 spending per student while having a bottom 5 results.
Matt mentioned in a recent podcast that DC is able to make these very high investments in teacher pay that other districts aren't able to make because of the small size and wealth of DC relative to the US as a whole. However, I'm not sure that this extreme investment is actually doing anything other than make people feel like they are doing something.
It’s fair to say that a huge plank of the left, liberal, progressive thinking people is that one of the primary causes of American public school underperformance is property tax delineated school underperformance. And they don’t seem particularly interested in statistics or jurisdictions that don’t fit those numbers.
I do think that separating housing values from school funding would create a more equitable education system, but that's different than claiming that funding equity will solve all our problems.
Actually that observation applies to public education as a whole. Per capita real spending (ie after inflation) has trippled over the last 50 years, but no increases in learning.
"Over the past half-century, America’s per-pupil spending on K–12 education has nearly tripled, and, despite a dip from decreased tax revenues during the Great Recession, it now stands at an all-time high in most states. The U.S. spends more money per pupil on primary and secondary schools than any other major developed nation, and American teachers earn substantially more than their peers in the private sector. Although local school spending relies heavily on property-tax revenue, state and federal spending ensure that a state’s per-pupil spending is comparable across race and socioeconomic status. Spending varies widely between states, but that variation shows little correlation with academic achievement. The challenge for American K–12 education is to provide students with equal opportunity despite significant inequalities of circumstance. Achievement gaps by race, class, and zip code still persist, but inadequate and inequitable school spending are not among the causes."
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/issues-2020-us-public-school-spending-teachers-pay
"...anything you do to make a neighborhood a better place to live...risks setting off a cycle of displacement."
Don't you mean, "a flywheel"?
That sentence about a flywheel, set off in it's own paragraph - open trolling.
Yeah, sometimes when you suggest to people that they might not want to make such a public display of their illiteracy, they respond by declaring that you are not the boss of them.
It's okay. Sixty years from now, English may have evolved so that "flywheel" means something new, and then it will find some new word for flywheels. I'll be dead.
Best rationale I can think of for using flywheel this way is that a flywheel is something that takes a lot of effort to get it started, and takes a lot of effort to suddenly stop it. Maybe that's close enough to give the expression superficial plausibility until the original meaning of flywheel is lost to time.
Oh, I'll grant you there's probably some grounds for the misconception.
I'm not trying to say that it's an *inexplicable* error -- most errors arise through some regular causal process, and so have some explanation.
I mean last time, he faced all this criticism from someone- https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-more-porsches-means-cheaper-priuses/comments?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo1NTY3MjY4LCJwb3N0X2lkIjo0MDAxMzg5NywiXyI6ImFoaU9WIiwiaWF0IjoxNjMwNTA2MzY0LCJleHAiOjE2MzA1MDk5NjQsImlzcyI6InB1Yi0xNTkxODUiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.VgUSxnQh8w7--WVopf30iFVp5LYrOi6IBijTA3GRuNI#comment-2643288
I'm extremely skeptical, from a kind of effective altruism point of view, that our public K-12 funding isn't aggressively wasteful. This seems like a highly compelling case that DC is really doing everything you possibly can to put the most elite, well payed, well vetted, well resourced teachers you can possibly identify into classrooms and just get... not much to show for it at all. The marginal impacts of this massive level of funding just seems almost completely negligible next to the conditions in kids homes. And I don't see how you could possibly be doing it much better than DC is doing it.
It just seems overwhelmingly like childhood poverty is the real issue a lot of this funding should be targeting.
Well, I guess there's a simple experiment to test that theory. Randomly give some families extra cash. See if that improves test scores for their kids.
I don't blame the people who live in those communities to be concerned about the gentrification effects of improvements. They are barely hanging on to housing as it is. A world where a Starbucks moving in is likely to be a harbinger of rent going up and you losing your place is one where you probably don't have the luxury of voting on a principle.
I don't blame them. I blame the people in the surrounding affluent neighborhoods and their exclusionary zoning policies, often filled with people like Dean Preston (SF District 5 Supervisor) who, from his 3M mansion, uses California environmental law (CEQA) and any other tool at this and his constituents disposal to shut down any affordable housing project - even ones where 100% of the units are Below Market Rate. I keep waiting, in their attempts to goalpost shift, to hear a demand for 120% of the units to be BMR.
The utter failure of urban NIMBYism (meaning, rich faux-left NIMBYs like we have in spades in SF) is reflected in the fact that the mere act of improving a school, park, or other amenity is shunned because it will raise property values.
In the DC area there are a lot more nearby cheap options - anywhere outside of the DC metro is shockingly cheap compared to California. So I feel like the low-income NIMBY's deserve more of the blame outside of California than they do within it for the reasons you're saying.
Obviously it's no one's preference to be priced out of their neighborhood, but the housing situation isn't nearly as dire as it is in California. California NIMBY's strike me as an especially terrible breed.
>>Anywhere outside of the DC metro is shockingly cheap compared to California.
This is an aggressive/impossible standard to evaluate against. For one, saying "it's not as expensive as CA" isn't really useful for anyone who is trying to find housing within a specific metro area with a certain expectation about income and cost of living relative to that metro. Also, I'm not exactly sure how you're defining "outside the DC metro" (which is pretty big) but the acknowledgment that cheap housing is only available outside the metro undermines your point. If someone working a service job in DC has to commute 3 hours round trip from Fredericksburg (or wherever) to get to a job in the city because they can't find a closer affordable option, that's a failure of housing policy and urban planning.
I don't think I'm making those kinds of arguments. I was responding in the spirit of "Which type of NIMBYs do I personally feel sympathy for or feel deserve the most blame?" That's necessarily a fuzzy kind of argument. I have relatively more sympathy for low income NIMBYs in California where housing is incredibly expensive over the entire state than I do for low income DC NIMBY's who don't need to go nearly as far for more affordable housing. It's hard to feel sorry at all for high income NIMBY's in most cases.
I'm sure there are sympathetic individuals in all these groups. There are even people with tough stories being priced out of their preferred neighborhoods in the incredibly cheap metro I live in, but as a group I feel most sorry for Californians trying to stay in their state because they have the most challenging situation. And I guess my point was that I think the SF area NIMBY's Aaron brought up are just a special kind of bad in the amount of harm they inflict on fellow citizens.
An addendum to a previous post on DC teacher policies, relating results from previously unreported research. Yes, of course, this is one of the posts that are free to the public, meant to attract new subscribers.
Tomorrow's post on the economics of OnlyFans (*) will only be for subscribers, of course.
(*) And needless to say, its impact on housing density. SFH-only zoning delenda est.
I don't know who the American professors were with their 46 interviews, but a sample "of convenience", which is all it was, cannot be the basis for any generalized statement on the teacher reforms.
Imagine how it would complicate and worsen things if each neighborhood in DC had its own independent school district, dependent on the revenues it could raise from its own tax base, with its own teacher salary negotiations and hiring, etc., and where districts in the richest neighborhoods in DC spend twice as much or more per student as the poorer neighborhoods.
That's the situation in most States. Philadelphia and its suburbs are a good example. It's true that neighborhood effects matter a lot and can swamp resource differences -even within the unified school district of Philadelphia schools in the most expensive neighborhoods are most highly regarded. But they don't even compare resource-wise to neighboring suburban school districts, such as Lower Merion. And that has a feedback into the housing market that creates islands of artificial scarcity -- there's more demand for housing in suburbs that want to remain low density suburbs than there would be if the urban neighborhoods next door had better schools. (Notice that's a feedback loop not a flywheel).
This is conventional wisdom but it's completely contradicted by the data. Poorer and Blacker public schools receive more per-pupil funding than richer and whiter public schools (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332858419872445).
No dispute that neighborhood and other out-of-school effects swamp resource differences, at least at the aggregate level though not necessarily for individual students with needs that aren't met in poorer districts. The differences between schools that track neighborhood differences even within large, unified SDs - Philadelphia, Minneapolis, DC, etc. - support the idea that per-student funding isn't the main thing.
But it's also just a fact that there are very large disparities in resources across districts even within single States -- look at Pennsylvania, for example, where some districts spend more than twice as much as others (https://www.education.pa.gov/Teachers%20-%20Administrators/School%20Finances/Finances/AFR%20Data%20Summary/Pages/AFR-Data-Summary-Level.aspx). There are also large, arbitrary differences in teacher salaries. Maybe the districts that spend a lot are wasting money, but even if the overall effect is only small there's no good justification for such disparities in a public service provided by a single State.
Real or perceived differences in local school district quality also feed back into the housing market, and so further a self-perpetuating dynamic of inequality. It's not possible to legislate where people live or what neighborhoods are considered desirable, but it is possible by legislation to equalize resources across school districts, so it just seems like a no-brainer. It's interesting that often the same people who say resource differences aren't a significant factor to student outcomes then turn around and oppose equalizing them - either it matters, so should be addressed, or it doesn't matter much, so why oppose it?
That the paper you linked goes to the trouble of highlighting that per-pupil funding is lower for poorer and blacker students when their own data shows that the mean difference is 230 but the standard deviation is 765, really calls into question the bias of the authors. It may be factually true but pretty meaningless in light of the variability. So why bother to call it out???
This is the kind of numerical distortion that might occur because a few cities have particularly high costs and a larger percentage of black students. Their calling-out of statistical anomalies leads me to doubt the veracity of their data entirely.
I think it's sufficient evidence to bring the widely held thesis that "lower performing schools are lower performing because they're underfunded" into serious question, that's all.
I agree that the "underfunding" narrative is weak, although it's important to recognize funding disparities are also created by the fact that wealthier schools have wealthier parents who funnel money through PTAs, fundraisers, etc. So the total "funding" is probably higher at "better" schools for that reason, even if the state contribution is the same.
I don't know if there's a fix for that or if it's the kind of thing we should try to fix, but that factor does probably contribute to the virtuous/vicious cycle (flywheel?) wherein good schools accumulate reputation and resources while the opposite happens at bad schools.
I strongly agree with, "into serious question."
I've seen Title I schools that got a dump truck of money, all new everything, so it's not totally impossible.
Interestingly the linked article calls out poor and black schools as having lower spending on infrastructure("all new everything") but more on instruction, administration and social services.
Hi Matt,
I would just like to ask about a tweet of yours where you were mocking Afghanistan hawks, by comparing them to the Padish Emperor, our Cher Cousin, for wanting to leave Sardaukar on Arrakis to continue pogrom against the Fremen…. All comparisons and metaphor or simile aside…. Shouldn’t the Emperor, and Baron Harokonnen have accepted that Sardaukar on Arrakis to fight the Fremen?
SPOILERS FOR DUNE AHEAD;
It is always the weirdest pat of the book for me; after his ultimate victory over Leto Atreides, Barron Harkonnen starts making some straight stupid decisions.
He asks the right questions of his guard captain about how nobody can confirm that Paul and Jessica are dead, but right away he says that he’s just doing this to scare his Captain, and that of course they are dead. There are at least two instances where Count Fenring and the Beast Rabban tell the Baron “Hey, these Fremen are actually a huge problem, and they’re beginning to follow this weird religion…” and he continues to just be like “Either those are survivors of the Duke’s men, or they are just rabble.”
He specifically denies the continued use of Sardaukar in Harkonnen livery on Arrakis after the conquest.
Wouldn’t a garrison of Sardaukar permanently stationed on Arrakis have hindered Maud’Dib’s plans? Couldn’t it have forestalled the Jihad?
"And since people who don’t like the system are raising spurious racial equity complaints, it’s worth noting that retention of Black and Latino teachers is better than retention of white teachers."
So its racist against white people, just like the style guide you're following?
I have no doubt that if you pay more money the possibility exists that you will be able to hire more able teachers. Maybe. But raising salaries on your existing teachers seems rather suspect if you expect that alone to raise performance. It shouldn't unless teachers are considerably less noble than is currently thought. It would allow you to replace the more poorly performing teachers.
Generally speaking though, unless you are robbing other school systems of their better teachers, then most of your new hires are going to be shiny new teachers or teachers with only a few years experience. They generally are lower down the pay scale. Which, as you rightly point out, brings us circling back to affordable housing to make relocating inviting. Funny how that always works that way.
For many of the reasons you mention the impact of one district raising salaries is probably a lot smaller than all districts raising salary. But even one district changing pay will have some marginal impact. Maybe the most important will be long-term retention of the best teachers who you might expect to have more options outside of public school teaching.
"If the school got better, that would be great for the whole community, including the low-income families who rely on it. But the price of housing would also go up, which is great for incumbent homeowners but bad for renters — especially low-income renters."
This statement would only be true if rental rates > income growth rates. That could happen but won't necessarily happen and more likely would only be true for a subset of the existing low-income renters.
"rental rates > income growth rates"
In major and mid-sized cities this has been true for decades already.
But isn't that a compositional effect in aggregate of new Class A apartments pushing the top higher? I thought when you hold the analysis at the rental property level for Class C it was below income growth rates.
Said differently ... my understanding of the Class C apartment market is precisely because they don't have pricing power to raise rents and general deferred maintenance investment returns have been depressed. I could be wrong.
I've never seen data indicating this. I can say that my anecdotal experience in a second-tier market says "no, not at all."
I have rental properties that fall into classes B and C, none of which rent for less than double what they would have in 2011. I did not own them then, of course, but I know what their market rents would have been as I'm from the area.
In other words, improving the quality of urban life is just like improving labor productivity (through automation, less overstaffing, etc). People won't support it unless the background conditions--full employment, housing abundance--assure that everyone will benefit
Since lower housing prices are MY’s panacea, I’d love some rigorous data on how much de-zoning would help. I suspect that, just as out of school factors dominate school performance, the attractiveness and economy of different cities dominates housing prices.
Glaeser and Gyourko studied this question. Their hypothesis is house prices should approximate the cost of producing a new unit. They found this hypothesis is generally true except in supply-constrained housing markets.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w8835/w8835.pdf
Right - don't supply-constrained markets partly become that way as a result of being attractive?
I don't think that's right. The "constraints" (i.e. the zoning laws themselves) actually exist almost everywhere but they're only binding in a few high cost areas.
To provide a concrete example illustrating my point, I'm sure [insert decaying city like Detroit] has a zoning code but it's just not the case that there's enough demand to make the zoning a binding constraint on new supply of housing units.